Page 121 of Blood Game

“Last night...”

No, Kris thought. She couldn't do this. Not now.

“You're right,” she told him. “About everything.”

It was too easy, he thought. After everything that had happened, after every excuse, every argument, and that cool logic that she'd thrown at him.

Too easy.

He followed her to the upstairs room they'd shared the night before, and that bed.

She ignored it, and him.

The sweater was dry where she had hung it earlier over a chair in front of the furnace. She folded it and put it in her shoulder bag, along with food he'd brought back the night before. The curse followed her down the stairs to the lobby.

Monsieur Martin frowned, then handed her one of the brochures for the car rental agency that he kept for guests. She thanked him, then paid the bill for the room.

“Goddamn!”

She heard it as she left the inn.

“Wait!”

She didn't—she knew what the conversation would be.

It had started to rain as she crossed the street and followed the directions Monsieur Martin gave her. She ducked under the canopy of a restaurant awning, then started across the next street. Her head came up as a car swept around the corner and braked to a stop, blocking her.

James shoved open the passenger door. The anger was still there, in the expression on his face, in the way he refused to look at her, at his hand wrapped around the gear lever.

“Get into the fuckin' car!”

CHAPTER

THIRTY-FOUR

NOVEMBER 9, 1944, NORTHERN FRANCE,

Françoise went ahead, slipping into the darkness, the misty rain closing around him so that he might not have been there at all, like a ghost. They had all learned to be ghosts.

He was from this area and knew it well, every farmhouse, each stream, and low-lying area, even a series of caves where they'd hidden two days before. He'd made it his business to know it all and it had served them well, allowing them to remain hidden as the German forces moved around them, moving steadily toward the Ardennes forest.

But why? Why subject men and equipment to the worst of the coming winter? Winters in the north could be brutal.

Already there was snow on the ground, making movement slow and exhausting as they pushed their way over muddied roads and then no roads at all. It had snowed that morning and they had been grateful, the four of them, for it had covered their escape.

Three days earlier, they had followed enemy movements, alerted by their contact in the south. Something was happening, something the Allies were not aware of, and it was critical to get information.

They'd been playing cat-and-mouse with them for months, ever since the Allied landing, the German infantry scattered by the unexpected numbers of the Allied forces.

Cat and mouse. She liked the image it brought, but she had refused long ago to be the mouse.

A sound, almost impossible to hear, brought her head up. When you lived by the sound of a footfall, the shift of a weapon, or a sudden drawn breath, you heard everything. Even a familiar footfall, as Françoise reappeared, silently waving them on.

Once they had the information they were after, they had a name that meant safe haven—a widowed woman and her young son. Lucia was her name. Her farm was across the river. When they reached it, emerging one by one on a hand signal from tree cover at the river's edge, they stopped and surveyed the flow of the river in both directions. It was higher than anticipated.

Françoise waved them down along the embankment and they followed single file, ghosts grateful that it was a moonless night in spite of the snow that muffled their footsteps and filled in their tracks. They had walked no more than a couple hundred yards when Francois held up a hand in a signal to stop.

It was invisible to the naked eye, submerged just beneath the surface of the water, connecting one side of the river to the other, and she breathed a small prayer of thanks. No doubt the woman's son was responsible for the 'life line,' a rope that had been carefully hidden.