Lotti was completely unfazed. ‘What about you, Aunt Vicky?’ she asked impishly. ‘This must be one occasion when you don’t want people thinking your pearls are paste.’

‘Absolutely,’ Vicky said, fingering the beautiful pearl necklace that had been Adam’s gift to her when they had married.

‘Nuff said, Monkeyface,’ Max said warningly, in a voice only she could hear. ‘We may be among friends and family, but walls can have ears.’

He was seated at the other side of her, his handsome face tense and strained. He was a man used to projecting an easygoing, wise-cracking facade few people ever saw past. This, though, was an occasion that was stretching his talent for deception to the utmost. There had been a moment in time when, if he had set the date, Ilse would have married him without a second’s hesitation, and he had allowed that moment to slip through his fingers. Somehow he had lost her—and he hadn’t a clue as to how or why.

The odd thing was, though, despite his gut-wrenching sense of loss, his bewilderment and—he was honest enough to admit to himself—his wounded pride, he was also certain that Ilse had made the right decision. He would always have treated her as if she were a piece of fragile porcelain—he had simply never been able to bring himself to treat her any other way. Nicholas would take great protective care of her too, but he would also treat her as a woman.

Looking at them, he knew they were already lovers. Sex, an area of activity that had never previously been a problem to him, had become a problem where Ilse was concerned. He had found he couldn’t forget the almost avuncular relationship that had existed between them throughout her childhood. Though he hadn’t realized it at the time, their relationship had never been as honest and as intimate as it should have been and it had been Ilse, far less experienced in the ways of the world than he, who had been the one to realize it.

He took a deep drink from his wine glass, fixed his habitual easy-going smile on his face and turned his attention to the long, funny complaint Lotti was making about Ilse’s choice of sugar-pink chiffon for the bridesmaids’ dresses.

‘I shall look like something that’s stepped off the top of a Christmas tree,’ she said in mock resignation. ‘And if Nancy had been here Ilse would never have got her into sugar-pink. She would have had open rebellion on her hands.’

It was so true that Vicky laughed and then, seeing the taut expression on Claus’s face, her laughter died. He was seated directly opposite her. Like Berthold, with whom she had so far had little conversation, Claus was flaunting his gold swastika pin, engraved on the back with Hitler’s signature; it glinted in the lapel of his evening jacket.

She averted her eyes from it and turned her attention to Berthold, who was seated on the other side of the table next to Zelda. It wasn’t the happiest of seating arrangements but he seemed to be making the best of it.