His Very Own Girl (13 page)

It’s all right, Joe.

She was the one to slip her tongue past his smooth lips and delve into the warm hollow of his mouth. She was the one to slide her hands down his biceps and squeeze the muscle that waited, hard and tense, beneath his olive drabs. She was the one who moaned first, then basked in his answering sounds of passion. While she was tasting and gripping, testing his nerve and her own, Lulu’s mind was a hundred steps ahead. She was taking off his tunic and tugging down his suspenders, dipping her fingers into his trousers.

Wanting this hard, implacable man open to her—open and revealed—spun Lulu’s head with dizzying possibilities. The power of her erotic visions as she kissed him, bending into him, left her gasping. He nuzzled her neck and licked the spot just behind her earlobe.
Not
kissing Joe could be nearly as exciting as kissing him, so long as he kept using his mouth somewhere, anywhere on her skin.

She breathed his name, a rasping whisper. The train puffed toward the station and exhaled a shriek of steam.

“Lulu,” he said, as winded as she was. “Lulu, I can’t—”

“I thought that I could hold fast to those rules of mine and block out all of this, but I don’t know if I want to anymore.” She gripped his hair down to the scalp; wincing first, he let his mouth ease into a wide grin. “This
is
dreamtime. And I want to have the good along with the bad. And this, Joe—this is good.”

He placed a whisper-soft kiss across her knuckles, then held her hand close to his heart. Lulu felt its strong, measured pulse through the layers of his uniform.

An air-raid siren ripped to life.

The ominous roar of approaching bombers followed.

Lulu cocked her ear toward the sky. The aircraft were distinctly German, their unsynchronized engines creating that dreaded whir-whir drone. “Junkers—Ju 88s. A lot of them.”

Only a moment earlier she’d been warm and wanted and lavished with a long-denied passion. Now they had to get safe. Lulu’s thoughts narrowed to that one impulse.
Safe.
Find shelter. Don’t get caught out.

But there was no panic in her blood. Like a marathon runner asked to finish another two miles, her senses were already on alert after kissing Joe. The jump from aroused to alarmed wasn’t a far one. Joe’s expression of calm intensity hadn’t altered. As when he’d fought Dixon, he simply seemed a more potent version of himself, with no haste or flustered movements.

“The underground walkway,” she said. “It connects the platforms.”

The other would-be travelers and the nearest conductor had the same idea. Fear streaked late-night faces, where the talcum powder and lipstick and hair tonic had been mussed, made sweaty and imperfect by an evening of fun. Four years, however, had eroded whatever alarm might have otherwise blossomed. The train screeched to a halt, its brakes like the squeal of a gutted pig. Some of the forward passengers disembarked and joined the jittery queue to the underground walkway. The others, farther out in the rear carriages, would just have to huddle and pray.

Joe grabbed Lulu’s hand, his grip saying without words that he wouldn’t let go. Bodies to the back of them and bodies in front of them, Lulu swallowed a rush of claustrophobic fear. People had been crushed to death in London, dead from suffocation long before the bombs fell. But she tightened her fingers around Joe’s and let the heady, terrible rush of horror seep away. She’d need all of her wits and calm to get them through what was coming on a roar of German engines.

The stream of people descending to safety produced a clatter of feet down two flights of concrete stairs. No one shouted or even talked. The humming drone of the bombers was more distinct now, gathering force, preparing to do their worst.

With her lungs working hard, her blood and brain on high alert, she pushed after Joe along the corridor. Cold, damp basement air whipped against her face and seized her legs. Sweat gathered under her arms while goose bumps jumped to life beneath her prickling stockings. The bombers would be in sight now, over the eastern horizon, their dark shapes as ominous as a murder of crows to a dying animal.

She and Joe reached the far end of the walkway. Bodies piled inside, behind them, all around them, panting and sporting faces that glowed in the near blackness. Air became a precious resource, so humid was the atmosphere of their terror.

Joe nodded toward where a flight led to the opposing platform. “Toward the stairs.”

“No,” she said. “Falling debris.”

“Doesn’t matter. I need to get clear as soon as the bombers are gone.”

“Why?”

