“How—how far is Madrid?”
The man’s chin softened and shifted to one side. “About two hundred miles.”
Two hundred miles? By foot? He didn’t even speak Spanish. “Sir, please...”
Louis exchanged a look with his buddies and crossed his arms. “If he must walk, we shall walk with him.”
“Quite right,” Philippe said. “This chap ran a safe house in Paris. Dozens of our boys have been saved because of him. If you’d like us to return to Old Blighty and our bombers, you must take him too.”
The diplomat blinked rapidly. “I—it’s highly irregular.”
“So is war,” Philippe said.
Paul sent the official a look both firm and pleading.
The man pressed his lips in a line. “I’ll take you to Madrid and not a mile farther.”
“Thank you.” Paul’s breath flowed out in relief. Another step closer to the girls he loved.
ATLANTICOCEAN
MONDAY, JANUARY26, 1942
Black turned to gray turned to pink, and still Lucie lived. She huddled in a crevice on the ship’s tilted hulk, along with two sailors and the captain. Shivers wracked her body, but she lived.
“Why haven’t we sunk?” she asked the captain, who spoke French and Portuguese.
He pulled his coat collar tight around his bearded chin. “There are watertight compartments below.”
The chopped-off stump of a ship bobbed in the waves. How long could it remain afloat? How long could they survive without food or water?
Lucie tugged her knit cap lower over her ears. It crackled with frost.
Josie’s terrified cries still rang in her head. The girl had lost her mother, she’d been torn from her father, and she’d been abandoned by Lucie. Even if Lucie survived, Paul would never forgive her.
Once again Lucie had acted impulsively, and everyone paid.
An icy wind swept over her face, and she shook off the guilt. Her survival on the hulk had required agility Dominique didn’t have so late in her pregnancy. If Lucie had taken that seat in the lifeboat, both mother and child would have died.
Lucie pursed chapped lips. Just because her decision was impulsive didn’t make it wrong. She’d weighed lives and legacies, and she’d seen to Josie’s safety.
Conviction rose inside her with the sun on the horizon.
She’d come to see discipline as good and impulsivity as bad. But discipline was only as good as the task it was applied to, and impulse was only as bad as the action it caused. What if the impulse was to kindness? Then discipline deserved to have its say and nothing more.
One of the sailors shouted.
Lucie snapped her gaze to him.
The sailor stood braced against the lopsided deck, and he pointed. On the gray waves a gray shape rose and fell. A ship? Or another U-boat?
The captain stood, tugged off his coat, and waved it overhead, shouting.
“What is it?” Lucie asked.
“A destroyer. An American destroyer.”
Lucie cried out in joy. “We’re saved!”
