Given her disillusionment and fury when she discovered that Gideon was agent Invictus, Josie had never expected this night to end with him standing, bronzed and glistening and nearly naked in front of her, bandaged and bruised. Hadn’t anticipated the lush feel of his skin beneath her fingers, the feral power of his muscles against her palms, the brush of her nipples across the sinew of his shoulders. His unmistakable arousal at her touch or when he looked at her just that way, a durable tumescence that she wanted to fondle, to explore.

But now he was looking sleepy as he staggered toward the bed, an enormous bear shambling toward his winter cave, dangerous, because he might snag her for one last meal before settling down to sleep until spring.

“Can you make it to the bed, Gideon?” She caught his forearm, the hard-shifting power beneath his skin confirming that he had forced himself through a program of rehabilitation in the months since his injury, targeting every muscle and bone in his body, including his beleaguered leg. “How does your knee feel when you walk on it?”

“Hardly any pain at all.”

“Here you are. Just slip onto the bed, on your stomach, please. That’s it.” Like leading a child toward his nap.

He mashed his face into the pillow, then turned out to her, eyes half-lidded. “If you were an enemy agent, I’d suspect you drugged me with your liniment.”

“You found me out. I treated my bare hands with the antidote before massaging the sleeping drug into your bare skin. Do you want the antidote?”

“Not ever.” His voice had grown low and groggy.

Josie retrieved her jar and set it on the bedside table, trying to ignore the heap of man sprawled out across the mattress, dwarfing the bed, the bolster and the bank of pillows. His broad shoulders relaxed, rising and falling as he breathed.

Her “live drop” in the flesh.

Damn the man and all his faults. He was perfect for her, perfect all around. Honorable and witty, opinionated and intelligent, handsome beyond all thinking. He loved children and dogs and birthing calves, was charmed by Nimway Hall and her beloved wood. Had even come to accept her word that the Orb of True Love was a strange family legend and not a threat to world peace.

But he would never accept that she was, and needed to remain, Arcturus, and she dreaded his scorn when he discovered the truth. The clock was ticking on their idyll, the war was about to intrude in a way she could never have anticipated when he arrived at Nimway.

He groaned and muttered when she began kneading the hard-packed muscles along the back of his good leg, her hands aching to range freely over his firmly-shaped, muscular backside beneath his knickers, but that would lead to an eventuality she had longed for but could no longer afford.

By the time she finished with his massage, he was snoring softly into his pillow, his breathing steady and deep. She would have risked pressing a kiss on his temple, but that might wake him and break her heart completely.

Best to keep a professional distance while she was still able. She was about to slip the message capsule out of her trouser pocket when she realized his eyes were half-open and he was looking at her.

“Have I been asleep?’

“You still are.”

“I thought so, Josie. You’ve always been my dream. Or have you been here all the time?”

“Both.”

“Then come, love, join with me.” He beckoned her with his curled finger and she knelt on the rug beside the bed, couldn’t help herself any more than she could stop herself from loving him. He sifted his fingers through the hair at her nape, his eyes half-lidded and smoky as he drew her close. Kissed her softly, deeply, nibbling and crooning, his gaze wandering over her face. “You are a wonder to me, Josie Stirling, Guardian of Nimway Hall. Commander of the Orb of True Love.” He kissed her once more and settled back against the pillow. “What shall I do without you?”

“Are you going somewhere, Gideon?” she whispered.

His answer was a long, deep breath and a soft snore.

Hers was a quiet sob.

Because the truth was immutable. She was Arcturus. He was Invictus. The country was at war and needed them both equally. In the most hopeful part of her heart she knew that Gideon was wise enough, perceptive enough to accept her as his peer. But would he be able to invoke that fairness in himself when he learned the truth?

If he couldn’t, he would just have to apply to the SOE for a new posting, a new partner. She damn well wasn’t going to resign just to soothe the man’s brittle pride.

She loved him, would have proudly served their country along side him, gladly spent the rest of her life with him. But, if all that happiness was the sacrifice she must make to help win the war, then so be it.

Her heart broken and aching for what she was about to do, Josie packed up her first aid gear and removed it to the sitting room. By the time she returned, Gideon had rolled onto his back, one arm crooked over his head on the pillow, the other resting at his side, fingers flexed and relaxed.

