Josie kept catching herself smiling like a loon as she hurried back to the kitchen, whistling even. Tried hard to settle the fluttering in her stomach and the racing of her heart each time the colonel–Gideon–found his way into her thoughts.

She discovered the timber inspectors exactly where she’d expected to find them, resting in the servant’s hall under Mrs. Lamb’s capable care, Rufus slumped against the back of an arm chair, Darby lying face up on a bench, eyes shut tightly.

“How are the wicked timber people?” Josie asked in a whisper, peering at the welt on the back of Darby’s hand.

“Much better, if a bit tipsy after two doses each of my tincture of stinging nettle.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Lamb. I do need to finish up with them before we send them home.”

She roused the men with copious amounts of sympathy then settled them into the farm office where she coached them through their reports on the state of Nimway’s forest reserves, and finally sent them on their way with pots of Mrs. Lamb’s bee-sting poultice, a basket of cheese, jam and bread, and a half-dozen bottles of Nimway Scrumpy.

After all, with the fate of her beloved Balesboro Wood still firmly in the remorseless hands of the Timber Supply Department, she wasn’t above a bit of bribery.

“All in for the war effort, right, Winnie, my girl?”

Winnie agreed with an enthusiastic wag and a woof and a toothy smile, cocking her head to the side, ears flopped like a pair of wavy black flags.

“Good, then. Let’s go find out how the new schoolroom is coming along! Children, Winnie!” Josie’s highly anticipated gesture sent the dog chasing out of the farm office and barking up the gravel lane toward the make-do school, perched on the upper edge of the newly turned field of winter wheat.

She couldn’t have been more pleased when she finally caught sight of the building, gleaming in the sunshine. Winnie went chasing past, her delighted bark bouncing though the valley as she went in search of the children.

Mrs. Tramble and Mr. Broadfoot were standing under the eave of the shed roof, examining one of the windows.

“You’ve done a spectacular job of it, Mr. Broadfoot!” Josie said as she approached. “Don’t you think so, Mrs. Tramble?”

From the outside the structure still resembled the old stone-built loafing shed, but Mr. Broadfoot had repaired the slate roof, added a timbered floor, a fourth wall with a door and two awning windows, plus a small pot-belly stove.

“Indeed, he has, Miss Josie! I’m thoroughly delighted! Better even than our school in Stepney. The children think so too. Never in my life had students so excited about starting their first day of school!” A cloud of squeals and laughter rose up from the apple orchard, as though to put a point on the children’s approval. “We thank you so much!”

Freedom and fresh air—a clean classroom and the great outdoors; how could they not thrive after the squalor and neglect of their lives in London?

“Class time should be right comfortable in here in the schoolhouse for the next few months, Miss Josie—” Broadfoot gazed up into the eaves. “Until the weather turns bitter and we get our first snow storm.”

“Of course.” She hadn’t had time to think that far. “Let’s plan to relocate the class to the east parlor after Christmas. Unless the SOE requisitions another wing of the Hall.” Not entirely impossible. “Anything else come to mind?”

“I just been tellin’ Mrs. Tramble here, that I’ll be pluggin’ up these soffits with reeds from the lake to reduce the draftin’ on those windy days ahead.”

“You’re always thinking well ahead of me, Mr. Broadfoot.” The man and his family had been a vital part of Nimway Hall since long before Josie herself was born; he knew the ebb and flow of the seasons, how they effected every field and tree, the livestock and everyone on the estate. “Then I’ll leave you both to your work. And thank you. This war is bringing out the best in everyone.”

Almost everyone, she thought as she strode back toward the farm office to face the two hours she needed to spend typing and assembling the heap of reports she owed the Ministry of Ag. Gideon and his staff of officers were doubtless doing their best, but damn the man for not recognizing the same effort in the people around him. Perhaps their time together in the woods today had served to soften his opinions somewhat. The test would come at half-ten. She doubted he would pass.

Still, she’d been hoping to see the man at dinner, became increasingly annoyed at herself for repeatedly glancing up from her plate of Lord Woolton’s ghastly vegetable pie and the Ministry of Ag’s weekly circular every time someone new entered the dining room, chiding herself for being disappointed when it was one of the Land Girls or Mrs. Lamb and not him. Gideon. Quite a fine name.

