Army of You & Me (4 page)

“Me?”

“Yes, you.” He held up a truffle. “Any good?”

She ignored him. “Don’t you have friends?”

He laughed. “None in my platoon are Londoners. The rest of my friends still live in Cambridgeshire. You’re my London connection. Help a man out?”

“I’m sure you don’t need help. You seem perfectly capable of managing on your own.”

“With plenty of things. House hunting has always been one of my failings. I need a second opinion.”

“Why do you need a flat? Won’t you be going back on tour soon?”

“Probably, but not for a while. I’ve got time on my hands, and if I live with my parents any longer, there will be blood.” He glanced at her under his lashes. “Come on. It’ll be fun.”

“Erm...”

“Isn’t it lunch time soon?”

“Not...”

Cain nodded to the dog-shaped clock behind her. “Getting to one. Let me take you to lunch. See if I can convince you to flat hunt with me.”

“I work during the day.”

Cain stood up and stripped off his gloves. “After work appointments are pretty easy to arrange since lots of people have jobs. I just need a second opinion.” He leaned forward and wiped something from her cheek. “White chocolate. Food?”

It made her giggle. “Okay. All right, then. Just food.”

He furled his eyebrows at her. She supposed he was probably far too used to being obeyed.

They’d been wading in the marshes for days. In between the smell of rotting corpses and the stench of her own body, Madeline didn’t just think about food. It occupied every waking minute. Food she hadn’t been able to finish. Meals she’d shared with her cousins. Dishes her mother prepared before she’d been shot on her way home.

One of the women she and her father had been travelling with for the last few days had been cut with a machete. The wound was infested with maggots, but she didn’t cry. She hadn’t cried at all. Another had her baby ripped from her and murdered in front of her eyes. The woman had died shortly after. Madeline knew deep down she’d given up, like so many others were close to doing.

Every so often the
interahamwe
would call across the marshes, “Snakes! Come out, snakes!” and spray bullets into the distance. Some people were hit by the stray gunfire. The wounds would kill them and the
interahamwe
would come into the marshes to check their prey. Madeline and her father would hide amongst the corpses and pretend to be dead. Dressed as a boy, Madeline was saved from having her innocence ripped from her. Every day, even though her scalp itched and her arm weighed heavy with her body’s cells fighting possible infection, she knew she was lucky. She knew what she had escaped. Whether her cousins, aunts, and uncles had, she had no idea.

“Mpoyi.” Her father called her by their surname in front of everyone else. If they didn’t know she was a girl, then the soldiers wouldn’t know, either. “This way.”

They edged away from the rest of the group.

“Daddy, are we going the right way?” she asked. He patted her dirty cheek affectionately.

“We’re almost there.”

“Where?”

“There are soldiers here. Not Hutus
—
United Nations. They’ll help. They must. How can the whole world watch us be slaughtered and not help us? This way, darling. The more south we are, the closer we are to getting out.”

In her young life, Madeline had learned a lot about the world. She knew the world didn’t care about her.

***

Cain edged Madeline into the restaurant. It was gently lit, inclined to romance, and from the look on his date’s face, not to her liking one bit.

“Can we go somewhere else?” she asked, looking up at him. In another of her vintage get ups, she had a silk scarf in her hair, tying back her twists.

“What’s wrong with this place? It’s round the corner from your shop.”

“Exactly,” she muttered under her breath. “They are terrible with desserts. They buy from the supermarket and slap on a ten-pound price tag. Out of order.”

Cain tilted his head to the side to catch her eye. “We’re having dessert?”

She lifted a shoulder. “You look like a dessert man. Well. You know. Like one meal wouldn’t be enough for you.”

He laughed and opened the door for her. “Thanks. I think.”

She placed her hand on his and pointed across the road. “Pub. How long since you had a proper pub lunch?”

“About a year. Maybe longer.”

“Awesome,” she announced, clapping her hands together. “This is one of the best. Anywhere. I defy you, I challenge you to find better.”

Ah, she liked food. Good to know she was passionate about something. He hadn’t noticed the pub on his way to the sweet shop, but then all his mind was on Madeline. She made a beeline for a window table and called out to him over her shoulder, “Roast pork and that strawberry beer, please.”

“Good God.” He frowned. “At least have a shandy, woman.”

“Pork me. Beer me,” she demanded, sitting down. Cain burst out laughing.

“Your wish is my command.”

With a delicate hand she waved him to the bar and retied the scarf on her head. She was an extremely striking woman. He glanced around the pub and noticed the blatant looks men were sending her way. It was that mouth of hers. It only conjured dark, sensual
—
insanely sensual
—
thoughts. He grabbed a menu and breathed out to gather some control. He ordered a pint of lager and ordered the roast lamb along with Madeline’s pork and beer.

