the mistakes she’d made. “His father was British, his mother German. Dr. Cole had spent his childhood in London, then attended university in Berlin before receiving the Leipzig position.
“After I took the examinations, he expressed great admiration for my aptitude and agreed to take me under his instruction. He and his wife offered to provide me with room and board.”
Silence stretched from Alexander, hard and cold. His knuckles whitened on the glass. “His wife.”
Lydia nodded, shame curdling like bile in her stomach. “He was married. His wife…” She forced the name past her lips, punished herself with the memory of a soft, brown-eyed woman who rarely seemed to speak above a whisper. “Greta. That was her name. Greta. She was a good person. They’d met when he first accepted the teaching position.
“My grandmother had accompanied me to Germany. She wanted to find me a suitable companion, a chaperone, so that she could return and help my mother. She soon realized that Greta would serve well in that role, so my grandmother went back to London within a month. And Greta… it was so easy for her to be a companion. She taught me some German, ensured I wrote to my father and grandmother every other day. They had no children. I think she… she wanted to treat me like a daughter.”
“What happened?”
Lydia’s heart thumped hard against her ribs. An image of a younger Dr. Cole burned through the back of her mind, the man for whom she’d developed a dark fascination—elegant Dr. Joseph Cole with the brilliant mind and the cold, sharp eyes of a true intellectual.
“With special permission, I was able to take classes at the university, though I couldn’t matriculate,” she explained. “I didn’t make many friends. There were no other girls, and the ones in the village didn’t know what to make of me. The boys just thought I was an oddity. I spent nearly all my time with Greta and Dr. Cole. Then her mother became ill and she had to take a trip to Bremen. That left Dr. Cole and me alone. His elderly aunt came to stay at the house to avoid the illusion of impropriety, but she was frail and a bit forgetful. She spent most of her time in her room.”
She shifted, still not looking at Alexander but aware of his unmoving, rigid presence. Her skin pressed against her clothes, sweat dampening her throat. She took another swallow of brandy.
“I was… I was taking a bath. He knew it; he’d seen the maid bring up buckets of water. He came into my room when I was…”
Her voice broke. She squeezed her eyes shut, the mist-filled memory congealing, forming behind her eyelids. Her initial shock giving way to wary intrigue as Dr. Cole approached the bath with deliberate intent. His fingers sliding over her ripe but untouched body, awakening her skin, her blood, her arousal.
“But he didn’t… it wasn’t…” Alexander’s voice was strangled.
Lydia shook her head. “It would be easier if I could tell you he forced me. He didn’t. He made an advance, yes, and perhaps he might’ve stopped if I hadn’t… if I hadn’t responded. But I did. I allowed him to do what he wished, and I… I liked it.”
Her face burned with mortification, but she forced herself to continue as if this confession were penance for having enjoyed the illicit pleasures of her own body.
Long-suppressed memories seeped into the edges of her mind, the way Dr. Cole had shifted from a cerebral professor to a heated lover, the dispelling of her inhibitions like the shedding of a snake’s skin. The freedom of her own nakedness, the delicious rasp of flesh against flesh.
“Before him, I’d never… I’d lived only inside my mind,” she said. “Never gave much thought to corporeal matters. Certainly nothing like that. I was astonished. I… I didn’t want it to end.”
“But it did.”
“Eventually. We continued even… even after Greta returned. When she wasn’t home or in the middle of the night. Sometimes at his university office. If she suspected anything, I never knew. She treated me no differently, which should have made me put a stop to the whole sordid thing.”
“How long did it go on?”
“Four, five months. Until I realized I was with child. I was terrified, of course. I told Dr. Cole, and it was like dousing a fire with cold water. In a very deliberate manner, he told me I would never be able to prove the child was his and that if