“Dreamy, ain’t he, Miss Josie?”

“What’s that, Trina? Who?” Josie glanced down the length of the table toward the young woman sitting at the opposite end with the other Land Girls, felt a telling blush that threatened to unmask her guilt.

Damn if she wasn’t being called out for staring at the door to the butler’s pantry, her mind wandering to the conservatory just beyond, actually listening for the sound of Gideon’s deep baritone that would let her know he’d returned safely from the wood.

“The colonel, of course,” Trina said, looking toward the same door, elbows propped on either side of her bowl, her sharp chin resting on the back of her clasped hands. “Haven’t you noticed, Miss Josie? He’s so, well...manly.”

“And virile.” Francie sighed, flicked her dark hair over her shoulder, and took the same pose as Trina. “Like Clark Gable in Gone With the Wind.”

“Brawny, is the colonel—like a Scot!” Maureen said, broadening her brogue and sharing a blushing giggle with her compatriots.

Josie did her best to ignore their girlish gossip, trying to read the Ag’s hideously boring new circular on current theories of planting, cultivating and harvesting sugar beets, but failing each time his name was mentioned.

“Sure, the colonel’s unholy handsome,” Patsy said, “but don’t you ever wonder how a big strapping soldier like him got himself wounded? I surely do.”

Wounded? Josie set down her fork and stared at the door again, as though she could see him through it. Gideon, wounded?

“I mean,” Patsy said with a catch in her voice, “I can’t help wondering at the colonel’s wound, because my husband’s in the 1^st Royal Tank Division in North Africa, fighting the Italians, and I haven’t heard from him since early August—goin’ on two months, now.” The girl’s pale brows came together in a worried frown. “I think about soldiers getting wounded all the time. Worse than just wounded, actually.”

“Now, now, mustn’t worry yourself, Patsy.” Trina rubbed Patsy’s forearm. “Your Bert probably falls right asleep every night after driving his tank across the burning sand all day. That’s why he hasn’t written.”

“That’s probably true, Patsy,” Josie said, still confused by the mention of Gideon’s wound and ashamed at how little she knew about the young women living under her roof, “the general mail from the front is unreliable at best. But I’m sure you would have heard if he had been badly wounded.”

“Miss Josie’s right,” Maureen said, touching Patsy’s hand. “My own brother, Dougal, was shot in the shoulder during the evacuation and my mum didn’t know it until he showed up on her doorstep in Clydebank with his arm in a sling.”

“But ladies, back to the colonel’s having been wounded–how do you know this?” And why wouldn’t he have mentioned something to her?

The four young women looked directly at Josie, actually stared. Trina canted her head to the side. “You must have noticed, Miss Josie. That limp of his, on his left side. A dead give-away there’s something wrong with his leg.”

“Cane’s another give-away.” Francie gestured at her own leg with a piece of buttered bread.

Gideon has a limp? Walks with a cane? Since when? She’d spent nearly an hour with him in the woods today, crawled around on the library floor with him last night. Surely she would have noticed.

“Was it an accident?” Josie asked, feeling horribly unsettled, but certain it must have been that afternoon, after she left him. Otherwise, how could she have missed him limping through the wood? “When did it happen?”

“Didn’t ask,” Maureen said, spreading blackberry jam across a slice of bread, “and soldiers don’t like to talk about that sort of thing. But I’ve been imagining he must have been wounded in hand-to-hand combat with a Nazi stormtrooper.”

Trina let out a low whistle. “I certainly wouldn’t mind a bit of hand-to-hand combat with the colonel.” She laughed and nestled back against her chair, closed her arms around her chest in an embrace. “Those smoky blue eyes—”

“That square chin!” Francie said.

“Those luscious lips! Ooo, I just want to bite them!”

“Maureen!” the three young women said in a single voice, before they all fell to laughing.

Still dumbfounded at their claim that Gideon had been limping around with a cane, Josie could only look on and listen in stunned amazement as the young women kept up their wild fantasies about him.

