Glory was proud that she had not become seasick, although the flat, calm waters off Honolulu may have contributed to her achievement. She and fifty other medical staff from the hospital were on board the Navy’s newest hospital ship. Superman had set up an orientation tour so that people from whom the advance base invasion augmentation teams would be formed would at least know what a hospital ship looked like.
This one looked a lot like an ocean liner, which she had been just seven months ago when they painted her white, then put a green stripe around her sides and enormous red crosses on her stacks, sides, and top decks. The main dining room and ballroom had been converted to operating theaters, and the forward and after holds to medical supply storage compartments. The six hundred individual staterooms could hold up to four patients each. The ship’s crew was made up of all merchantmen, not Navy, and, of course, there was no armament onboard whatsoever. Everyone knew there were no guarantees that the Japs would respect all those red crosses, especially after they’d sunk the Australian hospital ship Aurora in 1942. This one, called the Salvation, was almost thirty thousand tons, much bigger than Aurora, and she’d just finished a three-week fitting-out period in the naval shipyard at Pearl.
Today’s sea trial, as Stembridge called it, was mostly for the benefit of the shipyard engineers, who ran ship’s systems tests while the medical people checked out the operating rooms and all their equipment. They’d come out of Pearl early that morning and had circumnavigated the island of Oahu for the entire day. Glory was truly tired after a day of going up and down companionways, into the main holds, and through all of the sickbed staterooms with Stembridge as he conducted a whirlwind inspection, he with a flashlight and she with a large notebook, writing down what seemed like a few thousand discrepancies. They’d then done a mock operation in one of the four ORs, where they quickly discovered that the anesthesiology systems had everything but a way to pipe the various gases to the table, among other things.
It was now an hour before sundown. Glory stood with Stembridge up on the starboard side of the navigation bridge, right behind the ship’s expansive pilothouse. Stembridge was comparing notes with the ship’s superintendent from the shipyard. Glory had stepped out of her uniform shoes and was enjoying the feel of cold steel against her aching white-stockinged feet. The island of Oahu lay to starboard at about twelve miles, pale green in the yellowing light of late afternoon. The city of Honolulu was in view as they sailed past Diamond Head. Farther to the west she could see the masts of warships in the Pearl lagoon, interspersed with yard cranes at the shipyard.
The master of the ship, a ruddy, round little man with the face of a leprechaun, stepped out onto the bridge wing to have a cigarette and a mug of coffee before entering port. He was a merchant officer from the Moore-McCormack Lines, from whom the ship had been requisitioned. His uniform was a navy blue jacket with four stripes, white trousers, and an open-collar white shirt. With that face, Glory thought, the four stripes looked incongruous, but based on how the crew treated him, he was fully in command.
Up above, on the signal deck, two Navy signalmen were shooting the breeze with the ship’s civilian signalman. One of the Navy guys pointed toward Pearl and said, “Hey, we’re getting a light.” The other Navy man turned around, squinted over at Pearl, and then asked the merchant sailor, a fifty-year-old with a large gray beard, to uncover the ship’s signal light. Glory stared across the water in the direction of the naval base and finally saw a lone, yellow light winking at them urgently from among the forest of masts and stacks. The older Navy signalman told the other one that he would read while the other wrote down the message. The merchantman with the beard seemed content to let the Navy guys do their stuff, exchanging a wink with the master one level below, the old hand letting the eager beavers play Navy.
“Probably a challenge,” Stembridge said at her elbow.
“What’s a challenge?”
“A code, either a number or a word, that changes every day. Any ship approaching Pearl gets challenged. If she doesn’t come up with the right code word in reply, they tell the Army at Fort DeRussy over there to open up with their sixteen-inch coastal guns.”
She gave him an arch look. “Of course they do,” she said, believing not a word of it.
“Baker Tare, stand by to write,” called out the reader. He was looking through a pair of binoculars clipped to the top of the lamp while holding down the light’s signaling arm to give the signal lamp at the base a target. The other man began filling out the message blank, which he held on a clipboard.
“Easy, Mike, Easy, Roger, Golf, Easy — emergency.”
The master, overhearing that, frowned, took his cigarette out of his mouth, and flipped it over the side. Then he listened to the reader calling out the rest of the message.
“Yoke, Oboe, Uncle, break it — You.”
“Able, Roger, Easy, break it — are.”
“Sugar, Tare, Able, Nan, Dog, Item, Nan — break it — standing.”
