Chapter Ten #2
Blane went still. Not the watchful stillness she’d first noticed at the concert.
Not quite. This felt different. He’d made his case, and now he was waiting.
And that, more than the plane or the car or the fact that he had somehow appeared behind her at Heathrow before dawn, settled something inside her.
He wasn’t telling her to go with him—he was asking to go with her.
“What happens if I say no?”
His answer came without hesitation. “You get on your flight.”
“And you?”
“Go back to Farnborough. Figure out somewhere else to go.”
“And you’d just let me leave?”
His jaw tightened once. “Wouldn’t like it.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
“I know.” He held her gaze. “Yeah, Bea. If that’s what you want, you get on your flight.”
She swallowed. “And if I say yes?”
Something changed in his eyes, but otherwise he didn’t move. “We go to Crete.”
There were no promises, no declarations, no attempt to tell her what this meant beyond today. Just Blane, standing in front of her, asking for more time. Yesterday she’d thought there could be no someday in their plan. Apparently, there could be a today.
She looked down at the boarding pass still clutched in her hand, then back at the man waiting for her answer. “Do I at least get coffee on this ridiculous plane?”
His smile broke through. “Coffee, breakfast, whatever you want, darlin’.”
Bea handed him her suitcase handle. “Then you’d better get me to Farnborough.”
“Where exactly are we going?”
“Crete.”
“Got that part.”
She laughed. “A little village called Meraki, not far from Spili.”
He pulled out his phone.
“What are you doing?”
“Logistics.”
~ ~ ~
Blane did as she asked, and by the time they arrived at Farnborough, the jet was ready to go.
Bear, the pilot, greeted him with a smirk, and Blane scowled back at him.
He’d been grateful that most of his friends were on the other side of the Atlantic while he tried to figure out what the hell he was doing.
But Bear’s presence was a necessary evil.
He turned to Bea. “This is Bear. He flies the jet. Bear, this is Bea.” He watched her step forward to shake hands.
“Nice to meet you. I hope this isn’t putting you out.”
Blane narrowed his eyes at his friend. If that fucker dared say anything that made him look—
Bear gave Bea a genuine grin and shook her hand a little too hard. “Far from it. When Cash told me where we needed to go, I thought it was great.” He shot Blane a smile. “Then he told me why, and it got even better.”
“I think it’s rather wonderful myself. And thank you.” Bea looked up at the jet. “I’ve never flown in a private plane before.”
“Come on up, then.” Bear gestured toward the steps. “I hope you’ll like it. We’re all stocked up. They managed to load everything for a hot breakfast into the galley for you guys.”
Blane liked Bea even more when she stopped with one foot on the first step and looked back.
“What about you? I hope there’s enough for you as well?”
Blane grinned. He wasn’t about to throw Bear under the bus, since he was playing nice, but he knew damn well that Bear and his copilot, Dean, enjoyed cleaning up whatever their passengers didn’t eat.
By the time they were taxiing out to the runway, with Bea across from him drinking her coffee, the knot in Blane’s chest had finally loosened.
He should probably be wondering what the hell he was doing—why he was headed toward Greece with a woman he barely knew instead of toward Hamburg with his team.
But he wasn’t. For the first time since he’d walked away from Bea’s door last night, everything felt right again.
He hadn’t known if she’d let him come. What he had known was that he wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he hadn’t asked if he could.
She smiled at him and set her cup down. “Is this really happening?”
“Sure is.” He hadn’t thought about it until now, but the jet was probably something special if you’d never flown in one before. That explained the disbelieving smile on her face.
“You’re really coming to Crete?”
That made him smile back. “Looks that way.”
“You do realize this is insane?”
“Nah. This is how things go if you let ’em.
You don’t have to follow the path you’re expected to take—not even if you’re the only one doing the expecting.
Sometimes life grabs you by the—” He stopped himself just in time.
“Throat. And gives you a chance to step out of your rut. Seems to me not taking that chance would be insane.”
He wasn’t sure he understood what she meant by the way she smiled at that. “Anything you want to tell me?”
She laughed softly. “Only that I wonder if you know how precisely you just described what I’m doing. I have a sister, you know.”
He cocked an eyebrow.
“Yes. Rosalind. Rosalind expected me to take a very different path after Simon died. She thought I should move in with her and Jonathon. Well, not with them, exactly, but into the annex at their very lovely home in Sevenoaks.” She shivered visibly.
