“It’s been a rough couple of years, hasn’t it, old chap?”
Philip nodded, his face somber. He turned to Caitlyn. “I haven’t left my village since my wife died. She was the sparkle in my life, and with her gone...” He patted Spencer’s strong hand with his gnarled one. “My boy here convinced me to visit him. We had big plans for this trip, but I had to go and have a heart attack on my first day in London.”
“We can take care of those plans next time, Granddad. London will still be here.”
Philip stared into Spencer’s eyes until even Caitlyn’s chest ached with the realization that there might not be a next time.
“Of course.” Philip’s shoulders straightened, and he shifted in his seat until he sat upright. His face brightened. “I have an idea. Caitlyn, my dear, when we spoke in the hospital I got the impression you’re interested in history.”
“I am.”
Philip pushed his chair back, startling Minnie. She gave a yawn, then circled Caitlyn’s foot before dropping and resting her chin there. “I’ll be right back.”
He ambled into the room Minnie had been shut up in earlier, which Caitlyn guessed was the guest room. She took the opportunity to steal a peek at Spencer. Brows lowered, nostrils flared—she’d be terrified of the annoyance on his face if she didn’t know it was directed at his grandfather. Why, she had no clue.
“What’s going on?”
“I dread to think,” he muttered.
Philip rushed back to the table, clutching a shoe box that he set on the table and laid his hands on top of. He turned to Spencer with a gravity that made Caitlyn’s breath catch in anticipation.
“You know what I want now, son?”
Spencer barely moved. “Yes.”
“And you understand why I can’t be there?”
“We can wait, Granddad—do it together later.”
Philip shook his head. “I’ve been meaning to do this for years. First with your granny, but life kept getting in the way. Then with you but...well, I guess death got in the way. Near-death, anyway. I want you to do this while I’m still around to hear the stories you bring back.”
Spencer flinched. He opened his mouth as if ready to argue, but then snapped it shut. He jerked his head and collapsed back in his chair like a marionette whose strings had been snipped.
Philip turned to Caitlyn, and her belly filled with dread at playing a role in the unfolding family drama.
“Caitlyn dear, my beautiful wife, Lillian, was born and raised in Wapping. She sent me letters during the war.” He tilted the shoe box lid off and carefully extracted a folded, yellowed letter. His hand trembled as he passed it to her. “Read it, please.”
“Out loud?”
He nodded. She glanced at Spencer again, not wishing to upset him by reading something so personal, something that clearly affected him deeply. His face had shuttered, leaving her little insight into his thoughts, but he tilted his head forward in assent.
Caitlyn unfolded the letter.
September the 14th
,
1940
Dear Lieutenant Bailey
,
Thank you for posting my brother’s final letter.
It’s the only one we’ve received since he went to the Front.
Your own letter telling stories of the marvellous times you had together in France helped ease our family’s pain
,
though I suspect you cleaned it up more than a bit.
Lenny always was a scoundrel.
If you’re ever in the East End
,
I
should like to buy you a pint and hear the stories unfit for my mother’s ears.
With most sincere regards
,
Lillian Tufnell
P.S.
Please don’t bear a grudge against my mother that she didn’t write this letter herself.
She has not been well since the telegram arrived.
Caitlyn laid the letter on the table. Swallowing hard to dislodge the lump in her throat, she settled her gaze on Philip. “Her brother was killed?”
“Tragically. Lenny and I trained together, served together. He became my closest friend.” Philip cleared his throat. “He was very much like our Spencer here—not just in looks, though he’s always favored his granny’s side. I had plenty of stories unsuitable for a mother’s ears. And Lillian’s promise to buy me a pint...well, that may be common with young ladies today but it wasn’t in our day. Not in the tiny village I grew up in, anyway. I found myself eager to escape the war, not just to be with someone who knew Lenny as I did, but to meet a city girl who could be that forthright.”
He flashed a mischievous grin between her and Spencer. “We Bailey men have always had a special fondness for cheeky women.”
Finally, Spencer met her eyes, resignation written all over his face. “Granddad came to London so we could read Granny’s letters together and visit the places she wrote about.”
“I was injured and evacuated to Gloucestershire. Lillian was a volunteer nurse by then, so she moved to be closer to me. The Blitz left the East End in a terrible state, and Lily couldn’t stand to come back for years.” Philip took the letter from Caitlyn’s hand, folded it carefully and put it back in the box. “But I hate to leave Spencer exploring all of this family history by himself. Why not share it with someone who’s equally fond of digging through the past?”