Never in the realm of tradecraft had there been a more perfect example of a live drop than Arcturus delivering the message into the closed fist of Agent Invictus while he slept.

Her next moment would set in motion a cascade of consequences which would cloud the rest of her days and prove to the orb once and for all that she and Gideon were not compatible and would never be.

She drew the capsule from her pocket, still warm from its hiding place. Overcome by an aching heart, she pressed it to her lips then easily slipped it into the cradle of his palm, his fingers still relaxed and curled, as though he’d picked up the dead drop, only to be bewitched by a spell that had sent him to sleep before he could read it. And perhaps he had been.

But he would read the message in the morning, would realize in an instant that she was Arcturus and come looking for her.

And just in case their paths didn’t cross during the day, as so often had happened, she’d added a note to the back of the Aux Unit list, instructing him to meet Arcturus tomorrow night in the cider mill.

Then Heaven help them both.

She carefully settled a blanket over him, her dear, handsome, intractable Gideon. He slept on in his dreams, his chest rising and falling in a rhythm she would have loved matching with her own in some fairy tale future, drifting to sleep every night to the sound of his steady breathing, waking every morning wrapped in his arms.

That kind of peace between them was not meant to be. The morning would bring the end of all things. And she hardly slept a wink.

* * *

But it was clear to Josie the next morning as she was standing at the workbench in her office sorting seeds for next winter, that Gideon had slept hard and awakened late, as furious as a hungry grizzly. She assumed all this about him when she heard his door slam above her, the rush of his footsteps down the backstairs, his sharp knock on her door—then the man himself was standing at the doorway, shirtless, shoeless, in a clean pair of uniform trousers, his vest and a pair of leather braces.

“Josie!” He was breathing like a steam engine.

Here it comes—in a blaze of anger and accusations. How could she possibly have predicted that the end would begin with Gideon looking so wickedly handsome?

“Yes?” Let him make the first strike.

“Did you—” He stopped and shut the door, came to stand next to her, gently turned her chin with the tip of his finger and looked deeply into her eyes. “Did anyone come into my room last night after you left?”

“I’m sorry?” She couldn’t parse his question, or place the emotion in the fierceness of his gaze. “What do you mean?”

His smile was lop-sided. “I quite remember your—” he made a sultry sound in his throat, lifted the hair away from her ear and whispered “—your touch, Josie. The fleeting pain of your healing hands, the pleasure you lavished upon my aching flesh.”

“Oh, my—” He brushed his warm lips against her nape, slipped his fingers along the ridge of her collar.

“You see, I remember that much.”

“As I do.” Would never forget that moment. Or this.

Or that the puzzling man might be setting her up for a shattering fall. She stepped away to the tray of seed cups on the table. “Now, what is it you were asking, Gideon?”

“Yes, of course.” He seemed to gather his senses, leaned back against the workbench and folded his arms across his chest. “I wanted to confirm that you were the last to leave my room last night.”

She was ready for his accusation, would answer his questions without equivocation. “As far as I know, Gideon. You were fast asleep when I left. I turned out the lights in your room and the sitting room, closed both doors. Were you expecting anyone?”

“Not exactly.” He rubbed his stubbled chin with his thumb and forefinger. “Not then. Certainly not in my bedroom.”

So that was his conclusion? Damn the man! Of all the narrow-minded, unimaginative, dim-witted pillocks! She had just admitted to being the last person in his room the night before. The message from Arcturus was probably tucked into his trouser pockets at this very moment, written in her own hand. And still he couldn’t possibly fathom that it was she who’d made the drop while he was sleeping.

What a bloody pleasure to be reeling out just enough rope for the lout to hang himself. “So, Gideon, I take it you were expecting someone. Just not in your room. When was the meeting supposed to happen, then? Where?”

He shook his head, still mulling over the answer that was standing right beside him. “Can’t get into that, I’m afraid—”

“Official Secrets Act, of course.”

“It’s just that I found something I wasn’t expecting to find.”

“In your room? What did you find? Where was it?”

He looked down at the palm of his hand, clenched his fist. “Can’t discuss that either.”

Exasperated beyond her ability to remain polite, Josie turned to him and plastered on a smile. “How can I help you, Gideon?”

