Table of Contents
Excerpt
Praise for Barbara Burke
Not2Nite
Copyright
Dedications
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
A word about the author…
Thank you for purchasing this publication of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.
They stood silently.
Slowly her hand came out of her pocket to rest on the top of his arm. The other one reached up to gently touch his cheek. He could see the glint of her eyes, those impossible brown eyes, as she gazed up at him gravely.
“Are you going to kiss me?” Her cool British voice gave him no inclination of how she felt.
“Is that what you want?” Guy wasn’t sure what he would do if the answer was no.
She didn’t reply, and he took that for her answer. Quickly he undid the clasp on her helmet and pulled it away, letting it drop to the ground without a thought. Free of its weight, she tilted her face up, her lips dark and full in the black night, and settled more deeply into his grasp.
It was invitation enough.
He bent his head toward her.
Her lips were soft and cold. Willing, but tentative. Her arms circled his neck, and he pulled her to him more tightly, body to body despite the thick winter clothing they both wore.
The night suddenly got a lot warmer.
The kiss didn’t last long. It was too sweet to be sustained, and they were too new to the sensation to change it into something more. As soon as Guy sensed Molly withdrawing, he broke it off.
But he didn’t release her.
And she made no move to pull away.
“Was that a mistake?” he asked.
“No.” Molly sounded quite sure, and Guy’s heart soared. But then she continued, “However, repeating it might be.”
Praise for Barbara Burke
“Is there such thing as love at first sight? Author Barbara Burke makes a convincing case in her historical romance, NOT2NITE. Through the use of accurate historical detailing and believable, true-to-life drama, the author has us hoping that love will conquer all. Will you be able to put the book down? Not2Nite!!”
~Norma Cook, author of The Lion’s Den
“RECOMPROMISING AMANDA is a delightful story. Ms. Burke took all the great qualities of a historical romance novel and compressed it flawlessly into this little gem. …I am duly impressed that Ms. Burke told an enjoyable and charming story in such a short book. This is a perfect story for a perfect couple.”
~The Long and the Short of It Reviews
“One of the best Historical romances I've read in a while because it had everything I love this genre of novel to have including a scandal in the past, some subtle humor and great main characters in Amanda and Jason. The dialogue and plot of this book made for easy reading.”
~The Romance Studio
“Barbara Burke takes the best of the traditional Regency romance and spices it up in this fantastic tale of two people who are so right for one another and cannot see what is right before their eyes. …I cannot wait to see what else this author has to offer because I enjoyed her style and creativity.”
~Got Erotic Romance
Not2Nite
by
Barbara Burke
A Candy Hearts Romance
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.
Not2Nite
COPYRIGHT © 2016 by Barbara Burke
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
Contact Information: [email protected]
Cover Art by RJ Morris
The Wild Rose Press, Inc.
PO Box 708
Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708
Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com
Publishing History
First Vintage Rose Edition, 2016
Digital ISBN 978-1-5092-0625-4
A Candy Hearts Romance
Published in the United States of America
Dedications
In memory of my mother, Phyllis J. Flint,
who lived through it.
I’m sorry I didn’t pay more attention to the stories.
~*~
And to Ross, of course.
Chapter One
London, February 1941
Guy had never been so lost. When he’d emerged from the warm, yellow glow of the pub, he had absentmindedly assumed he’d be stepping into a familiar world. A world where streets were lit with electric lamps and roads were identified with signs posted prominently, their names in easy to read bold letters. A world where lamps shone from every window and cars screamed past, lighting up the shadows of night even in the darkest back alleys. A world he knew, even if he was in a foreign country at war.
His mistake.
Even though it was winter, the daylight savings time had meant it was still light when he’d entered the small establishment, drawn in by the sounds of laughter and the raw bitterness of a late winter’s day. He hadn’t really paid attention to the heavy black oilcloth he’d had to push aside to enter. He was too intent on the warmth of the gas fire and the row of tap handles glistening in a seductive line across the back of the well-polished mahogany bar. As he sipped on the second pint of a very palatable bitter ale, propped as close as was reasonable to the flickering flames of the room’s only source of heat, the publican’s careful draping of the blackout curtains as dusk slowly settled had completely escaped his notice.
But when he’d warmed up and reluctantly decided he’d better press on, he had been brought up short. Outside it was as black as the inside of a cow, and Guy didn’t have a clue where to turn. In daylight it had seemed a simple task to follow the cryptic instructions that had been quickly copied down onto the back of an old envelope. A maze of streets might lead to his destination, but the route seemed clear enough. So he’d stopped on a whim, confident he knew where he was going. His mistake had lain in not re-entering the pub immediately he now realized. Instead, after stepping outside into the dark of a world under attack, he’d blundered along, convincing himself that he remembered which direction he had to take. More fool him.
