by Penny Jordan
She was cycling happily down the centre of it when she heard the car, the sound so unexpected that at first she made no attempt to move off the crown of the road. The village saw its fair share of wartime traffic; the squire's wife still drove her car on Red Cross business and Lizzie was used to the imperious sound of car horns demanding the right of way, especially when they were driven by excitable young men in uniform.
She was not, though, used to them being driven down this narrow little lane which led only to the hospital, which was why, lost in her own daydreams, she did not initially react to the sound of this one until it was almost too late.
The realisation that someone was driving up behind her, that the car was one of those expensive, open-topped sporty models driven by a young man with wind-blown thick black hair, bronzed skin, and the dashing uniform of an airforce pilot, hit her in a series of small shocks as she glanced over her shoulder and saw the shiny dark green bonnet of the car, realised that there wasn't room for both of them on the narrow little road, tried desperately to turn to one side, and lost her balance at the same time. The young man stopped his car with a cacophony of squealing tyres, protesting engine and angrily bellowed complaints about her sanity.
Lying on the dusty road, her knees stinging with pain and her eyes with tears, Lizzie wished devoutly that a large hole would appear beneath her into which she could conveniently disappear.
Her face scarlet with mortification and embarrassment, she struggled to her feet, at the same time as she heard the car door slam.
'I say, are you OK? That was a nasty tumble you took… I thought you'd heard me…'
'I did…but I didn't realise… Well, no one ever drives down this road…'
She was on her feet now, her face still red, a tiny voice inside her deriding her for her vanity in not wearing the woollen stockings which would have protected her now smarting skin from the road, all too conscious of the appearance she must present to this unbelievably handsome young man who was now standing next to her, towering over her, looking at her in a way which made her loathe and castigate Lady Jeveson for ever being stupid enough to choose such unflattering clothes.
Two bright spots of colour burned on her cheekbones as she realised what was happening to her. For the first time in her life she was experiencing the dizzying, dangerous sensation of falling helplessly in love with a stranger—that sensation, that awareness… that feeling which she had heard so often described by the others.
The unexpectedness of it distracted her momentarily, her mouth half parting at the wonder of it, so that Kit Danvers found his attention caught by her, despite the awfulness of her clothes and the hairstyle that made her look like photographs he had seen of his grandmother.
If one really studied her it was possible to see that she was quite a looker, he recognised with the ease of a master long used to seeking out his quarry in the most unexpected of places.
Finding pearls hidden in dull oysters was Kit Danvers's speciality—the other men in the mess envied him for it, admiringly, if sometimes resentfully, recognising that when it came to women Kit Danvers had something, some unrecognised quality that the female sex found it impossible to resist.
Lizzie knew none of this. She only knew that as she looked into the laughing blue eyes looking back into hers, as she studied the handsome tanned face with its firm male bone-structure and its warm smile, something inside her melted and uncurled, something completely new to her and yet as old as Eve.
'You've got a smudge on your nose… There, it's gone.'
She held her breath as he leaned towards her and carelessly rubbed his thumb against her skin. A thousand pin-pricks of sensation were born where his touch had been, an odd yearning constricting her breathing, her body suddenly tense and yet languorous at the same time.
'Look, you can't ride that thing now… Why don't I give you a lift to wherever you're going…?'
'The hospital—I'm going to the hospital,' Lizzie told him breathlessly, scarcely conscious of what she was saying, unable to take her wondering gaze off his handsome, smiling face. 'I work there.'
'You do? Now, there's a coincidence. I'm on my way there too. They told me in the place where I'm staying that this road would get me there quietly and discreetly. Not supposed to be running this job really, you know,' he told her, patting the bonnet of his car. 'And she's a thirsty lady. But when you're in the forefront of a war you're entitled to a few perks. Luckily the Yanks aren't as parsimonious with their petrol as our people, and I know this Yank…' He broke off and smiled winsomely at her. 'Boring you to death, I expect. A pretty girl like you doesn't want…'
A pretty girl… Lizzie gazed adoringly at him. He thought her pretty… her heart raced and sang, and then she remembered all Aunt Vi's stern teachings and turned her head away from the dangerous potency of that warm smile, saying shakily, as she tried to pick up her cycle, 'I really must go… I'm sorry I didn't hear you coming…'
'Going to be late for work, are you? What do you do up there… nurse?'
'No, actually, I'm a nursing aide,' Lizzie told him and for some reason the surprise in his eyes hurt her a little. It had never mattered when other people spoke derisively about the lowly status of her work, but now, suddenly, for this handsome laughing young man, she ached to be able to announce that she did something very important…
'Well, we don't want you getting into trouble for being late. Not when it was really my fault. Hop in… I'll strap your cycle to the back.'
'I'm not actually working,' Lizzie told him, hesitating beside the car. It would be breaking all Aunt Vi's rules and her own to accept his offer of a lift, but she wanted to do so more than she had wanted anything else in her life. 'I'm going to visit someone…'
Immediately his glance sharpened. 'Boyfriend?' he questioned her, making her blush and shake her head.