He was already pulling a white band from a trouser pocket. Its red cross appeared black in those deep underground shadows. “Here, help me.”

With trembling hands Lulu secured the brassard around his arm. She traced the cross with her index finger, then gulped a mouthful of courage as he wove a crooked, stubborn path toward the stairway exit. Just at the base, there on the lowest step, they crouched low.

And waited.

Lulu leaned into Joe. His chest, so wide and robust, moved with the last of his panting exhales. Sweat salted his skin.

Feeling packed like a tinned herring, she held her breath as the bombs began to fall. The eerie whine of their long descent could be heard even over the engines’ rumble and the air-raid siren’s strident bellow. An explosion rocked the ground. Lulu ducked into Joe’s chest. Grains of dirt and sand shook down from the cracks between the concrete ceiling. Bits stung her ankle. Her calves, poking out from the hem of her skirt, felt especially vulnerable—legs and arms and skin, all so easily ruined.

She fixed her gaze on a place along the shuddering opposite wall, where flickering orange light formed a nearly perfect crescent. Where was the light coming from? A fire? Another bomb exploded, shaking the earth topsy-turvy. She squished her hands over her ears, but the colossal noise of the bombs—first falling, then ripping open—could not be drowned out. Instead she only heard more clearly the beat of her own galloping heart.

Joe’s mouth moved. Lulu pulled her hands off her ears and said, “What?”

“Fighters. Listen.”

Added to the mélange of destruction came another sound, this one as welcome as the sun after an endless night of terrifying dreams. High-pitched and aggressive, the whirl of Allied fighter engines added their harmony to the explosions.

“Mustangs,” she said, grinning. “And Hurricanes.”

“You’re sure?”

Lulu nodded. “Absolutely. Beautiful, aren’t they?”

“Never more so.”

Although danger still loomed directly over their heads, the mood in the walkway became buoyant. Lulu could only make out the shapes of those nearest, where tense faces split into relieved grins. Even if they died with the next touch of bomb to ground, at least the Jerries would get a nasty taste of lead. With any luck they wouldn’t make it back to Germany. They wouldn’t live to harm another terrified, huddled person.

As always, after the terror had done its worst, Lulu drew strength from her anger. Her hands trembled with the outrage of it. She should’ve been more resigned, but bully if each raid didn’t make her all the more determined to stay on task, to carry on and see the day when England was whole and safe again.

“Not much longer now,” said a Yankee rifleman on the other side of Joe. “We’ll have them done and gone by the end of the year. Teach them good, once and for all.”

Joe made a noise in the back of his throat, one that gently offered his skepticism in reply. Lulu clutched his hand a little harder. Part of her agreed with Joe’s realistic hesitation, but she didn’t want to. She wanted an end to it.
Now.

Tense minutes elapsed as the British and American fighters flew in dizzying circles of sound around the city, routing the bombers and chasing them back toward the southeast. Antiaircraft guns spit their fiery rhythm into the sky. A doomed Junker screeched its death knell. The ground rattled and quaked when it finally hit the earth.

“Dane Hill,” said a pale Englishwoman with a frizzy halo of hair. “That sounded like Dane Hill.” She looked upward along the stairwell and closed her eyes, slowly shaking her head. “My sister’s there. Dear Lord.”

A nurse wrapped the despondent woman in her embrace. Lulu averted her eyes; it wasn’t something people liked to admit, when they needed the comfort of a stranger.

“They’re stopping,” Joe said.

The siren began its mournful wind-down until only the low hum of its final note remained. By then the skies were quiet. But the city was not. Sirens of another kind—the fire brigade—filled the shocked aftermath with a shrill new desperation.

Joe separated from Lulu, his face set to confront the worst. Those intriguing eyes, so focused now, found hers. “I’m going to go see what I can do.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“No, Lulu. It’s too dangerous.” He smacked one fist into the other, the only sign of agitation he’d yet displayed. “Dang, I wish I had my aid bag.”

“I’ve endured worse,” she said sharply, retrieving his attention. “If you don’t know that, you bloody well should. This certainly isn’t my first air raid.”

His jaw tightened. “I can’t do my job knowing I have to look after you, too.”

