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  contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Excerpt from Starlight

  About the Author

  Don’t miss an exclusive excerpt from

  Starlight

  by Carrie Lofty

  Available now from Pocket Books!

  To Keven

  Because, from the first, you’ve shared my love of history.

  acknowledgments

  My heartfelt appreciation goes out to Molly Maka, whose zeal for the WW II era only enhanced my crazy need to write this unconventional romance. She exposed me to a great many resources, including the annual event in Rockford, Illinois—the largest assembly of WW II re-enactors in the world. I will never forget our ride on the B-17 bomber Aluminum Overcast, the existence of which was brought to our attention by another enthusiast and author, Kristina McMorris.

  The insightful women of Chicago North RWA offered astute critiques on early manuscripts. The heart of this novel was guided toward its correct course by that collection of skilled writers.

  I am grateful to Cathleen DeLong for putting up with my endless mammoths.

  To these wonderful individuals, I add my thanks to the Circle Divas, the Broken Writers, and the Loop That Shall Not Be Named, as well as my ever-supportive family: Keven, Juliette, Ilsa, and Dennis and Kathy Stone. My father’s interest in history has affected so many aspects of my life.

  As for Kevan Lyon and Lauren McKenna, I remain perpetually amazed by your support and willingness to take chances. I am a very lucky woman to share this journey with you both.

  author’s note

  I adore Lulu and Joe. So many men and women plunged into marriage when the world seemed destined for destruction. I like to think my fictional characters serve as a tiny memorial to all of those brave lovers.

  Battlefield medics rank among the unsung heroes of military service in World War II. The Geneva Convention prohibited killing unarmed personnel, but as the war progressed, that consideration was regularly ignored. Because parachute regiments dropped into surrounded positions, their medics were often embedded with the same company. As such, Joe was lucky. Others were frequently moved, never having the chance to bond with men they were tasked with treating.

  Female pilots from around the world flocked to Britain to “do their bit” with the Air Transport Auxiliary. Men declared F4—unfit for military service—were also welcomed into their ranks. These selfless civilians freed countless pilots from ferrying duties. The organization was the first British agency to offer equal wages for men and women, yet the ATA’s contribution to the war effort has been largely forgotten.

  The histories I referred to most often include Forgotten Pilots by Lettice Curtis, Fighting for Life by Albert E. Cowdrey, and Medic! by Robert “Doc Joe” Franklin. Although the 512th Parachute Infantry Regiment is fictional, I patterned its campaigns after those of the 507th PIR, about which I consulted many sources on the 82nd Airborne Division.

  As always, I look forward to your comments! Please contact me by email at [email protected]. I also welcome you to visit www.CarrieLofty.com and to follow me on Twitter (@CarrieLofty).

  chapter one

  Leicestershire, England

  January 1944

  Lulu Davies wiggled and shifted, then flexed both ankles. She twisted at the waist to ease the pinched knot at her lower back, but the Hurricane’s tight, narrow cockpit didn’t allow room enough for a more satisfying stretch. Her numb backside would just have to wait until she landed. All the while the engine’s growling drone and the unavoidable smell of petrol made her head ache.

  But oh, the view.

  She lived for the view.

  The sky that day was entirely unlike Britain’s typically overclouded winter. Brilliant blue stretched to the far horizon. Lean winds, hardly strong enough to consider, brushed up from the south. Snow like unfurled bolts of linen garbed the East Midlands in bridal white. Weakened winter sunshine flashed off lacy patches of ice. The distinct shadow of her fighter plane reached far over the countryside.

  Lulu smiled privately. She was as guilty as every other Briton with regard to whinging good-naturedly about rationing, dissecting Prime Minister Churchill’s latest speech, and gibbering on about every combat update that came over the wireless. When she was alone and flying, however, nothing else mattered. The world was at her nod. She was her own person, soaring high with the birds.

  She edged up as far forward as she could and peered down through the filmy window glazing. The Hurricane’s front-mounted engine blocked most of her headward view, but on the aft side of its cowling, she sighted the bright white spire of the Methodist church in Thorpe Acre. Like every other Air Transport Auxiliary pilot, Lulu had learned to navigate entirely by sight at a low elevation. No maps. No radios. She was only five miles from her destination.

  A few minutes later, at an altitude of a thousand feet, she spotted the Royal Air Force airfield called Wymeswold. Ruts of mud cut lengthwise down the snowy landing strip. With the winds so light, she’d simply glide the throaty fighter right along those ruts. Out of long habit she ran through her checklist: petrol, brakes, fuel booster, hydraulics. After landing she might be able to squeeze in one more ferry flight before returning home. Then her best friend, Paulie Travers, had said something about a night at the club—

  The undercarriage lever wouldn’t budge.

  Lulu’s heart jumped.

  Once more she pulled on the cool metal lever, hauling downward until her wrists burned. It didn’t shift an inch. Without being able to maneuver the undercarriage and the flaps, she wouldn’t have wheels for landing or the ability to slow her rate of descent. Lulu fought her body’s appetite for shallow, panicky breaths by breathing through her nose.