“Item, Nan, Tare, Oboe — break — into.”
“Mike, Item, Nan, Easy, Fox, Item — oh shit! — minefield!”
Glory heard the master’s china mug shatter on the deck. She had just turned to see where he’d gone when suddenly a mountainous thump hit the ship and lifted the bow twenty feet into the air, followed by an enormous explosion of dirty, smoke-filled water that rose a hundred feet and then fell back onto the forecastle like a tidal wave. The ship shuddered along her full length and then began to slow, her bow dipping down into the sea before coming back up again.
Glory found herself sprawled on the deck, along with Stembridge and the ship’s superintendent. All three of them had turned to the ornate wooden railing to begin pulling themselves upright when the ship hit a second mine, again at the bow. This one produced a smaller water column but seemed to punch the ship much harder. A third mine went off in a sympathetic detonation off the starboard side, but far enough away that they saw it rather than felt it. The ship, which had only been making ten knots, slowed to a stop, and this time the bow was not coming back up. As Glory watched in horror, the forward-most sixty feet of forecastle deck folded down right in front of the H-shaped kingpost and collapsed into the sea. The kingpost followed it in a rattling crash of dismounted winches and thrashing wire cables.
The master, white-faced, stepped out onto the bridge wing and told the signalmen to send out an SOS to the naval station. Glory could hear other voices shouting inside the pilothouse. The master ran back in, shouting orders of his own. The ship’s superintendent followed him into the pilothouse, yelling something about organizing a shoring party. Above them, the Navy signalman began to work the signal light’s metal arm so fast Glory could hardly see his hand. The merchantman with the beard was nowhere to be seen.
“Let’s get below,” Stembridge said, grabbing her arm. “Get all the troops in one place. This damn thing might sink on us.”
As if he’d been overheard, the ship’s announcing system crackled to life on the topside speakers all along the upper decks.
“This is the captain. We’ve hit a mine. Two mines. Engineering department damage control team muster at the number three hatch with shoring gear. All medical passengers assemble on the port side, that’s the seaward side, boat deck, with your life jackets. Lifeboat captains lower away the portside lifeboats to the rail and stand by.”
As they hurried across the catwalk behind the pilothouse to get to the port side, Glory felt the deck beginning to tilt. She realized they were going slightly downhill. They stopped to let some crewmen, already in their life jackets and steel helmets, come racing up the portside stairway ladder. The looks on their faces said it all.
“Where’s your life jacket?” Stembridge asked.
“I have no idea,” she said, feeling suddenly like an idiot.
They rushed down the first ladder, and then Stembridge saw a life jacket locker mounted to the inboard bulkhead. He opened it, gave one to her, and then began strapping one on himself.
Glory just looked at it. It was blue-gray in color, soft and spongy, with a confusing array of white strings hanging down like the tentacles on a jellyfish. It had a tarlike smell. She might technically be a naval officer, but she had no idea what to do with this thing.
“Turn around and hold out your arms,” Stembridge ordered. He pulled the jacket first over one arm and then the other, whirled her around to face him, and began tying strings. “I think we can get all of our people into two boats. I’ll deal with the boat captains; you corral everyone and get a muster. Make sure no one’s still belowdecks. Got it?”
She nodded, which was difficult because he had knotted the neck string right up under her chin. He was looking down into her eyes.
“Scared?”
The downward tilt on the ship was increasing. “Yes.”
“Good. Focus. Everyone else will be scared, too, so they’ll do whatever someone in authority tells them to. Give orders, not suggestions. Tell everyone to muster together, near one or two boats. Then get a head count.”
They felt the engine trembling, followed by a whipsawing motion through the ship’s structure that rattled the outside fittings. The engine shut back down. Stembridge appeared to be listening.
“Propeller shaft’s probably broken,” he said.
“Is that bad?”
“Means we can’t back out of the minefield,” he said. “Hope Pearl’s sending tugs. Right. Let’s go.”
The portside boat deck was already crowded with the people from the naval hospital, all struggling with the unfamiliar life jackets. A half-dozen ship’s crewmen, also in life jackets, were busy lowering the six portside lifeboats to the railing level. The ship was heavily down by the bow now and continuing to list to port. As Glory arrived, she heard the crewmen directing some of her people to grab boat ropes so that the boats didn’t swing out too far from the railing. There were gates in the railing, all of which were now open. She saw Sally Adkins, called her over, and then told her to help take a muster of the medical people. Sally promptly told the nearest people to fall into ranks. Most of them just looked at her.
