Never Leave Me Read Online Free PDF

same speed and lack of fuss with which he had entered. Dieter watched the Horch skim down the linden-flanked drive, his handsome face sombre. Their intelligence services had not been able to discover the Allies’plans. Yet Resistance leaders would have to be alerted in order to co-ordinate the attack. If it was to be in Normandy the local underground leaders would be the first to know. His mouth tightened. That line of enquiry meant he would have to liaise with the Gestapo at Caen and Bayeux.
    He wheeled on his heel, gravel scattering as he marched back into the chateau. His family was an old German family that could trace its name back for hundreds of years in the Almenach de Gotha. His father had been a soldier and his grand father a soldier before him. They were members of the officer caste who hated the Nazis and when it came to the Gestapo, Dieter shared their contempt. He wanted to have as little truck with his country’s bully boys as possible.
    She was walking towards the foot of the main staircase when he entered the hall, wearing brown slacks and a cashmere sweater that had seen better days. Her hair was windblown, soft dark tendrils brushing against her cheeks, and there was mud on the low heels of her shoes. She kept her bicycle in one of the deserted stables at the rear of the chateau and he judged that she had just returned from one of her frequent trips to Sainte-Marie-des-Ponts. Her eyes met his coolly, large and dark in the pale perfection of her face and an impulse of sensuality went up like a flare inside him.
    He wondered what the devil it was about her that he found so arousing. He was thirty-two, and his taste had never run to virgins. Before the war his social circle had been high and fast-moving and the women he took to his bed had been glamorous sophisticates. Innocence had never held any charms for him. Yet ever since entering Valmy he had been electrifyingly aware of the Comte’s young daughter.
    The blaze of defiance with which she had faced him in her father’s rooms had sexually disturbed him. He had never seen eyes so dark and brilliant, lashes so long and curling. There was a brightness to her, a vividness, that he found intensely arousing. It was as if she were lit by an inner flame and he found his eyes being drawn to her time and time again. She was very French. Carelessly elegant. Even in the crumpled slacks and old sweater there was an air of chic about her. A style that had nothing to do with what she wore and everything to do with the way she wore it.
    She had paused, one foot on the bottom stair, the thrust of her hip and the long line of her leg unknowingly provocative, her shining black hair held away from her face with two heavy tortoiseshell combs, her violet-blue eyes hostile.
    He barely glanced at her, striding across the hall and entering the grand dining-room with its array of maps. There were enough willing Frenchwomen without deflowering the daughter of his reluctant host. He gazed down at the maps, pencilling in large areas, a deep frown furrowing his brow. More land east of the Vire could be flooded and more guns placed on the cliffs, their barrels aimed, not towards the sea but directly down at the beaches so that they could fire at point blank range along the waves of assaulting troops. His pencil faltered, her face dancing insidiously in his mind. Her mouth was full and soft, like the petals of a rose. He wondered what it would be like to kiss and gave an expletive of annoyance. Damn the girl. He had other, far more important, things to think about. With renewed concentration, he studied the maps of the coastline, identifying areas of weakness, determined that if the Allies invaded, they would be thrust back into the sea.
    Lisette ran up the stairs to her room, a small pulse pounding in her throat, the breath tight in her chest. His presence filled the chateau. It was no longer their home, but his. He moved through the rooms with utter assurance, ordering