“Don’t be.” Jess shook her head. “When I was in Naples, I heard that one in ten GIs has VD. That you can buy a woman in exchange for a ration box.”

“Women and typhus are the cheapest and most plentiful things in Italy. There’s hardly any food for the locals. The women have children they need to feed. The GIs have the only currency worth anything—rations. And some of them spend it any chance they get.”

He spoke quietly, and Jess knew from his tone that he wasn’t one of the GIs trading his rations for women. “What a mess,” she said.

“A mess I was happy to escape from for a week,” he finished. “When I landed in England, I heard you needed a hand. Then I had meetings about…” He shrugged. “Forward planning.”

“Invasion plans?” Jess guessed. An invasion was being talked about more and more. Everyone knew it was coming but nobody knew when or how.

“Yes. Now I need to say,” he veered off the subject, “that I have some rules.”

“My God!” she snapped. For the last half hour she’d started to think he was an ordinary person but now he sounded just like Warren Stone. “I’ve been told the rules so many times, I could recite them backward. I’m to stay out of combat zones. Not flirt with any of your men or act in any way befitting my reputation as a model who has, for the past three years, lived with a man in a scandalously unmarried state and slept with at least half of America. Is that about it?”

“No,” he said evenly.

“What have I forgotten? Oh, of course, bat my eyelashes and wrap my legs in silk stockings so you all have something to look at besides the mud?”

She realized, once her outburst was over, that the two men in the back had gone completely silent. So had Dan.

“Your past doesn’t mean a damn out there in Purple Heart Valley,” Dan said eventually. “It’s the present that’s going to get you blown up. Which is what my rules are about, if you’d let me finish.”

“Oh.”

“I didn’t know you were a model or…anything else.” The tough paratrooper actually blushed.

Jess couldn’t help it. She began to laugh. To have finally found someone who didn’t know or care who she was and to have blurted it all out was not one of her finest moments.

“I’m sorry,” she said between gasps of laughter. “I think I might sit quietly and not say anything for the rest of the trip. I was mad with Warren Stone and I paid you the discourtesy of thinking you were just like him. Tell me your rules and I promise to listen.” She tried to compose her face but she knew the corners of her mouth were still twitching.

He laughed too and his eyes caught the light, glinting silvery blue in the sunshine. “I know you’re pissed off. I can’t help that. My only rule is that the safety of my men comes first and if you jeopardize that, I’ll boot you back to New York quicker than Warren Stone will. Fair enough?”