He made a sound in his throat then pushed away from the workbench. “Frankly, you can’t help me, Josie. Not any more than you have already, than you did for me last night with your tender care.” He turned toward her with a smile that melted her heart, then cupped her face between his large, capable hands and kissed her again, deeply, fully.

She closed her eyes and kissed him back, slipped her fingers through his dark hair, tugged him closer, relishing this final moment of intimacy with the man she loved with all her heart.

He laughed softly against her mouth, and set her away. “I’ve much to do today, Josie. And I see that I’ve interrupted your—” he gestured to the workbench.

Josie took a steadying breath. “Seed sorting—”

“I’ll be sure to know that next time. Now I must return to my room and finish dressing.”

“Other plans for the day?” She couldn’t help asking because she knew exactly how his day would end.

“Nothing of note. Though I do hope you and I can meet tonight in the library. I’ve missed our time together.”

“So have I.”

“Half-ten, then,” he said with a smile and so charming it took all her restraint not to toss a trowel at his head on his way out the door.

In any case, the die was cast. Arcturus and Invictus would meet this evening in the cider mill, come hell, high water, or an air raid.

* * *

Gideon raked his fingers through his hair as he tromped up the stairs to his room, trying to make his way through the herb-scented fog of his memories of last night and yesterday. No matter which path he followed, each ended with Josie. Her hands kneading his aching muscles, soothing his aching flesh, working his tendons until she had molded his pain into a pleasure so fathomless he could hardly keep his eyes open, despite his yearning to enfold her in his arms and make love with her through the night.

He’d heard nothing after that, and had slept like a stone until nearly eleven, had awakened flat on his back in his knickers, his knee much improved. It wasn’t until he had sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the bed that he realized he was clutching a dead drop capsule in his hand.

He’d assumed at first he must have gotten out of bed after Josie left, encrypted a message to Arcturus for the morning, prepped the capsule with his reply, then had somehow returned to bed with it and fallen back to sleep. Why else would he have awakened holding a drop capsule?

It was only after he’d unscrewed the cap and read the message, that he knew the capsule wasn’t his. Couldn’t be. The rolled slip of paper was the list of Aux Unit recruits Arcturus was supposed to deliver during the live drop.

Yesterday. At the fete.

How the hell had it gotten here in his room? Who had put it into his hand? Arcturus? Had the man entered his room in the dead of night, come close enough to slip the capsule into his hand and not wake him?

A head full of questions had sent him, half-dressed, downstairs to Josie’s office. Just the sight of her standing at her workbench had thrown him off balance again, set his pulse racing. Her uncommon beauty, the rose of her mouth, the fragrance of sage and apples that wreathed her hair. She’d become everything in his life, his respite from the war, his reason to feel hopeful.

Not wanting to spook her, he’d hesitated to bring up last night’s egregious security breach, the significance of an agent—enemy or friendly—gaining access to Nimway Hall, let alone to his bedroom, undetected. After all of his early blustering about her laxness, one of his own men had failed to protect them!

But he’d learned little from Josie’s recollections of the previous night, had stolen kisses from her and made a promise that nothing would stop him from meeting her in the library tonight.

Gideon returned to his suite more troubled than ever, more outraged, because it was clear to him that someone—Arcturus, at best—had deliberately penetrated an intelligence operation without first signaling his intent. He investigated every inch of his sitting room and bedchamber, the common area in the corridor, looking for evidence of a breach, points of entry, detritus on the carpet, papers moved on his desk, drawers rifled.

A quarter hour later, he’d found nothing out of place, out of the ordinary, only the mint and lemon scent of Josie’s liniment.

Having wasted time that he couldn’t afford, he dressed for the day, snagged a late breakfast of buttered toast and jam from the redoubtable Mrs. Lamb then took his tray to his desk.

He found Crossley and Easton at their drawing boards, Durbridge at the far end of the worktable, bent over the materiel lists for the Operational Base.

“You’re looking spry this morning, sir,” Easton said with an approving nod. “Shook Miss Stirling to bits when she learned you’d banged up your leg again.”

“I’m fine, Easton, thank you,” Gideon said, wondering suddenly, impossibly, if one of these three men was Arcturus, hiding in plain sight. Nonsensical in this case, but not unheard of for the SOE to plant two intelligence agents in the same department without them knowing about each other.

