Once a Warrior (18 page)

“In the vestibule.”

She lifted a hand to his cheek. “You get the bedroll and I’ll make a fire.”

“
We’ll
make a fire.”  He turned his lips into her palm, then released her.

There were enough live embers beneath the ashes of last night’s fire to catch quickly when Anne-Marie touched a match to the kindling under the logs that Mike had laid on the grate.

As the blaze grew, its orange-and-crimson flames brushing heat across their faces and lighting the dark corners of the unfurnished room, he retrieved his bedroll from the vestibule and, together, they spread it in front of the hearth.

He unlaced his snowpak boots and toed them off. Following his lead, she stepped out of her sensible traveling shoes and met him in the middle of the wool blanket that covered his canvas shelter half. Seeing that he’d already removed his shoulder holster and partially unzipped the top of his tank suit, she reached to undo the buttons down the front of her dress.

“Let me,” he said huskily, laying a staving hand over hers.

No fantasy, no matter how richly woven, could have prepared her for the way he lingered over undressing her.

One by one, he slowly undid her buttons and slid her dress off her shoulders. She shivered, but not from the cold, as he lowered his head and savored the satiny curve of her neck. First one side. Then the other.

Her slip came next. Hooking his thumbs under the straps, he drew the undergarment down until it landed in a cottony pool at her feet. Both of his arms went around her, and she felt her brassiere go tight, then loose, then fall away.

The sound that rumbled in his throat when his gaze shifted downward made her stomach tremble. “Beautiful.”

Her lashes swept down shyly, then lifted. “I’m small.”

“You’re perfect.”  To prove it, he cupped her breasts in his hands, holding them as if they were fragile glass that could be shattered by a careless touch. “Just perfect.”

Her breath quickened when his thumbs feathered over her nipples. Her heartbeat accelerated as he teased them to aching fullness. Her pulses pounded and her hands gripped his wrists, urging him to soothe that which he’d so skillfully inflamed.

And still, he didn’t hurry. He slipped his hands inside the waistband of her rayon panties and peeled them and her ribbed stockings past her hips and over her slender legs. On his knees now, he slid his warm palms up and down the backs of her thighs while he nuzzled the soft, tawny curls at their juncture.

If she had been thinking straight, she would have been shocked. As much by what he was doing to her as what more she wanted him to do. She swayed, dizzy from the onslaught, and dug her fingers into his shoulders.

Mike was dying to taste her. To ravish and plunder and devour. But because this was her first time, he put the brakes on desire, got to his feet and skimmed a finger along the delicate ridge of her collarbone.  

“I’ve dreamed of seeing you like this.”

Anne-Marie wondered how he could touch her so gently yet look at her with such simmering violence. Her hand trembled as she finished unzipping his tank suit top. Fumbled a bit when she spread it open.

“And I, you.”

Firelight licked the planes and hollows of his face as he shucked off his tank suit, skivvies and socks. In the nude, he was every erotic statue that she had seen or imagined. Her gaze held a connoisseur’s gleam as it swept from his broad shoulders to his flat stomach, from his bold erection within the dark nest of his loins to—

She gasped at the sight of the inch-long scar high on his muscular thigh. Before she could stop herself, she reached out to touch it. “
Mon Dieu
, what happened?”

He savored the slow up and down rub of her finger for a few seconds before he took her shaking hand in his. “A piece of shrapnel.”

Tears welled up in her eyes as the war, which they’d managed to hold at bay thus far, came crashing back into their midst. “You . . . you could have been killed!”

“But I wasn’t.”  He brushed a tear from her cheek and pulled her into his arms.

“Was it painful?” she persisted, unable to bear the thought of him suffering.

“I’m all right, Anne-Marie.”  His voice was as gentle as the hand he stroked down her back.

She wrapped her arms tightly around his waist and pressed her cheek to his hair-matted chest. “Make love with me, Mike.”

“I will,” he promised.

“Now.”  She threw her head back, the embers of an age-old need flaring in her eyes. “Please, now.”

