crumpling and bashing it until it sat on his head at the appropriately battered angle. At last Nina came out with her hair lying damp against her shoulders, smelling of peroxide. “Better,” she said contentedly, running fingers through her newly blond roots as they set off in the direction of the beach.
“Why do you dye your hair?” Ian said curiously. “Not to be rude, I like it. But considering that your only other nod to personal adornment has been to tattoo your aviation record on the soles of your feet . . .”
Nina shrugged. Another of those arbitrary questions she refused to answer—Ian let it be, and they strolled on down the long deserted beach, shoulders brushing. It was now full dark, just the faint glitter of stars overhead and the gritty slide of sand beneath Ian’s shoes. Nina stopped and pulled off her sandals as they came to the edge of the water. Her profile was bright against the darkness, and Ian thought of the night on the ship rail. “Nina,” he asked, “those five years you spent in England before this . . . was there anyone for you? I wouldn’t blame you if there were,” he added, not entirely truthfully. Falling for his wife had brought out a possessive streak, he was finding, but that didn’t mean he had to give in to it. “It wasn’t precisely a real marriage.”
“There were a few,” Nina said matter-of-factly. “Was five years. You?”
“A few,” Ian admitted. “No one lasting. Are any of your fellows waiting for you?” he made himself ask. If she said yes, he wouldn’t say another word.
“No. Peter, he goes off to fly with aerobatic team. Simone, she’s married—”
Ian stumbled in the sand. “Simone?”
“My boss at Manchester airfield, he brings a French wife home from the war. But he’s in town every night with his mistress now, and Simone gets lonely. Bozhe moi, she could tire out a tiger. You ever need sleep,” Nina advised, “get a Frenchwoman, forty-five, who wears eau de violette and hasn’t had good roll in the hay in years.”
Ian digested this. “Bloody hell, Nina—”
She chuckled. “I shock you?”
“A bit, yes.” It wasn’t as if he was unfamiliar with the idea of females who enjoyed female company. It was a little odd, however, to realize that his wife, like her razor, cut both ways.
“You’re thinking now, this means I don’t like you?” Nina grinned, tugging his head down for one of her voracious kisses. “I do.”
“I have fairly compelling evidence by now that you like me, comrade.” Ian returned the kiss, hand sliding through Nina’s damp hair, then shrugged out of his jacket, flung it over the sand, and tossed her down on it. She wasn’t wearing the willow for someone in Manchester, whether a British flyboy or a Frenchwoman who smelled of eau de violette, and that was enough to fill him with relief and hunger, setting his lips at Nina’s throat and slowly kissing his way down. Come on, comrade, he thought. There’s starlight and sand and the smell of the sea, and there’s me making love to you. Be moved by the goddamned romance of it all, would you? Be moved, Nina. Give me a chance.
“Stay with me.” He said it simply, in the moments afterward where they still lay twined up and breathing hard among the scatter of clothes, before his wife could get brisk and pull away. “I don’t want to divorce you, Nina. Stay with me.”
She stared at him, and he could feel her pulling away without moving a muscle.
“Give it a year,” he said, drawing a thumb down her sharp cheekbone. “You like this work, you like the chase, you like me. Why not stay? Try it for a year, being my wife more than just in name. It wouldn’t be like most marriages, children and Sunday lunches and peace. That would bore you, and it would bore me. We’d have this instead, the road and the hunt and a bed at the end of it. Give it a year.” Ian put everything into the words. “Give it a year, and if you want to walk away at the end, we’ll divorce. But why not try?”
Nina sat up, linking her arms around her knees, her face like a small obdurate shield. “I don’t love,” she said. “Is not what I do.”
Go soft-eyed on her and she will bolt, Ian thought. “Love isn’t the word,” he said. “I’m not sure there’s a word in the world for