‘What? Leave now?’ As she looked into the intensity of Max’s electric-blue eyes, she was more startled than ever. ‘Without waiting for Lotti?’

‘Without waiting for anyone,’ he said fiercely, his arm around her waist where it had ached to be all evening. ‘I want to be on my own with you. I want to alter our relationship just as Claus altered his relationship with Nancy.’

As her eyes widened and her lips parted in incredulity, he lowered his head to hers and, uncaring of whoever was watching, kissed her deeply, full on the mouth.

Chapter Sixteen

The Ruhr and Berlin, Easter 1935

It was a brilliantly warm day for mid-April and Claus pushed his chair away from his magnificent hand-carved desk and walked across to the massive windows that looked out over the Remer steelworks. The area they covered was vast. From giant furnaces and chimneys steam and smoke rose in unbroken dense clouds. Production was at full pelt, and with Germany’s mammoth rearmament programme now no longer a secret but a source of international contention, was likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

He pinched the bridge of his nose to relieve the beginnings of a headache. Ever since he could remember he’d been brought up with the knowledge that he was heir to the House of Remer. All his education—his years at technical college studying engineering and steel-making—had been geared to that end. What he had never expected, though, was that he would find himself the sole proprietor of the House of Remer so suddenly or at such a young age.

‘So—you’re only twenty-three?’ his father had said testily when he had dropped the bombshell that he was not only retiring but reverting the company from being a joint-stock company into one of single proprietorship and that the proprietorship was now Claus’s. ‘So what difference does that make? Running the management of the House of Remer is something you’ve been brought up to do. Every head of every administrative department is absolutely capable and totally loyal, as are all the engineers and all the workforce. All that is needed is control. And you are more than capable of exerting that control.’

That had been true and he had known it, false modesty not being something that ever troubled him.

What did sometimes trouble him was how Max felt about things, for if Berthold hadn’t voluntarily relinquished control of the House of Remer in 1911, it would have been Max who was heir to the House of Remer, not him.

It wouldn’t have worked, of course. Not because Max was like his father and wouldn’t have been capable of such responsibility—he sometimes thought that despite Max’s apparently relaxed exterior he was capable of anything—but because there was no way a House of Remer workforce would have accepted him after England became his home—and the present government would certainly not have accepted him.

At the thought of the Nazi hierarchy and Max in deep discussion about House of Remer armament production he felt a flare of amusement. Even if Max had remained in Berlin and been educated in Berlin, it was unlikely he would have become a Nazi—and Hitler didn’t deal with anyone not totally loyal to National Socialism.