His gaze caught her fire and returned its golden radiance. She felt her head spinning and clutched at him for dear love, afraid she was falling. But he was just lowering her to the thin cushion of the bedroll before following her down and easing himself over her on his hands and knees.

“I wish it was a feather bed.”  His gruff voicing of her girlish fantasy brought a new stinging to her eyes.

She blinked back her tears and wound her arms around his neck. “We’ll pretend it is.”

The heavy drone of planes in the sky rattled the windows of the house and shook the floor as he bent his head and kissed her. He drew her tongue into an erotic duel in which there were no losers. But on the battlefield to which he was returning, she knew, there could only be one winner.

“
Je t’aime
,” she murmured as he continued to kiss her and caress her until her body arched instinctively against him, seeking more. “
Je t’aime, Michel
.”

Mike knew in his heart that Anne-Marie was saying she loved him. He could hear it in the soft intensity of her voice. Could see it in her eyes, her face. But with his two best friends already gone and himself just a fugitive from the law of averages, he couldn’t say it back. Couldn’t bring himself to tell her how very much she meant to him.

So he did the next best thing. He moved her hands from his neck to his hips, then slowly entered her. And as the firelight cast a glow over their entwining limbs, he stroked her and he stoked her and he showed her that love has a language all its own.

* * * *

“Again.”

Mike didn’t say in case it was the last time, but he didn’t have to. Lying cradled in the curve of his arm in front of the fire, Anne-Marie heard the urgency, raw and rough-edged, in his voice. Understood that time, not the Germans, was their worst enemy now.

Swallowing her tears and her fears, she looked down. At the luminous dial on the watch he still wore. At the dark hairs swooping down from his forearm to curl about that serviceable wristband. At his long, strong fingers strumming restlessly from her waist to her hip to her thigh and back again.

Then she looked up, into the molten force of his eyes, and felt a heat that had nothing to do with the flames at her back rising inside her.

“Yes,” she agreed, her own voice shaky but certain. “Again.”

* * * *

Her arm tucked securely in his, Anne-Marie walked with Mike to the square.

They’d remained in the house, hidden away from the world, until the last possible moment. She had promised herself she wouldn’t cry when it was time for them to leave, and she hadn’t. But as they approached the corner where the Army truck would pick him up, she could feel her eyes beginning to sting and her chin to quaver.

Determined as much for his sake as for her own to maintain her composure, Anne-Marie took a deep breath and said calmly, “I’ve heard that in Paris I can get a kilo of sugar for a pack of American cigarettes.”

“That’s only—what?—a little over two pounds.”

“Enough for one person for a month or more.”

Mike’s throat ached as he glanced down at her and saw her staring straight ahead. The sun had ducked behind a bank of late-afternoon clouds, but her hair shone like gold in the cheerless light. She wasn’t wearing gloves, and her hand looked pale and pretty against his olive drab sleeve. Her taut fingers, however, reflected her inner turmoil.

“Well,” he drawled, giving her arm an affectionate squeeze as they approached the square, “as long as you don’t trade ’em for turnips.”

She smiled up at him, but her eyes bespoke a sorrow that resonated in his soul.

Before she could reply, though, the canvas-topped Army truck rumbled into the village and came to a stop with a squealing of brakes and a grinding of gears.

It was better this way, Mike thought as he looked to the east, toward the German front and away from Anne-Marie’s haunting amber eyes. Already he could hear the sounds of shells exploding one right after the other. He could see the smoke rising and smell the acrid odor of gunpowder. Already he could feel that familiar tightness forming in his gut as he once again faced the prospect of his own death.

The truck driver leaned across the seat and opened the passenger door. “Wanna ride up front, Lieutenant?”

Ignoring the envious looks of the young replacements crammed onto the rail seats in the rear, Mike tossed his bag and his bedroll into the cab. Then he turned back to the woman standing quietly behind him and kissed her, quick and hard. And, perhaps, for the last time.

Anne-Marie felt her lips tremble and prayed that she would get through this without falling apart. She tried to smile at him but couldn’t quite manage it. “I’ll send you my address when I find a place to live in Paris.”

