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She frowned, then—despite the fact that her right foot was close to numb from the cold—removed her other shoe, collected her briefcase, and padded all but barefoot in her now-torn hosiery the final block to her flat at 16 Woburn Mansions.
As she went, she could not help but be saddened again by the ugly gaps in the buildings. German bombs had destroyed large sections of the city—the damage had been utterly indiscriminate—and there was more and more of the destruction almost every day.
It was no different here at Woburn Square, where bombs had taken out ten of the twenty-four entrances and reduced what not very long ago had been a lush and meticulously kept park to nothing more than a burned fence and bare trees.
Adding another insult, the once-manicured park was now pocked from where crews had dug dirt to fill sandbags and dug out small shelters, for those who could not reach a basement or subway shelter quickly enough when bombs began to fall.
Sixteen Woburn Mansions had survived, but its windows now were boarded with plywood and its limestone façade scorched black from the fires that had raged up and down the street.
Ann walked up the short flight of stone steps, dug into her briefcase, and came out with a key ring, then put one of the keys in the heavy brass lock of the massive wooden door and, when she heard the loud metallic clunk of the tumbler turning, depressed the lever above the handle with her thumb, leaned her shoulder into the door, and walked inside.
She went to the lamp, clicked it on, and sighed. It was good to be home. Ann appreciated the fact that while her flat was not what one would describe as opulent, it was certainly comfortable—and superior to most flats in London, particularly the ones on Woburn Square that now were nothing but rubble.
And most important, for now, it was hers alone.
Sixteen Woburn Mansions had been assigned to the Chambers News Service, through its London bureau chief, by the Central London Housing Authority acting on a memorandum from CNS’s main office in Atlanta, duly relayed through the SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force) billeting officer, that had stated that the flat was intended to house all five CNS female employees in London, names to be provided as soon as they were available and could be forwarded from Atlanta.
And while the flat technically did indeed currently house all of the female employees of the Chambers News Service London bureau—in the person of one Miss Ann Chambers—what the bureau chief did not know was that it had been Miss Chambers who initiated the memorandum from the Atlanta office just after having obtained an assignment to the London office and just prior to her arrival in England, and that while it was theoretically possible there would be more female employees sent to serve in the London bureau, for the near term at the very least it was not at all likely.
This caused Ann some genuine mixed feelings. She knew that she was bending the rules. She knew that people in London were packed in flats, and ones smaller than hers. But she also knew that she would give up the flat in a heartbeat when she was sure that it had finally served its purpose—helping her have a private place to land the love of her life—and she was determined that that was going to be soon…very soon.
After that, she promised herself, she would make amends for this bit of selfishness.
The bureau chief suspected, of course, that Ann had used the system to her advantage, but it made no sense to fight it.
For one thing, Ann Chambers was the daughter of the owner of Chambers Publishing Company and the Chambers News Service—and, accordingly, was the London bureau chief’s boss’s boss.
For another, she was a fully accredited correspondent, and a damned good one. She had real talent, wasn’t afraid of hard work, and consequently turned in solid feature articles that the news service sent out on the wires around the world. Her Profiles of Courage series about ordinary everyday citizens serving in extraordinary roles during wartime had become wildly successful.
Why, then, would the bureau chief want to upset the apple cart over what, at least for the time being, was a technicality? As far as he knew, more female employees might be on the way; he certainly could use them.
There was no question that Ann was more than earning her keep. Which was a good thing because there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that the last thing that Brandon Chambers, chairman of the board of the Chambers Publishing Company, would have stood for was blind nepotism. He was a tough, no-nonsense businessman—some said a real sonofabitch, a reputation that Chambers wasted no effort to dispel or even dispute—who had built a world-class news service from the ground up and would not make a token hire of a family member unable to pull his or her own weight.
Early on, Ann had shown that she had a way with words—much like her father—and so while it came as no real surprise to Brandon Chambers, he was nonetheless not happy when out of the blue she showed up at his Atlanta office and announced that she had dropped out of Bryn Mawr and said that if her father did not give back the part-time correspondent job that she had held off and on since high school, she was reasonably sure Gardner Cowles—who owned Look magazine and a lot else—could find something for her to do. And very likely make it a full-time position.
Cowles was Brandon Chambers’s bitter competitor and just cutthroat enough to find great glee in providing Ann Chambers with a job at Look magazine, which was regularly beating the life out of Life.
Thus, there was no changing his daughter’s mind. “I wonder where she got that lovely stubborn personality trait?” Mrs. Brandon Chambers had said with more than a little sarcasm when her husband phoned with the news of their daughter’s plan—and Ann went to work that day in the Atlanta home office as a full-time Chambers News Service correspondent.
Now, some months later, she had had herself transferred to the London bureau.
That, too, had triggered howls of protest from the corporate office of the chairman of the board—he never believed any woman should be a war correspondent, and certainly not someone of his own flesh and blood—but it quickly became another father-daughter battle lost by Brandon Chambers.
Dick Canidy had been asleep twenty minutes when he snored so loudly that he woke himself up. It took him a moment to get his bearings, and as his brain told him where he was he heard a key being put in the front door, the lock turning, and the door opening.
He started to jump up but stopped to admire the silhouette of the well-built young woman in the doorway. Ann closed and locked the door and carefully found her way across the flat in the dark.
He laid his head back on the pillow. Her presence excited him. He could feel the beating of his heart beginning to build and a slight sweat forming on his hands. After a moment, he ever so slightly caught her scent…and smiled.
He watched as she padded to the fireplace—Is she barefoot? he wondered—and dropped her shoes and leather bag to the floor—She is barefoot! Or at least in stockings. Ann groped around until she found the matches, then lit the candles at either end of the marble mantel. They started to glow brightly, the light filling more and more of the flat, and he lay in the shadows on the couch.
Jesus Christ, if I say anything now it’s liable to scare her out of her skin!
Then she started to take off her outer clothes.
Now, this could get interesting….
Ann put down the matches on the mantel, then pulled off her overcoat and without turning tossed it over the back of the couch. She slipped her V-neck sweater over her head—uncovering a white blouse that fitted her form tightly—and was about to throw it on the couch, too, when she had a second thought.