“She moved our mother in there after our father died. I think she would have liked me to become her next duty, obligation, and care project.”
“Jesus, Bea. You’re not an old lady.”
She laughed again. “Thank you. I said almost the same thing to her when she offered. She thinks I’m very ungrateful, and perhaps a little unhinged, going off to Greece like this.”
He shook his head. “Is that why you asked if I thought this was insane? Because the people in your life think it is? Simon would’ve thought so too?”
“Yes.” She turned to stare out the window, watching the clouds and the small patchwork fields down below. “He thought I was very unreasonable. And definitely not grateful enough.”
Blane gripped the arm of his seat. “Because you were supposed to be grateful for his version of reasonable, even though it never took you or what you wanted into account?”
Her gaze snapped back to his. “Perhaps he was right. Perhaps I am entirely unreasonable and just too selfish to see it?”
“Bullshit.”
He was glad it made her laugh, but that hadn’t been his intention.
“I’m serious, Bea. I…” He hesitated. There was a lot he could say about her dead husband from the little she’d told him, and probably a lot more from what she hadn’t.
But this wasn’t the time. She was making her own decisions now, and how she wanted to frame her history was one of them. He didn’t want to influence that.
So he smiled. “The only unreasonable thing I can see about you is your taste in food.”
She let out a startled little laugh.
“But I’ll reserve judgment for now. You might prove me wrong once you’re away from bad British food.”
She reached across and slapped his arm. “It’s not all bad. And you can hardly talk; your idea of fine cuisine is pizza.”
“Good pizza.” He shuddered. “Not whatever that thing was they tried to feed me the other night. That was not pizza.”
She was smiling at him, but there was something thoughtful in her expression.
He cocked an eyebrow. “What?”
“That was only last night, Blane.”
She was right. He met her gaze. “It was. Seems longer.”
“A lot’s happened since then, though.”
He nodded, about to tell her how glad he was about that, when his phone buzzed.
She eyed it warily. “Aren’t you supposed to have turned that off?”
“It’s all good. There’s inflight Wi-Fi.”
“Oh my! Well, you’d better get it, then.”
He picked his phone up from the table in front of him. It was a text from Cash. He glanced back at her. “What?”
“Nothing. Just taking it all in. I mean, of course your plane has Wi-Fi.”
He frowned. “Cash’s plane.”
“That distinction is becoming less convincing by the minute.”
He shrugged and opened Cash’s message, trying to hide his smile. The smile disappeared when he saw what Cash had sent.
“Is everything all right?”
“Yeah. Just Cash being Cash.” He shoved his phone into his pocket. It buzzed again immediately. This time there were photos. “Jesus Christ, Cash!”
“Oh no. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. The man just can’t follow instructions.”
“What instructions?”
Blane looked at the pictures again and shook his head. “Doesn’t matter.”
“Blane.”
“Nothing bad. Cash just has a different definition of simple than I do.” That was an understatement if ever there was one, but he’d deal with Cash later. For now, he got to his feet. “You ready for breakfast?”
She nodded, peering past him toward the galley. “More than ready, if I’m honest. I didn’t know if someone was going to magically appear and serve it to us. I don’t know how this works.”
“We do it ourselves. It’s usually only us guys who fly. Wouldn’t want a flight attendant to have to put up with us.” He gestured toward the galley. “Want me to make you a plate, or do you want to come see what you want?”
She was already getting to her feet with a smile. “I’d love to come and see.”
She peered at the trays as he lifted the lids. Scrambled eggs, bacon, sausages, hash browns, mushrooms.
“There’s pancakes and waffles in there.” He pointed. “Cereal, fruit, and yogurt over there.”
She nodded, but looked uncertain.
“You want something else?”
She laughed. “No! I’ll be very happy with some bacon and hash browns. But what about Bear and—what did you say the other one’s name is?”
“Dean.”
“Should we make plates for them? Are they allowed to eat while they’re flying? Do they have to take it in turns, or…?”
He put a hand on her shoulder. “Let’s get you fed first. I’ll let Bear know when we’re done.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“The two of them will descend like locusts.”
She laughed.
“I’m not joking. You can check this galley before we get off. There won’t be a damn thing left. So pile your plate up. Take extra if you think you might want another muffin later or anything. Those guys will pick this place clean.”
Once they were seated again, side by side with their breakfast laid out on the table in front of them, he raised his coffee cup to her.
She lifted hers to meet it. “I never would have believed we’d be having breakfast together this morning.”
He almost choked on his coffee.