Chapter Three
Blane scowled down at his phone. It was his own damn fault Cash was harassing him.
He should have replied to the earlier texts.
But after his run-in with the Englishwoman this afternoon—with Bea—he’d been even less inclined to answer.
He didn’t like lying to his friends. And even when he tried to hide something, Cash could sniff it out in seconds, even from five thousand miles away.
He shoved the phone back in his pocket. He’d deal with him tomorrow.
Right now, he scanned the arena again. Night two of three, and the place was even busier than it had been last night—the crowd bigger, louder, the atmosphere somehow brighter.
Still no sense of trouble anywhere in it, just people having a good time.
He’d thought about finding a different spot tonight. But the one where he was standing gave him the same view of Bea, and he found he liked standing here.
His phone buzzed again. “For fuck’s sake, Cash.”
Cash: I’m gonna keep harassing you till you tell me what’s going on.
As he stared at the screen, another text came in.
Cash: Or I could ask Brookie what she knows about this woman you’re seeing in London.
Blane clenched his jaw.
Blane: Leave Brooke out of it.
Cash: Come on, bud. You know I’d never upset her. She’d hate to think you’d finally met a woman, and I knew more about it than she did. But you gave yourself away, you know that, right? You didn’t say there is no woman.
Blane shook his head.
Blane: Before you get ahead of yourself—she’s someone staying at the same hotel. I ran into her here at the concert. That’s it.
He hit send and waited. As the seconds ticked by and he realized he was gripping the phone, he knew damn well what Cash was doing—making him sit with what he’d said.
While he waited, he glanced up to the raised row where Bea sat. She was smiling tonight, looking more relaxed, bouncing a little in her seat like she wanted to dance. There was a space behind her row where some of her neighbors got up and danced whenever the upbeat numbers played.
So far, Bea hadn’t joined them.
His phone buzzed against his palm.
Cash: Make an effort, bud. Talk to her.
Blane: I talked to her a little today.
Cash: Then talk to her some more tonight.
He caught himself smiling at the phone and shut it down—shut himself down—fast.
Blane: What’s the point? I’m heading back Sunday night.
The reply didn’t come right away.
Cash: We’ll see how it all pans out. Be in touch, bud. See ya.
He scowled at that. We’ll see how it pans out? Maybe Cash was just distracted—another call, something with the team.
The second act finished their set, and as the applause rolled through the arena, people started spilling out of their seats and past his spot in the shadows, heading for drinks and bathrooms before the next act came on.
When he checked on Bea, he found her looking right at him. Her smile faltered for a fraction of a second, embarrassed at being caught. Then it came back, warmer this time, and she raised one hand in the hint of a wave.
He smiled back, he couldn’t help it. But before he could raise his own hand in greeting, the smell of a very sweet perfume filled his nostrils, and a breathy “oh my gosh” made him turn.
Two girls stood in front of him. Maybe twenty-five. Bright, friendly, completely harmless—and radiating the specific determination of young women who’d decided a big, quiet older man in a genuine cowboy hat was the most interesting thing at the concert.
“Okay, this is so random, but—are you security? You’ve so got the security look. My friend said no way, but I said—”
Neither of them was over five and a half feet, but Blane had already taken a step back, wishing the shadows would swallow him. One of them had her phone out, the other was doing something with her hair.
And Blane Wilder—who had gone through doors other men didn’t come back out of—felt the particular cold sweat of assessing every exit and finding no way out.
“Ma’am, I’m not—” He scanned around him, desperate, finding nothing—until relief swept through him.
Bea.
She was his only hope.
He took three steps forward out of his dark corner, and the crowd adjusted its flow just as he’d counted on. Bea hadn’t been headed his way, but she felt the shift and looked up, her gaze finding his instinctively. It was as much of an opening as he could dare hope for.
Now all he could do was commit to the leap and pray.
“Sorry, ladies.” He said it easy, certain, already lifting a hand toward Bea like a man who’d done it ten thousand times. “There’s my wife.”
And then he committed—the way he committed to everything, fully, without a visible seam—and walked straight at a woman whose last name he didn’t know, having just told two strangers she’d married him.
The whole play lived or died on her now.
He watched her clock him coming. Watched her clock the two younger women behind him, the raised phone, the word wife still hanging in the air.