The old man certainly knew how to lay the guilt on thick. His assessment of her hit so far off the mark he might as well have been aiming for China. Nothing scared her worse than digging through the past. She might love stories about people from centuries gone by, but when it came to exploring her own family history she left the past well enough alone. She’d buried it alongside her mother.
But had she really? Would she continue suffering these humiliations with men who made her heart go pitter-patter if the past’s tentacles didn’t still hold her in their slimy grip?
No. She refused to let that happen. She’d spent years fleeing the terrors of her teenage years, and it had only ratcheted up her fear of intimacy. She squared her shoulders. These freak-outs had to stop. Now.
“I’d be honored to walk through your family’s history with you, Spencer. My visa expires in a few months, though, so I don’t have much time. When should we start?” There. Let him know she wouldn’t fall for him, if it made a difference. Pure sex. An opportunity to overcome her fears so that maybe, one day, she could feel normal. That was all she wanted. And if she humiliated herself a few times in the process, who cared? She’d be moving on again soon anyway.
Spencer’s brow rose. She gave him a tiny nod that she hoped conveyed her hidden meaning. He crossed his arms on the table, leaning forward with an intent stare. “You’re sure?”
She held her breath and took a plunge. “Absolutely. Never been so sure in my life.”
Chapter Five
November the 21st
,
1940
Dear Lieutenant Bailey
,
Thank you for your reply to my reply to your original letter.
It was quite unexpected
,
but warmly received.
This letter may ramble on.
I’m writing from the air-raid shelter at Hermitage Wharf in Wapping.
When the all-clear whistle blows
,
I
am sure I will decide against sending it.
There’s comfort
,
though
,
in distracting myself from night after night of Jerry’s bombs falling on London.
Moonlight draws the bastard Luftwaffe straight to us
,
since my family’s home is just a few steps from the river.
Most nights I feel as if there is a large target painted on the roof.
I
pray all is well with you
,
and that this war will soon end and bring you home to your loved ones.
I
pray there will still be a Britain left for you to return to.
Even though I know you will never see this letter
,
I
send you my very warmest regards.
Lillian Tufnell
Caitlyn leaned against Spencer’s shoulder as he read his grandmother’s letter aloud. They sat on a bench in the grassy gardens at Hermitage Wharf, perched atop an embankment on the Thames with a magnificent view of Tower Bridge. A black stone tablet with a flying dove cut out of the center stood at one end as a memorial to the East End’s Blitz victims. Spencer had taken several photos to share with Philip later. Now he folded the letter Lillian had written from the relative safety of an extant air-raid shelter somewhere below them, and gently slid it back into its envelope. His voice had fallen quiet as he’d neared the end of the letter.
“Did your grandparents ever talk to you about the war?”
He shook his head. “Not much. Granddad talks about it in general. You know, why the Germans lost, that kind of thing. But nothing personal. They talked about Lenny sometimes—they named my mother Leonora after him—and I know Granny was the only one in her family to survive, but I’ve no idea how.”
He stared down at the letter. “They must’ve talked to each other about it sometimes. One night when I was about ten or eleven, a paint factory several miles from us caught fire and exploded. When we heard the noise, Granny collapsed. She was almost...I don’t know...catatonic. Granddad yelled at me to go away, but I can remember her muttering something about the Nazis. At the time, I was so young I thought maybe the Nazis had returned. They were always the baddies in the films I watched. So I spent the night staring out the window with my cricket bat.”
“Cricket?”
“Yeah. I played it until I started competitive rugby.”
The image Caitlyn had of little-boy Spencer guarding his house from Hollywood villains made her want to wrap her arms around him, but mostly she felt heartsick for the older woman who’d had such a severe flashback. Would Caitlyn herself be like that in forty, fifty years? Still unable to control her body’s reactions? God, please no. “How long did it take your granny to recover after that night?”
“No time. At least, she seemed normal to me the next morning.”
Thinking carefully about how to phrase this without giving away her own experiences, Caitlyn said, “I think most people of their generation came home and did everything possible to get on with their lives except talk about the traumas they experienced. No wonder she reacted to an explosion if she spent so much of her youth hiding underground from bombs. It must’ve been really upsetting for her to realize the Nazis still held so much power over her all those years later.”