“She caught us when she was coming out of your room last night with her medical bag,” Crossley said, holding his protractor to the light. “Asked if we’d let you sleep in this morning, said it would do your knee a world of good.”

“It has, Crossley. Thank you.” Of course, his staff was quartered on the same floor as his suite. “By the way, what time was that? When you saw Miss Stirling?”

“Just before eleven,” Durbridge said as he pulled open a file drawer. “The fellows and I closed the fete at ten, had a quick pint afterward at the Hungry Dragon—”

“Did any of you hear anything later? See anyone upstairs who shouldn’t be there, that you didn’t know?”

“Hell, no!” Crossley stood and stretched. “Would have tackled the fellow and alerted you, for certain. Why? Was something stolen?”

“No. Just curious.” He left the matter where it stood and joined Crossley and Easton at the drawing boards, discussed the interior layout of the OB. The plumbing and electrical risers, the wall of bunks, storage shelves for food and munitions, dining table, chairs, a latrine carved into the limestone–for a cave it was bloody well-appointed. The trapdoor entrance carved into the ceiling was so well camouflaged on the forest floor he wouldn’t have been able to find it, even in the daylight, had he not known it was located immediately above the original collapsed door to the icehouse.

“Everything to plan, as you see, sir,” Easton said. “We should be at the next Operational Base in Chard in two weeks.”

“Everything to plan,” Gideon said, heading for his desk, adding under his breath, “except recruiting and training the Aux Unit.”

He retrieved the list from his trouser pocket and carefully uncurled the slip of paper until it looked like a normal note, rather than a secret, encoded communication from a stealthy, not-to-be trusted fellow agent. With little enough time to contact the candidates and assess their skill sets, Gideon began creating individual evaluations cards for each name on the list.

He finished in the late afternoon, had already made appointments to meet with three of the twelve men—four, if he counted Edward. Satisfied with his progress, he was about to ball up the slip of paper and toss it into the fire when he noticed a line of uncoded writing on the reverse.

“Bloody hell!” he said under his breath. “Back in a few minutes, gentlemen.”

Gideon left the office, crossed the great hall and entered the darkened library, the windows still shuttered, the blackout curtains closed. He went directly to the Speed map of Nimway and flicked on the sconce lights.

“The Cider Mill?” He hadn’t been there, hadn’t seen it on the map of the grounds they had used to site the OB. He ran his torch across the face of the map, but found nothing.

The estate must have a cider press somewhere; Nimway Scrumpy had been on sale at the fete. He drank it every day. And who better to point the way than the lady of Nimway Hall.

Hoping Josie was still in her office, he left the library through the service hall and found her still bent over her collection of seeds.

He hadn’t gotten two steps into the office when she turned and smiled and asked, “What can I do for you, Gideon? You look lost.”

“Do I? I guess I am.” In more ways than she could ever know. But how to ask about the mill without sounding suspicious? “The Speed map in the library. I was looking for something—can’t seem to find on the map and frankly had never heard about—the cider mill?”

“Ah.” She swept him with her gaze, as calm as he was on edge. “Are you in need of a pint of Nimway Scrumpy, Gideon? Because Mrs. Lamb keeps a keg on hand in the kitchen.”

“It’s not that. Just curious about the mill. Do you mind showing me, please?”

“Not at all.” He followed her into the library and stopped along side her. “Trouble is, Gideon, the cider mill doesn’t fit on the map.”

“Where then?”

“I was about to say that if it were on the map it would be out here on the western edge of the orchard, at the end of this lane. There’s a road beyond that we use for deliveries to Balesborough and beyond.” She smiled, slipped her hand inside his, taking his breath away. “Do you want me to take you there?”

“Ah, no, Josie. But thank you. I just—Crossley is cataloging the remaining undocumented structures on the estate grounds and we all realized that we’d never seen the cider mill that produces such delicious scrumpy.” He could not have sounded more implausible if he tried.

“Thank you for the compliment. I’ll pass it along to our cider master. This is his busiest season, of course. I’m sure the press will be working overtime.”

“Tonight?”