“Just like OCS, goddammit,” she yelled. “Now fall in.”
Glory saw one of the merchant seamen nodding approvingly as the pretty, blue-eyed blonde took charge. She looked for Stembridge but couldn’t find him in all the commotion. The noise on the boat deck subsided as doctors, nurses, orderlies, and med techs fell into ranks, looking like rows of blue-gray pumpkins in their bulky kapoks. Glory heard a whoosh, followed by a second one, as the bridge personnel fired red distress rockets into the evening air. Then Stembridge appeared.
“Do we have everybody?”
“Sally’s taking a muster,” she said. “When do we get into the boats?”
“The captain thinks they can contain the flooding to the forward holds, but they can’t use the engines. The problem is we’re adrift on the edge of a minefield.”
“How in the hell—”
“Navigation error. They turned toward Pearl too soon. There’s a destroyer coming out, and she’s bringing tugs. The captain recommends we stay aboard for now.” He surveyed the uneven ranks of medical people, the front row holding on to the life rails to keep upright. “Let me talk to everybody. You take one of the docs and do a quick tour of the OR spaces. Make sure no one is down there.”
All the lights were still on inside the ship, but it was deathly quiet as they went down two decks to what had been the dining and ballroom area. Salvation was not a steamship. She had a diesel-electric power plant, where a set of large marine diesels drove generators, which in turn drove a single electric motor coupled to the propeller shaft. They could hear the diesels idling a few decks below, and, except for the unusual slant of the deck and some dangling light fixtures and overturned furniture, they would never have known the ship had hit not one but two sea mines. Ordinarily there would have been up to twelve hundred passengers and crew on board, but now there was only the basic crew, the shipyard engineers, and the medical team.
As they walked quickly through all the medical spaces, Glory sensed that the doctor was in a hurry. She asked him why.
“If we hit another goddamned mine, we don’t want to be down here, do we.”
She hadn’t thought of that, and stepped up the pace. She’d been dealing with patients who’d survived sinking ships for two years. It had never occurred to her that she might become one herself. After checking the four operating rooms, they went forward to make sure the recovery wards were empty, and promptly got lost. Glory felt a surge of fear when she realized that neither one of them knew exactly how to get back topside, and the fact that they were both holding on to the passageway bulkheads to stay upright wasn’t helping.
Then they heard a noise that sounded like an injured animal. It was coming from beyond the large steel door ahead of them, on which the words MAIN GALLEY were printed. She realized that the door was really a watertight hatch. The doctor went ahead and grasped the operating handle.
“Wait!” Glory called from behind him. He turned to look at her. She pointed toward the bottom of the door, which was dripping beads of water from the bottom up to about a foot above the hatch coaming.
“Oh, hell,” he said. “It’s flooding. We can’t open this door.”
At the sound of his voice, the whimpering noises from the other side grew louder. “I think we have to,” she said. “There’s someone in trouble on the other side.”
“We do, and if that’s the ocean, we’ll never get it closed. That could sink the ship.”
They stared at each other, intensely aware that they were probably right at or even below the waterline, especially with the ship down by the head. Then the sound became a man’s voice, but it was masked by a burbling noise, as if he were trying to shout through water.
“We can’t just leave him,” Glory said.
“Okay,” the doctor said. “Damned thing’s probably going to sink anyway. Stand back.”
He lifted the handle but forgot to step out of the way. The water pressure on the other side immediately punched the door open and pinned him between the bulkhead and the hatch. A wall of greenish water two feet high swept past them into the OR passageway, nearly knocking Glory off her feet. Beyond the hatch they saw a tangle of piping that had come down from the overhead. One of the pipes was pumping water into the galley passageway, and beneath the mess they could see the figure of a man on his back trapped by all the debris. They plunged into the pile of metal, heaving and twisting as best they could until the doctor grabbed her arm and pointed. They could see the man’s Oriental face, which was now under perhaps six inches of water. His eyes and mouth were wide open.
The doctor swore. It was too late. They climbed back over the pile of piping and tried to close the hatch. They had to wait another minute for the water level to equalize between the two spaces, but then they were able to get it closed and dogged back down. Their khaki trousers and shoes were soaked. Glory felt exposed with the wet fabric clinging to her lower body, but the young doctor was more interested in all that water.