“I’m not asking you to look after me. I’m asking you to let me help.” She stood up, her stiff knees creaking like rusted metal hinges. “You don’t know where we are or how to get where you’d be most useful. I can do that at least.”

Joe looked at her for a long moment, but his gaze wasn’t still. It flicked all over her face, down her body, and settled on her mouth. Lulu kept from touching her lower lip, where she could still feel the abrasions of their kiss.

“Fine. We’ll go together.”

Glad her heels were relatively modest, Lulu sprinted up the stairs with Joe at her side. His arm scooped protectively against her lower back. It felt good to run after all of those tight moments of waiting.

When a conductor and an American military police guard stepped in the way, blocking their exit, Joe grimly glanced down toward his medical brassard. “Do you have a first aid kit?” he asked the conductor. “Anything?”

With a body resembling that of a gorilla, all round and beefy, the conductor hustled Joe and Lulu into a station office. “This is all I have.” He handed over a metal tin that probably contained more sticking plasters than useful supplies, but Joe thanked him anyway.

Outside the station, flames to the east reflected off dense clouds and choking smoke, casting the night sky in orange and red and billowing black. Unnatural heat blasted Lulu’s face. She winced and recoiled with a gasp, her back pressing flush against Joe’s chest.

Everywhere was noise and running and shouts. All had purpose except for the occasional pain-laced scream. Sirens blared as the fire brigade arrived at engulfed buildings a few streets over. Farther east, Dane Hill burned and belched a dirty haze skyward.

“We’ll take the alley south.” Lulu’s voice scratched raw and low in her throat. “That’s where the fire brigades and rescue will be.”

Joe stood framed by the train station’s arched entryway, his lean features made more austere by the play of shadow and flame. “And as soon as you show me the way, you’ll get clear?”

He needed this. She was going to feel helpless and heartsick when the time came, but he needed to hear the words.

“Yes,” she said. “And then I’ll take shelter. I promise.”

chapter eleven

Joe topped the slope at the end of the alley and headed left, just as Lulu directed.

Lulu.

She shouldn’t have been there, with her steps hurrying just behind his. Danger sparked and burned all around them. The roads into the Dane Hill area were blocked with the toppled debris of collapsed buildings, where an entire row of townhomes spilled their fiery innards onto the street. Brick fell like flaming hail. Joe tugged Lulu away, his body like a shield over hers. Although he’d felt the urge to protect her since their first meeting, he now knew what he stood to lose.

But he could no longer worry about Lulu when he found his first patient. A man struggled from under a nearby pile of choppy, blasted concrete. What was once a butcher shop had deflated into a wrecked dome.

“Help!” the man called as he pulled a young woman from the smoking rubble.

Joe hauled on the unconscious young woman’s arms as Lulu urged the man to a seated position. “He’s a U.S. Army medic,” she said, urging her charge to be still. “Let him work. Is anyone else inside?”

“Two more,” the man answered.

Examining his patient, Joe noted facial contusions and a large lump above her left eyebrow. But she was breathing regularly and had no other visible injuries. The people trapped inside the collapsed shop needed him more.

“Lulu, stay with these two. If anything changes, holler for me.”

He didn’t stay to receive her acknowledgement, and he wouldn’t let himself worry about her, looking pale and worn in the strange orange light of the burning city. She was sensible and knew how to respond to moments of crisis. He’d seen it. Now it was his turn to be sensible. Scared, possibly injured citizens needed him far more than Lulu did.

Joe ducked and crept on all fours through the gap the man had crawled out of. Only the fires down the street illuminated his cramped path. Shadows and the colors of flame wiggled over the crumbled, jutting concrete and distorted Joe’s depth perception. He let his hands lead the way. Sharp edges bit at his fingertips. Smoke lodged in his throat like an old wad of gum.

Then—skin.

Joe groped around, finally identifying an ankle. Blood slicked his palms. Grunting, tugging, he dragged the body of a downed woman out into the open. He needed light, space, and a clean breath. Only when he emerged could he see the woman’s crushed head. Bile surged into his mouth, but he refused to vomit. She was dead and there was nothing he could do. Before the other two survivors could see, he whipped off his tunic and laid it over the victim’s ruined body.

But Lulu caught his eye, her expression hopeful. Joe shook his head and turned away.

