They headed into the kitchen, and soon they watched over scrambled eggs while he sliced ham.
Awkwardness played a role in her thoughts. She hated feeling tongue-tied, and sometimes this man did it to her when no one else evoked such a reaction.
“Alec, I was surprised you called me.”
He stopped slicing the ham and put the remainder back in its container. “I surprised myself.”
She stirred the eggs with a wooden spatula, carefully scrambling them. “It was a long time since I’d seen you or heard from you. I was worried.”
He turned toward her. “I won’t lie to you. There were dozens of times I thought of calling, and more than half the time I couldn’t because someone was using the phone at the station. Two times the Tribune line was busy or you weren’t in your room at the Savoy. Then I was busy fighting fires. Other times…I hesitated to call because of how we left things.”
So he’d tried to reach her. The idea brought warmth to her heart.
She scrambled the eggs into their final dry consistency, just the way she liked them. “That makes me feel even worse.”
“Why?”
“Because I was afraid to call you, even when I was worried every night.”
“Every night?”
“Yes. The raids have been…well, I don’t have to tell you how they’ve been. Awful.”
She handed him a plate.
“Yes.”
He scooped eggs and ham onto his plate. She did the same with hers, and they went into the formal dining area off the kitchen. When they settled down, he offered her a glass of wine. She decided on water instead, and he did the same. With all of that completed, they started to eat.
They ate in silence for a short time before she said, “I hope this weather keeps up. It might prevent the Germans from repeating the same raid they did the other night.”
Sylvie felt his gaze on her and looked up. “Which night?”
“The fifteenth.”
His gaze fell to the table. “That night was something else.”
They ate in silence for a long time. “This is nice.”
He grinned. “Ham and eggs?”
“Yes. Any food any time I’m hungry is great. But the quiet feels nice too. It’s good to have moments where we can reflect.”
“I agree. I could have used that on the fifteenth.”
She heard a tone in his voice, and it made her pause. “That was a rough night.”
“Where were you? I know you said you were out during the bombing.”
“James and I went to a restaurant and the bombing started. He suggested we try and write up a story from the event. See what it was like on the front lines.”
His frown was about five miles wide. “He suggested it?”
“Yes.” Anger rose inside her. “Don’t start with me, Alec Kent.”
He looked startled. “Start?”
“You’re angry I was with James, or you’re angry he suggested we go into the street rather than into the shelter.”
His mouth tightened. “Not the wisest choice to stay out of the shelter and wander around when bombs are falling.”
She paused rather than tell him off. “I don’t suppose so. I did get a fantastic story out of it.”
His fork clanked as he shoved his empty plate aside. “I hope it was worth risking your life.”
The sigh that came out of her held impatience. She chewed a bit of ham thoroughly before responding. “With all the bombings, I imagine you went to a fire or two?”
“Yes.”
She could see the recognition in his eyes. “It’s a part of your job, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Getting the story is my job.”
“They aren’t the same. You’re not paid to get blown up.”
She sighed again, exasperated. “There’s no point in me being in London, of being a war correspondent, if I’m not in London. And anywhere in London a bomb could fall. Anywhere. Anytime. People die in shelters, Alec.”
He sipped his water and looked pensive. Tension eased from around his eyes. “Of course. I see your point. I just…”
“You just what?”
His gaze clung to hers, and resignation filled them. “It’s not logic speaking here, Sylvie. Simply worry. Thinking about you in danger drives me mad.”
“Just as it drives me mad with you in danger.”
He laughed softly. “Well…I’ll stop worrying if you do.”
“Not a chance.”
He stared at her for a long time. “It’s a deal then. I won’t stop worrying about you, and you won’t stop worrying about me.”
“Deal.”
“We don’t have to like it.”
“But there it is,” she said.
After they finished eating, they washed dishes and returned to the living area. She plunked down on the couch, and he settled close beside her. Closer than she expected. It felt right and good, but her senses, her body returned to the same reaction it had the last time they were together. She flashed back to the kiss, and her mouth tingled. She ached and wanted with a fierceness that made her long for another kiss. Startled into acknowledging how much she wanted it, she couldn’t think of a word to say.
“I sense there’s a reason why you wanted me to come by other than my sparkling personality,” she said with a smile.
He chuckled. “Actually, I think you’re right. The fifteenth was bad and not just because of the bombings.”
“What happened?”
“In the morning Sally Higgins tried to jump off the roof of the Fleet Street station.”
Sylvie’s shock came in a gasp. “What? Why? I can’t imagine her doing something like that.”
“She got a telegram saying her husband was killed.”
Sorrow touched her with sharp knives. It was as if she knew Sally far better than she did. “Oh, no. No.”
“She was chatting with me, and someone came in with the telegram. A couple of hours later I learned she was on the roof.”
He explained how he’d gone upstairs with some others and talked her out of jumping. He told her what Sally said, how she hadn’t loved her husband enough. “As if that would have saved him.”
“She’s grieving. Maybe she loved him more than she thought.”
