are no lines to compare ourselves to. Start fresh with no ghosts haunting our every step. A new life all our own. Isn’t that what you’ve wanted all along?” As soon as the notion bolted from her mouth, it was suddenly and clearly the only thing she wanted to do. The promise of a new beginning, together.
“America.” The word whispered like a dream on the fog. Something stirred beneath the hopelessness in his eyes. “You want to go to America with me?”
“Yes, I do. Despite what people may believe, I can actually think for myself. But if you keep making ridiculous statements like that, then I’m bound to change my mind.” She grasped his face, bringing it inches from hers. No more hiding. “Whoever we were before and from wherever we came no longer matters. It’s just you and me, Kat and Barrett.”
His hand closed overtop hers, warm fingers sliding between hers and drawing out the early morning chill from their tips. Deep within his blue eyes, something dared to stir, dared to slip out from its restraints and bare itself to her. She recognized it in an instant as the same hope that swelled in her breast. Brought together and tested by the searing fire of war, their fates were sealed. No longer two broken pieces but one solid entity made stronger together.
“Do you truly mean that? You and me, no more family names, no more lineages, no more past? We can start anew?”
“How many times do I have to say it? Yes, I mean it.”
He gripped her hands tight. “There’s something I need to tell you. I should have long before now, but I can’t keep it from you any longer. No more secrets.” Raising her hands to his lips, he pressed a firm kiss to her knuckles and raised his beseeching gaze to her. “I have to meet our contact first, but when I come back we’ll talk.”
A tiny worry snagged her feeling of complete elation, but she waved it off. Nothing he could say to her would top the nightmare of lies and horrors they had experienced. Whatever his confession, they would overcome it together. As they always had.
She smiled at Barrett with all the love brimming in her heart. “Yes, we’ll talk. Hurry back.”
* * *
Only a few more hours and he’d finally put this accursed place behind him. His contact, a burly man with the burnt, metallic smell of a smithy clinging to his faded coveralls, had outlined the plan in just under an hour. They would wait until nightfall, then meet him in the apple orchard two miles north of town where a Lysander plane would touch down shortly before midnight to ferry them back to England under the cloak of darkness.
“Simple as that, eh?” Barrett had said.
The smithy had shrugged. “Long as the Boche don’t see us and you make that plane on time. It waits for no man—or in your case woman.”
Adjusting the sack of food the smithy had given him over his shoulder, Barrett grabbed the top rail of the broken split-rail fence and hopped over. Across the field leaned the decrepit barn. And Kat.
Her pleas had hammered at the walls he’d bricked up to keep her safe. It had taken every last shred of defense not to give in to the passion of her kiss, but it was the hope sparking in her eyes that proved to be his undoing. She didn’t care where he came from, nor that he had nothing to offer her. She was under no illusions as to what kind of man he was and yet wanted him still.
An itch stretched up his side as the knife wound did its best to heal. He pulled his jacket tighter across his stomach to keep from scratching away Kat’s hard work to keep him alive. She deserved better than he could hope to ever offer her. But no man could care for her the way he did. No man could—he swallowed against the tightness building in his chest—love her the way he did. Aye, she had his heart now and forever.
He started across the field, his footsteps lighter than the past few days when he’d trudged along with no hope. America was his dream, but she had changed it. Without her in it, it was a spit of land, bleakness that stretched on and on until his dying day. Only she offered him the light and rest he so desperately craved, and he could spend the rest