“From five in the morning until the crew finishes up about five this evening.” She slipped her hand out of his and straightened his tie. “Now, Gideon, I’d like nothing more than to spend the rest of the day with you in the library, but that will have to wait until tonight.”

Yes, tonight, my dear Josie. After tangling with Arcturus and setting the man straight about boundaries and honor and professional lines that should never be crossed.

* * *

Gideon spent the remainder of the afternoon attending to his everyday duties: approving Durbridge’s equipment lists for the OB, signing purchase orders, organizing the training schedule for the Aux Unit recruits, finally composing that week’s report for Capt. Fenwick at Operational Section headquarters in Bridgwater, a constructive week that showed his men and their abilities in the best possible light, and made him proud.

By six o’clock he had determined that none of his three officers could possibly be Arcturus, and dismissed them for the night with his permission to trounce their rivals from yesterday’s tug-of-war in a game of darts at the Hungry Dragon, scheduled, significantly, for seven. He took dinner at his desk and a half-hour later it was time to leave.

Gideon gathered up his rucksack and slipped out of the Hall, unnoticed by anyone but Winnie, who caught up with him as he stepped into the garden, and trotted along side.

“Then come along, girl,” he said, charmed by her canine smile and the energetic wagging of her tail as they started down the hill toward the lake.

Having no idea from which direction Arcturus expected him to approach the cider mill, he cut short around the lake, with Winnie in the lead as though she knew where he was bound. They followed a deer track north through a stand of timber until it crossed the commercial road, which eventually ended in the well-traveled lane that led up through the thickening twilight into the cobbled mill yard and its tidy complex of buildings.

A warehouse, a brew house, three wagon loads of apples waiting in line to be pressed. And at the center, what looked to be the oldest of the buildings, the two-story stone cider mill, perched on a slope that fell away into the shadows behind the building.

Winnie sniffed her way through the deserted compound, the cider makers gone for the night as Josie had predicted. He felt no sense of danger, of being watched. He was ten minutes early, perhaps Arcturus hadn’t yet arrived.

Feeling entirely at ease, Gideon went up the stairs of the cider house, told Winnie to stay outside, then opened the door and entered the main room, its air rich with centuries of pressed apples and fermented cider. In the shadows, he could see three hulking presses of varying sizes and ages in three separate alcoves, the ceiling crisscrossed with timbers and pipes, pulleys and ropes. A maze of unfamiliar equipment, silent as a stone, the works appearing to have been cleaned and abandoned not ten minutes before.

He found the open gallery to the cellar and took the set of worn stone stairs down to the landing and the closed door. Prepared to meet anyone on the other side—Arcturus or enemy agent, Gideon listened a moment, readied his electric torch and his side arm then carefully lifted the latch and pushed the door into the soft darkness of what appeared to be an open storage area for all manner of cider making equipment. Long shelves of jars and jugs, baskets and funnels, piles of folded burlap, bales of straw and an empty wagon parked in front of a pair of large sliding barn doors.

An odd place for a live drop, a new one on him. Unique to Somerset, to Nimway Hall. Deciding against calling out to alert Arcturus, he closed the door behind him and switched off his torch to allow his vision to adjust to the shadows.

Only then did he notice—through a forest of hanging ropes—a small clapboard room tucked into the back corner, a pale yellow glow seeping around the edges of a door, and a voice, staccato and low, followed by the faintest set of clicks.

Arcturus—at last.

He made a silent, studied approach born of his training and stopped at the door to listen. The murmur of the same voice, another round of clicking. The frizzle and buzz of a radio dial searching out a frequency.

Had Arcturus been operating all this time from the grounds of the Nimway estate? Was he the cider master, or Tully, the orchardist, after all? And why hadn’t he been informed by HQ of the radio transmitter?

It was long past time to confront the man and make this bloody live drop happen! Gideon yanked open the door, expecting to find Arcturus at the radio—

Not Josie! But there she was, perched on the edge of a stool, headphones covering her ears, elbows propped on the tall table, her left hand twisting a knob on the transmitter, her right hand holding a pencil, poised above a code book.

She turned and smiled at him as though she’d been expecting him, eyes bright and excited as she listened to whatever sounds were coming through her headset.