“You’d best take care, Maureen,” Patsy said with a wag of her finger. “Don’t let your Lieutenant Crossley hear you say such things about another man, especially not his Commanding Officer, else you’ll be buying your own beer tonight at the Hungry Dragon.”

“That is if the lot of them are back in time for a tipple in the village.” Trina giggled along with Francie.

“If?” Maureen sat upright, her eyes wide. “I hadn’t thought of that!”

Josie couldn’t help but ask, “Where have the colonel and his staff gone, Patsy?”

“Dunno any more than that, Miss Josie. Mrs. Lamb told us she served them an early dinner in their headquarters, while they were working behind closed doors.”

Francie dropped her fork into the center of her empty bowl and pushed it away. “I saw them leave through the French doors as Trina and I were driving the Fordson into the stableyard. Must have been near seven o’clock.”

“Francie, did you see which direction they took?” Josie heard herself ask again, too quickly, too openly, wondering why she cared where the man was or what he was doing. Let alone whether or not he had been injured, or that he walked with a limp, or carried a cane. Or still planned to meet her tonight in the library.

“I think I did,” Patsy said as she piled up the empty soup bowls onto her own. “I was pulling carrots in the garden for Mrs. Higgins when I saw them heading around the paddocks toward the woods. The colonel, his staff and three of those sapper fellows.”

“Ah.” That made sense, then. Gideon would be showing his men the survey site he’d settled on that afternoon. “I just wanted to know where they were, for a head count, in case of an air raid.” Though not a single siren had sounded in Balesborough since that week of practice drills the day after war had been declared, and in the first week of the London bombings.

“I pray there’s no air raid, tonight, Miss Josie!” Patsy said as she added Josie’s bowl to the stack. “It’s my turn for a bath. I plan to wash my hair in the sink then soak for at least ten minutes in my five inches of warm water. After that, I’ll write to my husband again—”

“—then you’ll sneak down to the kitchen for a hot milk and a slab of honey bread,” Trina said, “as usual.”

“And find you there before me, Trina!”

“Well, thank you ladies,” Josie said as she stood with her empty plate, “for another hard day’s work in the fields. Nimway Hall couldn’t possibly survive the war without you!”

“Thank you, Miss Josie!” Francie said. “You’re a right good egg, you know. The four of us hooked the brass ring when the Women’s Land Army assigned us to Nimway Hall.”

Josie stopped at the butler’s pantry door. “Why would you say that, Francie?”

“Oh, miss, the stories we’ve heard from the other girls. Slighted rations, dangerous farm equipment, sleepin’ stacked like cord wood in tiny rooms, or on moldy mattresses alongside the bats in the attic, treated like slaves—”

“We’re only two to a room at Nimway, Miss Josie, not in the barn but in the main house,” Patsy added. “Our beds are soft and warm, plenty of food, you let us play the gramophone in the parlor for as long as we like, you trust us like the grown women we are—”

“And we bless you for your kindness every day.”

Josie couldn’t help her broad smile or the catch in her throat. “Well, thank you. We’re each doing our best to bring Patsy’s Bert, and all the others who are in harm’s way, safely home. Enjoy the rest of your evening, ladies. If anyone should ask for me tonight—” like a certain injured colonel “—I’ll be at a meeting of the WVS in the village hall and should be back by ten o’clock.” In time for her meeting with the injured, or perfectly healthy, Gideon Fletcher.

Josie left the young women still gossiping about Gideon and his staff of eligible officers. She found Mrs. Lamb and Mrs. Tramble eating a late supper with the evacuee children in the servant’s hall dining room, their animated conversation turned to the badger sett they had discovered in a copse of alder near the apple orchard—a capital event that had kept them out until near dark.

“Sleep well, children,” she said, “work hard at your new school tomorrow and listen to everything Mrs. Tramble tells you.”

They wished her a chorus of good nights and caught the kisses she blew back to them.

Josie donned a farm jacket, grabbed a shielded torch and took the shortcut to the WVS meeting, through the new fields south of the Hall, all the while trying to think back on her hike through the forest with Gideon. Tried to recall him limping, or stumbling. Propping his gait with a make-do walking stick, or relying on a tree to steady his balance. He’d led Cassie as they ambled over the trails, keeping up with her pace, seemed to pick his way along the pathways as steadily as she.

