kissed him passionately on the lips and he responded by pressing her in so tightly against his body, he almost lifted her off her feet and snatched away her breath. It was as if now, with permission to love her, he could unleash all the passion he had been holding back for so long; the passion he had kept so carefully in check so he could fulfil his mission. He lifted her gently into his arms and placed her on the bed. As a shaft of moonlight found its way through a chink in the curtains, illuminating his face for a second, she saw tears in his eyes.
‘Are you sure, Vivi?’ he whispered, his voice hoarse with the emotion and his breath coming thick and fast now with his desire. ‘I wanted to marry you before we… I wanted all of this to be done the right way.’
She smiled up at him, thinking what a charming but impossible dream that was. They were undercover spies in one of the most dangerous places on earth. If they made it through another day alive it would be a miracle.
‘After the war,’ she assured him as she started to unbutton his uniform. ‘We can think about all that after this war is ended and we have won.’
It felt surreal as her hands ran down the grey woollen cloth of his tunic, with the black-and-silver Iron Cross he’d won for bravery reminding her he had belonged to the Third Reich before her, that he still did. She removed the clothes of the enemy to reveal the man she loved inside. Before they knew it, they were undressed and urgently seeking one another, finally able to satisfy the hunger that burned like a raging fire through both of them. Their lovemaking felt all the more exquisite because they could get lost in their pleasure, when so much of their time was preoccupied by their fear and anguish. They made love for hours that first night, indulging in the pure bliss of one another as the weight of the world around them disappeared.
Once she had her new papers, Vivi’s way of life became even more intense than when she was in France with SOE. She’d gone from the relative ease of living in Cornwall again to being in league with a spy, working for and being in love with a man the world saw as a Nazi. Becoming Marcus’s secretary, she wore the Nazi uniform, and each day as she walked through the streets of Paris and approached the building where her enemy waited for her she wondered if that day would be her last, if one misstep would change everything. The only high point for her was she got a chance to see Marcus in his work, every day, and she was in awe, not only of Marcus as a human being, a simple man she was in love with, but at his skill at fooling the Reich and maintaining his calm, calculating demeanour in every situation. Driven by his desire to defeat Hitler, he was meticulous in his deception.
One of his jobs for the Germans was to examine and correlate all the information coming in about the Allies’ movements and brief his commanders. But instead of doing that he would carefully change documents to advance the Allies’ cause. It was a nail-biting roller coaster for her on a daily basis. Also, knowing that back home she was probably being perceived as a traitor broke her heart, especially when she thought of her father and her siblings. The one thing that propelled her forward was the thought of the people she had already let down, who had probably been arrested or, indeed, worse. The brave people she had met who had inspired her. She wanted no more needless deaths because of her. She owed them all her life and service and she believed bringing down the Nazis from within was their greatest hope.
As well as working with Marcus, she tried desperately to find out what had happened to the Renoirs, but even via Marcus’s high-level Resistance contacts, there was no news of her friends.
Some of those early nights, when Marcus was sleeping deeply, she would sob into her pillow, heavy with the guilt. Yvette with her curious eyes and mane of blonde hair, her perfect life as a fashion designer ahead of her, or Monsieur Renoir with his hunched figure and contemplative nature, both fiercely protected by the fiery presence of Maman. She had to