  She tried to kick the lever down with the heel of her black leather flight boot. Two attempts came to naught. Her awkward position in the tight cockpit allowed no leverage. Nothing worked.

  “Oh, bugger.” The words were swallowed by the monotonous roar of the huge Merlin engine, but she felt better for having voiced them. “Bloody rot and bother!”

  With Wymeswold directly below her, she had no choice but to make another circuit and try again. As she banked the plane steeply clockwise, she saw houses and airfield outbuildings through the right glazing; blue sky shimmered through the left. Level once more and ready for another approach, she rubbed one sweaty hand at a time along the legs of her cold-weather flight suit. Then she grasped the jammed lever with renewed conviction.

  But she didn’t pull. Not yet. First she wanted to have a word with her plane.

  “Now look slick, mister,”
she said, glaring at the controls. “You were just at a repair depot, you hear? Unless you want to fly straight back there, you’ll quit this nonsense and let me land!”

  She pulled the lever, her bicep sizzling and her bones threatening to snap. When the hateful thing remained indivisibly fixed, she kicked the underside of the control panel. “I hope you liked High Ercall, you wicked bucket of bolts, because that’s exactly where your rusted arse is returning to!”

  Only then did she indulge in the one thought forbidden to pilots: I’m going to crash.

  Unfiltered panic blistered her composure. Images of a flaming, mangled wreck skidding along the frozen airstrip, her body a grisly smear beneath the fuselage, made her hands flit and flutter. She couldn’t breathe. Thick waves of blood in her ears smothered even the engine’s guttural rumble.

  I’m going to crash like Mum and Dad.

  But rather than adding to her doubling panic, that grim thought restored her focus. On a mapping expedition in 1939, Lulu’s parents had lost their lives to bullets, not faulty machinery or poor technique. Their tiny unarmed Auster hadn’t stood a show against an Italian Centauro fighter over the barren sands of Egypt. They’d died for king and country, but Lulu wasn’t prepared to join them in that noble sacrifice. For the sake of pride alone she refused to be put in the shade by a pair of mulish wheels.

  She let out an exhale that bordered on a hoarse scream, then pulled a face at the controls. “Very well, if you insist. Plan B. And by Plan B I mean a pancake landing.”

  Lulu tugged leather earflaps and goggles over the large RAF blue handkerchief that swathed her hair. As for the parachute . . . well, this was either going to turn up trumps or it wasn’t. Besides, the plane would be a guaranteed loss if she made a brolly hop. To use her parachute would leave the crash entirely to chance, endangering the ground staff and civilians. Her responsibility was to keep that from happening.

  And to save my own skin.

  The airstrip awaited her, appearing impossibly short. Patches of snow lost their glittering beauty. Service personnel had dribbled out of the hangar, and a few dozen GIs gawped skyward. As with most small air bases, Wymeswold had no tower—no way for Lulu to let them know what to expect. Had the situations been reversed, she would’ve been standing in their place, watching and praying.

  “But please, boys, have an ambulance at hand. Nothing too rich, mind. Just snappy.”

  The time had come. Urging the plane into a descent, Lulu couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen the ground rushing up to meet her at this velocity. Perhaps never. But her panic-stricken jitters had cleared away. Her hands were calm, only slightly numb from grasping the yoke. Each wink of sunlight off corrugated tin and every ice-edged puddle along the sides of the airstrip came into focus. Perfectly clear, as if seeing without her eyes, she acted on reflex alone.

  She took a deep, steadying breath and gave herself over to fate.

  Pfc. Joe Weber tied off a field bandage and positioned the fallen man’s arm above his head. “Now don’t move. The aid station jeep’s on its way.”

  He clamped a pencil in his teeth and pulled out his pad of Emergency Medical Tags. After filling out information about the wounded, Joe ripped out the tag and stuffed it in the breast pocket of the soldier’s olive drabs. Snow was going to smear his graphite chicken scratches all to hell, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world—not during a simulation.

  “Web, can I get up now?” asked Pvt. Don Martin. “Or you gonna tie a ribbon in my hair next?”

  “Wouldn’t do you any favors to make you look more like a dame, Marty.”

  “But then maybe girls might spend more time with me.”

  Joe smacked his patient on the arm he’d just bandaged. “Get up, you heel.”

  Marty sat up and untied the field dressing to free his left arm, then swatted the snow from his sleeves. “Hope you don’t treat the rest of your patients that way. I’m pretty sure walloping the wounded isn’t procedure.”

  “Shut your trap.” Joe grabbed the dressing. “You probably deserved it.”

  The young jug-eared machine gunner grinned. “Probably.”

  Marty slip-slid back toward first platoon, leaving Joe to repack his supplies. In combat, supplies would actually be used, not tangled, dirtied, and shoved back into his aid bag. The contents were a hopeless jumble.

  Along with the rest of Baker Company, he’d been knee-deep in maneuvers since before dawn. They’d secured an intersection lined with high hedgerows, which had fed theories that they would invade through France or the Low Countries, not the Mediterranean. Then they’d had their butts handed to them by Able Company’s forest ambush—a forest that Pvt. Borsheim had said looked just like his grandparents’ property in southern Norway. His idle comment had added fuel-soaked logs to the nonstop blaze of rumors that sparked to life after each new exercise.