He wanted to tell her that, address or no, he would find her. To this point, though, he hadn’t made any promises he wasn’t positive he could keep. And he damn sure wasn’t going to start now. So he just nodded and said, “I’ll look for your letter.”

Then he climbed into the cab and closed the door.

Mike sat woodenly on the front seat, with his eyes on the road ahead, as the driver shifted gears. He’d sworn he wouldn’t look back, and he didn’t. But if he had, he would have seen Anne-Marie weeping openly as she waved goodbye to him.

CHAPTER  NINE

Stalag 58, Germany

The prisoner of war camp sat in a peaceful green valley beneath a warm April sun. Apple trees wore blossoms as white and frilly as a bridal veil. Wildflowers grew in wild profusion at their feet and birds flitted through the spring-blue sky overhead.

Everything and everyone was quiet.

Until a vast panoply of American tanks and open-topped M-7s, their engines growling like panthers and their guns rattling a warning, crested the grassy hill.

And the hundreds of hollow-eyed internees crowded behind the rusting barbed-wire fence raised a cheer that echoed throughout the valley.

Mike ordered his tank driver to stop on the high ground. Then he focused his field glasses on the compound for a moment before calling down to the emaciated man who was riding point, “I don’t see any guards in the towers.”

A new hope seemed to light the escapee’s eyes as he looked back from the front end, where he was standing with one arm hugging the gun. “They must’ve heard us coming and made a run for it!”

“You think it’s a trap, sir?” the artilleryman to Mike’s right shouted over the noisily idling engines.

“There’s only one way to find out.”

“Go in with triggers fingered.”

Leaving Anne-Marie was the hardest thing Mike had ever done. She’d become a part of him, like the shrapnel in his leg: hot and painful and impossible to ignore. And as he’d strapped on his gun in the waning light of a day that might have been their last, he couldn’t help feeling bitter about having to return to the war.

But as bad as he had it, the mission was still his priority. It had to be. Especially if he wanted to live long enough to see her again. So when he rejoined his battalion, he rolled up his sleeves and got down to the sordid business of destroying everything in his roundabout path to Paris.

His first day back, he’d helped clear the high ground on the enemy side of the Prüm River for an infantry division that was attacking across it. A couple of weeks later, he’d laid a highway of hot steel for an armored drive toward Frankfurt. And just last week, he’d fired one smoke mission after another to cover his own battalion as they crossed the Rhine River on pontoon bridges for the final thrust into the evil heart of the Fatherland.

How he’d gone from directing fire missions to leading a rescue mission was another story altogether.

At the crack of dawn, while the battalion was warming up its engines for today’s push, an escapee from the prison camp had staggered into their command tent after walking all night. His eyes fever-bright, his remnant of a uniform hanging on his skeletal frame and his boots coming apart at the seams, the young corporal had looked certifiably crazy. Yet he’d sounded perfectly coherent as he’d explained to the CO that there were almost a thousand American soldiers, most of whom had been captured during the Battle of Bulge, being held in a German prison camp some five miles away.

“We have to hurry, sir,” he’d said. “Some of the men were wounded during the Bulge and never received proper medical care. Others suffered frostbite when they were force marched out of the Ardennes.”  He’d squared his coathanger shoulders then. “All of them are starving.”

“
We
?” the colonel had queried as he’d eyed the scarecrow of a man swaying unsteadily across the stack of C-ration cartons that served as his desk.

The former POW’s face had twisted with pain as he’d leaned forward and said, quietly but firmly, “I promised the men I’d bring help or die trying, sir.”

Mike had gone into headquarters to pick up his observation maps just a few minutes ahead of the escapee. As he’d listened to him talk, he couldn’t help but think of the terrible fate that had befallen John Brown and Charlie Miller, whose wife Daisy had given birth to an eight-pound boy in early February. Something in his eyes or his facial expression must have reflected his growing determination to help those other men, as he had not been able to help his two best friends, because he’d come out with orders to liberate the camp.

Now he gave the go-ahead sign and the column, guns pointed outward in case the Germans were playing a deadly game of cat and mouse, moved slowly but steadily down the hill. Ambulances and jeeps full of medics followed closely behind. Yet more armor brought up the rear.