He could only watch in dumbfounded silence as Josie, his love, read out a set of numbers into the microphone as though she’d done so a hundred times. She listened intently, touching the tip of her pencil to the code book, counting number by number, paused and then said, “Roger. Johnnie-Sugar-One. Out.”

“Josie.” Her name was the only thought in his head. Josie-Stirling-One. Was she a Special Duty civilian observer, along with everything else? “What are you doing here?”

She turned on the stool, hooked a heel on the crossbar and pulled off the headset, her eyes glinting in the pale light of the single shaded bulb hanging over the radio.

“Have you really not figured that out, Gideon? After all the clues I left you last night and yesterday, last week and the week before?”

“Clues?” He was having trouble not gathering her into his arms, his marvelous Josie. “I don’t understand.”

“Yesterday at the fete—I was so surprised! I wasn’t expecting you, any more than you were expecting me.”

“After kissing me, imploring me to come? You invited me, Josie.” He’d been so torn, wanting to escort her, having instead to meet his contact, afraid suddenly, in this fracturing moment, that he’d misunderstood her feelings for him. “Don’t you remember?”

“Gideon, you’re not hearing me. Josie invited you to the fete.” She stepped down from the stool and took his hand, held it fast, as though afraid he might turn and leave in the next breath. “But it was Arcturus who arranged the live drop between us.”

“What do you mean?” Her words roiled inside his head, making them difficult to follow.

“At the Coconut Shy, just after six. We would find each other as agents do, I would hand-off the list of the Aux Unit names then we would go our separate ways, unremarked by anyone but us.”

His heart slowed, his brain too. “You’re not making sense, Josie. How could you know about—”

“And how could you not know, Gideon. I am Arcturus. Why can’t you understand when the evidence is so very clear?” He glanced away from her silly chatter, but she caught his cheek with her soft hand, found his gaze and trapped him in her story. “That after I’d dressed your leg and massaged your aching body, you kissed me and fell asleep and I left my own dead drop capsule in your hand.”

“You couldn’t have.” Surely, someone else—

“I told you this morning when you asked me that I was the last, the very last person in your room, and yet you didn’t believe me.”

A night of magic that must still be holding him in its enchantment, muddling his thoughts.

“And yesterday, you waited nearly an hour at the Coconut Shy for Arcturus to approach you. But the live drop never took place, did it? Because I called it off.”

“You?” She couldn’t have. How could she have known what was about to happen between him and Arcturus?

“Because when you came to flirt with me at the Shy, you were wearing the Spitfire badge on the right side of your jacket, not on the left where I had pinned it earlier.”

He spread his fingers against his chest where she’d touched the badge, the memory of her warm palm and her odd reaction, her sudden distance and melancholy, beginning to settled on his heart like a dark web.

“You see, Gideon, I knew in that single moment that you were Invictus, the agent I had been waiting for.”

No. “But that would mean you are—”

“Arcturus? Yes. I am. And there I was, standing in front of you at the Shy with the message capsule in my pocket, ready to hand it off to you, waiting for you to recognize me as Arcturus. But you didn’t. You were looking right at me, Gideon, looking for me, so blinded by your narrow-mindedness that you couldn’t possibly see me as your equal. Your fellow agent of the SOE. Your partner.”

Not his partner. “Not possible.”

“Certainly not possible after tonight, Gideon.”

A chill swept through him, the life he’d begun to imagine with Josie at his side vanishing beyond his reach. She’d made him love her for her generosity, trust her with his heart, believed in her ideals. And now she had turned her exacting mirror on his shame, revealed to him his own fanciful reflection of himself, a man no longer whole, no longer invincible.

“You’re right, Josie—or whoever you think you are.” He took a deep breath to temper his outrage, filled his lungs with the warm scent of apples and autumn and this woman of illusions. “We are dangerous together.”

“How can you say that?”

Because she had changed him, unfocused and diminished him. “I’ll stay at Yeovilton tonight and make arrangements for a transfer in the morning. We are done here.”

“Just like that, Gideon?”

Just like that. No other way. “I’ll report to headquarters that we weren’t a match, as we must be in order to be partners.”

She was looking at him with watery eyes. “Which will hurt me more than you could ever imagine. Because I love you, Gideon. I will to the end of my days. For your uncompromising courage, your compassion and your sense of honor.”