Saw her assemble the entire situation at speed—and understand that he was a man who’d just stepped off a cliff and was holding his hand out to her on the way down, betting everything on a stranger’s mercy.
Crossing toward her, he had just enough time to grasp what he'd done. He'd handed her the power to leave him standing there. She could laugh in his face, tell them she'd never seen him before in her life, and watch him hang for it—and he'd have deserved it.
He kept his face easy and his hand up and walked into the fire he’d set, with the flat clarity he got right before something went bad.
Your move, lady.
~ ~ ~
Bea watched him coming and understood the whole situation before he’d closed half the distance.
She’d heard the word wife. She could see the two girls behind him, the lifted phone, the word still hanging in the air—and the man himself, large, certain, walking toward her with his hand out like they’d done this ten thousand mornings.
Making a beeline for a woman he’d exchanged perhaps nine words with.
Because something behind him had frightened a man who did not look like he frightened.
He’d jumped. That was the thing she saw that the girls couldn’t. A decisive man had leapt clean off a cliff and put his hand out on the way down, and he was betting everything he had that she would catch him.
She could not have said in that moment why she did it. Only that she knew the look on him.
She let him hang for exactly one heartbeat, long enough that he’d feel it, long enough that he’d know she’d chosen.
Then she stepped into him like she’d been doing it for thirty years and laid a hand flat against his chest. His heart was beating like a much younger man’s.
She filed that away, delighted, and tipped her face up with all the fond, weary patience of a wife retrieving a husband who’d wandered off.
“There you are. I leave you alone for five minutes.”
She felt him start breathing again under her hand. Caught you, she thought, and didn’t let it show.
She turned the smile on the two young women—careful not to look like the kind of jealous wife who’d take her husband’s wandering out on them. She gave them a kind, unbothered, absolutely immovable smile, the kind of smile that closed the door so gently you thanked it on the way out.
“Hello. I’m so sorry, I’ve got to steal him. He wanders off and forgets he’s married. Don’t you, darling?”
The word darling took her by surprise. Dear would have made more sense, surely. That was the word a wife reached for. Except dear belonged to Simon. Thirty years of use had worn it smooth and gray, and she couldn’t imagine using it here.
Darling, on the other hand, had come out far too naturally. She declined to examine that.
It was only then she noticed Blane had wrapped his arm around her shoulders. He gave her a slight squeeze, and she came back to the moment.
“Oh—” The girl with the phone deflated, though she was gracious about it. “Oh no, you guys are so cute. I’m sorry. We thought he was security. We didn’t mean—”
“Not at all. I completely understand. He does have the security look.” Bea patted his chest. “He’s very proud of it.”
Bea steered, and Blane let her guide him out of the corner and into the flow of the crowd—her arm still around his waist, his around her shoulders—and neither of them said a word until they were swallowed up and safe among twenty thousand strangers who didn’t care who he might be.
Out on the concourse, the crowd flowing around them, she let go and stepped back to a normal distance.
She did miss the warmth of his arm, though she couldn’t for the life of her interpret whatever his knitted eyebrows were trying to signal. If he was cross, that was going to be his problem. He’d signaled for assistance and she’d obliged.
“You’re welcome,” she said, with a smile.
And finally—for what had to be the first time she’d seen—he smiled back.
“Why’d you do it?” he asked. “Play along?”
She considered it a moment, then decided there was no harm at all in telling him the truth.
“Because you looked, for about one second, exactly like I felt the night I checked into the hotel.” The eyebrows went up a fraction.
“Like the whole world had suddenly noticed you, and you’d have given anything to be invisible again. ”
She gave a small shrug. “Just that—I know that look, because I know the feeling inside it. And I’d hate to leave anyone standing in it.”
There was a silence. She lifted her chin as he studied her. It might not mean anything to him, but it was her reason, and she was proud of it.
Then one of the young women called from across the crowd, still cheerful, still wanting to be nice. “Wait—what’s your name? You guys are adorable together.”
Bea turned and smiled. She didn’t know these girls and would never know these girls. She could give them the name that didn’t hold any of her. The full one.
But— She shot a sideways glance at Blane.
Beatrice would never have married him—not even for three minutes, not even as a falsehood in front of two young women.