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By Root 798 0

I’m the best person to sort out billets for the officers.’ There was an open mix of irony and irritation in his voice, and this time when he looked at her she could see his annoyed impatience quite clearly in his eyes. That too surprised her. She wasn’t used to hearing an officer express his or her feelings so openly to someone of a lower rank. But then they had all noticed the different and far more relaxed behaviour within the US forces, where the ordinary servicemen never stood to attention when they saw a senior officer, unless they had a specific reason for doing so. No British officer would lean back in his seat in the casual way the major was now doing, but no amount of relaxed deportment could take away the fact that everything about the major warned that he could be a very formidable opponent. Opponent? They were supposed to be allies, Diane reminded herself, wondering if she would have been so on edge if he hadn’t witnessed her making such a humiliating fool of herself.

Somehow she had to forget that, and focus on the reason why she was here. She couldn’t blame him for finding the task he had been given unappealing. It was not going to be an easy assignment, she could tell.

‘The good news is that most of the ground work has been done already,’ he told her, ‘and I’ve been given a list of the places I need to go and check out. The bad news is that they seem to be spread over half of Cheshire, and by my reckoning it’s going to take us the best part of a week to get round them all.’

A week! Diane dipped her head, not wanting him to see how horrified that made her feel.

‘So I guess we’d better make a start otherwise the Eighth is going to find its officers sleeping under canvas in a Burtonwood field. How well do you know this area?’ he asked her.

‘Not well at all, sir,’ Diane replied, sitting bolt upright in her seat and looking straight ahead.

‘OK then, how well can you read a map?’

Now she did look at him. ‘Group Captain Barker said you wanted a stenographer.’

‘So you can’t read a map.’

The irritation in his voice stung Diane into saying fiercely, ‘I can read a map but—’

‘Yeah?’ He pulled in to the side of the road, bringing the Jeep to an abrupt halt, and then turned to her, commanding, ‘Show me.’

As he reached across to remove a map from the shelf in front of her, he was so close that Diane could smell the clean fresh smell of soap on his skin. Immediately she recoiled from it and from him, appalled by the unwanted ache of yearning that had suddenly and violently seized hold of her. Kit…Kit…She closed her eyes. She must make herself remember that what she was feeling was because of him, and not because of this man, who was, after all, nothing to her and never would be. But Kit didn’t want her, he didn’t love her; she was nothing to him now, so she might as well…She might as well what? Throw herself at another man who didn’t want her, just because he made her remember that she was a woman? Did what she was feeling now help her to understand what happened to those women who took up with men to whom they were nothing? Because if it didn’t then it should, she told herself fiercely. This, what she was feeling right now, was surely happening to her because she had lost Kit. Because she was a woman, and there was a war on, and no one knew what the future might hold, and she was filled with an urgency to live whilst she still could. But not through a man like this one, Diane warned herself.

When she opened her eyes she discovered that her unease was causing the major to give her a hard look as he settled back in his own seat and unfolded the map.

‘OK, now show me where we are now.’

She knew perfectly well how to read a map, but his proximity, coupled with what she had just been thinking, was making it a struggle for her to focus.

‘Are you sure you can read a map?’ she heard him asking drily. Damn him, why couldn’t he leave her alone?

‘We’re here,’ she told him, exhaling in relief as she finally managed to pinpoint where they were, and then realised that her relief had been too soon when he leaned across