“That whole compartment is going to fill up eventually,” the doctor said. “We’ll have to tell somebody about that. Maybe the engineers can get that water pipe shut off.”
“Fine,” she said, “but first, how do we get out of here?”
“Let’s try going back the way we came,” he said, and together they went squelching back up the slippery inclined tiles toward the operating rooms.
It took them ten minutes to find their way back out of the medical complex and up to the boat decks. The sun had set, and now most of the light came from the ship’s own gallery lights. They reported to Stembridge, who went up the ladders to the bridge to tell the captain what they’d found below. Glory went to find Sally.
“Everybody’s here,” Sally said. “There’s a destroyer right out there, but I think it’s stopped.”
“I would, too,” Glory said.
Sally eyed Glory’s wet trousers. “What happened to you down there?”
Glory explained, and Sally shivered at the thought of the man drowning under all that wreckage with help so close.
They could see the shape of the destroyer and its running lights. Behind it in the distance were four smaller shapes, each with a white bow wave visible in the twilight. The hospital ship’s bow-down attitude seemed to have stabilized, as had the port list. Glory stared out at the twinkling reflections of the ship’s lights on the flat seas. She wondered how close they were to any more mines. The fact that the destroyer wasn’t approaching worried her, and it was clear that the quiet crowd on the boat decks fully understood why the rescue ship hadn’t closed in. The topside speakers came on.
“Deck department lay down to the fantail to receive tug and hawser.”
They watched as a six-man crew went aft along the main deck to take a hawser from one of the tugs. A grim-faced captain came down from the bridge to reassure the medical people. He told them that the two mines had essentially blasted the same part of the ship, but at least she was no longer flooding.
“That tin can out there is providing navigation positioning for the tugs. They’ve turned on the navigation aids ashore so we can get a three-point fix in reference to the minefield. We’re in it, but just barely. The tug will hand up that towing hawser and pull us in the direction of safety. Then they plan to put the rest of the tugs alongside and take us into the shallows near Pearl.”
“Why not into the harbor?” Stembridge asked.
“We’re too far down by the head,” the captain said. “They’ll send out some caisson floats, get the bow up, then we can get over the reef. That’s going to take all night, folks, so if you want, go inside to the lounge nearest the boat decks and have a seat. But keep your jackets handy.”
“How did this happen?” one of the doctors asked.
“The navigator made a serious mistake, that’s how. Anyway, this will be your last night on board. Mine, too, probably.”
It did take all night, and Glory found herself making a bed out of a sofa in the lounge, using another life jacket as a pillow. The ship’s main galley had been fully flooded by the broken water line, but the captain’s galley managed a soup-and-sandwich meal at about eight that evening. By the next morning, the ship was being held just off the entrance channel while partially flooded caissons were cabled onto the remains of the bow. While this work was going on, the medical staff was removed by personnel boats from the naval station and returned to the landing at Hospital Point. It was only later in the day that she learned that the destroyer had been USS Evans, where Marsh Vincent was the XO.
Marsh wrapped up his day at 1800 and went to the O-club for dinner. Then he walked over to the nurses’ quarters. The carrier group was going to sail in the morning. He wanted to see Glory if that was possible, but when he got there Sally met him out on the front verandah.
“Glory’s exhausted,” she said. “She’s asleep. But you can visit me if you’d like.”
“My secret admirer,” Marsh said with a warm smile. “You bet.”
Sally brought out two beers from the nurses’ secret hoard, and they sat out in the shadows of the verandah. Marsh had not known that Glory or the other medical people had been on board the Salvation.
“You had a close call,” he said. “One more mine, or if either one had hit her on the side, she’d have gone down like a ton of bricks. As it was, they barely got the caissons out there in time.”
“I guess sometimes ignorance is bliss,” she said. “They didn’t tell us much, just to muster up on the boat deck and stay near the lifeboats.”
“You were there, too?”
“I was the musterer-in-chief on the boat decks,” she said proudly. “I even gave an order, and everyone obeyed.”
He gave her a mock salute. “Well done there, Chief Sally. If you weren’t so pretty I’d shanghai you for the trip west right this minute.”
Her eyes sparkled. “Then we wouldn’t have to write, would we,” she said.
“Those letters have been wonderful,” he said. “I didn’t realize how much I missed getting mail until you started writing. I got one from Glory, but then I guess she got busy.”
Some of the sparkle went out of her eyes, and Marsh realized he’d just made an error, mentioning Glory.
