Time After Time (16 page)

He had already come to the conclusion that she wasn't as dull-witted as she appeared on the surface, and as he stared at her features now, he found to his surprise that her facial structure was excellent. At one

time she must have been an extremely beautiful woman. If she would ever relax the tight control she was maintaining, not only on her emotions but apparently on every muscle and nerve of her body, she would probably still be beautiful.

"How did you get into this?" he asked, breaking the silence at last.

"The Germans took over my city," she replied, her voice dry. "You might say I was handed a formal invitation to get into this."

"Every Parisian lost his city. It's not unpatriotic to simply stay out of the way. Why did you become involved with the resistance?"

She didn't look at him. She didn't pause in her preparations for the meal. She simply began to speak quietly, in a voice free of emotion.

"My brother Rene had his fifteen birthday three weeks before the Germans entered Paris. He was as silly and naive as any young man is entitled to be at that age. To Rene, there were no strangers. Everyone he met was a new friend. The brightness of his mind and his joie de vivre attracted the attention of a Nazi colonel. This man was quick to discover the normal insecurities of youth that lurked beneath the attractive surface. He courted Rene. He made a young, foolish boy feel important. When Rene found out he had unwittingly betrayed a friend, he hanged himself."

As she spoke, she chopped the vegetables with smooth, unfaltering motions. "I found him when his body was still warm with the memory of life. I cut him

down." The knife came down again and again on the potatoes, the sound unnaturally loud. "I lifted him to his bed and washed him. I dressed him in his Sunday suit. Then I buried him before the Nazis even knew he was dead."

The vegetables were efficiently scooped up and added to the pot that bubbled on the stove. "I am a woman. To take up arms would be ineffective. So I do what I can. I am a small gear in a very large machine. Perhaps the gear will make smoother the process of destroying the destroyer. If the gear sends them to burn in hell even one second sooner, then the small gear has served her purpose."

Beads of perspiration had broken out on Paul's forehead. His white-knuckled fingers gripped the back of the chair with terrible force.

If she had cried, if she had railed against the cruelty of life, he would have felt sorry for her. He would have pulled out worn-out words of sympathy to comfort her. But she hadn't. She had told her story without a hint of self-pity. And Paul had lived every minute of the horror with her.

Neither of them spoke again. They shared the plain but filling meal in silence. Even when he pushed back his chair and opened the door that led to the basement, they didn't speak. Somehow ordinary words would have trivialized what she had told him.

In darkness, he made his way back to the small, hidden room. He removed his boots, holding the knife in his hand as he lay down on the blanket that was spread next to the wall.

In an effort to relax, he tried to call up memories of his home, and the friends and family he had left behind. His world. He thanked God his sister would never have to go through what the woman upstairs had gone through. Leah wasn't even a woman anymore. The war had taken that part of her identity away from her.

When he heard movement on the other side of the panel, Paul rolled to his knees, the knife grasped tightly in his fingers. He saw the glow of the oil lamp seconds before she moved into the room.

"This will keep the rats away," she said, placing the lamp on a wooden crate.

Paul nodded, waiting for her to leave. But she didn't. Without so much as a glance in his direction, she began to undress. She pulled the brown sweater over her head and laid it aside, then unbuttoned the skirt and let it fall to the floor, her movements efficient and without hesitation. As she reached behind her back to unfasten the plain cotton bra, she caught his eyes on her.

"For two years I have been cold and I have been lonely." Her voice was as flat and dispassionate as it had been in the kitchen, but now he saw a slight tremor in her lower lip. "For a little while—just a little while—I want to feel warmth again. For tonight I want to remember what it was like to be alive."

Paul felt an instantaneous reflexive tightening in his loins as he stared at her. The glow of the lamp gave her body soft, hazy edges, reminding him of rich, creamy velvet. There was nothing hard about her now. Her

small, firm breasts were proudly beautiful, while the golden-blond triangle between her smooth thighs was at the same time mysterious and poignantly vulnerable.

He had been wrong when he thought her anything less than feminine. As the subtle light stroked the fluid lines of her body, he knew he had never seen anyone who was so very much a woman.

With a casual move, she released her hair to fall around her shoulders, and it was the most intimate gesture he had ever witnessed, sending liquid fire rushing through his bloodstream. At that moment she raised her head and met his eyes. This was not the look of a supplicant. She wasn't begging for his warmth, and she wasn't demanding it. She was simply facing her need with the same strength she had faced the loss of her city and the death of her brother.

Without a word Paul removed his clothes, then spread out the blanket so there was room for them both.

She lay down beside him, keeping her eyes on his face. At that moment Paul knew that something beyond the obvious physical response was happening to him. He didn't just want to give her pleasure, he wanted to bring her back to life. He wanted to give Leah a part of himself, a part that would be with her forever. He didn't want her ever to be cold or lonely again.

He felt her body, barely touching his, and knew as surely as if it had been carved in the stone wall behind him that all his life had been preparing him for this

moment, every seemingly random action had been leading him to Leah.

Reaching out, he framed her face with his hands, then slowly lowered his lips to her. For a brief moment she tensed, almost as though his touch were a shock to her system. But when he started to pull back, she grasped his shoulders with strong fingers. She didn't try to deepen the kiss; her lips remained perfectly still beneath his. It was then that he realized she was trying to capture and draw out each separate step of their joining.

Gradually he felt her changing beneath his hands. Relaxing didn't describe it. It was deeper and more miraculous than that. It was like a flower whose petals struggled to unfurl with an almost painful slowness until it at last became a spectacular, open blossom.

