Once a Warrior (12 page)

Actually, Mike had been thinking about swinging by that little French inn tomorrow, the one his tank crew had discovered today, and seeing for himself if the barmaid really was as easy as they claimed. They’d come back to camp reeking of cheap wine and even cheaper perfume just as he was getting ready to leave to have dinner with the Gérards. Only the memory of honey-blonde hair and amber-brown eyes had kept him from taking a detour.

Talk about a rock and a hard place, he thought now. Here he sat, torn between a broad who was rumored to have round heels and a beautiful woman who’d stood up to the Nazis at every turn. And surprising the hell out of himself when he nodded and said, “Yeah, a picnic sounds like fun.”

* * * *

“
Le nez
.”

“You don’t pronounce the
z
?”

“
Non
.”

“
Luh nay
.”  Feeling clumsy and foolish, Mike repeated phonetically the French words for
nose
.

Anne-Marie rewarded his latest effort with an enthusiastic, “
Bravo
!”

These past two days had been short, but sweeter than anything either of them had ever known before.

Over yesterday’s picnic of pungent Camembert cheese, accompanied by slices of soft bread and crisp apple and topped off with a bottle of vintage
vin rouge
that she’d found in her grandfather’s cellar, they’d told each other their whole lives.

Mike had felt her sorrow, as keen as a knife’s edge, and his own slow-burning rage as she’d described the Stuka attack on Rouen that she’d survived and her parents and younger brother had not. And the story of how her cousin Maurice had died at the hands of the Nazis had poured kerosene on the fires of his fury.

Anne-Marie, in turn, had murmured regrets over the death of his father, expressed her deepest admiration for his mother’s determination to keep her family together and sighed with envy when he showed her the small black-and-white picture of his sister and brother that he carried in his soldier’s Bible. She would give anything, she’d said, to see even one of her deceased relatives again.

“My grandfather is dying,” she’d whispered then.

“I wasn’t sure you knew.”  He’d thought she might cry, providing him with the perfect excuse to take her in his arms, but she had remained in control of her emotions.

She’d raised her chin, her eyes shining like liquid amber, and said, “He misses my grandmother.”

A skylark’s song, as melancholy as it was melodious, had accompanied their accounts of John Brown and Miriam Blum. Had he reached for her hand first, or she his?  Neither remembered but both became increasingly aware that they were sharing more than just a sense of loss.

Their war stories had fallen on the lighter side. And deliberately so. Each of them had seen enough of its horror in their young lives without having to revisit it.

So she’d laughed until her stomach ached when he recounted bedding down in a barn in the dark of night on what he thought was a haystack and waking up the next morning to discover he’d been sleeping atop a pile of manure. And he’d shaken his head in utter astonishment when she told him about the German patrolman, unaware that she carried sabotage plans in her bicycle spokes, who’d helped her patch the front tire.

Finally, he’d revealed his artillery call sign and she her Résistance code name.

“’Ello, One-Fox,” she’d said saucily.

He’d gazed at her in a steady, serious way that made her uncomfortably warm. “Hello, Tiger Lily.”

Embarrassed, she’d glanced away. “I have to go home now.”

Mike hadn’t kissed her goodbye. Though Lord knew he’d wanted to. Instead, he’d filled her bicycle basket with packets of Nescafé and made her promise to come back first thing tomorrow.

So this morning, wearing her summer-white Sunday dress and a straw boater hat that had belonged to her grandmother, Anne-Marie had ridden out to the field to attend Mass with him. Accustomed to the pomp and ceremony of her village priest, she’d been amazed when his battalion’s chaplain simply spread a snowy white altar cloth across the hood of a jeep and called his flock to worship. She’d never felt closer to God or more afraid for a man than when she’d knelt in the lush green grass beside the American soldier who would be leaving her soon.

The gathering storm clouds had scuttled their plans to go swimming after Mass, so she’d hung her hat from her bicycle handlebars, he’d bought them each a bottle of Coca-Cola from the Clubmobile, and they’d taken a long, leisurely walk around the lake. When the wind picked up, raising gooseflesh on her bare arms, he’d loaned her his field jacket to wear over her light cotton dress and helped her roll back the too-long sleeves. In return, she’d offered to give him a French lesson.

