‘Gott in Himmel! Are you all right?’ His voice was urgent, his arm tight around her shoulders, his eyes brilliant with anger and anxiety.
‘Yes … I …’ She tried to pull away from him but it was impossible. She seemed to have lost all her strength and there was something hot and sticky running down her leg.
‘Good God, you could have been killed!’ He swung his head round, shouting at his petrified chauffeur to open the rear door of the Horch and then, as she gasped aloud in protest, he swung her up in his arms, striding with her towards the car, the blood on her leg smearing his immaculate uniform.
‘No … please. I can walk.’ Her head was spinning with concussion, with shock, and with the desperate need to free herself from his touch.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said curtly, laying her on the leather rear seats of the Horch. ‘You couldn’t walk a step.’
She caught a glimpse of the white, frightened face of the chauffeur and felt a surge of pity for him. He looked like a man whose career had come to a very sudden end.
‘Please …’ she said again weakly. There was blood on the luxurious interior of the car, on his uniform and on his hands. He edged into the seat beside her.
‘Can you sit up if I help you? I want to take your coat off and see how badly you’ve been hurt.’
She tried to protest and couldn’t. His arm slid once more round her shoulders, pulling her against him so that her head was resting on his chest. She could hear his heart beating, smell the faint aroma of the spice and lemon cologne that he used, and knew with terror that her nightmare of physical capitulation was on the verge of becoming reality.
‘Please …’ she gasped again. ‘You must let me go. I’m all right. It’s only a graze.’
‘Stop being childish,’ he said peremptorily, ignoring her protests, easing first one of her arms out of her coat and then the other, with stunning gentleness.
‘Can I help, sir?’ the chauffeur asked nervously from his refuge behind the steering wheel.
‘For Christ’s sake, give me the first aid box!’
The chauffeur had been too dumbfounded by the Major’s reaction to the accident to have thought of the first aid box. He stumbled from the car, hurrying round to the boot, wondering what the devil the fuss was about. He had recognised the de Valmy girl, of course, but even so, he saw no reason for the Major to behave like a man possessed simply because she had been thrown from her bicycle.
‘Please, you must let me go,’ she said, trying to pull away from him, her voice stronger, as the wave of dizziness that had engulfed her when she fell receded.
‘Not until I’ve seen how badly hurt you are.’ he said grimly, ‘and I can’t do that until I’ve taken your stockings off.’
‘No!’ This time her protest was so vehement that he paused, disconcerted. There was no trace of the ice-cool disdain with which she usually treated him. Her eyes were wide as she shrank back against the leather seat and with a shock he realised how deep her detestation of him must be. Physical revulsion was not a reaction he was accustomed to. That he was experiencing it now, when he had allowed his own feelings for her to surface, infuriated him. ‘You’ll damn well do as you’re told!’ he rasped, taking the preferred first aid box from the chauffeur, flicking the lid open and seeing with relief that there was a plentiful supply of bandages.
Her eyes flared at his high-handed manner. She wanted to tell him to go to hell, but her throat was so tight that no words would come and she only knew he couldn’t touch her so intimately. It would be beyond endurance. Beyond forgetting.
She closed her eyes, fighting for control as he whipped off his gloves and thrust them towards the chauffeur.
‘You can’t … I won’t let you,’ she uttered hoarsely as he knelt at her side and with a gentleness that nearly robbed her of her senses, lifted her skirt high to her hips. Her lingerie displayed none of the serviceable qualities of her bloodied woollen stockings or tweed skirt. Her brief panties were unmistakeably Parisian. He sucked in his breath sharply. A wisp of creamy-beige satin strimmed with fragile lace barely encased the soft mound of her pubic hair. Crisp dark curls escaped enticingly only inches from his fingers. Desire rocked through him, merciless and urgent.
‘Shouldn’t we take her back to the chateau, sir?’ the chauffeur asked, trying to redeem his reckless driving by being helpful.
Dieter swore beneath his breath, aware that it was just as well the chauffeur had reminded him of his presence. The rape of an injured French girl would hardly have been something to look back on with pride.