“She’s more than busy these days,” Sally said. “Superman has practically made her into his chief of staff for the expansion project, and she still has OR duties.”
“Superman?”
“Oh, that’s just what everybody calls him. Dr. Stembridge, chief of surgery. Tall, dark, handsome, very fast in the OR, knows everything, sees everything, jumps buildings with a single bound … and he keeps Glory flying along behind him every minute.”
“Got it,” Marsh said. He wondered if their association extended beyond the hospital and then realized he had no right to ask that question. “Will any of the staff here come west with the new hospital ships?”
“Not if they keep running into minefields,” Sally said, “but yes, that’s part of the expansion project. Superman is running training classes on mass casualties, triage, and what he calls two-stage surgeries. That’s where they do a minimal, stabilizing repair, move on to the next patient, and then come back later and do it right.”
“This sounds like invasion planning to me,” he said.
“You’d know more about that than we would.”
“Not necessarily. We know the carrier’s flight schedule each day, and when they expect air attacks. Beyond that, the tin cans are mostly in the dark. Our world stops at the visible horizon. Has Beast been by?”
She made a face and looked down at her shoes for a moment.
“Okay, what happened?”
She told him about Mick’s late-night visitation. Marsh just shook his head. “Did he get into trouble for all that?”
“No one knows. The whole quarters got to listen to him until Glory sent him packing. After that, we haven’t heard.”
“I was going to try to see him on this visit, maybe run into him at the club.” He looked at his watch. “I’ve got to get back. We’re sailing in the morning. That’s a secret, by the way.”
“Sure it is,” she said. “Only the whole base knows.”
He laughed. “A lot different from December 1941, isn’t it.”
“Except in our business,” she said. “If anything, we’re seeing more casualties than in ’forty-two.”
“This war’s getting bigger and bigger,” he said. “After Midway I think we were down to two aircraft carriers in the whole fleet. Now the new Lex is one of six carriers, and that’s just in our task group.”
“The Japanese must know how this is going to end,” she said.
“They worship death,” he said. “An ‘honorable’ death in battle is the highest achievement they can attain in their lives. I believe we’re going to have to kill every stinking one of them before this is over.”
“On that lovely note, Commander,” she said.
“Sorry,” he said. He covered her hand with his. “You will keep writing, won’t you? I live for your letters.”
“Of course I will. I’ll even try to get Glory to write at least once.”
He looked her in the eye. “Forget Glory,” he said.
“Can you forget Glory?” she asked.
“I’m trying,” he said. “I’m learning that everything I ever thought about her existed mostly in my own pointy little head. So now I’m trying to grow up.”
She squeezed his hand. “Don’t be too hard on yourself, Commander Marsh. Glory Lewis breaks hearts just by walking by. She puts the rest of us way back into the shadows.”
“Not that far back, secret admirer.” He leaned forward and gave her a brief kiss on the cheek. “Stay out of minefields, okay?”
She reached up, put both arms around him, and gave him a lingering kiss on the lips. “Hurry back, Commander Marsh,” she whispered. “Life is short.”
Marsh flagged down a base taxi that was headed back to the destroyer piers. There were two other lieutenant commanders in the cab. One was a submariner and the other a destroyerman. Based on the fumes, they’d had a great evening. The destroyerman asked Marsh what ship he was on. Marsh told him he was XO in Evans.
“XO,” the submariner said. “Pretty damned young to be an XO, aren’t you?”
Marsh shrugged. “I don’t feel that young anymore,” he said.
The other two laughed at that. It turned out that the submariner was the exec on a fleet boat, and the other officer the exec on his destroyer. The submariner leaned forward from the backseat. “Care for a little advice there, XO?” he asked.
“Absolutely.”
“Find a handkerchief, get that lipstick off your face. Otherwise someone on the mess decks with a grudge might write your wife.”
“Not a problem,” Marsh said. “Don’t have a wife.”
“Well, in that case, leave it right there. The crew’ll love ya.”
He nudged the other officer, and they both laughed hysterically, as only drunks can. Marsh smiled, but for entirely different reasons.
Glory didn’t know who had come up with the idea for a hospital staff beach party on Waikiki, but it hadn’t taken too long to organize. Everyone was ready for a break, and the hospital’s commanding officer had managed to tap into some money from something called the welfare and recreation fund at the base. The party was held on a Sunday afternoon behind the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, and only the duty section personnel remained in the hospital. Everyone else had shown up at the beach via the Navy shuttle bus system that ran from Pearl to downtown Honolulu once an hour. There was beer and soft drinks stuffed into ice-filled GI cans, along with a hard-liquor tiki bar back up the beach.