Had easily caught her up in his arms when she knocked herself off balance; she would have fallen to the ground had he not been quicker than gravity.

And oh, those arms that held her. Powerful and steady. She had lain back in his embrace for longer than she ought, had stared up into those sparkling blue eyes, focused on his mouth, wanting him to kiss her. Maureen had it right. Lips to nibble on, and oh, to be nibbled upon, by those strong, straight white teeth.

Oh, stop! And stop wondering about the sudden appearance of Aunt Freddy’s Orb of True Love. What balderdash! Better to believe in fairies and Father Christmas than in her auntie’s tales of love fulfilled.

The nearly moonless night had fallen hard and the village was shrouded in wartime darkness as she approach from the churchyard, with every household window blacked out, shop and pub doorways closed and draped against light leaks that would guarantee a hefty fine from the Air Raid Protection Warden.

Nothing to warn her of the next hazard but the pale amber beam of her shielded torch. Hearing a motor engine rumble toward her round the corner, Josie stopped on the grassy verge near the lych gate outside the church and waited as two army lorries lumbered slowly past, their shuttered head lamps barely illuminating the road surface ahead.

She crossed the roadway to the pavement, negotiated her way along the familiar row of shop fronts, around the corner at the butter cross and finally made it into the darkened vestibule of the village hall without grazing a knee or falling over Mrs. Lister’s bicycle as she’d done last week.

“There’s Miss Josie, now!” she heard above the din of female voices as she ducked through the blackout curtains into the comparatively harsh brightness of the old village hall, its fat oaken cruck beams still holding up the roof after a few hundred years. “Let her decide who must take the older boys this time!”

“Sorry I’m late, ladies,” Josie said, ignoring the opening salvo as she shrugged off her jacket and hung it with her hat on the communal rail of hooks along the wall. “I see we have a full house tonight, thank you all for coming.”

“The County Evacuation Officer is sending us fifteen more evacuees, Miss Josie,” Mrs. Hartley said from her seat at the long table in the center of the room. “Ten of them are teenage boys from Bristol. I’m a woman alone, as you know—I’ll not be safe a moment if I take in one of them— ”

“That was your excuse about the young ones that come here last month. Eight-year-olds!”

“Vera’s right, Edith Hartley! You’ve an extra room in your house; it’s time for you to—”

“How dare you, Myrna Sykes!” Mrs. Hartley stood, knocking her chair over backward with a crash. “That room belongs to my own boy—”

“He’s twenty-four years old, and in the RAF, Edith, he’s got a perfectly good bed in his barracks at—at, wherever he’s stationed.”

“Roy needs his room when he comes home on leave—“

“Ladies, please!” Josie said as she took the seat at the end of the table, seeing a too-familiar fear in Mrs. Hartley’s eyes, hearing it in her voice. Her only child, her son, flying nightly against a ruthless enemy. “We’re here tonight hoping to find a fair and kindly way to house these new evacuees, the children especially—for their benefit, not our own.”

Myrna Sykes stood, thumped the table and got everyone’s attention. “All I can say, Miss Josie, is that we ought to be thankful the reception officers no longer line up the poor dears against a wall at the train station and allow the billeting families to choose on their own.”

“Agreed, Mrs. Sykes,” Josie said as the chattering began to die down and she leafed through the evacuee log book. “We’ve seen fewer broken hearts since we began matching the incoming children with the proper family situation.”

Lots of nodding and peaceable agreement around the table.

“And, Mrs. Hartley,” Josie continued quickly, before anyone could interrupt, “I see here on the list that we’ll be taking in a middle-aged blind woman, a retired school teacher who lost her sight in the first wave of bombings. Perhaps, you’d consider sharing your home with her.”

Mrs. Hartley scanned the intent faces of the women now sitting around the table and seemed to relax some. “Well, perhaps.”

“Good then. Shall we get started?”

A simple question that launched another hail of opinions that took the better part of a quarter-hour, three pots of blackberry leaf tea and a plate of carrot biscuits to finally bring the subject back to ground.