‘Yes,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘Just as soon as I stop the bleeding.’
He began to ease down one of her stockings and as his fingers touched the naked flesh of her thigh she moaned, a tremor running through her.
‘I won’t hurt you,’ he said, his voice smoke-dark with suppressed passion. ‘I promise.’
She turned her head away from him, tears of shame stinging her eyes. It wasn’t pain that had caused her to tremble. It was something far, far worse. Something she would die rather than allow him to see.
Slowly, with unutterable care, he eased the tattered remnants of her stocking down towards the knee. The old-fashioned, unprotected metal handle-bar had gouged deep into her thigh, slicing the flesh open in a long, ugly gash. His jaw tightened at the sight of it. Quickly he reached for a cotton wool pad, pressing it against the wound, bandaging it with swift dexterity.
She lay unmoving, her head averted, her hands tightly clenched. Soon it would be over. She would forget his concern. His care. She would not leave it to Elsie to betray his plans to the Allies. She would betray them herself. It would be her revenge on him for the assault he had made on her body and her senses.
The bandage at her thigh was secured. His hands moved lower, easing the bloodied wool over her knee and down her leg. Summoning the last vestige of control that was left to her, she opened her eyes, pushing herself upward on the elbow of one arm. There was another deep gash at her knee and long, raw grazes the length of her leg.
‘I can bandage my knee myself.’ she said stiltedly.
He glanced up at her, one eyebrow slightly raised. ‘I’m sure you can, but I can do it much more efficiently. My hands,’ he said pointedly, ‘are not trembling. Yours are.’
Her cheeks flooded with humiliated colour. ‘It was the fall … the shock…’
He hesitated fractionally before pressing a cotton wool pad against the gash on her knee, his eyes curious. That her fall had caused her state of shock was so obvious that it hardly warranted explanation. Yet her voice had been fiercely defensive. He slid his hand beneath her calf to support the weight of her leg as he reached for another bandage. As he did so he heard again the small, desperate gasp of breath that he had previously thought was pain.
Slowly, very slowly, he raised his eyes once more to hers. The pupils were still widely dilated, pansy-dark in the pale ivory of her face. Excitement, sure and hard, seized him. The tremor that had run through her body when he had first touched her had not been of pain. It had been the same age-old, primitive response that had flared through him when he had first confronted her across the vast, silk-draped bed.
She saw the expression in his eyes change; saw the realization and the answering heat and she knew there was nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide.
‘Don’t touch me,’ she panted desperately. ‘Please don’t touch me!’
A smile touched the corners of his mouth. It was a protest he had no intention of heeding. From the very first he had suspected that beneath the ice was fire and now it was palpable. He could both see and feel it. Quickly, carefully, he bound her knee, every sexual nerve end in his body raw with desire. There would be complications. However badly she wanted him, she would not submit easily or without guilt. But it would be submission. It would not be violation, the careless rape so many of his compatriots freely indulged in.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ he said, and took her hand in his.
‘No …’ she whispered as he slowly turned her hand over, palm upward, raising to his mouth. ‘Please, no…’
The hard, hot imprint of his mouth seared her flesh. She shuddered, closing her eyes, wanting his hands once more on her naked thigh, on her breasts, wanting to submit totally and irrevocably. His thumb; and forefinger cupped her chin, tilting her face upwards.
‘Look at me,’ he commanded, his voice thick with un-assuaged passion, and as her eyelids flickered open he drew her towards him.
She could feel the slam of his heart against hers; smell the clean, sharp fragrance of his cologne. She wanted to score his back with her nails. To sink her teeth into his neck and taste the sweat of his body. To have him take her then and there on the rear seat of the Horch.
‘Give me your mouth.’
The moment of capitulation had arrived. Time, as she knew it, stood still. Her pulse thundered in her ears and then she lifted her head high and spat full in his face.
‘Never!’ she hissed, her eyes burning. ‘I shall never give you anything, Major Meyer!’