Sadness poured off Spencer in waves, leaving Caitlyn struggling to figure out how to comfort him. Maybe just by shutting up. They didn’t know each other well enough for her to wrap herself around him in a hug. Nor could she squeeze his knee or pat his leg without risking looking like she was coming on to him instead of lending him her support.
He sighed as his shoulders relaxed back into the bench—shoulders so wide they left her no room to scoot away. Not that she wanted to. Their bodies connected from shoulder to knee, lighting up all the tingling nerve endings along her left side.
“Did your grandfathers fight in the war?”
His question drew her mind away from his body heat. “No clue.”
He shifted to stare at the side of her face, but she kept her eyes trained on the murky river water undulating with the wake of a passing boat. “You don’t know?”
“Nope.”
“Did you ever meet them?”
“My dad was estranged from his family—I think by mutual agreement.” The mutual agreement being that they all thought each other the world’s biggest asshole, and they were all correct. “And my mom...” Her mom hadn’t been allowed to have much contact with her parents or sister. They might have acted as a lifeline, pulling her out of the marriage she was slowly drowning in. “My mom’s parents lived far away. They lost touch over the years.”
She lied with surprising difficulty. This had been her stock answer throughout her adulthood whenever she’d been asked about her family, but now the words sounded lame and insulting. No one, not even close friends like Emma, knew the full truth.
Spencer stared at her a long while. “People don’t lose touch with their parents just because they live far apart. There has to be some sort of decision there—a decision not to call or write. You’ve never asked your mum about it?”
She hesitated, torn between wanting to explain why asking her mom now would be impossible and simply brushing off his question. In the end, she shook her head. “No. Never.”
He transferred the letter to his left hand, his right hesitating midair for a hint of a second before settling on her thigh just above her knee and squeezing. Was he coming on to her?
She winced.
No
,
you idiot
,
he’s comforting you
,
just like you wanted to comfort him a few minutes ago.
She’d lied about her family for so long and to so many people that this time shouldn’t have been difficult. For some reason, though, her gut filled with shame. His hand felt unnaturally heavy on her thigh, as if her guilt weighed it down. Spencer shared his family’s intimacies with her, and she couldn’t do the same. Not without falling apart. Not without becoming the victim she’d spent years fighting to overcome.
He tilted his head until it rested against hers. “Wherever you went just now, come back. It doesn’t look like a happy place.”
She forced a smile. “No, it wasn’t.”
It was her childhood.
She tried to turn toward him as best she could, what with being squeezed between his widespread legs and the wrought-iron arm of the bench. “Should we read the next letter? Explore somewhere else she writes about?”
“Not just yet.” He bent over and slipped the letter into Caitlyn’s bag before standing and rubbing a hand over his tight belly. “I’m starving. How about lunch at the Dog and Bell?”
Caitlyn joined him in silence as they left the park and walked down a cobblestone street winding between renovated warehouses. They’d met in the park half an hour ago, and so far he hadn’t mentioned anything about their nonverbal exchange the other night. She’d thought she’d broadcast her message loud and clear:
If you’re interested in me
,
don’t let the virgin thing stop you.
Even if it always stops me.
Because I don’t want it to stop me anymore.
Okay, so maybe her signals weren’t as clear as they could be.
What could she do about that? She’d sound like an idiot if she brought it up now, but he was the first guy she’d met in a long time who seemed attracted to her and who set the butterflies in her tummy aflutter. He was the first man who made her want to try again.
Even if it meant throwing herself on a pyre of humiliation.
She groaned aloud. She didn’t mean to, but it slipped out before she could control it.
“You all right?”
“Mmm-hmm.” Lips clamped tight. No more inadvertently honest noises would slip out.
Spencer opened the door of a flower-bedecked riverside pub and stepped aside for her to enter. Hanging baskets of colorful summer blooms outlined the burgundy door and hunter-green window frames. The floor creaked under Caitlyn’s feet as she approached the bar and grabbed a menu. Too unsettled to notice the pub’s quintessential Ye-Olde-London feeling, she scanned her choices before handing it over to Spencer. He set it on the bar without glancing at it.
Without glancing away from her. Damn, he stood right next to her, leaning against the bar and staring down in a way so casually hot that those butterflies went mental.
“Yes?” a woman’s voice asked from the other side of the bar.
“Fish and chips, please,” Caitlyn whispered.
“I’ll have the lamb, side of boiled potatoes, no butter. And double the usual portion. We’ll be outside.” Spencer slid his hand over hers and gently tugged her toward a door near the end of the bar. The narrow pub was heaving with lunchtime diners, so Caitlyn could only follow Spencer as he pushed his way through, clearing a path for her as if he navigated human traffic like this all the time. He never dropped her hand.
