Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“The answer’s no,” she said as his eyes slashed to her, because as everybody knew the best defense was a good offense, and she walked by him like she didn’t have a worry in the world. She wore a silky white blouse with her slim black skirt—her suit jacket hung from a peg near the lift—and she could feel him looking at her as she passed. She held her head high, putting a little extra oomph in her walk because she knew he was watching, and distracting him was, she felt, her best hope for warding off whatever this was. Her pumps clicked on the hardwood floor. Her heart started a drumbeat in her chest. “To whatever hideous thing you’re here to try to get me to do.”

He made a sound that was a cross between a grunt and a growl, shoved away from the wall—he dropped his stick, which hit the floor with a clatter—and came after her. Grabbing her elbow, he pulled her around to face him.

“Hey!” She tried to yank her arm free without success.

“Nice try, but it’s not going to work.” He was holding both elbows now as his eyes raked her face. The wall was right behind her, maybe a step away, and he was right in front of her, boxing her in. The curtains were open; dust motes danced in slanting rectangles of sunlight that lay in patches on the floor, but the windows were on the opposite side of the room, leaving his back to them and his face in shadow. Hers, she knew, was well lit. He could undoubtedly see every nuance of her expression, which had probably been his goal when he’d pulled her around like that. “Feeling guilty, angel?”

“I’ve told you before, don’t call me angel.”

“I’ll call you anything I want. And I notice you’re not answering the question.”

Her chin came up. Her pulse drummed, but she would be damned before she’d let him see.

“Of course I don’t feel guilty. Guilty about what?” She tried yanking her arms free, but his grip was too strong. The abortive movement ended up with her having backed herself up against the wall, and him still holding on to her arms, not quite pinning her there with his body but close. She could feel the cool, smooth plaster against her back, through the thin nylon of her blouse. She could feel the heat and solid strength of him scant centimeters away.

“You tell me.”

If he hadn’t been holding on to her arms, she would have pushed him away. As it was, she had to content herself with a glare. “Let go of me. What is wrong with you?”

He shifted his grip to her wrists, holding them against his chest. The man from last night, the man whose strong arms she’d wanted to rest in and whose broad shoulders she’d wanted to shift her burdens onto, was long gone. Whatever had brought about the change—and she had a sinking feeling she knew what it was—the look in his eyes gave her pause. She wasn’t afraid of Max, but if she hadn’t known him so well, if she’d been anyone other than herself and her relationship with Max had been anything other than what it was, right in that moment she could have been.

“Suppose you tell me what you were doing this morning on the rue Duphot.”

Bullets of panic shot through her bloodstream.

He knows. He knows. What does he know? How does he know?

Her spine stiffened with not entirely feigned indignation. “Do you have someone following me?”

He bared his teeth. “Tell me.”

“If you must know, I went there to give someone something.” She was purposely vague. Her response was less of an answer than a way of buying time while she decided just how much to reveal. Damn it. Damn it! Why hadn’t she foreseen this, and had a story ready to deal with it? “Remember those old friends I told you I ran into the other day? One of them.”

He inhaled. Drawn through those bared teeth, the air made a whistling sound that, coming from anyone other than Max, would have been chilling. “Don’t lie to me.”

“Are you having my room watched? Or the hotel? How low can you get?”

“How low can I get?” His fingers tightened on her wrists. “Not as low as a double agent, believe me.”

“What?” Her eyes widened in shock.

“That’s what Touvier suspects you are. He’s the one who’s been having you followed, not me. You have any idea how close you came to being killed this morning?”

That rattled her. “The gestapo—”

“The gestapo would’ve had to queue up. By Touvier and his crew. The only thing that’s keeping them from coming after you at the hotel or here or the theater is that they’re afraid of me. That nice chap with the bicycle? He was one of Touvier’s. If you’d gone to Jean’s Café—it was Jean’s Café, wasn’t it?—as he’d told you, you would have found yourself with a bag over your head being whisked off somewhere to be interrogated by members of Touvier’s cell. And then shot, if your answers didn’t satisfy them. As they probably wouldn’t, if you lied to them the way you’re lying to me.”

“You can’t really think I’m a double agent!”

“Can’t I? Because you’ve been so honest with me up until now?”

“You don’t trust me?” Her voice quivered with outrage.

“I don’t trust anybody. It’s how I’ve managed to stay alive. And you’ve been coming apart at the seams lately. Behaving erratically. Asking questions about things you’d normally have no interest in.”

“So you just assume I’m guilty? What are you going to do? Torture me into confessing? Kill me? I got away from Touvier, and so you’re here to finish the job?”

“Don’t play games with me. There’s too much at stake.”

They were practically nose to nose now, snarling at each other.

“What makes you think I’m playing games? You’ve caught me! If I’m a double agent, your duty is clear. Turn me over as a traitor. Kill me yourself.”