He suspected he was already lost beyond any hope of saving long before he admitted defeat. His only alternative seemed to be to try to return to the pub by retracing steps that had been only vaguely imprinted on his memory the first time round. Naturally he’d only made things worse. He kept walking, hoping to find some kind of landmark, any indication at all of where he was.
It was eerily quiet on the street after the friendly clamor of The Horse Under Saddle, despite the fact that it was only eight in the evening. He heard the occasional voice in the distance or the rumble of a vehicle creeping along in the dark. The most persistent sound was that of glass crunching under his feet, a disconcerting reminder of where he was and the damage that had been done in the months and months of relentless bombing that was simply called the Blitz.
He kept his head down in the hopes of discerning the changes in shadow that would mark the difference between sidewalk and road. He didn’t expect to be able to do so, but it gave him a purpose.
Then he walked headfirst into a
lamppost.
It was bad enough that he’d cracked his head, but to do so on a useless hunk of iron that had originally been positioned where it was in order to cast enough light to guide people through the streets safely was just too much. He appreciated irony as much as anyone, but not when it was actually made out of iron and raising a goose egg on his brow. He tried to take a step away, and a quite unpleasant sensation of nausea came swimming to the surface of his awareness. He put out his hand quickly to clutch the cold metal and steady himself before he took an inglorious tumble to the glass-littered ground.
“Damn,” he muttered quietly, lifting his free hand to feel his face. A lump was already forming. God knows what had happened to his hat, knocked off during the encounter and probably in the process of forming an unbreakable bond with the random detritus of the bombed out streets. He took a few deep breaths, willing the dizziness to stop so he could let go of the lamppost and carry on with his doomed quest for a familiar landmark. When he thought he’d succeeded, he gingerly let go of the post and stood up straight. His head hurt, but he was pretty sure he was seeing straight again, and the nausea had receded. No real harm done, then.
In fact, the lamppost might have knocked some sense into him. Clearly he couldn’t go on wandering around in the dark until morning found him somewhere between Trafalgar Square and the Isle of Dogs.
Or in the Thames.
But which way to turn?
“Just don’t smack into the post again,” he admonished himself under his breath.
The signposts might all have been removed from the streets and even the veriest hint of illumination might be vigorously suppressed, but Guy suddenly remembered that street signs weren’t just on posts. They were often affixed to buildings, inconveniently high for drivers attempting to find one road in particular, but clearly apparent for those who had the time to scour the sides of the old stone and brick buildings for the small plaques. Of course, they were a lot easier to see in the daytime. And it helped if you were actually on a street corner, which Guy wasn’t.
At least he didn’t think he was. That didn’t seem too helpful.
One thing he did know. He was standing on the sidewalk, or the pavement as the Brits called it, and the lamppost was to his left. So the road must be farther left. If he followed it, he would eventually get to a corner, and when he did, he could look for a sign on a building. How he was going to see the sign was a problem he’d leave until he actually got to the corner. First things first.
Walking with one foot on the curb and one foot in the gutter, he gingerly made his way along, moving slowly so as not to fall off the sidewalk when he came to an intersection and risk another ignominious tumble. One advantage to the blackout, he ruefully acknowledged to himself, was that at least no one had seen him make a complete idiot of himself. Of course, he wouldn’t have been in position to make a complete idiot of himself were it not for the blackout.
The corner was, thankfully, not very far away. Though he stepped off the pavement with a jar that momentarily set his head swimming again, he managed to stay on his feet. A small victory, but at this point he was willing to take whatever he could get.
He wondered what the chances were that if he stepped into the middle of the intersection he’d find a statue of Eros. That would certainly place him in Piccadilly Circus. However, considering how many intersections there were in a city of seven million people, he considered it unlikely that he’d found one he would recognize quite that easily. And given the way his luck was running, he suspected that the minute he actually managed to figure out where he was he’d be hit by a bus as incapable as he at finding its way through the darkened streets.
Against the rules or not, he needed some sort of light or he’d be wandering the streets of London until the sun rose. It was almost as quiet as it was dark. Surely he’d be able to hear an enemy aircraft if there was one above. Bombing runs had decreased substantially in the last few weeks. The word was that Goering was running out of planes as well as pilots to fly them. God bless the RAF. At this stage in the proceedings, he was pretty sure he wouldn’t be putting the entire western world in jeopardy by risking enough light to search for a sign post.
He felt through his pockets, fortunately one of the few things he was able to do efficiently in the dark. Men often complained about women’s handbags, but he had to admit that the collection of loose change, ticket stubs, bits of paper, broken pencils, and apparently, candy that seemed to accumulate in his various pockets could put any female to shame. Surprisingly, he didn’t seem to have any matches on him, but eventually he found the monogrammed Zippo lighter his father had given him in the front pocket of his trousers—how did it get there? It was usually in his breast coat pocket—and pulled it out.
