“You’d be surprised how many Americans there are in London. Lady Randolph Churchill for one. You’ll fit right in. More to the point . . . what idiot told you you’re overgrown?” he demanded, sounding every inch the outraged English lordling. “You’re just the right height.”
“For getting things off high shelves?” Emmie couldn’t help herself; she always spouted nonsense when she was nervous.
“No,” he said firmly, looking at her in a way that proved just how well-matched they were in height. In her thick-heeled rubber boots, they were practically nose to nose. And lip to lip. He brushed a strand of stray hair out of her face, his hand cupping her cheek. “For this.”
“Don’t mind me!” They jolted apart as Nell brushed past them. “Dave’s ditched the Red Cross truck at the gate again. Marie is threatening bodily harm.”
Captain DeWitt pressed the heel of his hand against his eye. “Good Lord, it’s like Euston Station. Is there any privacy?”
“Not much.” Emmie fought a disconcerting tendency to giggle. They’d gone from romance to farce, but, bizarrely, that made her feel better. It made it more real, somehow. More something that might actually happen to her, instead of a woman out of a book. “Come on, we’d best go get the coffee.”
She took his arm, and it felt entirely natural to do so, to walk down the duckwalk together with the sun shining on their heads.
Captain DeWitt—Will, she reminded herself—looked sideways at her. “They’ll all be talking about us now, won’t they?”
“They already were,” Emmie admitted, smiling despite herself. “We live in very close quarters here—it gives us something to talk about other than the war. Nell has been sneaking behind the barracks with one of the engineers and Florence has been walking out with a Canadian forester who doesn’t seem to mind that she hasn’t washed her hair since Christmas. She says it helps to keep warm. Oh, and Gwen Mills thinks we don’t know that she’s been exchanging letters with one of the doctors at the Red Cross hospital.”
“Emmie—” Will stopped her before she could lift the flap of the kitchen tent. “You do know, don’t you, that this isn’t just a wartime infatuation? This isn’t your friend and the forester or stealing kisses behind the barracks.”
Behind the barracks, Emmie thought, would be a much safer place than the duckwalk. She was rather sorry they hadn’t thought of it. Because if this was a wartime infatuation—well, maybe it made her a hussy, or a fallen woman, but she’d rather have all the memories she could have to take home with her once it was over.
Will tried to take her hands and remembered he was holding the coffeepot. “Before the war, when life was an endless garden party and the worst that might happen was tea gone tepid, I made the usual rounds of Saturday to Monday and did my duty at the requisite number of debutante dances. I’ve met any number of women I’m happy to esteem as friends, but never anyone I wanted to share a breakfast table with for the rest of my life.” Before Emmie could say anything, he added firmly, “That’s not the trenches speaking or the loneliness or delusion brought on by tainted food. That’s you. Because you’re like no one else in the world, and if the world had to come to this for me to find you—maybe the kaiser isn’t all that bad after all.”
“I really don’t think you should be saying that,” said Emmie in a voice that didn’t sound like her own. “Doesn’t that count as treason?”
“All right. We won’t invite the kaiser to the wedding,” said Will, his breath warm against her lips.
“That idiot of a Red Cross truck driver!” Emmie jumped roughly a foot in the air as Mme Gouge stomped up to them. “Pardon me—that man just makes me so angry. Did you want something?”
“Yes, some privacy,” muttered Will in English.
Emmie took the coffeepot from her would-be lover’s hand. She had very fond feelings about that coffeepot at present. She had very fond feelings about everything. But particularly the very annoyed Englishman standing next to her.
Demurely, Emmie handed the coffeepot to Mme Gouge. “Mrs. Barrett wanted a fresh pot of coffee for Colonel Hayes. And possibly a few biscuits?”
Chapter Twenty-Three
I want another month, perhaps two, to make sure the Unit is so firmly fixed in public opinion that no one could possibly contemplate sending them home again—or breaking them up into smaller groups and farming them out for canteen work, as the Red Cross is now threatening to do.