Mike had spread his sleeping bag on the same secluded patch of the small beach where they’d picnicked the day before, then dropped down on it, Indian-style. Anne-Marie had tucked her skirt beneath her and folded her legs in ladylike fashion to sit beside him on its cushiony surface. He’d proved to be an apt pupil as she’d taught him the words for
head
and
eyes
and
nose
.

But now, ready to move lower, he looked at her soldier’s dream of a mouth that had kept him awake for two nights running and asked, “Lips?”

“
Les lèvres
,” she answered, moistening her own with her tongue in a way that made the skin on the back of his neck prickle.

Thunder grumbled in the distance. Or was it gunfire?  They both looked in the direction it had come from; they both felt time rushing away like grains of sand in an hourglass; they both looked back with the terrible knowledge that this might well be their last day together.

Mike got to his knees and brushed a finger down her cheek. Then he coiled a windblown strand of her soft, silky hair around that same finger and gently drew her up until they were kneeling face to face. He wanted to see, just once before he left, if she tasted as good as she looked.

“How do you say, ‘I want to kiss you’?”

Anne-Marie stared into his intent brown eyes for a breathless moment. She’d been raised to believe that the sin of the flesh started with a kiss, and had always been careful to stop any boy who tried to go beyond a chaste peck. Yet even knowing that this was a man who would take everything she had to give, she couldn’t refuse him.

“
Je veux t’embrasser
.”

He didn’t try to repeat the strangely pretty words. He just slid one hand into her hair, tilting her head back, then slipped an arm beneath the field jacket she was wearing and clamped it around her waist. Slowly then, he lowered his mouth to hers.

 Anne-Marie had been kissed before, but never like this. He touched the corner of her lips with his tongue. Took soft, plucking bites with his teeth and applied a gentle suction that generated a moan, low and deep, in her throat. On and on he went, teasing her and tempting her until her head buzzed, her blood raced and her breathing rasped as if she’d been bicycling uphill.

A jagged streak of lightning divided the sky as she wrapped her arms around him and parted her lips for more.

Mike was no longer thinking “just once.”  No longer thinking, period. She was soft and supple and as sweet as a feast after a long fast. Craving more, he sampled and savored her mouth. Used his tongue to trace the provocative curves that had been driving him stark, staring crazy. And then he plunged deeper, knowing he could never get enough of her.

Thunder clapped as the kiss turned ravenous, slanting this way, then that.

He wouldn’t give her promises he couldn’t keep. Couldn’t give her permanence when he didn’t even know where he would be this time tomorrow. So with hands that were as strong as they were sensitive to a woman’s needs, he gave her pleasure.

And what pleasure it was . . .

She shivered with it when he cupped her breast. Quivered with it when he shaped the soft flesh to fit his palm. Then thought she would die from it when he flicked his thumb over her nipple and brought it to full, aching bloom.

Desire zipped up her spine when his other hand moved down to her derrière and pressed her closer. She felt the steely evidence of his arousal through the thin material of her dress. And was amazed that she found no shame in letting him fondle her so intimately.

Two days ago they’d been complete strangers. Yesterday they’d become friends. Today, if nature took its course, they would be lovers.

Mike knew the French phrase for asking a woman to go to bed with him. Hell, the whole damn battalion had been practicing it since well before the landing. But Anne-Marie was so classy and “
Voulez-vous coucher avec moi
?” suddenly sounded so crass.

He nuzzled his way to her ear. Nosed her silky hair out of the way and sketched the sensitive shell with the tip of his tongue. Then he left his lips there to whisper, “How do you say ‘I want to make love with you’?”

Anne-Marie felt a skitter of panic as she turned her head and looked into his face. His dark hair fell over his brow and his dimple had deepened beside his smiling mouth. But it was his eyes, filled with breath-stealing tenderness, which had her shrinking away from him.

This was all her fault, she knew. It was she who had thought he would be satisfied with a few kisses. She who had melted like warm candle wax in his arms. Now it was she who had to put a stop to this.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured.