Glory had come with a group of nurses, including Sally and three of the other OR supervisors. They’d all changed in the outdoor ladies’ bathhouse and then joined the crowd of doctors, nurses, admin people, orderlies, and some staff officers from Admiral Nimitz’s Pacific Fleet headquarters up on the hill at Makalapa. The ratio of men to women was about six to one, which suited most of the ladies just fine. Glory, like many of the other women present, did not know how to swim, so she confined her water activities to wading in the shallows, while other more adventuresome people swam out to the protective reef and tried their hand at surfing. She was also being careful not to get her new one-piece bathing suit wet, as she was afraid that it might become much too revealing. She’d bought the suit downtown on impulse almost six months ago, and this was the first time she’d actually worn it out in public. Sally, her adventuresome roommate, had talked her into it.
Late in the afternoon a crew from the hotel came down and fired up a pit-style barbecue. Glory had to move her beach blanket once the smoke started up. As she was doing so, she saw Stembridge waving her over to his little group under a clump of palm trees. She recognized two of the women there but none of the men. Stembridge introduced her as Glory Lewis, surgical coordinator at the hospital. The men were all staff officers from the Pacific Fleet headquarters. She listened absently to all the names and then joined the group on a large beach blanket, sitting next to a Captain Somebody, who was wearing a Hawaiian shirt over his khaki swim trunks.
Behind the group was a small beach hut, containing a narrow bar and a lone bartender who was presiding over an oversized Waring blender. Stembridge signaled that they needed another round. A moment later the barman brought frozen concoctions of some kind to the group, and she took one. She sniffed the glass. It smelled of crushed pineapple and various tropical fruits. Thank God, she thought, it’s not one of those head-breaking mai tais. In fact, she didn’t smell any liquor at all. She took a sip. It was delicious.
“Like it?” the captain asked. He was in his fifties, gray-haired, and discreetly giving her bottom the once-over whenever he thought she wasn’t looking.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s nice. What’s it called?”
“Missionary’s Downfall,” he said with a grin. “They take a ripe pineapple, slice the top off, extract the core, then make vertical cuts in the fruit from the inside. Then they fill it with Five Islands gin and put the top back on. Set it outside in the sun for a few days so the pineapple begins to ferment, then chill the whole thing. Usually they bring it out with a straw, but tonight they scooped out the good stuff and blended it with ice. One’s lovely. Two, and you’ll be the star of the evening.”
She smiled. “Thanks for the warning. I’m not much one for stardom.”
“You ought to be in the movies,” he said, letting his leg drift over to hers. “You’re certainly beautiful enough.”
“Thank you, kind sir,” she said demurely, knowing where this was going. She looked over at Stembridge and flashed a silent “help” look at him. He said something to the cute young nurse at his side, got up, and came over to where Glory was sitting.
“Like that stuff?” he asked.
“In a careful sort of way,” she said. “The captain here was explaining how it’s made.”
“That’s a state secret, Captain,” Stembridge said. “Takes all the fun out of it. Glory, come meet the fleet surgeon.”
He offered his hand and pulled her to her feet. She smiled at the crestfallen captain and walked across to meet yet another doctor, tugging her rubbery swimsuit down in the back. She noticed that Stembridge didn’t let go of her hand as he introduced her to the senior doctor in the Pacific Fleet. She quietly disengaged and then shook hands with the elderly captain, who was visibly on his second or perhaps even third Downfall. He was so drunk, in fact, that all he could do was nod and smile, nod and smile. She looked at Stembridge.
“You sent the signal,” he said. “Consider yourself rescued. Hey — the music’s on. Let’s dance.”
The hotel had piped music from one of the bands inside to the tree-mounted speakers on the lanai dance floor, which was basically a low wooden platform on the sand in the middle of a small grove of palms. Lawn torches scented with citronella gave off a yellowish light.
She felt unusually self-aware, dancing bare-legged with this handsome man wearing nothing but his swim trunks. Some of the other women had wrapped colorful beach skirts around their waists, and Glory wished she’d done the same. It was doubly awkward because they’d taken their drinks with them onto the floor. Her swimsuit fit like a second skin, and its bullet-bra top made her breasts stick out like impudent dunce caps. The bottom of the suit barely covered the tops of her thighs. She saw Sally dancing with one of the officers from the fleet headquarters. Sally was wearing a suit similar to Glory’s, except hers appeared to be made out of even thinner material. The poor man with her was having a tough time concentrating on not stepping on her feet or his own arousal. Sally winked at her over the man’s shoulder.