He gave her wrists a shake. “You bloody fool, if it was anybody but me standing here, you wouldn’t even get a chance to explain. Tell me what the hell you were doing at five in the morning on the rue Duphot.”

His eyes—she’d never seen that particular glint in them before. It was ugly, even deadly.

She was going to have to tell him. Not the whole truth—not the part about her mother, at least—but some of it.

“I went to a safe house, all right? Number two rue Duphot. It’s used by the Resistance. Hardly a place a double agent would visit.”

“Unless she was reading messages left there by our agents and reporting on their contents to the Germans.” From his reaction, he’d known about the safe house, known what that address was.

“You know that isn’t true!”

“That’s what Touvier thinks you’re doing.”

“He’s insane.”

“Then what were you doing?”

Her lids drooped as she frantically calculated how much to reveal. It was no more than a fraction of a second before she caught the involuntary action and snapped her gaze back up to his again, but it was enough: he’d seen. His face had hardened. He watched her with a fierce intensity. Waiting to catch her in a lie? Thank goodness she’d told the truth about rue Duphot being a safe house! She had to fight the urge not to wet her lips. For her mother’s sake, for Emmy’s, she was going to have to lie very carefully, while staying as close to the truth as possible.

“If you must know, I dropped off a note. It contained some of the same information I gave you last night, and I was passing it on to the friend I was telling you about,” she said. His eyes flared, his breath hissed, his lips parted. Before he could let fly, she quickly added, “It’s not what you think, so don’t go exploding all over me before I can explain.”

“Please do explain.” His voice was ominously even. Dark color stained his cheekbones. His eyes—they were no better. She still didn’t like the look in them.

“The other day, when I told you I’d run into some old friends...” Her hands rested in two tight fists against his chest. His hands, big and tan, looked brutally strong wrapped around the pale skin and fragile bones of her wrists.

He wasn’t hurting her. Max had never hurt her, and she was as sure as it was possible to be that he never would. Still, the accusation Touvier had made against her was as serious as they came. The penalty for getting caught betraying the Resistance was death.

“One of them—” she paused as his face changed, subtly, but she caught it, and she thought he must be remembering the bruises on her arms, and assigning her “one of them” to the man he’d assumed was responsible “—was someone I was once very close to. I hadn’t seen her in a long time, since before you and I met, but there she was. She knew I was singing at the Casino de Paris, and that I had access to a lot of high-level German officers. She told me she was with the Resistance, and she asked me to get some information for her—about which trains leaving Paris were least likely to be searched. So I did. I wrote it down, and, as she had asked me to, I left the note at the house on rue Duphot this morning. And then I left.”

For a moment he simply looked at her. Then he swore, softly and violently. “So what you’re telling me is that now this friend of yours knows that Genevieve Dumont, the Black Swan, is amenable to working for the Resistance. Do you really think that was a good idea?”

“It was a onetime thing. A favor. I don’t expect to hear from her again.”

“After all the trouble I’ve gone to to shield you, to keep you the hell out of it as much as possible, you—told a friend.”

At the look on his face, she fumbled for something that would make her story more palatable to him. “I didn’t want her to think I was a...a collaborator.”

“Yes, you did. That’s what you want everyone to think.” He said the words very slowly and distinctly, as if she might have trouble understanding them. “That’s your cover. That’s what allows you to do what you do. That’s what allows me to do what I do.” His eyes blazed at her. “Bloody hell, Genevieve. You have to know how bloody stupid that was.”

“You’re hurting my wrists.” Even though he wasn’t. But a distraction was definitely needed.

“Am I, now?” He released her wrists only to put his hands on either side of her waist and crowd her back against the wall. His body was solid muscle, and she could feel every well-honed centimeter of it. She was instantly, reluctantly aware of him as a man in a way she hadn’t been for a long time. Her breath caught. Her first, knee-jerk impulse was to shove him away. That would be a waste of time, she realized almost instantly. He was far too big to be dislocated by a push from her, and also, possibly, the action might reveal too much about the way he was making her feel. Instead she stood fast, holding her ground, head tilted back, hands splayed over his chest because they had nowhere else to go, glaring up at him.

She said, “You give information to people not in our network. Touvier, for example.”

“What I do and what you may do are two entirely different things. Touvier runs his own cell, but it’s part of my network. I’ve worked with him for years. This friend of yours—”

“She won’t tell anyone. I’m sure of it.”

The sound he made could have been mistaken for laughter if it had held even the slightest trace of humor. It didn’t. “You’re sure of it. Do you realize you’ve put your life in her hands? What’s her name?”

Too late, Genevieve saw the danger. “Why do you want to know?” she parried.

“Out with it. You’ve made a mistake. I’ll go and fix it.”

Suspicious, she searched his face. “You won’t—hurt her?”

“Is that what you think of me, Genevieve? Really?”

“What I think—” Genevieve said slowly as the truth of what she was saying hit her like a brick “—is that you’re very good at answering questions with questions when you don’t want to actually answer them.”

