Lily’s knees trembled as she walked down the narrow hall toward the main room of the cottage. Robert had only been there an hour, and already she was a wreck. She honestly didn’t know how she was going to get through this. It was bad enough having Robert in the cottage, dredging up all the old emotions. But it was infinitely worse knowing Jack could be seriously ill. She’d suffered so many losses in her life. She didn’t think she could bear it if something happened to her precious child.
In the last hour it seemed as if every nerve in her body had been stripped bare and exposed. Every new bit of information had those nerves jumping like a bad tooth prodded with a sharp instrument. Her entire world had been rocked off its foundation when she’d seen Robert standing on her porch, glaring at her with those cool blue eyes.
Because she couldn’t seem to get herself settled down, Lily took a few minutes to stack some logs on the grate in the hearth. When the fire was blazing and she finally ran out of things to do, she turned to face Robert. He’d taken one of two chairs and was staring at her intently, as if she were a puzzle that had just befuddled him.
“Stop looking at me that way,” she snapped.
“I’m just trying to figure out what you’ve gotten yourself into since I left.”
“I haven’t gotten myself into anything.”
“Yeah, I guess you blindfold all your visitors.”
“That’s just a precaution. In case you haven’t noticed there’s a civil war going on.”
“I’ve noticed,” he shot back. “I’ve noticed a lot of things since I’ve been here, and I’ve yet to get a straight answer out of you about any of them.”
She tried to laugh but didn’t quite manage.
“What the hell are you up to, Lily?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The bits and pieces I’m getting from you don’t fit,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me the whole story?”
She glared at him. “And what story would that be?”
“The one that explains what you’re still doing in this godforsaken country with an innocent child in tow.”
Because she was much more comfortable with anger than any of the other emotions boiling inside her, she held on to it with the desperation of a drowning woman hanging on to a float. “I got caught up in the movement,” she snapped. “Is that mysterious enough for you?”
“You were involved with the rebels before…I left the first time. Tell me something I don’t already know.”
Letting out a shuddery breath, she sank into the second chair and looked into the fire. “Nothing has changed.”
“Everything has changed, damn it. Don’t lie to me.”
Her eyes met his, and within their depths he saw the memories, felt them in his heart the way he had a thousand times in the months since he’d last seen her. A young doctor and an American journalist in a strange land surrounded by ugliness and danger. Two people longing for their homeland, but bound by their love of freedom and a responsibility to help those unable to help themselves. Robert and Lily had spent their days doing what they could to breathe life into a country dying a slow death of oppression. By day, Robert inoculated children, treating the innocent for disease and malnutrition and neglect. Lily wrote her articles, sending them to newspapers in London, New York and Frankfurt, and visited the orphans, the children whose parents had been killed in the war. The children no one cared about.
By night, Lily and Robert met in a smoky little pub, exchanging stories, decompressing, laughing on the outside because inside they felt like crying. For a few short hours they escaped the war, talking about all the things they wanted to do with their lives, their hopes and dreams and plans for the future. Surrounded by despair and destruction and hopelessness, they found peace and their own tiny slice of paradise. They fell in love in that dank little pub. The most unlikely of places that led them to something extraordinary and breathtaking….