From there, Jordie and Romana hit it off like wild fire. Weren't mothers-in-law the absolute limit? Weren't husbands? They laughed over Jordie dodging Elliot's requests about the dinner party he'd like to throw by reminding him they employed a housekeeper for a reason. They found they had more than mildly aggravating in-laws in common, but a profession. Two surgeons, days out of theater and looking with trepidation toward the holidays to come. Jordie specializing in trauma and Romana in vascular surgery. It was a wonder to find someone who understood how Jordie thought without condescending to her. Even seeing her in action, many of her male colleagues at St. Francis' thought her survival rate an unending run of good fortune rather than learned experience on display.

Not Romana.

"I tell you, nothing less than raising the dead will convince a chauvinist you haven't simply batted your lashes and asked nicely for the patient to live. It's galling."

"I try to ignore it and let my work do the talking. Arguing doesn't get me anywhere." That had been her fathers' advice—'if you insist on putting your shoulder to the mountain in the hopes of it moving, keep your head down, your mouth shut, and push.' That had worked in the theater of war. Less now she was back in England and hamstrung by what her colleagues believe she should do now she'd shed her combat boots.

"That's where you and I differ, Jordie. I love a good spat. Regardless of whether I've changed their mind, I know I've been heard." She eyed Jordie's rapidly dwindling cigarette. "Could I?"

Jordie passed it along.

Romana took a therapeutic inhale of the remaining smoke and held it in her lungs. She then exhaled with a sensuous moan not out of place in one of those lurid pulp novels Jordie could never admit to having read. The air around them was momentarily obscured with the haze of their smoky breath. The cold had no place here, piercing as it tried to be, digging in at their bones and Jordie's particular aches.

When she was done, Jordie took the cigarette back from her and finished it off with a final, burning puff and stubbed it out in the snow. She retrieved gum from her pocket, from habit, a holdover from her emergency field kit from before. Always be prepared to be unprepared. She extended a stick of the pale green gum to Romana. They chewed companionably.

She's even pretty when she chews, Jordie thought, glib. This was that feeling she'd sworn to ward herself against on returning to Bristol. That instant affinity that exceeded kinship, an attraction bordering on kinetic she hadn't once felt for a man. Not even Elliot when they were young lovers, and everything should have been heart-stopping.

"I know it's a terrible habit. Elliot complains about the way my hair smells, or my clothes. He says I make the furniture reek of tobacco." The housekeeper groused about it as well and Jordie had taken to sneaking out to the back garden to smoke her fill when the house grew oppressive.

"Don't tell me, he says it isn't ladylike?" Her inflection smacked of shared experience. Someone had told Romana she wasn't woman enough. Jordie would have gladly bought tickets to that prize fight to see them decimated.

"He doesn't like the taste." Jordie hadn't thought to complain about how Tamsin tasted. She'd been too overawed to have her, to be allowed to be had by her. Elliot, she thought, would have complained.

Romana shrugged and that wasn't very ladylike either by Elliot's estimation, or the estimation of his equally opinionated mother. "You aren't an hors d'oeuvre, you aren't meant to be ready for his consumption any hour on the hour, and I do mean that in the Biblical sense as well."

Jordie sputtered between barks of laughter. It had been a good, long while since another woman had sprung innuendo on her so audaciously. The rules that had poured the rambunctious, busy, tree-climbing girl Jordie used to be into the upright woman of a certain class she was had bore in on her for four months and seventeen days, since she had stepped off the military transport that had brought her back to her native shores. For a moment, they didn't press quite as hard.

Romana sat back, shapely legs neatly crossed, an arm extended behind Jordie along the back of the bench. She appeared supremely pleased to have shocked a laugh out of Jordie.

"Has anybody told you you're a riot, Romana Gentry?"

"Hardly. I've seen riots. No, I'm a barn-burning party no one of any standing should ever attend but everybody wants to see. Watch out you don't stand too close to me."

"I'm not afraid of a little fire." She had slept through it and driven into it. She had carried people out of it on her back.

"I'm anything but little." Romana tapped Jordie's hand where it sat clutching her knee. "You'll see."

Not twenty meters off, young Troy cried out in the ruins of his fort. Both women spun to see him raking a sizable splattering of crunching snow from his nose and chest. Madeline's cabal scattered around her, leaving her damp-mittened and guilty of expression. She was already running to him to make her excuses.

"Troy, Troy, don't cry. I didn't mean it, honest!"

"Oh dear, I think that's my cue to play mother and kiss it better." Romana leveraged herself off the bench. "It was good meeting you."

"And you. Take care of yourself," Jordie said, echoing the well wishes she'd sent her ambulance drivers and nurses as they saddled up to dive into the worst skirmishes in search of survivors.

Romana winked, almost like she knew what it was Jordie was meaning to say. "You too, Jordie. I hope to see you around."

Jordie saluted, unwilling to admit she rather hoped she'd see Romana too.