Stembridge seemed to be making sure he didn’t bump into her body, and she was being just as careful not to make physical contact. There was no avoiding his intensely masculine presence, though a mixed aura of perspiration, suntan lotion, and a hint of something far more elemental. He was a well-made man with no body fat, long, strong arms, and hands hardened by years of surgery. She sipped her drink, still pretty sure that there wasn’t much booze in it, couldn’t be, not with all that ice and fruit juice.
Another couple bumped into them from behind her, and she felt the unmistakable brush of exploring fingers across her bottom. She flinched away and right into a full-length contact with Stembridge. For just an instant, she stopped moving and so did he. They were touching from top to bottom, and she felt a sudden flash of desire that she hadn’t experienced literally for years as his hard body made firm contact with the front of her swimsuit.
Then the music stopped, and they hastily broke apart. Stembridge, pretending that nothing had happened, was looking over her shoulder and heartily greeting someone new and then introducing Glory, who was still trying to recover her voice and her composure. They joined the line that was forming for the barbecue, everyone talking, no one listening. By this time, Stembridge was behind her in line, and she was once again intensely aware of him, as if their bodies had unfinished business to conduct. She downed the rest of her drink in one long gulp and put the wide-mouthed glass down on a table near the barbecue. She was glad that it was getting dark, because she was sure there was a red flush rising on her neck. Or maybe it was just the Downfall. Now that she’d finished it, she realized that, yes, there had been a wee bit of alcohol in that thing. She wasn’t drunk, but she’d never been a serious drinker, and it didn’t take too much to make her head spin.
“Let’s sit over there,” Stembridge said when they had their plates. He was pointing to a tiny table just off the dance floor. Once they were seated he asked if she needed another drink. She’d wobbled just a bit sitting down.
“One of those was quite enough,” she said, “but please don’t hold back on my account.”
“Me?” he said. “I don’t drink. This is just ice and pineapple juice, so I don’t have to listen to ‘real men’ razzing me for being a teetotaler.”
“That makes you something of a rare bird in the Navy,” she said.
“Got to like the booze much too much, early on,” he said. “Quit while I still could. Self-control is important to me.”
“I usually need a drink at the end of the day,” she said. “One cocktail, one cigarette. My two vices.”
“Only two?” he said with an easy smile. “Sounds like a dull life.”
“Mmmm” was all she said, looking past him at the afterglow of the sunset over Diamond Head.
Back at the nurses’ quarters, Glory went straight to the bathroom, still wearing her suit. She’d seen two of the other nurses taking their leave of the party right after dinner and had joined them on the empty bus. Stembridge had been gracious about her leaving early, saying he’d be on the next bus back himself. They had an official pass to be out after curfew, but they were still restricted to the military bus system.
She stepped into the communal bathroom and turned on the lights. There was no trace of her flushed skin from earlier, although her eyes were a bit bloodshot from a combination of the sun and that sneaky drink. Her hair had that lank, lifeless look that came from too much salt air. Just for the hell of it, she turned on the shower and stepped in, still wearing her suit. She rinsed her hair and then got back out to examine herself in the mirror. She’d been right about the bathing suit: Soaking wet, it had become just barely transparent, displaying some rather private areas of contrasting color. She’d have to remember that, the next time she went beaching.
Once in bed, she let her mind wander back to that moment on the dance floor. It was one thing to be conscious of a man’s desire from a safe distance. It was quite another to feel it so directly. She’d been startled by the strength of her own response. Had she been hiding herself under false pretenses these past two years since Tommy had died? At least Stembridge had had the good grace not to tell her, as every other man eventually told her, that she had to rejoin the human race, start living again, et cetera. In fact, he’d never put a foot wrong in that department, and yet what she’d felt on the dance floor had been unmistakable. Did that mean simply that he was a normal, healthy male of the species, or was something more subtle going on between them? Was it possible he was working some kind of reverse psychology on her? Pretending he didn’t desire her to the point where she’d notice, and then maybe go on the sexual offensive herself?
Listen to me, she thought. Being Lady Everest for the past two years had simplified her life immensely. Why change now?
Still.