Can’t help the dead.

He kept repeating that sentence as he dove back inside, searching again. Dwelling on the departed could poison a medic’s judgment, paralyze him when there were more to be saved. Or so he’d learned. He didn’t want to see it happen in practice.

He came to a concrete slab. A hard shove produced no results. It stood three feet tall, from the street to the makeshift roof of debris, but it might as well have been a padlocked door for how completely it blocked his way.

From behind it came a young man’s pleading voice. “Hullo? Please? Is anyone there?”

“I’m here,” Joe called. “I’m a U.S. Army medic. Are you hurt?”

“I—I can’t move. My leg’s caught.”

Outside the muffling insulation of that hulking pile of rubble came the approaching sirens of the fire brigade. Joe thought maybe he should crawl back out there, find a unit to report to, find proper supplies to help the wounded. But no, this came first. The flickering image of the dead woman’s crushed head reinforced his determination. Not another one. Not tonight.

Showers of fine concrete powder formed a cloudy curtain as he identified the far edge of the slab. He reached his hand around and found what felt like the muscle of an upper thigh.

“There you are. Is that your leg?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good.”

Joe continued his blind search until he found where a slim ankle was caught. He outlined the edges of the crushing hunk of slag and tested its weight. Grunting, he tried once again to shift the concrete.

“Not too much longer now. What’s your name?”

“James. James Woorley.”

Joe contorted his body to better reach through the opening. There was just enough room for James to crawl through, edging to freedom on his belly, if they could free his trapped foot. “Well, James Woorley, I’m going to need your help.”

From above came the wrenching groan of settling debris. Joe’s guts clenched.
Well, shit.
His haste bordered on panic now. He took hold of James’s free foot and lined up the slick soles of his shoes with the widest part of the concrete block that pinned down the boy.

“James, you need to help me push. It’s gonna hurt. Got that? I’m not lying when I say it’ll hurt like hell. But we don’t have much time.”

“It’s going to fall, isn’t it?” James asked, his voice watery and weak.

“Yes, it is.” Forget invading Europe. They were going to be squashed stains on the pavement. “We need to go. Now. You ready?”

Palms slick, fingertips rubbed raw, Joe grabbed the block with both hands. His heart was smacking hard against his breastbone.
This is it,
he thought. He would pull with all his might and the entire dome of crushed building would collapse on his head. Nothing else to do. It was that or leave the kid to die on his own. Joe couldn’t stomach that.

“All right, ready? One, two, three, push!”

He pulled and the boy pushed. But nothing moved. The sirens grew louder and Joe’s slippery hands edged back along the jagged block, losing their grip. James screamed. The tons of concrete above their heads groaned again. Dust sifted down like flour. Joe shivered as tears squinted from his eyes.

Still nothing.

Anger bunched in his muscles. This young fella didn’t deserve being trapped alive. He was just a kid!

“Go, James! Keep going! Harder now!”

James shrieked as he shoved that pain-stricken energy into pushing. Joe readjusted his hold and leaned back, pulling with the fervor of all his frustrations. His shoulders and spine and thighs lent strength to his arms, but that cramped position stole his leverage. Fat and sticky, his tongue felt like a dry sock in his mouth.

Then . . . a shift.

Joe’s pulse surged around such a small victory. He rubbed one palm at a time against his trousers. “That’s it! C’mon, James. We’re not gonna die here, you hear me?”

The block shifted again. One more hard shove inched it back. James’s incoherent sobs neared the point of hysteria, giving Joe the resolve to pull one last time. The slab gave way.

Joe landed on his butt and smacked the back of his head against a jagged outcropping. More dust fell like heavy snow showers. Fingernail-sized pieces smacked the back of his neck. He cursed and spat as blood oozed down through his hair.

Joe grabbed the kid’s ankles. Although one was likely broken or crushed, he pulled anyway. James cried out but kept pushing with his arms to aid in escaping through the slim opening. Hyperventilating breaths heaved across his skinny chest.

The debris settled again with a moan that made Joe shiver. The building was a dying animal now.

Outside, Lulu shouted his name.

He kept repeating a reply he couldn’t voice.
I’m coming, Lulu. Wait for me, I’m coming.