'No, it's one of the patients… I promised him I'd wheel him out to see the rhododendrons now they're in flower. He says they remind him of his grandparents' home when he was a little boy…'
'Sensitive little thing, aren't you? A no-hoper, is he?'
Something in the careless way he spoke jarred on Lizzie's tender conscience; even though she knew that for Edward Danvers life could never ever be anything other than painful and lonely, she said quickly, 'No— no, of course not…'
Perhaps it was the stark contrast between the two men: Edward so pale and thin, old before his time, his body wasted, his manhood destroyed by the same terrible injuries which had necessitated the amputation of his legs.
It had happened in the frantic push to land on the Normandy beaches. He had been helping to organise the disembarkation, standing chest-deep in the icy cold water. Someone had got into difficulty in the water—a young private who couldn't swim—Edward had dived down to help him, and had been crushed beneath some landing equipment in the rush to get the troops ashore.
Edward's life had been saved but not his legs, and even now in his nightmares he cursed God for that cruel mercy.
In her mind's eye Lizzie saw him, so thin and wasted in his wheelchair, and compared him to this man, so fit and healthy, so insolently cheerful and careless of whatever dangers fate had in store for him, and suddenly and unexpectedly she was overwhelmed by a swift surge of protective, possessive fear, by a need to take him to herself and keep him safe… It was the first time she had ever experienced such an emotion and it stunned her, leaving her feeling too vulnerable and weak to object when he insisted on helping her into his car, and fastening her bike across its boot.
The space inside the car was so tiny that when he got in she was immediately conscious of the heat of his body, of its warm male scent, of all the differences of sex that separated them and stirred exciting frissons of sensation in every corner of her body, in her blood, under her skin, a tingling dangerous wave of heat that made her cheeks burn and her heart pound.
He set the car in motion, driving it with a careless recklessness that excited her even while it frightened her.
'I take it you don't have any people living locally— any family,' he enlarged, taking his attention off the road to turn and look at her. She made him feel a rare curiosity about her with her lack of any regional accent, her shyness, her total air not just of being unawakened but also of being completely unaware. He doubted that any man had ever kissed her, never mind…
'No. No, I don't,' Lizzie told him huskily. 'My… my aunt.'
'So what brought you to this part of the country, then?'
He was an expert in knowing how to approach a woman, and this one, this woman, child, green as she was, was going to drop into his arms as easily as ripe soft fruit.
All it needed was a little care, a little flattery, a little coaxing.
Lizzie gave him a surprised look. She was not used to people being interested enough in her to ask her questions. A warm glow began to spread through her body, bringing with it a dizzying surge of self-confidence and bravery.
'My… my aunt sent me here. She knows the matron in charge of the hospital.'
'Your aunt, you say… You don't have any other family, then?'
'No… not now…' Her voice dropped, her eyes darkening as she relived the shock of hearing of her parents' death. 'There was a bomb…'
While he nodded his head and made sympathetic noises, he was congratulating himself on having picked a real winner. No family to speak of apart from an aunt who, by the sound of it, didn't give a damn and anyway was too far away to be of any concern to him. He had a couple of days' leave owing to him. There was no reason why he shouldn't spend them here… Any longer than that and he would be bored out of his mind with her. As he made light conversation with her he amused himself by imagining what she would be like. She would be nervous but malleable; she would give him whatever he asked of her, just as long as he told her he loved her. He smiled cynically to himself. He was well aware of the effect his handsome face had on susceptible female hearts. He had seen that bemused, adoring look in too many pairs of feminine eyes before not to have recognised it.
Women were such fools. Tell them you loved them and they'd give you anything… everything…
'What a pity we can't pretend that you don't have to go in here,' he murmured softly to her, as the hospital came in sight. 'Then we could just keep on driving… run away together and never, ever come back. Would you like that, my sweet? Would you like to spend the rest of your life with me?'
Lizzie's heart thumped frantically with a mixture of shock and delight.
She heard him laugh and knew that she was blushing…knew that he must be able to read her feelings in her eyes.
'Shall we do that?' he continued to tease her. 'Shall I steal you away, take you somewhere where it would be just the two of us…?'
His voice had developed a deep, caressing, almost mesmeric quality. Totally unable to take her eyes off his face, Lizzie discovered that she had virtually forgotten to breathe and that suddenly her lungs were labouring desperately to take in air.
Taking advantage of her bemused state, he allowed the tone of his voice to change, to deepen with regret as he told her, 'How I wish I could do just that, but I can't, can I…? There's a war to be won.' He allowed his eyes to darken, his whole manner to become subtly infused with purposefulness; he had discovered very early on in the war that if there was one thing women fell for even more than being told he loved them, it was the suggestion that he as a man of honour had to put his country before his feelings. This one, he could see, was no exception.
Lizzie was aching inside. Soon they would be going their separate ways, and she doubted that she would ever see him again, despite what he had said. A tearing, sharp pain splintered inside her, making her catch her breath and lose her colour.
'I think you'd better drop me off here,' she told him as they approached the gate. The matron had very strict views about the girls keeping their distance both from the men and from their visitors.