And an additional two hours to match fifteen names to fifteen beds. The blind woman to Mrs. Hartley. Four children to Nimway Hall, two little girls and two of the older boys who she could only hope would be kept well in hand by the mere presence of Colonel Fletcher and his men.

* * *

“You were exactly right to choose this spot for the Operational Base, Colonel,” Crossley said from the near utter darkness on the rise above the tumbled entrance to the ice house. “There’s certain to be a passage into a cave just below here; the hills of Somerset are riddled with them.” Crossley washed the shuttered beam of his torch across the ground, the light flickering through the underbrush like a wild fire. “The roof can’t be more than four feet thick up here, the same limestone as the surrounding hillside.”

“How long will it take to get through to the chamber?” Gideon asked from his position in front of the entrance below.

“Six hours, seven at most, sir, depending on the composition of the strata, and the power of the charges we can set without making too much noise–“

”And causing too much interest from the locals,” Gideon said, remembering Josie’s warning, “including the evacuee children, who seem to be as inquisitive as a tree full of squirrels.”

“Best to do the work in the dead of night, Colonel,” Easton said, “when the little imps are abed.”

“And camouflage the works by day. Good idea, Easton. Let’s finish surveying the site tonight. Estimates will suffice until we know what’s behind the rubble and the old door behind that.”

”And if we can get through the roof,” Durbridge said, his boots appearing in Crossley’s beam of light on the ridge above.

“Indeed.” All things being as they appeared, his staff would verify the specifications in the next day or two, then draw up construction plans, arrange for the delivery of supplies from the air field at Yeovilton and, with the help of his crew of sappers, be finished by the middle of next month.

Finished and moving on with his unit to the next assignment. He hadn’t spent a moment considering the timetable of his mission. The Operational Base, training the Aux Units, securing the Taunton Stop Line and, most critically, establishing a relationship with Agent Arcturus that would guarantee a permanent communication hub here in Balesborough.

A lot to accomplish for a man reduced to relying a cane. Yet, each accomplishment would bring him closer to the moment when he could return to special intelligence work on the front lines, where war was waged and a soldier belonged.

It was nearly half-nine by the time they returned to the Hall. Most of the men cleaned up and eagerly headed off to the Hungry Dragon to blow off steam in the village.

“Comin’ with us, sir?” Sapper Mullins asked, running a comb through his hair as he came out of the bath he shared with the other sappers.

“Thank you, Mullins. But I’ve reports to finish in my office before tomorrow.” Besides that, his knee ached like fire and made him feel like an old codger in the company of his men when they weren’t on duty.

And there was the meeting with Josie.

“No rest for the man in the commander’s chair, eh?” The young man tucked his comb into his back pocket and flashed a smile.

“Something like that.” Gideon watched Mullins hurtle toward the stairs, relieved when the crash he expected to hear from the floor below didn’t come.

He was on his way to clean up in his private bathroom when he noticed a light on in Stirling’s sitting room in the opposite wing of the Hall from his own, the faint sound of music and humming coming through the open doorway. It had been on his mind all day to share an idea with the man, but the father had been as elusive as his daughter.

Gideon found Edward reaching into a large wooden crate and rapped on the open door. “Have you a moment, Edward?”

Stirling looked up and smiled broadly. “Gideon, hello!” He waved Gideon into the room. “Do come in, have a seat.”

“Can’t just now,” he said, clasping Edward’s proffered hand, surprised at the earnest strength. “My clothes are a mess.”

“Nevertheless, you’re welcome any time to my ad hoc gentleman’s club.” Edward swept his arm in a grand gesture to include the paneled sitting room with its desk and pair of upholstered chairs. “Not the Garrick, but I prefer the old nursery to being bombed to oblivion. Don’t tell my daughter—she’ll gloat.”

“Official secrets.”

Edward raised a dusty bottle from the divided box. “Join me in a Cognac? Rescued a crate of my finest from my cellar. Must make the lot last till the end of this bloody war. Those bloody Ruperts at the War Office have any idea how long that will be?” The twinkle seemed to never leave the man’s eyes.