“Perhaps. I suppose in that state a person can have lots of feelings they can’t control.”
“You suppose? You grieved for your grandparents.”
“No, I didn’t. I was too young. My father’s parents died before the Great War, and I was but ten when my mother’s parents died. I wasn’t close to any of them.”
She thought about it a minute. “You’re right. My grandparents on my mother’s side died in the Spanish Flu epidemic. I was only a few months old. So I understand.”
“I haven’t really grieved for anyone…at least no one dead.”
She blinked when he said that. “No one dead?”
He turned toward her, his arm along the back of the couch. “I grieved when you left England…after the accident.”
What could she say? It was wonderful and terrible. “I’m sorry…I didn’t think. I didn’t know you cared that much.”
“I was bloody miserable.”
She smiled. “So was I. I’d lost my best friend in the entire world.”
His gaze was assessing, but oh-so gentle. Perhaps she could stare into his eyes forever and forget this last week and the harshness, the death, and trauma.
Still, she felt she’d missed something. “What fires did you take care of on the fifteenth?”
He told her about the warehouses, and then stopped cold. His eyes looked moist. She’d never seen him cry, not even as a child.
She reached for his hand and covered it. “What happened, Alec? You can tell me.”
He took a shuddering breath. “This fireman, a new man at our station…he ran up and told me Arnie was using him to replace me. I let Baxter take my place at the front of the hose. We were between two warehouses.”
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She thought she knew where this would go, and her breath caught in her throat. “Oh, no. No. Don’t tell me.”
Alec turned his hand over and clasped hers. “I started to leave the alley, but that’s when I saw the signs the walls might collapse. Air was puffing between the bricks. The wall integrity was going. I ran back toward Bink and Baxter. I was yelling, but it was hard to hear over the flames, the bombs, all that damned noise. Bink heard me, and he got Baxter’s attention. But Baxter didn’t run fast enough. The wall fell on him and the building next to it.”
He didn’t cry, but she could almost feel the hot need building inside him.
Her fingers tightened on his. “Alec. How awful.”
“Bink and I kept running because more of the wall crashed down and it blocked most of the alley. We were there until about four or five in the morning before we got the fire out.”
She held his hand and they went silent for a long time, just thinking and absorbing what they’d been through. After a time, she looked up at him, and his gaze tangled with hers.
“Did they have a service for Baxter?” she asked.
“His body was shipped to Ipswich to his family.”
“Did he have a wife and children?”
“No, thank God. He was only twenty, though. It was his first fire, Sylvie.” He looked away, his mouth twisting a little as grief savaged his face. He composed himself a moment later. “His mother and father were his only family. He was their only child.”
Sorrow for his family penetrated deep inside her. “How horrible it must be for them.”
“Before his body was sent to his family, it lay in a flag-draped coffin with three other firefighters who were killed that night. We all went to see them and paid respects. If you ever want to see grown men cry, that’s the place to be.”
Thinking about him escaping death by mere inches cemented a thought for her.
“I might try not to care so much about you, Alec. But…”
He reached up and brushed a tendril of her hair back from her face. “But?”
“It doesn’t work. You mean too much for me to pretend.”
A heated look came into his eyes, and every stark line of his handsome face seemed etched in stone. “I can’t share these things with anyone else but you.”
He’d hardened after his experiences, but there was a new warmth and passion inside him as well. She’d seen it at the cottage, and now it hit her like a wave. Her eyes teared up, and as one tear escaped, she quickly brushed it away.
“What’s wrong?” he asked softly.
“Just everything. Everything is wonderful and terrible.”
“I agree.” He stood slowly. “Let’s dance.”
She smiled. “You hate to dance.”
“Not with you.”
He went to the phonograph in one corner and placed a record on it. She recognized Vera Lynn’s A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square. “How beautiful.”
She stood, and he took her hand. They moved into the slow dance, and she didn’t care if he didn’t dance well. He drew her closer, and soon he held her closer than he ever had while dancing. Before long another Vera Lynn song, We’ll Meet Again, drew them to continue dancing. She floated on a feeling so sweet and heady. She closed her eyes and snuggled her head against his shoulder. Both his arms came around her, his palms making slow motions over her back. Was this heaven, at least for a few minutes? After their third dance, he tilted her chin upward and his mouth met hers.
His kiss was hot and assertive, no longer a sweet taste but a tender invader. She accepted hot strokes of his tongue, and time faded as she threw her arms around his neck and held on as if she’d never let him go. Where this would take them, she couldn’t imagine. Sensations bombarded her, more powerful than their kisses at the cottage. He drew back, and his eyes held more passion than she’d seen on a man’s face before. Desire tingled across her body, setting in motion powerful needs.
“Has James kissed you like this?” he asked, voice husky with hunger for her.
“No. He…”
He waited.
“He kissed me once. Nothing like this. Ever,” she said.
He cupped her face gently. “Did you like it?”
“I didn’t feel anything the way I feel with you.”