The receiver crackled and a thin voice squawked through the headset.

“Yes. Well, Josie. Then it’s done. Take care of yourself.” She’d chosen a path he could not follow.

“And you, Gideon.” Her voice had already turned away from him.

He shut the door on the intimacy of her hushed words spoken into another man’s ears and left the cider mill, his decision easily made.

* * *

The night was as dark as Gideon’s mood as he drove the Austin along the country road away from Nimway Hall toward the air station. He’d left the cider mill and called ahead to Todd, who had been eager to learn of his sudden interest in a new position in the SOE. Not behind enemy lines, but given the condition of his knee, that path now seemed forever closed off to him.

Whatever came of it, he couldn’t remain at his current post; working alongside Josie every day would not only be a threat to the operation, but an indictment of his principles.

You were looking right at me, Gideon, looking for me, so blinded by your narrow-mindedness that you couldn’t possibly see me as your equal.

Bloody hell, Josie was all he could see at the time, was far more than his equal, all the good he could imagine, their lives together stretching out into a future filled with love making and honey and loads of children. Even now, as he sped away from her as quickly as he was able through the darkness, putting as much distance between them as possible, she was calling him back to her with her nonsensical logic.

Different battlefields, certainly. Different weapons, different enemies, but, farming and soldiering are equally critical to winning the war.

Bloody woman and her bloody notions about the prosecution of the war. Warfare was an ordeal of violence and gore, the darkest of human strategies played out upon a landscape of death and horror, and survived only by the strongest. No place for romantic ideals. This war would not be won on the home front. Not with Spitfire fetes or ration books, or by village ladies knitting jumpers for the troops.

Not by Josie, who believed herself to be invincible.

Damn and blast! He hurried along the narrow lane, the only light available to guide him over the corrugated roadbed was the slitted spread of the car’s shielded headlamps. Not even the faintest illumination to mark the farm houses that he knew were set just off the roadway.

Nothing to illuminate the interior of the car but the soft glow of the dials on the instrument panel, which seemed stronger than he remembered, suspiciously blue-white and bright enough to throw its reflection into the center of the rear seat.

A vexingly familiar glow that he was certain he’d left behind forever at Nimway Hall. Convinced that his eyes were playing tricks on him, he slowed to a crawl, adjusted the rear view mirror to focus into the backseat where the glow was brightest, and nearly swerved into the hedge.

Josie’s orb! He stomped on the brake and stopped in the middle of the road, twisted in his seat. The bloody thing was still there, pulsing blue and white, its center swirling, agitated, as though wanting to speak its mind.

It’s pushy and rude and thinks it knows best—

As though such an object could actually think!

“What the devil are you doing here?”

Just as Gideon realized he was demanding an answer from a bloody stone, the yellow beams of a lorry came into view behind him. The hulking vehicle came to a halt and blew its horn. Feeling the fool, he pulled forward into a lay-by and listened to the string of colorful curses and grinding of gears as the lorry lumbered around him before continuing on its way.

He’d watched until it disappeared beyond a curve, hoping the incident would clear his mind of Josie and the backseat of his unwelcome passenger. But there it sat: the Orb of True Love, pulsing and shimmering and, yes, rocking all on its own.

“You’re not supposed to be away from the Hall, you bloody thing.” Must be a madness of some sort: to be chiding a stone for breaking the house rules and hitching a ride with him. Not that distance from the Hall seemed to matter. He’d driven the Austin well clear of the Nimway estate, nearly to the A37, fifteen minutes short of the air station where he would be free to choose his own path.

But like any stone, anywhere, it said nothing. So he reached between the front seats and grabbed the orb, opened the window and held it outside, ready to toss it to the verge and drive on, let it find its own way home.

Home to Josie.

Are you in need of true love, Josie?

She’d blushed and stammered at the time, answered with one of her distractions. Besides, I’m fairly sure that the orb changed its mind about us.

Then the marvelous woman had set about proving just the opposite, by ravishing him with her kisses, enchanting him with her magic, inviting him into her heart. To live there. To love her.

But if she was Arcturus, then who was he? Who was Invictus? Who could they possibly be together?

I love you, Gideon. I will to the end of my days.

Invictus. Unconquered.

Josie!