When he felt her move beneath his stroking hand, happiness burst wildly in his veins. He had given her this. His touch, his presence, had brought her back to life, back to warmth and light.

She opened her eyes, and they were vibrant gold flames, alive with emotion, blazing with desire. For him. Only for him.

He crushed her close, his urgent fingers grasping her softness. Finally he knew he needed to take as much as he needed to give. Holding him tightly, she laughed, and the sound was pure, unadulterated joy that spread around them and filled every corner of the secret room.

* * *

Paul paced back and forth in the small room. For the first time since he had been there he felt claustrophobic. Something was wrong. Every nerve was screaming at him—
something was wrong.
He had no watch, so he couldn't tell what time of day it was, but he sensed that it was past the time for Leah to be home.

Ugly visions haunted him, driving him mad. The visions weren't nebulous fears; in occupied Paris they were ever-present dangers. Her involvement with the resistance could be discovered at any time. His fists clenched at the thought. What came after the discovery couldn't happen to Leah. It couldn't.

When he could stand the tension no longer, he pushed aside the panel and moved across the basement to the stairs. He didn't stop in the kitchen but passed through the hall to the small parlor at the front of the house.

The wide front windows were heavily draped, cloaking the room in dusky darkness. He stood to one side and slowly lifted the thick fabric to look out. Long moments passed as he simply stared, frozen in one position.

The Germans were no longer two streets away.

Several truckloads of soldiers filled the normally quiet street. They banged on the doors of the houses across the street, accosted citizens on the sidewalk, shouted orders and insults.

As Paul watched, a young soldier repeatedly struck an old man. Again and again he hit him, until finally

the old man raised a hand and pointed—straight at Leah's house.

Paul didn't stop to consider what to do next. He knew he had to get out of her house, because the Germans would tear it apart brick by brick until they found him. And then they would wait for Leah to come home.

He raced down to the basement and began moving the boxes into the hidden room, leaving the door open so that it looked like nothing more than an extra storage space.

It took no longer than five minutes, but Paul knew that in those five minutes he had most likely sealed his fate. As he once again entered the hall in the center of the house, he heard the wood of the front door splinter at almost the same instant the glass in the back door was beaten in.

The side alley was his only hope. In the empty room that at one time had been a study, he slid open the window and dropped five feet to the narrow alley. Holding his body against the building, he moved quickly to the corner of the alley that ran behind the house. Ten yards away from him stood the one soldier who remained outside Leah's house. Except for him, the alley was empty, which meant Paul would be noticed the minute he set foot in the open.

Backing slowly, he turned and moved in the other direction. At the other end, where the side alley joined the main street, he moved behind a pile of trash. Then he waited. All he needed was for a vehicle to pass on

the street and his movements would be hidden from the soldiers.

Moments later he heard the rumble of a truck approaching from the east and tensed in preparation. When the truck finally appeared, Paul stepped from behind the trash.

At the same moment the young soldier who had been guarding the back alley rounded the corner.

For an instant they both stopped and simply stared at each other; then panic flared in the young man's eyes, and he raised his rifle.

Leah shifted the canvas bag to her other hand. Her steps became noticeably quicker as she thought of the dinner she would prepare for Paul. She wouldn't let herself remember that it was their last night together. One couldn't accept a miracle, then whine because it didn't last forever. A miracle had to be taken on its own terms.

Last night the center of the universe had shifted. Her life no longer revolved around hatred. The center was now Paul and the extraordinary love they had found in the midst of chaos. He had brought back sanity and laughter and love. She knew that even if they weren't together, as long as Paul was in the world, she would never be cold or alone again.

Leah turned the corner onto her street, and suddenly her steps faltered, her fingers clenching the canvas bag. Her eyes grew dark, darting frantically from soldier to soldier. When she spotted a young woman

in the window of the house beside her, Leah moved closer.

"They are searching all the houses," the woman said, her eyes red from crying. "They found a radio receiver in Jacques Martine's house. They beat him to death on the street. And Andre Reneau—" The woman broke off to spit contemptuously on the sidewalk. "He told the soldiers that in a house somewhere on this street, an American is hiding."

Leah felt the blood drain from her face. Dropping the bag, she turned and began to run. She had only one thought in her mind. She had to reach Paul.

The blocks were long. The houses and people around her seemed unreal, as though they had been frozen in place by her fear. By the time she reached her house, her heart was pounding and her lungs were heaving unsteadily in an effort to draw in sufficient oxygen.

Then, behind her in the alley, she heard shots. She ran back, then swung around the corner into the alley and stopped short. For Leah, reality shifted sideways, straightening only because she willed it to.

Paul was on his knees beside a young man. Ignoring the armed soldier, she ran to Paul's side, dropping down beside him, pulling him into her arms, feeling the warmth of his blood on her hands and her chest.

His green eyes met hers, and slowly his lips twitched into a smile. His breath rattled as he inhaled slowly. "My Leah," he whispered, his gaze drifting over her face. "My beautiful Leah."

She could feel him slipping away from her. She could feel the only meaning in her life sliding through her fingers.

"No—you will not die," she said, her voice fierce, her eyes hard with fury. "Do you hear?
You will not

die!"

* * *

"No!"

The word was torn from Leah's throat as she jerked upright in the bed. Her heart pounded; her nails dug into the flesh of her palms; her breath came in ragged gasps. Wiping the tears from her her face with rough, awkward movements, she moved to the side of the bed, throwing the cover to the floor in her urgency to turn on the light and locate the address book on her bedside table.