He flicked the wheel with his thumb and was relieved when the spark caught and a flame immediately leapt up from the metal chamber in the middle of the lighter. He held it high and looked up at the building he was standing beside hopefully, searching for small indications of a different kind of material from the pale stone, something that would mark the existence of a street sign and a shot at reaching his destination before peace was declared.
****
Molly walked along the road slowly and carefully. It had been a long day, and her feet were sore. Unfortunately, it looked like it was going to be an even longer night. Once again one of the fire watch volunteers had not turned up for duty. Not turning up when one was supposed to was, unfortunately, not unusual. People were suddenly posted elsewhere; a work or family crisis erupted; they decided they couldn’t take the relentless bombing any longer and escaped to the relative peace of the country where their chances of having the very roof over their heads crash down upon them was somewhat slimmer; they died. All one could do was send someone else in and hope for the best. Tie a knot in the rein, as the Duke of Wellington once said, and keep riding. But this particular volunteer was notorious for his dereliction. A pretty girl had only to wiggle her assets before he was off after her like a hound on the track of a hare, all thought of duty forgotten.
And it was up to Molly, the warden in charge of placing watchers across the rooftops of this part of London, to find someone to fill his too frequently vacated shoes. Only tonight there wasn’t anyone. Her resources were stretched as thin as gossamer, and there wasn’t a body to spare. Except her own. So now she was off to stand on a rooftop in February and make sure that any Nazi planes that made it as far as the skies over London would be seen and any damage they did would be reported immediately.
She’d so much rather be making a cup of tea and stretching out in a hot, deep bathtub before wrapping herself in a fluffy robe and curling up by the fire with a good book.
Well, that wasn’t going to happen. There were enough clouds in the sky so that a bombing run wasn’t guaranteed, but if those clouds cleared, the nearly full moon would probably make the conditions too tempting to ignore. The Luftwaffe sat on the coast of France, just a few miles from Dover, like a cat at a mouse hole, waiting for the opportunity to rain down more bombs on England’s capital, and to be fair, any other major British city that took their fancy.
But Britain was a lion, not a mouse, thank you very much. Even if aerial activity had been decreasing in recent weeks, this was no time to lessen one’s vigilance.
Metaphorically squaring her shoulders and physically lifting her chin, she told herself that even if she ended up being the last man (or woman) standing, she knew her duty and she’d perform it to the bitter end.
It was then she saw the flare of light up ahead.
“Oi!” she cried, all thought of sore feet and hot baths forgotten as she dashed toward the source of the light. “What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?”
****
Guy almost dropped his lighter when he heard the voice cry out in the darkness. He’d thought he was completely alone on the deserted street, and for a brief instant, the sudden sound was as spine chilling as the scary bits in Nosferatu, a German m
ovie about Count Dracula which he had sat through on a dare when he was eleven and had bad dreams about for months afterward. He could still bring to mind with crystal clarity the scene of the monster’s shadow climbing the staircase.
But the words that immediately followed that cry brought him back to earth. It was a woman’s voice, and an angry woman’s voice at that. Presumably—hopefully—attached to an all-too-human angry woman. And unlike a confrontation with the evil Nosferatu, an angry woman was something he could deal with. Anyone with a mother and a passion for playing baseball in the backyard learned how to do that at a very young age.
He was just about to pull out his best conciliatory tone when the lighter was unceremoniously smacked out of his hand and he was plunged back into darkness.
He hadn’t expected that.
“Are you trying to get us killed?”
The voice in the dark managed to sound both furious and delectable. Generations of offhand elocution had gone into developing that accent, and the ever-so-slightly superior tone probably came as naturally as breathing.
He hoped she was a looker because he was half in love with her already. But then he’d always been a sucker for a bossy woman who wasn’t afraid to show it.
“No, ma’am,” he said, as politely as he could. “I guess I just wasn’t thinking. I’ve been wandering around for quite some time trying to get my bearings, and when I got to the corner, I thought it would be okay to strike a light for just a minute to see if I could figure out what street I was on. Clearly I was mistaken.”
There, he thought to himself. Women love men who freely admit they’re wrong about something.
“Clearly,” was the dry response. “I’m almost embarrassed to have to stoop to such a cliché, but one never knows when dealing with Yanks, so I’ll just spit it out: don’t you know there’s a war on?”
“Yes, ma’am, I do and I’ve already apologized.” Guy tried to speak humbly, but he was starting to rethink his opinion of bossy women with plummy British accents.
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