Chapter One #2
He resumed his scan. The bass rolled in deep enough that he felt it come up through the concrete and into the soles of his boots, and another roar climbed from the floor.
Across the arena, thousands of people rose as one when the singer stepped to the front of the stage.
Arms lifted. Phones flashed to life. The light off the big screens washed the nearest sections blue, then amber.
His gaze moved steadily over them, then stopped. His chin came up.
The woman from the hotel. It was her. He wasn’t imagining things.
She sat above the section in front of her, a glass of wine resting on the ledge by one hand.
While everyone around her sang and moved, she watched the stage with a slight smile on her face.
She seemed comfortable enough to be there but not comfortable enough to forget she was alone.
He’d noticed her at the hotel, too — at breakfast, across the lobby, a near miss in the elevators when hers left as his arrived — and, unlike most things he cataloged and set down, he hadn’t yet managed to set her down.
He’d guessed she was alone. Alone and not completely comfortable.
So it surprised him that she was here— no, wait.
That wasn’t an empty seat beside her — there was a jacket on it. She wasn’t alone.
Disappointment hit him, sudden and heavy enough to piss him off. He pushed it away. What the hell did it matter to him anyway? She was just a face from the hotel, that was all. He should be glad she wasn’t here alone. He’d have to worry about her safety if she were.
He watched for a while, but no one came to take the empty seat.
No husband, no date — no girlfriend, for that matter, either.
Still, the jacket said it was waiting for someone.
If it had been a truly empty seat, he might have been tempted to claim it.
Sitting in the crowd beside a woman would be the best cover he could think of — no one would ever think to look for him there.
But even if that seat had a big VACANT sign on it, he wouldn’t have gone over, and he knew it. He didn’t know how to approach a woman like that—or any woman. He didn’t have the smooth lines or the charming chatter. He was, as Cash had once told him, about as charming as a granite cliff.
As he watched, the couple on the other side of the empty seat turned to talk to her.
Maybe they were all there together, but no.
The woman gave them the polite smile people used with strangers, chatted for a few minutes, then patted the jacket and said something that made them nod.
She rose and headed for the doors that led out to the concourse.
He was tailing her before he knew he’d moved. The narrow walkway swallowed her into the flow of people circling the arena, and Blane stepped out of the shadows after her, immediately too aware of his own size beneath the bright concourse lights.
What the hell was he doing? She was no threat to anyone, of that he was sure. And there was no other reason for him to follow a stranger out into the concourse.
She passed the concession stands without slowing, the air thick with beer and fried onions and perfume and too many warm bodies in too small a space.
Music from inside followed them as a muffled pulse, swelling every time one of the doors swung open.
She didn’t slow at the bar or the merchandise stands, didn’t look around as though she was searching for whoever should have been in that empty seat.
His stride faltered when she joined the line for the women’s bathrooms. Of course that was where she was headed.
He stopped in the middle of the concourse, and the crowd divided around him like water around a rock.
Maybe Cash was right about him. Maybe he really did need a vacation.
What other explanation could there be for stepping out into the open without a thought, when he was supposed to be here undercover?
He turned on his heel and walked straight into three young guys. They scattered around him like bowling pins and then apologized profusely to him for the collision he’d caused.
~ ~ ~
Bea stayed all the way to the end, right till the very last encore had died and the lights came up gold and ordinary. Then she let herself be carried out on the tide — twenty thousand people all deciding at once that they needed the same three trains.
North Greenwich station took them the way a drain takes a flood.
She shuffled down through the tunnels in a press of cowboy hats and warm coats and someone’s fading perfume, not unhappy about it; there was a kind of anonymity in being one body among thousands, nobody’s responsibility, nobody’s guest. She let the crowd decide her pace and thought about very little, the songs still playing in her head, the music still reverberating in her chest.
She changed at Bond Street for the Central line, and it was on that platform — the crush thinning, the air close and warm off the tunnel — that she saw the hat.
It was a weekend of hats, of course. Half of London had apparently decided to dress like Nashville, and there were still a dozen of them dotted along the platform.
But this one was pale and sat higher than the others, on a man who stood a clear head above the crowd around him, and who was — she was fairly sure, from the back, at forty feet, on a train platform — very still.
She found she had drifted a step toward him.
Purely practical, she told herself. If it was him, he was staying at her hotel, and she was, now she thought about it, not entirely certain of the walk from Tottenham Court Road at this hour with Meg not beside her to march them both along like she owned the pavement.
One could, quite reasonably, keep a fellow guest in view.
Follow at a sensible distance. Arrive safely in his wake and never say a word.
That was just sense. That was not — she was very clear with herself on this point — the behavior of a woman who wanted a second look at a large American she had already decided had no place whatsoever in her new life.
She took another step and told herself it was the crowd moving her.
She was close enough now to say something — not that she would, she was only checking — when the man turned to look at the board, tipping his hat back, and it wasn’t him at all.
This man was younger, rounder, with a cheerful, sunburnt face.
He caught her looking and gave her a friendly “All right, love?” in an accent that placed him firmly and unmistakably as being from no further west than Basildon.
“Fine, thank you,” Bea said, with tremendous dignity, and scurried onto the very next train whether it was hers or not.
It was, mercifully, hers. She found a pole to hold and stood very straight and refused, on principle, to examine why the disappointment sat quite so heavily — why finding out it wasn’t him should feel like anything at all, when the entire point of the exercise had been that she didn’t care one way or the other.
She was, she decided, tired—that was all.
It had been a long day, and an emotional one, and a tired woman could be forgiven a small irrational sag over a stranger in a hat.
It meant nothing. She would not be giving it another thought.
She gave it several more thoughts all the way to Tottenham Court Road.
There, the warning to mind the gap sounded rather disapproving as she stepped out onto a quieter platform.
The crowd here was thinner, the late-night kind, everyone moving with the looseness of people whose evening was over.
She followed the signs for the way out, already bracing herself for the walk, rehearsing the turns — left out of the station, or was it right?
and then — and lifted her gaze to the steep escalator rising ahead of her.
And there he was, near the top, a clear head above everyone on the moving stair, that pale hat unmistakable, riding up and away from her without the smallest backward glance — a man entirely unhurried, entirely unbothered — a man who, she imagined, had never once in his life worried about being followed, because it had simply never occurred to him that anyone would dare.
It was him. She was — she checked herself and then stopped bothering to check — quite certain it was him.
She stood at the foot of the escalator like a fool while a teenager tutted past her.
He must have been at Bond Street, after all — half the arena had been at Bond Street.
And a man had to get back to his hotel the same as she did, and there was absolutely no reason on God’s green earth to imagine that a stranger had noted where a woman was standing on a crowded platform, worked out where she’d likely be getting off, and gone on ahead so that he might, without ever being seen to do it, make sure she came up the escalator and out into the London night in one piece.
No reason at all; the thought was preposterous.
She stepped onto the escalator and let it carry her up after him, and did not, at any point, examine why the preposterous thought had settled somewhere under her ribs and made itself quietly, warmly, infuriatingly at home.
By the time she reached the top, he was gone — out through the barriers and into the dark, a big still shape one moment and no shape at all the next. She walked back to the hotel alone.
She was fine the whole way. Perfectly fine. She knew every turn, as it happened.
And if the pavement felt a little less lonely than she’d feared — if some foolish, tired, sixty-in-two-years part of her walked the whole way half-expecting to look up and find a cowboy hat waiting at the next corner, just in case — well. That was nobody’s business but her own.