She heard him suck in his breath, saw his jaw-bone clench, his eyes blaze; and then he said, his voice dangerously confident, ‘You will, Lisette, and both you and I know it.’
Her mouth was dry. One more word, one touch of his hand, and her hard won victory would be lost. She moved away from him and as she did so pain sliced through her and thick, dark blood began to seep through the bandage on her thigh.
‘Get back to Valmy as quick as you can!’ Dieter yelled to the chauffeur, and ignoring her vain protests, seized hold of more cotton wool, pressing down hard on the vein in her groin.
The chauffeur, who had been watching them with wide-eyed incredulity, hastily revved the car into life and careened round at the first opportunity. So that was the lay of the land. Major Meyer and the Comte’s eighteen-year-old daughter. He wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes. He wondered if anyone else knew. He had heard no rumours, no gossip. He pressed his foot down hard on the accelerator. No wonder the Major’s fury had been white-hot when the Horch had knocked her to the ground.
Lisette could no longer see clearly. The Major’s face danced before her eyes and no matter how hard she tried she no longer had the strength to pull away from him. Her head slumped against his shoulder and his arms closed tight around her.
‘Faster, man!’ Dieter shouted as the blood continued to pour dark and thick, saturating the bandages and swabs.
The Horch screamed out of the high-hedged lane and into the beech woods and Dieter grabbed a rarely worn scarf, using it as a tourniquet. His eyes were dark with fear and Lisette knew that the fear was for herself. In that moment, weak and semi-conscious, she forgot about the uniform that he wore. Forgot about the war. He had become her refuge and her strength and she leaned against him, secure in the knowledge that he would take care of her. That he would always take care of her.
‘You’re going to be all right, liebling,’ he said as they roared down Vamy’s long, formal driveway, skidding to a halt outside the brass studded, oak doors. ‘Trust me.’
There was such a depth of feeling in his voice that his chauffeur stared at him, stunned. Meyer was known to be mercilessly tough. He had come through Kiev and Sebastapol collecting one of the highest decorations for valour that the German state could bestow. Never, as long as he had been his chauffeur, had he known him to yield an inch in any situation. And now, because this slip of a girl was injured, his hard-boned face was ashen.
Keeping his thoughts to himself he sprang out of the driving seat, sprinting round to the rear door and springing to attention as the Major stepped out on to the gravel, the girl in his arms.
Marie was hurrying towards them, her eyes wide at the sight of Lisette’s disarrayed skirt, at the blood and at her indecent proximity to Major Meyer’s chest.
‘Get a doctor!’ Dieter shouted to his chauffeur as he strode through the stone-flagged entrance hall towards the stairs. ‘Take outriders with you and bring him back instantly.’
‘My God, what’s happened?’ Henri de Valmy cried, running in from the gardens, his face white, the secateurs still in his hand, forsythia blossom clinging to his jacket.
‘She came off her bike,’ Dieter replied shortly, not hesitating in his swift stride towards the stairs. ‘She’s bleeding badly. I need pads. Linen. Anything.’
Henri took one look at his face and did not demur. With Marie at his heels, he ran in the direction of the linen cupboards.
He didn’t take her to her own room. He was unsure which of the bedrooms in the east wing was hers and had no intention of wasting precious time by asking. Besides, it seemed only natural that the bed he took her to should be his own.
As he laid her on the blue silk counterpane she said so faintly that he could hardly hear her. ‘I don’t know your name.’
He looked down at her pale face and the dark spread of her hair over the pillows.
‘Dieter,’ he said, his voice tight in his throat.
A ghost of a smile touched her lips. Dieter. It was a nice name. She tried to repeat it but she was being sucked down into a vortex of brilliant colours and black rushing winds, and then her mother ran into the room, Marie hard on her heels, and the colours vanished and only darkness remained.
Dr Auge, the local doctor, was bewildered. A chauffeur-driven Horch to take him to Valmy; outriders; the demand for his presence issued not by the Comte but by the Wehrmacht officer in residence? It was all most unusual and he was filled with apprehension as he hurried through Valmy’s medieval entrance hall and up the winding stone stairs.
