Somehow, her hands found their way beneath his greatcoat, under his scratchy uniform jacket. She could feel the warmth of his skin beneath the linen of his shirt, not cold at all, but warm, so warm, his muscles shifting beneath her fingers—who knew a scholar could be so well-muscled—the whole animal apparatus of him that she had never noticed before, had never allowed herself to notice, because it was his mind one noticed first, his clever, clever mind. But under it all, all the learning, was this, this animal drive, that pulled them flesh to flesh and stripped her raw with pure, physical desire.
“Aurélie. Aurélie.” Max pulled back, his voice hoarse, shaking. “Wait.”
“What?” She rather minded the interruption. She felt cold without him, suddenly aware of the mess of her hair and the fact that her shawl was hanging drunkenly from one shoulder. She didn’t want to talk. She just wanted to go on like this, not thinking, not having to think. She held a finger to his lips. “Whatever it is, don’t.”
He kissed her finger, took her hand in his and pressed a kiss to her palm, before, reluctantly, folding his hand around hers. “There’s something you need to know.”
“What can possibly be that important?” The magic was fading. It was midnight again and cold and the graveyard was sere and grim, the stumps of the old trees raw and ugly. “Do you have a wife back in Berlin?”
“What? No! Nothing like that! Do you think I would . . . no!”
“Men do.”
“I don’t.” Before Aurélie could feel the relief of it, Max blurted out, “I was the one who told the major about your talisman.”
Aurélie leaned as far back as she could, squinting at him in the moonlight. “You . . . what?”
“I was the one who told him. About the talisman and the jewels and the legend around it . . . I never meant you to be harmed by it. I had thought we would move on in a few days, a week, at most. And you and the talisman were safely back in Paris. . . .”
Except that she had come from Paris and the talisman with her. Aurélie felt rumpled and scattered and thoroughly confused. “I don’t understand. Why would you tell him about the talisman?”
There’ll be fortune hunters, her mother had warned her once. Men who want what you have. Not her personal charms. It was clear her mother hadn’t meant that. But the jewels that were part of her patrimony. The jewels embedded in the talisman.
“It seemed to make sense at the time,” said Max helplessly. “The major was going to destroy the chateau. One less center of resistance, he said. He meant to find a pretext to torch the castle and your father in it. So I told him—I told him there was a treasure hidden in the walls. He didn’t know Paris well enough to know that the talisman is the centerpiece of your mother’s salon. That isn’t his world. But he liked the sound of priceless jewels—and mystical powers.”
“You told him it was here.” So much began to make sense. All those veiled comments. Hoffmeister’s determination to oust her from her quarters. She wondered if he had yanked the boiseries from the walls, torn up the boards from the floor.
Max grasped her cold hands. “I only meant to prevent him destroying the chateau. He had meant to place headquarters in Le Catelet, but once he heard there was a treasure at Courcelles . . . I wanted you to have a home to come back to.”
“You’re saying you did this for me?” She didn’t know whether to be touched or appalled. “You’re saying all of this—this occupation—is because of me?”
“No! Courcelles would have been occupied anyway. Just by other people. And the castle would have been destroyed and all its history lost.”
Her father in it, he had said. Yes, she could see her father refusing to leave his citadel, immolating himself on a principle. “So this was meant as a kindness, then?”
She must have sounded as incredulous as she felt. “Don’t you think I’d go back and change it if I could? There’s so much I would change if I could. I lie there at night wishing I’d gone back to Paris before all this started so that I might have told you—”
“Told me?”
It was as though her voice recalled him to their circumstances. She felt his sudden stillness, his indecision.
Quietly, without inflection, he said, “That I love you.”
Without the sound of the guns, the night was painfully quiet and still, the air sharp with frost. “Love.”
“Love,” repeated Max. His hands tightened on hers. “Do you think I don’t realize what effrontery it is to speak the word to you here? If I had come back to Paris, if I had spoken before, I might have said something without the sentiment being loathsome to you. But now . . . How can it be anything but an imposition?”