The kid wiggled free of the concrete slab. Their gasps filled the tiny space, that little bubble of refuge. Then Joe was backing out on all fours, guiding his patient with words and a hand along his calf. The ground rumbled. At first Joe thought it was the explosion of a late bomb or the thunderous return of those Ju 88s. But it was the building exhaling its last.

“C’mon, James!”

Joe made it to fresh air. The flickering play of blue-tinted flashlights was a colorful contrast to the black hell of that butcher shop death trap. The back of his head hurt like a son of a bitch. James clambered into the open night air, still hiccupping on his coughing, panting sobs. Joe gripped behind his knees and pulled hard, turning him onto his back.

A deep grinding whine of metal and concrete and brick cleaved the night. Falling into the warren where Joe had just been, the pulverized heap belched up a cloud of gray-green dust.

“Joe!” Lulu rushed to meet him. Her face glowed pasty white. With her gaze pinned to the wreckage, her eyes were two dark, unreadable spots.

“How are the others?” he asked.

Her shoulders shook, as if coming loose from that carnage and what might have been. “Quiet. How is he?”

“I need light.”

Nodding, she sprinted toward the nearest MP. Meanwhile Joe angled James’s body and propped his feet on an overturned garbage bin. Knowing his patient needed it more than did the dead woman, Joe retrieved his uniform tunic and balled it beneath James’s head. Only once he’d done what he could to prevent shock did he confront the worst of the wounds.

“Hold tight, James.”

The kid moaned, an arm thrown over his eyes. He seemed beyond caring now, having expended all of his energy in their frantic crawl to freedom.

In that dim orange half-light Joe spotted the distinctive glimmer of pinkish-white bone. James’s calf was a mangled compound fracture.

“Shit,” Joe whispered.
Where do I begin?

His mind was a screaming child, throwing questions and doubts. But his training waited in quiet cubbies. He inhaled. His hands stopped twitching, and he knew exactly what to do.

Lulu arrived with a British MP in tow. The man’s face was a picture of confusion. Having found his own calm center, Joe almost pitied him. But he didn’t have time.

“Bring me that light, soldier,” Joe said. “What’s your name?”

“Hawes, sir.”

“I’m a private, Hawes—no need for ‘sir.’”

“Yes, sir.”

“You got a wound pack?” Joe grabbed what the soldier handed over. “Thanks. And Hawes?”

“Sir?”

“I need an ambulance or a doctor. Which do you think you can find for me first?”

“Don’t know, sir. But I’ll find one.”

“Good. Go now. Lulu? Over here.”

She took the flashlight and became his silent, steady right hand. With that ghostly blue light spreading over James’s leg, Joe could finally assess the damage. Cartilage and bone weren’t meant to see the outside world. They were supposed to stay hidden beneath layers of muscle and skin. But not then. Not for James. It would take a surgeon to patch that crushed mass back together.

Whether James kept his leg was beyond Joe’s scope. His job was to save lives.

Lulu moved around to pillow James’s head in her lap. Her knees replaced the tunic, which she spread over his shuddering torso. Then she held the light in place.

The bandages in the wound pack were too small for such a big job, but the kit also contained morphine and sulfa. Joe doused the wound and injected James with morphine. Then he slipped his suspenders and yanked the khaki wool shirt off his own back. He sliced the shirt into pieces using a knife kept strapped at his calf. Carefully applying pressure, he wound one sleeve, then the other, around the injury. He used his suspenders to bind it.

“I sure hope this is excuse enough to warrant a new uniform,” Lulu said quietly. Her words were teasing, but her tone had been strangled of life.

Joe finished setting James’s wound, then moved to tend the other two civilians. The unconscious woman had roused, her moans groggy and her words slurred. Using supplies from the first aid kit, Joe cleaned the contusion on her scalp and bound it with the wound pack bandage.

“Your turn,” Lulu said. Her hands were on him, forcing his head to bow forward. “Nasty one, Joe. Blood everywhere.”

He hissed as she probed the slice on his scalp. “How bad?”

“Two inches long, fairly deep. You’ll need stitches.”

“It’ll wait,” he said tersely. “There’s more to do.”