“So she says.” The woman looked so soft, her smile so warm. As if reading Nina’s suspicion, she bent her head and sipped from the remaining soup bowl. She swallowed, holding it out again indulgently as if to say See? No poison.
Nina glowered, but took the bowl. The first spoonful nearly exploded her mouth with flavor, heat curling through her belly. She couldn’t help bolting down the rest. The woman smiled, said something to Seb. There was another eager exchange.
“What?” Nina asked, swallowing the last drop from the bowl. “Thank her for the meal and let’s be on our way.”
“She’s offering to let us stay the night.” Seb’s face glowed. “She says we can sleep in the kitchen, it’s warm, she’ll make up beds—”
Nina seized Seb’s arm, dragged him a pace or two back away from the woman. “No.”
“Why not? Sleep under a roof for a change, under clean blankets—”
“Seb, no woman living alone would bring people who look like us into her house!” Gesturing at their filthy clothes. “Which means either she isn’t alone, or that she’ll telephone the Fritzes and turn us in as soon as—”
“Is it impossible to believe someone might take pity on us? Might offer help just to be kind?”
“Yes. That is impossible to believe. And we don’t need her help.”
“You don’t trust anyone. That’s your bloody problem.” Seb’s thin face flushed at the hunger-sharpened cheekbones. “And we do need help. We’re hungry most of the time, running our bowels out eating nothing but game and roots. Why can’t we accept help when it’s offered?”
“Because if she’s friendly, all we get is a night sleeping warm, but if she’s not, we get picked up by Germans.”
“Maybe more than one night. Maybe she’d agree to hide us for a while.” Stubbornness was falling over Seb’s face in a wave. He wanted to believe so badly. Wanted to trust. “Not everyone in this war is only out for themselves. Try having a little faith in human nature for once.”
“No,” Nina said again.
He tried a different tack. “What could she do, one woman against two of us?”
Nina stared. “You know me, and you ask what one woman can do?”
“That’s different.”
Because I’m a savage, she thought. Because to an honorable young man like Sebastian Graham, well educated and well meaning and knowing nothing at all about the female sex, a small woman with smooth hair and buffed nails simply did not register as dangerous. Nina glanced over his shoulder at the woman in blue. She watched with a slight smile, content to let them hiss back and forth.
“I’m going back to our camp,” Nina told Seb. “I’m not taking the chance.”
He folded his arms. “I am.”
Nina stood back a step, surprised at the stab of hurt. I’ve fed you, hunted for you, stayed with you and now this?
He flushed again. “Nina—”
“I’ll meet you tomorrow at our campsite.” Cutting him off. “If you don’t come, I’ll know you’re on your way back to captivity in cuffs.”
“Or I’m helping the good Frau about the garden in exchange for being allowed to hide in her cellar,” he said quietly. “There are good people in the world, Nina. I trusted you, didn’t I? When the only thing I knew was that you’d be shot if you went back to your regiment, I still trusted you.”
Nina held up her razor. “I only trust this.”
“Strange how much you remind me of my brother,” Seb said. “Cool as ice and about as trusting.”
“Smart man.”
“Not a happy one.”
“Happy doesn’t matter. I’ll settle for alive.” Nina hesitated. “Come with me, Seb.”
But he wouldn’t. And Nina took off into the trees, too angry to look back and see him disappear into the ocher-yellow house.
HALF A KILOMETER’S FURIOUS HIKE down the shore, and Nina’s steps slowed. Dusk was coming now, the dark of a new moon falling. Good flying weather, Nina thought. Good hunting weather. She stopped altogether, scuffing her worn boots through the dead leaves. Something was off, something was wrong, she had no idea what.
Yes, you do. That woman could be telephoning the Krauts now, telling them she has an escaped prisoner of war in her kitchen.
No. Something even more wrong than that. She could have turned him in without inviting him inside. Why did she do that?
Nina looked up at the sky. Blue dusk, blue eyes . . . that woman’s eyes, no fear at all when she looked at the pair of ragged refugees turning up on her doorstep. Nina’s matted