His mouth smothered hers again, and as he kissed her, he created havoc inside her. Whether she liked it or not, she was in serious trouble. She clung to his sweater, fingers tracing his hard pectorals. He moaned. His mouth slid over to her ear, and a wild shiver tingled over her skin. His lips found the side of her neck, brushing tiny kisses that made her squirm and sigh.
Air raid sirens went off.
He broke their kiss. “In the closet.”
For a second she didn’t know what he meant.
He smiled. “The shelter in the closet.”
He started down the hallway with her hand in his. When they reached the closet, she hesitated at the door. “I can’t. I mean if it’s that tight.”
He opened the door and showed her the closet was enormous and stocked with everything a person could want for a shelter. “It’s well-ventilated to the outside, and we have food, drink, and playing cards. Even a bed.”
She saw the bed and a wild thought went through her head. She allowed him to pull her into the shelter, and to her surprise he pulled out a chair for her at a small card table.
“Let’s play some cards,” he said.
A little stunned by the shift from kissing to cards, she shook her head. “I hate cards.”
“I know. But let’s play anyway.” He settled on a chair across from her. The light bulb above their heads threw harsh lights over him. “We need to play cards.”
I’d rather kiss. Heat filled her face.
Before long they heard bombing in the distance, but it was far, far off. They played poker, and he won hand after hand. In between laughing and poking fun at each other, an underlying tension simmered between them. She saw it in every hot glance he threw her way.
She threw down her rotten hand. “I’m terrible at this.”
“You are.”
She stuck her tongue out at him. “Well, I’m still a better dancer.”
He laughed. “You are.”
They talked and talked, recalling some intriguing situations from childhood and all the scrapes they’d survived. Around one in the morning an all clear rang out.
“Amazing. The bloody Germans are done already,” he said.
“The bad weather did help us.”
She knew she should go to the Savoy, but too many unspoken things remained.
Honesty pushed her to clear things up. “Have you talked to your parents lately? How are they doing?”
“I talked to them about a week ago. Everything seems very good. The most amazing thing is they’re talking more often with your grandparents. It seemed all that time they were forced to spend together made them friends.”
She laughed. “Friends? When I talked to my grandfather yesterday, he complained about the time your parents spent with them. Then he complimented both of them to high heaven.” She sighed. “I don’t understand them…any of them.”
“They’re human. Just like us.”
“Hard to remember sometimes.”
“Being from a different generation…” He shrugged. “They don’t understand us, either.”
She shuffled the cards, again and again out of nervous energy. “At least they didn’t force us to marry at gunpoint.”
He leaned on the table, and the bare bulb above them turned the angles of his face into stark relief. “They’re terribly civilized, Sylvie. Only Americans do bollocks like that.”
She gaped at him, and then saw the twinkle in his eyes that told her he was joking. “You brat.”
She threw a card at him, and he had to pick it up off the floor. “Now who is a brat?”
“Well…picking on Americans. You’d better watch out. We might be the only thing standing between you and total destruction.”<
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He sobered. “You might just be right. So the Americans had better get their butts over here and save us again, right?”
Afraid the levity would retreat, she threw another card at him. “You’re darned right.”
“Little chit.” He threw the card back.
A free-for-all started. She tossed another card and another at him, and he was pretty good at catching the insanely unpredictable projectiles.
“Damn it, girl, you’re a pest. Any man tell you that before?”
“Never.”
He grunted and handed her a neat stack of cards she’d lobbed his way. “Put ’em away.”
She saluted. “Yes sir.”
One thing hung in the air that she couldn’t ignore.
She grabbed all the cards into a neat pile and set them aside. “Alec, have you forgiven me?”
His brow furrowed. “For what?”
“For the…for not telling you what your father did to get you into the AFS.”
One corner of his mouth lifted in an attempt at a smile, and his eyes held genuine amusement. “I don’t know. I might have to subject you to a hundred more hands of poker as punishment.” His eyes warmed again. “Or perhaps another kiss would do.”
Excitement took over her body again, and she couldn’t dampen her need. “If that’s what it takes for you to forgive me, I’ll gladly take the punishment for the crime.”
He stood and reached for her. “God, Sylvie. Don’t say that to me.”
She easily went into his arms, anticipation rushing and dancing. His kiss this time held more tenderness and less urgency than it had before. She ran her hands over his broad shoulders, and upward to cup his face. His bristly cheeks felt rough against her hands, but she didn’t mind. Thrills prickled along her skin at the mere evidence of his masculinity. Long and hard, his erection lay against her stomach. If she took another step in this, he would have her. She’d know a man’s passion and lovemaking for the first time. Though she longed for it, she also knew this wasn’t the right place, and perhaps not the right time.
She gently disengaged from his arms. “I should return to the Savoy.”
“You’ll never get a cab tonight. Sleep in the bed. I’ll take the couch.”
The wisdom of his words made the decision for her. Still, she hesitated too long.
One London Night Page 25
