There was a large guest room next to her office that she had made her own in the last year. Their living quarters, and the magnificent bedroom Matthieu had had decorated to look like Marie-Antoinette’s boudoir for her, was on the floor above. She hadn’t used it since he died. She had a dressing room beside it full of the elegant clothes she no longer wore. She had worn her simplest plain black clothes for the last year, mostly black jeans and sweaters. There was a bathroom with a deep marble tub, and Matthieu’s wood-paneled dressing room, with Axel’s bedroom beyond it, which was closed now, with all his belongings still there. There were six guest bedrooms on that floor, used by the bodyguards now, and Matthieu’s gym. There was nothing on the second floor of the apartment that she needed, and she never went upstairs herself anymore. In addition, there was a pantry with a microwave, refrigerator, and small stove, which the bodyguards used, and a laundry room, a luggage room, and a suite for the housekeeper and maid. In fact, she only used her office and newly adopted bedroom and the kitchen now. The rest was either out of sight upstairs, or the curtains were drawn as in the living and dining rooms that hadn’t been used in over a year.

In the last few years, she was too busy to entertain on the grand scale Matthieu enjoyed. She had never really liked it. She marveled at times at how much the apartment looked like his grandparents’ old apartment from photographs she’d seen. He had achieved just the effect he wanted long before Theo came along. She had always felt it was his home, or his family’s, more than hers, but it didn’t bother her.

The château was equally grand, and restored to exactly how it had looked when his grandparents were alive and owned it in their heyday, before the war that took everything from them because of their own bad judgment and the country they had betrayed. As a boy, he had frequently been reminded by people who knew that they had been collaborators. It was something no one had forgotten in France, even seventy-five years later. His family name was well known.

Theo walked into her office, set her bag down and looked around. She glanced at her mail and knew that her assistant had come from the office and taken all the urgent mail that had to be dealt with and paid the bills for her.