Her raven-black hair was touselled and roughened by the night. Her gray eyes were sparkling and eager, but Michael could see they burned with a lower flame. He could smell the too-sweet cologne of the man she’d slept with, could smell his hair pomade and his bitter sweat. He could smell the cigarette the man had smoked in the aftermath. A much inferior brand to the cream of the British crop, he thought.
“I’ve been with someone,” she told him, which was perhaps the biggest waste of breath in the history of the world.
“I know, but you’re with me now.”
“Please,” she said, her mouth up close to his, “will you hold me?”
He guided her the few steps to the bed, and lying down together he enfolded her, and she pressed her head against his strong shoulder and gave a soft quiet sound worlds away from the brassy trumpets of the Third Reich.
She went to sleep in that position. He closed his eyes against the blue-shaded lamplight and dozed, opened them, closed them again, felt the full length of her body shift against his, deliciously warm in the sheets, her thighs moving, her lips grazing his cheek, and still she slept.
She trusts me, he thought. She trusts a fiction, to keep her safe through the night.
My God, what am I going to do?
If he ever really went back to sleep he wasn’t sure, because the steam pipes began to knock and the radiator hissed. He heard the rumble and rush of wind beyond the glass. Maybe it was bringing heavy snow. The Ice Man’s element, he thought. To Hell with that bastard.
Suddenly he felt her above him, and when he opened his eyes she was staring at him with her chin supported on her forearm, as if trying to memorize every line, every pore, every newborn beard hair.
“I’ve realized what I can hear in your accent,” Franziska said. Her hair had tumbled forward, covering half her face. “You speak English.”
“Speak English?” He needed a few seconds to think about that. If he did decide to start speaking the King’s, she would instantly hear that he spoke it far too effortlessly. “No, I don’t.”
She frowned. It was a mystery she was trying to solve. Then her frown went away. Up close to his ear she whispered in lightly-accented English, “I’ve been waiting for you, for a very long time. I didn’t think you were ever going to find me. But I’ll wait for you still, however long it takes.”
With the greatest force of will he’d ever commanded, Michael just gave her a bemused expression and shook his head.
Franziska returned to her German: “I just said I bought you a present today. It’s in my handbag, over there.” It had been placed on a chair. She licked across his chest with her talented tongue. “Why don’t you go see what it is?”
When Michael removed the white-wrapped present with its green bow from the purse, he remembered Rittenkrett saying that this afternoon she called my secretary and said she had to go shopping. Here, then, was what she’d gone shopping for. A gift for him. He felt he should be pleased, but why did something the size of a pine knot seem to be caught in his throat?
“Open it, open it!” she urged, sitting up with her legs crossed under her.
He did. It was a flawless silver case, and upon opening that he found a shiny new Solingen travel razor, the kind that screws two parts together to make a whole.
“It’s very handsome,” Michael said. “That was kind of you.”
“I was going to have your initials put on it, but I wasn’t sure what type of lettering you’d like. There are too many choices these days. Can we go tomorrow and get it done? I’m free until two.”
“Yes, absolutely.”
“I’ll take you to lunch. All right?”
He nodded. He realized that she was asking for more time with him because the howling wind and cold outside spoke volumes of merciless death on the Eastern Front. Which, of course, now Berlin bordered.
“I’d like you to use your razor now,” said Franziska.
He touched his chin. It was a bit prickly.
“Not on you,” she told him, as she stretched her legs out before her. She wiggled her toes back and forth. “You missed the jar of shaving soap and the scissors in my handbag. Get them.” She smiled impishly, her dimples going deep. “I’ll wait.”
He got them. “And just what would you like me to shave?” he asked, though his cock already knew.
“I want a heart, right here.” She put a finger into her untamed black bush. “Are you up for that?”
Which might have been the second biggest waste of breath in the history of the world.
Michael prepared a warm towel and warmer water in a white bowl. He got the razor rinsed and ready. He got the soap foamy. His cock strained upward, which might be a problem. When Michael sat down on the bed between her open thighs to begin this heroic endeavor by shaping the heart with the scissors, Franziska gave a throaty little laugh that almost finished him off.
“We’re just using the soap cream right now,” she reminded him. “Go ahead, my life is in your hands.”
He did a good job. An excellent job. A slow, careful job. If a razor could speak, it would babble happily for the rest of its days.
Then it was done, and she gazed down upon the result and then looked at him with what he thought might be stars in her eyes.
“Now,” she said, “I can say that both my hearts belong to Horst Jaeger.”
He put the razor and the scissors and the soap and the bowl aside, and he grasped a handful of her hair to rock her head back and even as his mouth pressed forward hers opened to accept him and her tongue was formed of flame.
For the next hour, as the wind shrilled and the pipes thrummed, he devastated her. He took her to the edge and brought her back so many times she became a trembling, moaning, half-sobbing pulse of nerves vibrating with need and shining with sweat. He plunged into her full-length, at full power, and then he pulled out and balanced above her, the very tip of him making slow circles in the foldings of her new heart. Again and again he moved upon her, into her and within her. She cried out, and she mashed her lips against his shoulder to muffle her cries because any louder and the police would arrive to investigate the killing. Then, when she was crazed and her eyes were wild and her hair was a beautiful tangled jungle, Michael said he wanted to show her what pleasure he could give her with a strand of pearls.
At last, at length, as she lay upon him with her back against his chest and he clutched her breasts and stroked her fire like a machine, a cry came out from between her gritted teeth that became a scream from an open mouth. She tensed so hard Michael thought he could feel every muscle in her body move beneath the flesh like bundles of piano wire. It went on and on, and then the flash seared through his own body and as he slid out of her he felt the flood of her liquid explosion. In the next instant he knew what it was like to be a long-distance shooter, lying in a rain of his own making. She gave a groan that was nearly a different language altogether, and she turned over atop him and pushed him back in with one hand and clamped herself around him like a hot, soaking-wet vise.
They stayed that way, breathing hard together.
She shivered a few times, on her long strengthless falling back to earth.
She tried to lift her head. Tried to speak. He needed a towel and a new pair, because these were done for the night.
“Oh my God,” she finally was able to gasp. And again: “Oh my God.”