Message received, loud and clear.
Miraculously, they stepped onto the wooden patio above the Thames just as a couple began gathering their things. Spencer made straight for the table and sat across from Caitlyn, resting their joined hands between them.
“We have a few things to talk about, you and I.”
“Yes.” Her voice felt as creaky as the scarred wooden floor she’d just walked across. “Like what?”
He cocked a brow. “Are you a virgin?”
She laughed, more from shock than amusement. “Um...”
“Sorry, I tried to figure out a subtle way of knowing for sure, but the only methods I came up with are probably illegal. They’re definitely immoral.” Lines formed around his tight lips as he half smiled.
“Let’s save us both the trouble, then. Yes.”
His Adam’s apple shifted. She sat close enough to hear him swallow.
“Is that a problem?” she asked
“For me? No. Not at all. Is it a problem for you?”
“Big time. I’m twenty-seven. I don’t want to be a virgin anymore.”
Oh, God, the
relief.
Saying the words out loud released all the tension and fear of being abnormal that her body had clung to for years. Being a virgin wasn’t her choice—not anymore—and giving voice to that felt like the first step in overcoming her insecurities.
“In that case,” Spencer’s deep voice rumbled, “I lied. It is a bit of a problem for me.”
Caitlyn’s breath fled, taking her newfound confidence with it. “Oh. Of course it is.”
She tried to remove her hand from his but he gripped it tightly.
“Not in the way you’re thinking. I guess...” His gaze left hers to consider the river for a second before settling on her again. “I guess I need to know more about this virginity thing.”
“Well, it’s what happens when someone hasn’t had sex. Though I imagine it was so long ago for you that you’ve forgotten.”
One side of his mouth kicked up at her sarcastic tone. “You’re right—I barely remember being a virgin. But you might be surprised to hear I haven’t had sex in a hell of a long time.”
She cocked a disbelieving brow. “What constitutes ‘long’ for a professional athlete? Days? Hours?”
“Coming up on a year.”
Her jaw dropped. She covered her mouth with her hand. A year?
“I stay celibate during the season so I can focus on my career. Women can be...distracting.” His lips flattened and he blinked before focusing on her again. “For some reason, I don’t know...I haven’t told anyone this so it’s hard to put into words.” He took a deep breath. “I thought this summer would be like the last few, where I’d have a short-term relationship with a woman I met at the pub, or a woman I’ve...known, in the past. But I haven’t been able to do that. Not since Granddad’s heart attack.”
“You don’t need to be around him constantly, Spencer. I’m sure he’d love it if you went out more.”
He ignored the inference that his grandfather wanted to see less of him. “It’s not for lack of opportunity. I’ve had opportunity. I just haven’t had the stomach for it. Well, my
stomach
hasn’t been the problem.” He grimaced. “I want to sleep with someone I actually like, but I can’t take the risk of anything permanent. It needs to be someone I can be up front with, someone who knows it has to end next month when the season starts.”
“I can see your problem.” Her mind whizzed at the speed of light because she could already tell where he was going with this. Caitlyn was proud of herself for keeping the tremor out of her voice. Now she just needed to find a way to wipe her nervous palms before he noticed how badly they sweat. “You need to have sex with a friend.”
“Exactly! A friend who won’t be around very long, so she knows as well as I do that it’s nothing lasting.” He drew in an unsteady breath. “Caitlyn, I don’t think we need to keep talking in the third person like this. I’m obviously talking about you. About us. You’ve been on my mind a lot in the past week or so, but I couldn’t figure out if I scared you, or...?”
Her eyes flew to his and saw a little boy’s shyness lurking there. “Are you kidding?”
He shrugged. “Of course. Well, no. Not really. I mean, you
did
bite me.”
She yanked her hand away and cringed, her face burning. “I am
so
sorry about that. I totally screwed the pooch.”
He looked aghast. “You what?”
“I screwed the pooch. I made a mistake.”
“Yes, I can see how that would be a mistake.” He glanced around. “Caitlyn, that’s not a common expression here, so I’d be careful who you use it in front of.”
She barely heard him. He’d wound her up by mentioning the tongue debacle. “You’re ridiculously good looking. You’re beyond beautiful. And there’s something seriously wrong here that Plain Jane is reassuring Adonis of his attractiveness.”