Front Lines (Front Lines #1)(71)

“I thought Britannia ruled them. The waves.”

“Not tha’ one. Tha’ was a bloody treasonous wave.”

It is the last assault of a sea that is calming by degrees. Rio and Jack lean back against the steel bulkhead and stare blearily out at the convoy around them. A Royal Navy destroyer is a mile off, eternally patrolling for submarines. A second troopship is nearer, in line just astern. The sky is ragged, scudding clouds below a silvery moon, sky and moon both untroubled by the storm below.

“I’ve got . . .” Jack holds the bottle up to see that it has less than an inch of auburn liquid left in it. “That much lef.”

“No more,” Rio says.

Jack upends the bottle, swallows all that remains, and then belatedly says, “Sure you don’t want some?”

He is suddenly standing very close to Rio, or perhaps she’s standing very close to him, close enough that they no longer need to shout.

“You sing . . . good,” Rio says.

“You shoot good,” Jack says. “You shoot, I’ll sing.”

At which point he launches into a largely incomprehensible version of a song Rio has never heard.

“Come, come, come and make eyes at me, down at the old Bull and Bush, la-la-la.”

“Make eyes,” Rio says, and follows it with a snorting laugh. “I don’t even know wha’ tha’ means. Make eyes.”

“Hah!”

“Jenou, she . . . I don’t . . .” Something has gone wrong with her brain and her body, the sober voice buried deep inside her inebriated brain notices with alarm. Her body is way too cold and wet to feel this warm.

Jack turns to her and looks directly into her eyes.

“What. Are. You. Doing? Jack Stafford?” Rio enunciates as carefully as she can.

“Making eyes at you,” Jack says.

Rio is going to laugh but doesn’t. She’s about to give him a playful shove but doesn’t do that either. Instead she feels herself falling toward him, as if some kind of gravity wave is beaming from his suddenly serious eyes.

“I can do that,” Rio says. She steadies her head, which has a tendency to want to loll back and forth with each movement of the ship. And she looks into his eyes.

“Wow,” Rio says.

“Mmm?”

“It’s like . . .”

“Like?”

“Um . . .”

She closes her eyes when he kisses her.

The first kiss is tentative and a bit sloppy. Jack pulls away. He seems to be trying to focus his eyes, then gives up and in the end closes them, and moves forward blindly for a second kiss.

It would be easy for Rio to push him away. But she doesn’t. Nor does she close her eyes this time, but watches him, watches him with minute attention, and when it begins to look very much as if he will miss his target, she takes his face with her two cold hands and holds him still. Holds him still, and he opens his eyes, heavy lidded, somehow innocent and lustful at once, and for what feels like a very long time the two of them just look, inches separating them.

The distance between them lessens, and Rio feels the warmth of his breath on her nose and cheeks. His lips are parted, waiting, and she draws him closer, fraction of an inch by fraction of an inch. She tilts his head to the right, and her own to the left, because that is the opposite of how Strand kissed her, and she is aware of that memory, and aware that what she is doing is very wrong, but this is not a moment for fine moral considerations. Of far greater importance right now is the feeling in the pit of her stomach, and the trembling of her hands on his face, and the realization that they have both stopped breathing.

He does not kiss her, she kisses him, lips parted so she can taste him.

Which is when Jenou reappears to say, “Uh-oh.”

Your father got a job!

Frangie clenches her teeth as her bunk passes through all the angles between 45 and 135 degrees. On the downswing she extends her feet to stop sliding in that direction, and on the upswing she sticks a hand over her head to brace against sliding in that direction.

In her free hand she holds the letter she’s already read through several times. Obal has taken over his buddy’s paper route, Pastor M’Dale has won an award from the NAACP, and the labor shortage as men and women flood into defense plants has created an unexpected opportunity for her father.

Her father is dispatching taxis, a job he can do from a chair. He is earning a living. The family finances are saved. They aren’t well-to-do, certainly, but neither will they lose their home or go hungry.

You can come home now, baby.

That line is as sickening as the effects of the waves. Frangie enlisted to save the family. So she could contribute her allotment. It is the sole reason she signed up, the sole reason she is here on her way to North Africa in this follow-up to the successful American landings at Algiers and Oran.

She wants to ball the letter up and throw it away. Or burn it. Or rip it into tiny pieces and scatter them overboard.

Camp Szekely, Fort Huachuca, that hellish hospital ward near Manchester, two reeking, miserable ships, all to save a family that no longer needs saving. And her mother writes as if this will be happy news.

You can come home now? Frangie pulls the rolled-up coat she uses as a pillow from beneath her head, wads it up over her mouth, and screams into the rough wool.

The letter reached her in England as she was being herded along with thousands of others from ship to truck to train to truck to ship. Mail call, normally the happiest of times, had turned very dark very quickly.