‘My daughter came off her bicycle at speed,’ the Comte was saying to him as he ushered him along the uneven oak floor of the upper landing. ‘We’ve been unable to stop the bleeding.’
‘Where is the wound?’ Dr Ague asked, puffing for breath.
‘High on her inner thigh.’
Dr Auge increased his speed. It sounded like the artery. If it was, there was no telling how much blood had been lost. He paused at the open bedroom door, bushy eyebrows flying upwards. The Comtesse was kneeling at one side of the bed, holding her daughter’s hand, and a German officer stood on the other side, blood smearing his uniform, every line of his body tense.
The doctor looked swiftly across to the Comte in alarm. What in God’s name had happened that the Comte had flinched from telling him? Or maybe dare not tell him? He found no enlightenment. Henri de Valmy did not meet his eyes. He strode quickly into the room saying peremptorily, ‘The doctor is here.’
A tourniquet had been applied to Lisette de Valmy’s thigh. Bowls of warm, disinfected water stood ready for his use. He dragged his attention away from the sinister figure of the Major and tried not to think how the injury had been inflicted. Of one thing he was sure – it had been no innocent accident. Innocent accidents did not attract the attention of the Wehrmacht and the Major’s eyes were dark with an anxiety equal to that of the Comte.
The counterpane was heavily stained with blood and the girl was unconscious. He hurried to the bed, setting his ancient black bag down at his side, aware that the German was watching him with hawk-like intensity. Nervously he began to remove the sodden bandages. If Lisette de Valmy died, he did not want the responsibility placed at his door. He eased off the large pad of cotton wool staunching the blood and breathed an imperceptible sigh of relief. It was bad, but the artery had not been severed. It was an injury well within his competence to tend.
‘The water, Madame,’ he said to the Comtesse and, rolling up his sleeves, he set to work.
Even when the last stitch had been inserted the German did not leave the room. The doctor put away his needle and wondered again what the truth of the matter was. The injuries had not been caused in the process of rape. There was no sign of sexual abuse. Nor had the deep, jag
ged gash been caused by a knife. Taken together with the cut on her knee and the raw grazes to her shin, it was consistent with what the Comte had claimed. A bicycle accident, the unprotected metal handlebar slicing deep into the girl’s flesh.
He closed his bag and rose to his feet, unrolling his sleeves, ‘She should not be allowed to put any weight on it for several days. The wound needs keeping clean, Madame, until I come, again to remove the stitches.’
‘And when will that be?’ It was the German and his voice was a whiplash in the still room.
Dr Auge was acutely aware of the impressive decorations that hung on the narrow band of black ribbon about his neck, of his rank, and of his powerful personality. ‘A week … ten days, Major,’ he said nervously, glad that his task was finished and eager to escape from the Major’s presence.
‘Mademoiselle de Valmy lost a great deal of blood,’ the Major said tightly. ‘I would appreciate it if you would call each day and every day until she is quite recovered.’
It wasn’t a request, it was a command and he knew better than to attempt to refuse it. ‘Of course, Major,’ he said hurriedly. ‘I shall be here in the morning. Goodbye, Monsieur le Comte, Comtesse. Goodbye, Major.’
He had fully expected the Major to warn him against talking of his visit to the chateau but with his assurance that he would be at Valmy the following morning, the Major dismissed him from his attention.
Dr Auge scuttled from the room with gratitude. He didn’t trust what he didn’t understand and he didn’t understand the interrelationships of the four people he had left in the bedroom behind him.
Lisette lay back against the pillows, deep circles carved beneath her eyes. The moment she had regained consciousness she had been aware of Dieter’s continuing nearness and had been filled with terror at the comfort that it gave her. She dare not look at him. To look at him would be to surrender.
‘You need to rest now, chérie,’ her mother was saying solicitiously, straightening her bedcovers.
Her father cleared his throat. ‘I’d better carry Lisette into her own room first, my dear,’ he said gently.
Never Leave Me Page 6