What the Cowboy Never Wanted

Chapter One

She glanced at the chair beside her. It was doing its best, but it wasn’t fooling anyone — not even with her cool new leather jacket draped around its shoulders.

She’d hung the jacket there when she first arrived, feeling a little self-conscious about coming to a concert like this alone.

Then she’d felt foolish. But she’d left the jacket anyway.

That chair deserved something if it couldn’t have Meg.

They’d planned this and looked forward to it for months. It was their last hurrah before…

She’d splashed out on VIP tickets — which, here in London’s largest indoor arena, meant a single high row of bar stools with a narrow ledge for a drink, rather than a seat down in the vast banked rows below.

The row in front sat lower, so that even when the crowd down there surged to its feet, Bea could still see the stage over their heads.

Behind her there was no row at all — only a walkway where people danced when a song took them, and a little bar tucked into a dark corner.

A woman in a fringed jacket was up there now, dancing with two strangers while her husband guarded four drinks and watched her with a long-suffering smile.

She and Meg would barely have stayed in their seats.

Perhaps by tomorrow night, Bea thought, the last of her self-consciousness would have worn off and she’d be up there dancing.

She grabbed her phone from her purse and did her best to look busy while the couple beside her returned to their seats.

They seemed nice enough, but the last thing she needed was for them to take pity on her and adopt her.

She reread Meg’s text — the one her oldest friend had sent at half past two that morning from a hospital corridor, with its abundance of capital letters and exclamation marks.

Meg: OMG Bea! We’re at the hospital! Amy’s in labor!

How many times did I tell her? This grandbaby was welcome to come early — just not until after we’d had our weekend.

I can’t believe I’m standing you up! You’ll be at the hotel by now and everything.

Go to the concert anyway!! You’ve wanted this for months.

Don’t you DARE come home!! And DON’T go to that island even a day early just because I’ve abandoned you.

I know you, Beatrice! I’m so, so sorry! I’ll ring you. xx

The message brought a smile now. When she’d first read it, in the dark of her hotel room, she’d laughed, delighted for her friend and her family — and if she’d cried a little, well, most of those tears had been happy ones, for Meg and her daughter and the new baby.

She hadn’t gone a day early. She’d thought about it.

She could be in Crete by now — could be standing in the empty house that was somehow hers, listening to a language she didn’t speak drift up the hillside from the village below.

She could have arrived five days early. Nobody would know. Nobody was waiting in either place.

But she’d bought these tickets back in October, when the whole crazy Crete plan was still just a shape in the dark and a concert felt like something to hold on to.

Three nights. Country music, of all things — Meg had never let her hear the end of it, a woman raised on Radio 4 going weak at the knees for men in hats singing about trucks.

Bea had told her, and meant it, that they were the only songs she’d ever found that said the enormous things plainly.

Loss. Leaving. Loving someone across an impossible distance. Getting in the truck anyway.

There was even, God help her, a song about a dog. She steered smartly around the thought of the small warm weight that used to curl against her side, the sleepy thump of a tail when she said his name.

No. Not tonight. Tonight, she was going to enjoy herself.

So she’d stayed. She’d come to the concert alone, walked in with no Meg beside her, and been — not fine.

Fine was the wrong word; fine was for smaller things.

She’d been free. Nearly sixty years old — Meg insisted it was silly to claim sixty when they still had a couple of years left to run — but sitting here, the bass thrumming up faintly through the legs of the stool and into her, with the leather jacket she’d bought for no one but herself as her only company, watching twenty thousand strangers sing about the exact thing she was doing, not one of them knowing her name, it seemed to Bea that denying sixty would be the sillier thing by far.

Country music, she was beginning to realize, was less a musical genre and more of an emotional posture.

It was the specific, driving ache of being just about to get in a truck and drive away from everything you had ever known, even if you didn’t own a truck, couldn’t drive on the right hand side of the road, and were currently sitting in an arena in Greenwich.

She was, she supposed, about to get in the truck.

She swirled her glass and took a sip before setting it back on the ledge.

Around the arena the lights dropped a fraction, and a kind of anticipation moved through the crowd like a change in the weather — conversations faltering, faces turning to the stage.

The second warm-up act came out beneath a burst of white light, and Bea clapped with everyone else, laughing as the sound struck her almost physically.

Then one of the lights swept out past the stage and over the audience, and for a second it caught the pale brim of a cowboy hat at the dark edge of the arena. The American. She didn’t notice him. She re-noticed. That was the trouble with him.

She’d seen him at the hotel — once as the lift doors were closing on her, him stepping out of the one opposite, there and then gone in the half-second before hers slid shut.

And a second time she was less sure of: a big shape at the edge of the breakfast room she’d clocked and dismissed and then, annoyingly, not quite managed to un-clock.

And once, she’d mostly heard him — the back of him at the front desk, that pale hat unmistakable above the crowd, some cheerful receptionist chirping a whole paragraph of welcome while a low American drawl answered in about four words, as though words cost money and he was careful with his.

Two of those she’d filed away. The third, for reasons she declined to examine, wouldn’t quite file.

And here he was again — a very large, very still man in a cowboy hat, back at the dark edge of the arena where the light had found him, watching the crowd instead of the stage and doing a very good job, the rest of the time, of not being seen.

He was not, Bea thought, here for the music.

She turned back to the stage before he could catch her looking. She had a new life to walk into in five days, and it had precisely no room in it for a man who stood in shadows and watched the exits.

She was fairly sure about that. She was, in fact, about seventy percent sure.

~ ~ ~

Blane shoved his hands deeper into his pockets as he scanned the crowd. There was no need for him to be here. He knew that damn well. Not that he’d ever admit it to Cash — telling that man he was right about anything was never a wise move. But Blane had wanted to be here.

One of his teams was handling security for the artists on stage tonight, and he’d just wanted to see them at work without him.

He didn’t have any doubts about their abilities.

He’d just wanted… Who the hell was he trying to kid?

He’d needed to get away for a while. Living back in Montana was good.

It was great to be around his little sister every day again.

It was great to be in the place where he’d grown up, and able to hang out with his old buddies whenever he wanted.

What wasn’t so great was that he couldn’t tell them he didn’t always want to hang out with them.

He preferred to work. And so here he was, working — even though no one other than Cash knew that he was.

He’d watched his team from the shadows, avoiding the places any threat might operate from.

He’d trained them well; they’d be looking for shadows in the shadows.

The spot where he stood gave him a better view of the audience — and any would-be threats — than it did of his team.

He had to trust they were looking in all the right places.

He scanned the crowded arena, still kind of amazed that twenty thousand people would turn out for a country music concert here in London, England.

If he’d been dropped into this arena blind, he’d have sworn he was stateside somewhere.

He’d never have guessed he’d find such a concentration of cowboy hats and western boots anywhere this side of the Atlantic.

“Want me to get you a pint, love?”

The guy who said it walked by within three feet of Blane without noticing he was there. Of course, listening to the concertgoers left no doubt about where he was.

He turned back to scanning the crowd. The arena looked chaotic if you didn’t know how to read it.

Twenty thousand people talking, drinking, singing, and squeezing past one another.

Hats blocked sightlines. People abandoned their seats in clusters and came back carrying more cups than they had hands.

Light swept across the tiers in broad arcs, turning faces white and gold before dropping them back into shadow.

But crowds had patterns. They opened around an argument and tightened around a celebrity. They surged toward the doors and the bars and the bathrooms between acts. They shifted before trouble started, the people closest to it registering the threat before they understood what they’d seen.

This crowd felt easy—excited, loud, half-drunk in places, but good-natured. He’d have put money on nothing bad happening in it tonight.