He shook his head to clear it. “What?”

She scrambled to her feet. “I said—“

“I heard you.”  He stood and propped his hands on his hips, his breathing as harsh as the wind that now rose between them.

“I can’t,” she said on a note of regret.

Mike knew he couldn’t blame her for pulling back without also blaming himself for trying to push her too far, too fast. But that didn’t slake his pent-up lust. Nor did it keep him from behaving like a class A bastard.

He took a menacing step closer to her and snarled, “Can’t or won’t?”

Anne-Marie couldn’t believe the change that had come over him. His mouth had tensed, his dimple had disappeared, and his eyes had developed an edge. A dark and dangerous edge that told her what a fierce warrior he must be.

Still, she met his challenging stare levelly. “One thing you must know about me is that I always say what I think.”

He nodded curtly, trying his damnedest not to admire her show of spunk as he waited for her to finish.

“I’ve never known a man.”  She saw his surprise, something deep and shadowed in his eyes, and went on in a jagged whisper, “But I think you’ve known many women.”

He couldn’t deny it. Didn’t even try. He just continued to stare at her, steeling himself against emotions he couldn’t afford to feel.

“What do you want from me?” he finally demanded.

“Nothing.”  That wasn’t true, but it didn’t matter now.

“Then why are you—”

“But for myself,” she said, lifting her chin to that proud angle, “I want to be more than one of many.”

There was a time when Mike would have lied to her. He would have taken her in his arms and told her that she was the girl of his dreams, his one and only, the woman he’d been waiting for his whole life. Hell, he’d have told her the moon was made of green cheese if it meant she’d go to bed with him.

But that was two months and a thousand lifetimes ago. Now he could no more look into those golden-brown eyes and lie than he could sprout wings and fly. And besides, he reminded himself in a throbbing fit of frustration, there was always that barmaid.

“Goodbye, Anne-Marie.”

She swallowed the sting in her throat and met his eyes directly. They were remote, as if he’d already put hundreds of miles between them, and his face was so wooden that it might have been carved from one of the stately oak trees that surrounded them. But it was his tone of voice, so flat and so final, that broke her heart.

“
Adieu, Michel
.”

The wind whipped her hair across her eyes, almost blinding her as she turned and, still wearing his field jacket, ran toward her bicycle. She felt as if she’d barely avoided a tumble from a cliff. And realized she already regretted not taking the plunge.

* * * *

“March Order!”

Enraged at the sudden awakening, for it was the middle of the night and he’d just barely gotten to sleep, Mike sat bolt upright in his sleeping bag.

“Hubba, hubba!”

Mike recognized his battalion commander’s voice. He heard men grumbling, jeeps backfiring and tank engines growling to life. Sounds that told him the peaceful interlude was over and the war was starting again.

Rain pelted the sides of his tent as he rolled out of his sleeping bag and, telling himself that it was time to move on, began getting dressed in the dark.

After Anne-Marie left, he’d gone to see the barmaid. With her flashing eyes and full lips, her swaying breasts and supple hips, Gi-Gi was just the ticket he needed. Or so he’d thought as he’d sat at a corner table, letting her fill his glass with wine and his head with fantasies.

Problem was, the woman he kept picturing had honey-blonde hair instead of black. A slender body, not a blowzy one. The woman who haunted him was the one he couldn’t have.

He’d done everything he could to forget Anne-Marie. He’d ordered more wine, trying to drown his frustrations. Bummed a cigarette from another soldier, then crushed it out after one acrid puff. He’d taken that other woman’s hand in his, let her lead him up to the loft and down to the disheveled bed where she did her “entertaining.”  Tasted other men when he kissed her and told himself it didn’t matter.

But he was wrong, dammit. It did matter. A hell of a lot more than it should have. Because when Gi-Gi’s avid mouth was on him, coaxing his body to climax, his mind wasn’t on her. When he closed his eyes and found his release, it wasn’t her face he saw behind his lids or her name that rang through his head. And when he left her with a large tip for her time and trouble, he still wasn’t satisfied.

He still wanted Anne-Marie.

“Moving out!”