Taking a sip before he returned to the table, he closed his eyes. That had been a long time coming and well deserved. Carrying the drinks over with an order number written on a wooden spoon stuck inside a jar, he sat opposite Madeline.

She picked up her beer and held it aloft. “To coming home in one piece.”

“Truth,” he agreed, touching his glass to hers. He watched her sip her drink. There was something unnaturally erotic about a woman with a pint glass.

“So,” she asked, “what have you been up to since you got back?”

“Not much,” he admitted. “It’s strange. Most of the time in Afghanistan, there were days on patrol that my nerves were like piano wire. You live on adrenaline and expectation. Then you come home and... It feels weird. You miss it. But at least, it’s nice to know that a bang is going to be a car backfiring and not an IED.”

“A what?”

“Improvised Explosive Device,” he explained, “landmines, helpfully dotted around the Helmand province by insurgents. It’s why soldiers who come home with bullet holes say they’re lucky. Could have been worse.”

“Not much of a choice,” she said warily. “Bullet or being blown to pieces.” Her gaze fell on her drink. “I suppose that means you saw mine. Bullet wound, I mean.”

He folded his arms on the table and leaned in closer to her. “Madeline, you don’t have to talk about it.”

“I know...” She didn’t meet his gaze, only drew her fingertip over the wood of the table top. “But I was shot. Obviously, I mean. I was running away from the militia that raped and murdered everyone in my village.”

“Jesus,” Cain breathed. He hadn’t expected her to say it like that. But then why bother making it sound nice?

“Dad and I got out. It wasn’t luck or chance. My dad... He was prepared. And determined. And when we met your father – Captain Goldsmith then...” She breathed out and struggled to speak. Cain caught her hand and squeezed. “It was my only war wound. Physical.” A grin lit her face. “Maybe I’ll do an exhibition for you. Show me yours and I’ll show you mine.”

He felt lust punch him in the gut. Now all he could think of was Madeline slowly stripping off and pointing to various scars. God, he had to be messed up to find that sexual. “Well er... That sounds promising. What did my dad do?”

“Didn’t you ask him?”

“He said it wasn’t his story to tell.”

She shyly looked down at their linked hands. “He got me and my dad out of Rwanda. Into Tanzania. Put us in touch with a lawyer friend of his who is still the scariest man I’ve ever met. He sped us through the asylum system.”

“Good on Dad.”

“If he hadn’t... I don’t doubt we’d have been on the first plane back. I mean, now we can go back. With refugee status, you can’t.”

“What?”

“If you’re a refugee, you’re claiming asylum. You’re telling the UK government that your country can’t protect you. So you’re banned from going back there. Until you have British citizenship. Or indefinite leave to remain.”

“Have you ever been back?” he asked.

She shook her head. “No. I don’t think I’d ever go back. What was your worst tour?”

“Baghdad,” he said, blinking rapidly. Recognition that having the spotlight turned on him was thoroughly uncomfortable didn’t stop him from wanting to know everything about her.

“Would you go back?”

“I did.”

Madeline blinked. “Really? Why?”

The answer had always been straightforward to him. “Because I could help. And I did. I think I did. I hope so.”

“That makes me feel guilty.”

He wanted to pick up her delicate little hand and kiss it, send reassurance to her that it was silly to feel that way. “No one wants to revisit their nightmares.”

“My friend runs a charity. Helping Rwandan refugees find the path to forgiveness of those who tried to execute us.”

“Have you? Forgiven those who took your home from you? Your family? Your innocence?” Christ, was that why she was so skittish around him? Had she...

“I was lucky. So very lucky. Had my father been less than prepared to do what he did, I don’t think I would have escaped with my body as intact as it was. There were six-year-old girls who weren’t anywhere near as lucky as me.” She took a deep breath before speaking again. “It’s not forgiveness. I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to do that, but I accept that what happened, happened. You know?”

“I think you underestimate yourself. You’re sitting opposite a soldier, one who followed orders. Just like the Hutu militia.”

“If you were ordered to kill babies, behead women, would you follow those orders?”

Cain rubbed his eye with an absent finger. “After 2006, we had a change in orders. PID. Positive Identification at a Distance. It meant if we didn’t know who was shooting at us, if we didn’t know for sure it was Taliban? We couldn’t shoot back. Too many innocents got caught up in the crossfire before we got those orders. Those orders could have come earlier, and at the same time, those orders cost good soldiers their lives. I followed them. Didn’t raise hell about it, just got on with it.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“Yes, it does. War’s a messy business. People always get caught in the crossfire, whether you intend them to or not. You can’t drop a bomb on a known target and expect innocent people to escape the shrapnel.”

“That’s accidental.”

“They still died,” he said softly. “Ah, here’s our food.” He released her hand and leaned back as two hot plates piled with slices of meat, crispy roasted potatoes, and butter-topped vegetables were placed before them. “This looks like heaven on a plate, thank you.”