  Col. Shames, the 512th’s commanding officer, estimated that Baker had lost fourteen men in the drill, but watching the boys from Able run for the hills after a last-ditch counterattack had been worth it. Marty and three other soldiers had been designated first platoon’s casualties, giving Joe the responsibility of practicing mummy wraps and tourniquets on perfectly healthy, perfectly sarcastic troopers.

  The pale English sun was nearing the western horizon by the time they’d finished two more combat scenarios: clearing a house, then encircling and eliminating a sniper. They’d had more trouble with the ice than the drills.

  “Good work, men,” said Capt. Crowly. Baker Company’s commanding officer strode down the line. His doughy face was hardened with tightly reined approval. “Smoke ’em if you got ’em.”

  Joe slipped off his helmet, enjoying the chilly winter breeze as it blew across his sweaty hair. He tugged a pack of Lucky Strikes out of his tunic’s breast pocket and lit up. His brain felt stuffy and too full, but a deep drag eased his nerves. Medical details were all so repulsive—more familiar now, but unwelcome. How he remembered it all was a mystery, let alone how he would eventually withstand combat.

  Lay a bazooka on his shoulder and he’d take out a target. Shove him out of a C-47 with a parachute on his back and he’d pass muster. But stick a hypodermic needle and a bottle of plasma in his hands and Joe’s confidence scampered off double-time. None of it came naturally. He’d trade a few toes to be a regular rifleman, anyone who carried an M1 instead of an aid bag.

  Beautiful country, though. He finished his cigarette and breathed in, enjoying the bracing cool of a quiet afternoon. Maybe he’d expected craters and ruined buildings, like newsreel footage of London and Portsmouth that always made him wince—and then get angry. This part of the Midlands, however, was nearly unmolested by Stuka bombers and Germany’s new V-1 rockets. The early dawn snowfall had layered it in a white that was almost too clean, too pretty to look at.

  “That’s it, gentlemen,” Capt. Crowly shouted. “Pack your gear! The deuce-and-a-halfs’ll be here in twenty to haul your tails back to Rothley. Hubba hubba!”

  The men of the 512th, the newest regiment in the 82nd Airborne, began the long trudge out of the woods and back toward the Wymeswold hangar. Joe smiled at the luxury of trucks to transport them back to barracks after a long day. In basic training they would’ve marched home.

  “Hey, Web, wait up.” Pvt. Peter Smithson was the medic for Baker’s second platoon. His aid bag smacked against his thigh as he jogged to catch up with Joe. “So what’d ya think?”

  “About what?”

  “About the maneuver,” Smitty said, pulling out a pack of smokes. “Odds are on France today.”

  Like just about every other paratrooper in the 512th, he was obsessed with the where and when of their inaugural combat drop. He collected news reports and shreds of gossip like some men collected pinup pictures.

  Joe shrugged. “What does it matter? France, Egypt, the North Pole? Not like we have a choice.”

  “Then again, maybe they’ll send the whole 82nd back to Italy,” Smitty continued, undaunted by J
oe’s usual disinterest. “Henry Norton—you know him, corporal from second platoon?—he said the 45th Infantry just hit the beaches at Anzio. Those dumb doggies could use the assistance of a fine outfit like ours.”

  Joe decided to use Smitty’s other favorite subject to derail this particular train of thought. “You got plans tonight?”

  “It’s Friday night and I have a weekend pass, right?”

  “That’s right,” Joe said with a grin.

  “Then yes, I have plans.”

  “Care to share?”

  Smitty laughed and slapped Joe on the back. “Get the hell into town.”

  “Leicester again? Or up to Nottingham?”

  “Nottingham was too far. By the time we got there, all the clubs were full up. Wasn’t worth it. Besides, too many of those flak-happy RAF boys. Puffed up prigs.” Smitty smoothed a hand along his manically orange hair. “Not that I have any trouble with the English broads.”

  “No trouble running them off, you mean. They see your carrot top coming and hightail it the other way.”

  “Hell, Web, not everybody’s born with the looks of an A-number-one wiseacre like you.”

  “I thank my daddy every day,” Joe said. “Oh, blast, forgot my helmet. Be right back.” He took off at a quick jog, back toward the fringes of the woods where they’d trained.

  Smitty shouted after him, “Better hustle or you’ll footslog it back to Rothley!”

  Not gonna happen.

  Joe slid to a sloppy stop and scooped up his helmet, then pulled up short. At the hangar every lingering man had tipped his face to the west. More airfield personnel were joining them by the second, shielding their eyes and watching the sky.

  Silhouetted ahead of the setting sun, a Hurricane bearing Royal Air Force insignia roared toward the airfield.

  “No landing gear,” Joe whispered to himself. “Holy Christ.”

  From back at the hangar came shouts for an ambulance. Joe jerked free of his stupor and judged the fighter’s direction. He was the man closest to where it would push down—or crash, more likely. At that velocity the fighter was going to dig a ditch when it hit, a ready-made grave for the unlucky pilot.