'Fraternisation forbidden, is it?' he guessed, understanding at once and stopping the car.
Lizzie couldn't open the door and she watched breathlessly as he leapt over his own and came round to help her out, not opening the door for her as she had expected, but instead leaning down inside the car to lift her out bodily, so that for a brief, dazzling moment of time she was held against him, body to body, looking down into those teasing blue eyes, feeling her chest tighten and her muscles coil in heady excitement as he slowly lowered her to her feet, holding her tantalisingly and dangerously just off the ground, while he looked at her mouth and whispered to her.
'Tiny little thing, aren't you, just made to fit into a man's arms, with a mouth just made for a man to kiss? Has anyone kissed you before, sweetheart, or have you been saving yourself for me?'
Her heart was pounding so heavily, so noisily that she could barely hear what he was saying. She felt both lightheaded and yet at the same time as though everything around her had somehow become dazzlingly clear and sharp, as though she was seeing the whole world with new eyes.
'You know what's happening to us, don't you?' he pressed. 'You know that you and I…' He broke off, his face suddenly tense and fierce, his hands gripping her so tightly that it almost hurt. 'I've got to see you again,' he told her with an urgency that thrilled her. 'When will you be free?'
Free… She struggled to hold on to her sanity, to reason, but they had both been swept away and were no longer of any force in her life.
This was what mattered, this sweet sharp bliss, this delirious sensation of floating above the ground, of suddenly living life to the full, of knowing beyond any shadow of a doubt that she had met the man who embodied every single facet of all her yearning daydreams, that she had in fact fallen headily and instantly in love.
'I… after lunch,' she heard herself telling him in a thick, unfamiliar voice. 'I was going to write to my aunt. I write to her every week. She has arthritis and so she can't always write back…'
'I'll pick you up here at half-past two,' he told her softly, ignoring her flurried, strangled words.
And then, as he lowered her to the ground, his lips brushed lightly against her own, the merest touch—a touch which another and more aware girl would have recognised as deliberate provocation, but which to Lizzie appeared to be a gesture of the deepest reverence and respect, the most chaste kind of embrace, as though he hardly dared to do more than merely allow his lips to touch hers. So, in her reading, had the heroes hardly dared to sully their adored ones with the male carnality of their desires, cherishing their purity, even while they ached to possess it.
Lizzie knew nothing of the real world of real emotions, of the careless urgency with which men like Kit Danvers physically possessed her sex, claiming their compliance as their right as men who daily, hourly faced death.
'And, sweetheart…'
As she looked up at him, mute and adoring, he touched her braided hair and said, 'Wear this loose, and something pretty. I like my girls to look pretty…'
Just for a moment a cloud seemed to obscure the sun, chilling her skin. His girls, he had said… She frowned, her dizzying, bemusing dream suddenly darkened with reality, but then he touched her face, tracing the delicacy of its bone-structure, and the clouds were burned away in the intensity of the heat that shook her…
As she waited for him to unstrap her bike, Lizzie found herself wishing that it were already half-past two, that there were no long, tense hours to wait before she could see him again… hours which would be shadowed with fears that he might change his mind… that he might meet some prettier, more appealing girl whom he might favour with his smiles instead of her, and already, though she didn't know it, she had taken her first step into a dangerous and unfamiliar new world.
She found Edward ready and waiting for her, his face set and tense.
'I'm sorry I'm late,' she apologised. Some instinct that was beginning to grow with her own maturity gave her an insight into the feelings of others which she often wished she did not have. It was hardly less painful to
be so receptive to the emotional pain of others at second hand than it was for them to experience it themselves. Today she was particularly receptive to Edward's pain, her own emotional nerve-endings curling back in sensitive reaction to his anxiety.
'I thought perhaps you'd changed your mind. You shouldn't be spending your free time with me… Pretty girl like you should be out having fun.'
That was the second time in one morning a man had described her as pretty, but this time she felt none of the soaring joy she had experienced when he had described her thus, only a sharp anguished knowledge of Edward's own awareness that, while a woman might feel compassion for him, she could never feel desire.
As she wheeled him outside, she saw him lift his face towards the warmth of the sun. His skin had a grey, sickly undertone, the bones slightly shrunken under his flesh. He had lost weight in the long months he had been with them and her heart ached compassionately for him, as she contrasted him again with him.
The rhododendrons were set on a sloping bank just outside the formal gardens, and Lizzie, who had genuinely wanted to foster the tiny spark of interest she had seen in Edward's eyes the last time she had taken him there, had discovered that they had originally been planted by an owner of the house who had travelled extensively in China before the Boxer uprising. A keen botanist, he had collected various specimens in the wild and created this special area for them.
Where the formal gardens of the house had now gone to make way for vegetable plots, the rhododendrons had been allowed to remain.
Lizzie was slightly out of breath by the time she had pushed the wheelchair up the overgrown path that led to them, but her efforts were well rewarded when she turned a corner and stopped the wheelchair so that Edward could take in the full glory of the scene in front of them.
She heard him catch his breath, and, when she quickly kneeled down to look at him, she discovered that there were tears running down his face.