“I’m going to have her checked out.” His tone was impatient. “Give me her name.”

She considered making one up but had an instant horrible vision of some poor innocent woman with whatever name she gave being snatched off the street and tortured, or worse. That was not an outlandish thought. After all, he’d accepted the order to kill her mother if she couldn’t be rescued without an apparent qualm. He had a ruthless side; she’d encountered it before. Would he kill this poor fictional woman if it was necessary to protect what he had built? She had no doubt at all that, if he thought it prudent, the answer was yes.

“No,” she said. “I don’t think I will.”

His eyes narrowed. His hands hardened on her waist.

He said, “If she is what you say she is, we’ll soon find out, and none of us will have to worry anymore about it. If she’s not—did it ever occur to you that she might have been setting you up? That she might be an agent for the Germans? That she might be a collaborator herself?”

“She’s not.” Her tone was positive. “I know she’s not.”

“Give me her name.”

She took a deep breath. “No.”

“Genevieve—”

“No. I’m not going to, so you’re just going to have to take my word about her.”

“Do you have no concept whatsoever of the danger you’ve put us all in? I want her name.”

“No.”

“You work for me, remember? In a case like this, telling me no is not an option.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “I want you to listen closely to what I’m about to say. No. No. No. No. And if you keep pushing me, I’ll quit being your caged songbird, and then what will you do?”

“Is that a threat?” His head dipped so that, with her head thrown back, their faces were mere centimeters apart. She could feel the warmth and weight of his body—everywhere. Small details—fine lines radiated from the corners of his eyes; his irises had black rings around them; he was clean-shaven, but she could see the faintest shadow of dark stubble on his cheeks and jaw—imprinted themselves on her consciousness. He smelled, very faintly, of his favorite Gauloises and spicy shaving lotion. Of their own volition, her eyes dropped to his mouth—beautifully carved, curling with impatience—before shooting back up to clash with his.

“Yes,” she said.

His mouth tightened. He leaned closer, whispering into her ear. “Do you know why pretty little songbirds are kept in cages? To keep them safe from beasts.”

His breath feathered her skin. She felt the moist heat of it all the way down to her toes.

Useless or not, revealing or not, she shoved him hard. Without releasing her, he obligingly fell back a step, and she glared at him.

“I need a name, Genevieve.” His voice was brusque.

“So you can torture her? Kill her?”

“I don’t torture. And I only kill when I have to, and only what needs killing.”

“Do you realize how cold-blooded you sound?”

“Sometimes killing what’s a threat to you is the only thing you can do. As you should agree.”

She knew what he was alluding to: Charles Lamartine. Even the thought of that night, what she’d done, how it had ended, made her shudder.

“You know I had no choice.”

“I do know it. What happened that night came down to you or him, and you did what you had to do to survive. I don’t blame you for it. I applaud you. I was bowled over by your courage even then. What you don’t seem to understand is that this may be another one of those only-one-can-walk-away situations.”

“You can be persuasive when you want to be, can’t you?” The smile she gave him was small and tight. “But the answer’s still no. And you can’t bully me into changing my mind, or sweet-talk me into it, so you might as well quit trying.”

Their eyes clashed.

It was galling to know that the hammering of her heart wasn’t only because she was fuming and on edge and nervous about the lies she was telling and the secrets she was keeping. Some of it—a lot of it—was about him.

“If I wanted to bully you, I would have done it long since. As for sweet-talking you, there was a time I could’ve asked anything of you, and you would have done it.”

Now it was his eyes dropping to her mouth. Just for a second—no time at all—but that quick, glinting look was suggestive enough to send heat rolling through her in a thick, slow tide. Her breathing quickened. Butterflies—dozens of unexpected, oblivious butterflies—fluttered to life in her stomach.

Her eyes blazed at him. “That’s not true.”

“We both know it is.”

“Are you proud of having deceived me?”

“What is it they say about love and war? Just remember, when this all started, it was you who came running to me.”

“I didn’t know what you were. What you are.”

“You knew I’d see you safe. And afterward, when you could have gotten out, you chose to stay. All this time I’ve kept you safe, just like I’m trying to keep you safe now. From this woman, from Touvier, from your own bloody stupid, ungrateful self.” His eyes raked her face. “If your friend is what you say, why are you worried?”

“Because I don’t trust you.”

“Is that so?” One long-fingered hand moved to cup her jaw, trapping it. He held her face still as his eyes bored into hers. “If we’re going to talk about trust, you know what I thought to myself when I was listening to you tell me all about leaving a note for your friend just now? Hello, little rabbit.” And he dropped a mocking kiss onto the very tip of her nose.

His words shook her, but that was nothing compared to what that brief touch of his mouth on her skin did: jolted her with a lightning bolt of electricity that had her nails digging into his shirt and her toes curling in her shoes.

She sucked in air. Then she slapped him.

The crack of her hand on his face still echoed through the studio when a ding announced the arrival of the lift.

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