the trunk. Turned the rag over to the clean side, and began rubbing at the rain marks on the Lagonda’s dark blue fender. Through the broad front window of the hotel, the night porter watched us idly.
“I saw some bad things,” Finn said, “during the last year of the war.”
He stopped for so long, I thought he wasn’t going to say anything else.
“I have a temper,” he said finally.
I smiled. “No, you don’t. You’re the levelest man I know—”
He brought his open hand down against the fender in a sudden slap. I jumped, voice breaking off.
“I have a temper,” he repeated evenly. “The months after I left my regiment, it wasn’t a braw time. I’d go out, get wrecked, start fights. Eventually I got arrested for one of them. Earned me a term in Pentonville for assault.”
Assault. An ugly word. I looked at Finn and I just couldn’t see it. “Who’d you get in a fight with?” I asked softly.
“I don’t know. Never met him before that night.”
“Why did you fight him?”
“I don’t remember. I was fair smashed, walking around angry.” Finn leaned his back against the Lagonda, arms folded tight across his chest. “He said something, who knows what. I hit him. Kept on hitting him. Six people pulled me off once I started bashing his head against a doorpost. Thank God they got me off him before I cracked his skull.”
I stayed silent. It was misting now, very gently.
“He got better,” Finn said. “Eventually. I went to Pentonville.”
“Have you hit anybody since?” I asked, because I had to say something.
He stared straight ahead, not looking at anything. “No.”
“Maybe your temper isn’t the problem.”
He laughed shortly. “I beat a man to a pulp—broke his nose and his jaw and his eye socket and four of his fingers—and my temper isna the problem?”
“Did you get in fights like that before the war?”
“No.”
“Then maybe the temper isn’t really you. It’s the war.” Or rather, whatever he saw there. I wondered what that was, but I didn’t ask.
“That’s a lousy excuse, Charlie. Or every soldier who came home would be in the lockup.”
“Some go to prison. Some go back to work. Some kill themselves.” I thought of my brother, painfully. “Everyone’s different.”
“You should go in,” Finn said abruptly. “Before you get all drookit.”
“Yank, here. I don’t know what that means.”
“Before you get drenched. Not good for the bairn, Mrs. McGowan.”
I ignored that, leaning up against the Lagonda beside him. “Does Eve know?”
“Yes.”
“What’d she say?”
“‘I have a weakness for handsome men with Scottish accents and prison records, so I’ll give you a try.’ And never mentioned it again.” He shook his head, hair falling over his eyes again. “She’s not one for judging people.”
“Neither am I.”
“You still shouldn’t be hanging around a bad apple like me.”
“Finn, I’m a former good girl, and a current unwed mother-to-be. Eve’s a former spy, and a current drunk. You’re a former convict, and a current mechanic and driver and cooker of English breakfasts. You know why none of us judge?” I bumped his shoulder with mine until he finally looked down at me. “Because none of us have the goddamn right to look down our noses at anyone else’s sins.”
He looked down at me with an invisible smile that began and ended in the corners of his eyes.
I reached behind me and hoisted myself up to sit on the Lagonda’s long hood. It put me almost level with Finn when he turned to face me, as I leaned forward to fit my mouth carefully, gently, against his. His lips were soft and his jaw rough, just like the first time I’d tried to kiss him. Just like the first time, his hands rose to my waist—but this time I broke off the kiss before he could move back. I didn’t think I could stand it if he pushed me away again.
But he didn’t. He lowered his head back to mine, catching my lips and lingering. His hands were big and warm on either side of my waist, pulling me closer against him on the edge of the Lagonda’s hood. I let my hands slide into his rumpled hair where they’d been aching to go, and his hands slipped under the edge of my new striped jersey. He didn’t go lunging upward from there, just ran the backs of his fingers very slowly up and down the bare sides of my waist as we kissed. I was trembling all over by the time we pulled apart.
“I got engine