Honor Bound (Honor Bound 1)

“Really. Is there a cleaner’s shop nearby?”

“It’s probably closed,” she said. “But there’s an iron somewhere. All we have to do is find it. Can you do it yourself?”

“Sure.”

“It’s probably in one of the closets upstairs, it and the board,” she said. “Let’s go see. One of those lovely bottles of cognac is already up there.”

There was, in fact, a small but completely equipped linen closet. Peter set up the folding ironing board and plugged the iron in.

Frau Nussl handed him a snifter generously served with cognac.

“I’d offer to do that for you, but I honestly don’t know how,” she said.

“Is there a robe or something I could borrow? You lose the crease unless you let them cool for fifteen or twenty minutes.”

“That I can a

rrange,” she said, and went down the corridor.

Peter took a healthy swallow of the cognac and felt it warm his body.

Argentina? Assistant Military Attaché for Air? Accompanying a body? What the hell is going on?

Frau Nussl returned with a heavy silk robe.

“It’s Alois’s. Almost unworn,” she said. “When he puts it on, it drags on the floor.”

“It’ll do fine,” Peter said. “It won’t take me long. Thank you.”

He closed the door, took his trousers off, and laid them on the board while he waited for the iron to grow warm.

The door opened.

“I wondered,” Frau Nussl said, “what you would look like without your pants.”

Frau Nussl had changed into a dressing robe.

“Oh, really?”

“And I thought you just might be idly curious to see what I looked like without mine,” Frau Nussl went on, flicking the opening of her gown back and forth to give him, however briefly, that opportunity.

“Won’t that wait?” she asked. “Isn’t there something I could do to get you to put that off for a while?”

“You just did it,” Peter said, and unplugged the iron.

IV

[ONE]

The Diplomatic Reception Room

The Foreign Ministry of the German Reich

Berlin

1205 30 October 1942

“There he is,” Wilhelm von Ruppersdorf, Deputy Foreign Minister for South American Affairs, said softly to the three men sitting with him at a small table, and rose to his feet.