“If only they did. But, on the subject of prosecuting the war, I may have a job for you. If you’re interested.”

“Of course, I’m interested, man. This bull is already bored of the pasture. What sort of job?”

“Right up your alley, I think.” Gideon stepped inside the room and closed the door. “I’m quietly recruiting a group of men to join Churchill’s secret, stay-behind army.”

“Ah, yes, I believe I’ve heard of Winston’s secret army.”

“You have? How?”

“My dear man, the Garrick is not only a venerated gentleman’s club made up of actors, artists, writers and men of letters, it’s also a hot-bed of military intrigue. Not a few of us are veterans of the Secret Service Bureau in the last war. We’ve old connections, as you can imagine, buried deep in the halls of government. Also, my Anne and Churchill’s Clemmie were in school together, remained dear friends until Anne’s death. The two families go way back.”

So there was the lady of Nimway’s link to Churchill, a name she had casually strewn across his path like caltrops.

“Then, Edward, I could certainly use a man of your experience in the Auxiliary Unit,” he said, wondering—but not caring in the least—what the man’s daughter would think of him recruiting her father. “And as you’re already covered under the Official Secrets Act, you’ll not mention our conversation to anyone.”

“Especially not my Josie Bear, eh?”

Stirling’s smile was damn near as contagious as his daughter’s. “Especially not her. Thank you, sir. We’ll talk later.”

Just now he had to clean up for his meeting with the lady in question.

He stood naked in the bath, scrubbed and hosed off, letting the cold water sluice over the incision that ran from above his knee half-way down his calf. He dried off, determined not to spend more than a moment patching up the angry-looking wound, before dressing in clean brown trousers and a white shirt.

Ten-fifteen, not enough time to decrypt the message from Arcturus before his meeting with Josie. There would be time enough to do it later.

He left his cane in his room and took the backstairs, and timed his arrival in the library to exactly half-ten, expecting Josie to be waiting for him with a quip about proving how punctual she was. He was ready with a witty comeback, hoping to ignite the emerald green of her eyes when she laughed.

But Josie wasn’t in the library. Wasn’t lounging out of sight in one of the wingback chairs in front of the flames dancing in the hearth. Both chairs were empty.

So he switched on the reading lamp between the chairs, added a few logs to the fire then sat down and began idly thumbing through a copy of “Country Life” magazine, hoping to look as though he had been waiting hours for her.

More than fifteen minutes and a dog-eared article on cultivating edible ornamentals later, his “always punctual” hostess still hadn’t shown herself. Had begun to make him wonder if she had forgotten—

Slam! And another slam! The Hall had been so quiet that the sounds echoing in the service corridor behind the hearth brought him to his feet, would have sent him searching for the source, but in the next breath the library door swung open and Josie burst into the room.

“I’m late. I know. Sorry, Gideon. Couldn’t be helped.” She was drenched to her knees in mud, though the skies had been clear for the past two days. Her jacket and hair were strewn with twigs and leaves, which she was trying to tug free. “I’m afraid I’ve given you the wrong impression of me.”

“Hardly that, Josie.” She was breathing hard, eyes flashing in frustration with herself and whatever mischief she’d been making since their idyll in Balesboro Wood. “No need to apologize. We live in disorderly times. I was late myself. And you should stand over here, closer to the fire.”

She slipped in front of the hearth and sighed. “But at least you’re presentable.”

He’d been as bedraggled as she an hour before, but she didn’t need to know that detail of his work. “You look more than presentable, Josie, but if you’d like to adjourn until tomorrow night at half-ten—”

“I’ll stay. And I’ll be here tomorrow night on time, I promise.” She threw off her coat and turned her back to the fire. “Because I won’t have spent the last two hours leading the WVS meeting in the village. Seventeen women, and as many opinions about what to do with the new group of evacuee children we’ve been told to expect at the end of next week. Like herding badgers.”

“The children?”

“No. The women, not the children. So far the evacuees have been generally delightful, once they adjust to life in the country.” She combed her fingers through her hair, the image of an untamed creature from the forest. “That said, I’m deeply proud of each member of our group, for their willingness to sacrifice their time and treasure to help win this horrid war. Hitler and his commanders discount their contributions at great peril.” She shot him a challenge. “That goes double for our side as well, Gideon. ‘The WVS never says No’, as you’ve probably heard.”

