Always and Forever by Cynthia Freeman Read Free Book Online Page A

the International Women’s Congress in Paris, David combed Hamburg for copies of the Paris newspapers. Along with the other girls, she avidly read the reports.
    “How do you like this?” Rhoda said smugly. “This reporter says the Congress had more substance than the Allied male meetings at Yalta, Potsdam, and London. Cornelia Pinchot, wife of the governor of Pennsylvania, was there, and Florence Eldridge—she’s not just a terrific actress who happens to be married to Fredric March—and Vivian Mason, of the National Council of Negro Women, were there!”
    “Irene Curie-Joliet spoke for the French delegation,” Kathy read with pride. “Mme. Curie’s daughter.”
    “It’s strange,” David remarked, his smile whimsical. “People here in Germany have money but no goods. According to the Paris papers, the Paris shops are loaded with all kinds of fancy gifts for Christmas, but few people have money.”
    “David, as a man, how do you feel about the Women’s Congress?” Claire asked.
    “I think it’s a fine thing,” he said quietly. “They have a right to say, ‘Look, we’ve been through a terrible war. We have a right to be part of what happens in the future.’ As participants, not just onlookers.”
    Kathy glowed as her eyes met his. David had responded just as she had expected. Women went out to work in defense plants, and they joined up to serve in military uniform; but now that the war was over, most men expected them to go back into the kitchen again and stay there. For a truant instant— just an instant —she thought, I wouldn’t mind staying in the kitchen for David.
    Phil sat with David in a dreary tavern not far from the flat.
    “David, why can’t you take off a couple of days to go with me to Paris?” he argued again. “And don’t give me that crap about how badly doctors are needed. You’ve worked like a dog since you’ve been here. You have a right to a couple of days off.”
    “I’m needed, Phil,” David insisted. “Even on Sundays I go in for a few hours. We haven’t much longer here. Our budget runs out in a few weeks. I want to do as much as I can.”
    “I think you enjoy being a martyr,” Phil taunted. Damn it, he wanted David as a cover when he went digging for those paintings. He couldn’t afford any curiosity. He wasn’t the only ex-GI trying to smuggle museum paintings out of France. The government knew. They just didn’t know who or where. “I’d hate chasing around Paris on my own.”
    “I doubt that,” David laughed. “You’ll find some French mademoiselle delighted to entertain you.”
    “It’ll feel strange going back alone.” Phil tried a fresh tactic. “I told you how it was last time. Chuck and I lived it up like wild, and now he’s dead.”
    “You’ll get along,” David said calmly. “But I’m sorry about your buddy. That was a rotten deal.”
    “I’ll go,” Phil said after a minute. Maybe he’d try to persuade Kathy to go with him. David would be pissed if he did, he thought. It would serve David right. He was mad about Kathy and doing nothing about it except giving her those brooding looks. Kathy was a hot little number, he guessed, if a guy played it right. Maybe she wasn’t Betty Grable, but she was damned pretty. And built, he remembered with a familiar stirring. “Hell, I can’t go back home without one little fling. I’m beginning to feel like a monk here in Hamburg.”
    “Whatever happened to that girl you were so overheated about right after Pearl Harbor?” David asked. “Debbie, wasn’t it?”
    “Oh, we split up.” She’d blown a fuse when she discovered she was pregnant. Hell, she always said she knew how to take care of herself. “That’s when I enlisted.” The timing was right—he knew he’d be drafted in another few weeks anyway. It always got a rise out of women when he pointed out he’d enlisted; he hadn’t waited to be drafted. And the old man paid for the abortion when Debbie went screaming to