She wasn’t money at all, new or old, just a working girl with sensible shoes and an attic room that cost too much of her weekly salary.
As for being a Pratt . . . Maybe she had thought, once, that that would provide some social cachet, but she was reluctant to blurt that out, not just because she didn’t want Philip to know she’d been using him, but also because they sounded like horrible people. She didn’t want him to look at her and see Prunella Pratt. She didn’t want him to talk about her the way he did Didi.
Philip Schuyler reached across the table, took her hand, and, before Lucy realized what he was doing, raised her knuckles to his lips. “I don’t know when I’ve ever been so grateful to anyone for breaking her leg. Here’s to Meg and her multiple fracture!”
“You can’t mean that,” protested Lucy, flattered and appalled—but she left her hand in his.
“Oh, I’m sorry about her leg—don’t get me wrong—but I can’t be sorry about you.” Philip’s hand tightened on hers, his thumb moving in an intimate caress against her wrist. “There you were, in the secretarial pool, all that time, and I never saw you.”
“You said hello to me once,” said Lucy, and then wished she hadn’t. It made her sound like a besotted teenager.
“Did I? If I’d known better, I wouldn’t have just said hello. I would have asked you for a drink.”
There was something mesmeric about the way he was looking at her, his face so close to her, his hand on hers, the culmination of a thousand guilty daydreams. This wasn’t happening, not really. Philip Schuyler flirted, yes, all the time, but this was more than flirting, this was . . .
Not right.
Reluctantly, Lucy drew her hand away. “And I would have said no.”
“Don’t say no, Lucy.” Philip touched a finger to her lower lip, and Lucy felt the tingle of it, stronger than the gin, so exciting and so wrong all at the same time. “These lips weren’t made for saying no.”
And before Lucy could say no, before Lucy could say anything at all, Philip Schuyler leaned in and kissed her.
Sixteen
JULY 1944
Kate
The whine of sirens pierced the still night, jerking my eyes open. I was on call and still wore my clothes, making it easier to exit the sleeping quarters with only a quick hand-swipe of my eyes and a brief toe-search for my shoes before sliding them on. The air-raid drills were a weekly occurrence, and I moved through the mansion still half-asleep, my motions automatic. I no longer had to look at the drill instructions taped on most doors inside the hospital at the instruction of Mayor La Guardia; the familiar words and graphics of various siren sounds seemed to be imprinted on the inside of my eyelids.
I joined an orderly and a nurse as we each picked up a flashlight from the bucket on the landing, and I began systematically turning off all lights I passed as the steady scream of the siren continued outside. I peered through one of the drawn shades in a blackened room and spotted an air-raid patrol car racing down the street, pausing so its air-raid warden could jump out and douse a phantom fire.
One of the men from the ballroom turned hospital dormitory screamed from a nightmare, an unholy side effect of the drills. So many of the patients returned to their recent battles when they closed their eyes, the innocuous sounds of sirens more menacing to them, transforming into the sounds of falling bombs and spiraling planes.
I was headed in his direction when I spotted Nurse Hathaway and an orderly in the doorway. “We’ve got this,” she said.
I nodded, listening to the sound of scrambling feet throughout the hospital. I looked up the stairs, knowing I should make sure that Captain Ravenel was prepared to move if the siren sound began to waver, signaling us that it was no longer just a drill. Still, I paused. Since meeting his fiancée, I’d done everything in my power to avoid the attic room except to retrieve personal items when I knew he was sleeping and his fiancée wasn’t there. But nobody was running up to the attic. The captain hadn’t been coherent during the last drill and I pictured him up in the attic room, in the dark and alone, wondering what all the commotion was about. I had my foot on the first step when I heard my name.
“Dr. Schuyler?”
I groaned inwardly as I turned. “Yes, Dr. Greeley?”
“Where are you going?” he asked, although it was clear he knew exactly where I’d been heading.
“To see to Captain Ravenel. The attic room wasn’t included in the original drill plans because it wasn’t a . . .”
Dr. Greeley took my elbow. “The patient is fine. I saw to him myself. It looks like all that’s still needed is for you and me to find a safe place.”
“I’m quite . . .”