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 light-headed 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,