“Countless times, from my own mother.” And his three sisters. A rallying cry that accompanied their rationale for taking on wartime roles that only a man should be assigned.

“Is your mother a member of her local WVS?”

“President.”

“I thought as much. Has she taken in evacuees?”

“No children, but the last I heard from my sister, Mother had turned the Dower House into a way-station for older women displaced by the bombing in Maidstone.”

“Your mother and I have a lot in common, Gideon.”

Wise, iron-willed, compassionate to a fault; yes, more in common than he cared to admit. “Plainly.”

“Yes, plainly,” said as though she were holding back a question that she was too shy to ask–this woman without a shy bone in her body. “Well, then, Gideon, what are your plans for tomorrow? Anything I should be warned about in advance of your men setting off explosions in the paddock?”

Bloody hell, had the woman been spying on them at the ice house? “Explosions?”

She laughed and caught back her hair in a bundle. “Only that school starts tomorrow morning for the children and I prefer they not be distracted by military maneuvers in the middle of the lake.”

Josie Stirling was a crack shot at hitting the truth. “I’ve no plans to blow up anything in particular. And you?”

“Just more of the same. Winning the war against tyranny.” She picked up her jacket by the collar and grinned.

The air was warm now, the fire crackling. She was standing not two feet from him, mouth damp, cheeks pink, her eyes raised to his and glistening. Every ounce of blood in his body raced toward his groin, urging him to finish the embrace they had begun that afternoon in the woods.

Oh, but that wouldn’t be a very good idea, old boy. Not in the long run. “Well, then,” Gideon said, to his great regret, “shall we meet again here tomorrow night?”

She sighed then nodded, smiled wanly. “Yes, of course. Half-ten, on the dot.”

Then she was gone, taking the brightly charged air with her, leaving an empty space inside him that he’d never known needed to be filled.

Tomorrow night, half-ten, was the only thought remaining in his head.

Having plenty of work to do before tonight’s assignment was finished, Gideon banked the fire, turned out the light and made his way upstairs to his sitting room with its very yellow decor.

Finally he would have a moment to decrypt the message from Arcturus. He removed the rolled-up piece of paper from the floor safe then, out of habit, positioned himself in his desk chair so he was facing the door should anyone enter as he was decrypting the message. As arranged by the SOE, they were using a simple poem code in these initial messages, simply checking that the drops and signals between them were working.

Tennyson. Poetic and patriotic. Not the sort of message he had expected from an SOE agent, especially one as highly thought of as Arcturus. Even for a test message. But the finely wrought sentiment spoke to the character of the agent he’d yet to meet but couldn’t help admiring. A man of unwavering honor, stalwart, brave, willing to sacrifice his life for his comrades, his country, to willingly face down the fiercest enemy.

Arcturus could be any man who regularly passed through the area: a lorryman or a local officer at the air station, a farmer, a regular soldier posted to the base in Shepton Mallet; anyone at all with a set route along the A37 and an easy exit into Balesborough, a stop that wouldn’t seem out of the ordinary to a local or the casual observer.

Not that the identity of Arcturus mattered to him or his mission at the moment.

Once the dead drop communication line was secured and trusted, he and Arcturus would meet in a planned live drop and would then set about establishing a vital link between a half-dozen strategic centers that would go into action in the event of a German invasion.

His knee and back beginning to ache and stiffen from the day’s exertions, Gideon stood and stretched as he read through the message from Arcturus one final time, absorbing its words and meter, stowing away his speculation about the identity of the man on the other end of the message before he finally struck a match to its corner and watched it burn to ashes on his teacup saucer.

He read reports until he could no longer hold his eyes open, then spent a restless night on a feather counterpane on the floor instead of in the great buttercup yellow tester bed, in solidarity with his men whose mattresses had yet to be delivered.

Try as he might to shift his thoughts to Arcturus and the work ahead of them, he finally relented and drifted off to sleep with Josie on his mind, slipping lithely through in his dreams.