* * *
Fran was deplaning again, this time in Las Vegas. To walk out of McCarran had been to feel her throat spasm, as if she could see herself there in the summer heat, backpack on one shoulder, that last hurried kiss with Nic...
The rental car she picked up was no luxury SUV. Thoughts flashed through her of how she’d been so concerned that Nic had blithely helped himself to a hotel vehicle to take off in—and how that other security guy had greeted him on their return from the desert sunset.
‘Evening, boss.’
‘He’s on my team,’ Nic had explained casually.
Yes, you might say that—you might also say that your team ran to thousands of people all around the world.
And all the time he was Nicolo Falcone, and I never noticed...
Getting out of Vegas occupied her mind, and she was glad to hit Route 15, out of the city, heading north-east. She would need to break her journey, stop off overnight, but that should be no problem. The problem would come later—closer to her destination.
Winter was closing in, and though she’d checked the forecast, and it had been sufficiently clement, snow would stop her in her tracks.
She drove on, determined to make her destination. Expression set.
* * *
Nic was throwing his weight around. He knew it and didn’t care. That was what it was for. He was shamelessly using a mixture of arrogant imperiousness and calculated charm to get the information he wanted. Needed.
His eyes flashed blue fire. Where the hell was she?
Because she wasn’t in Cambridge. Her departmental secretary was looking at him apologetically. ‘You’ve just missed her, I’m afraid. She’s gone to California—for an interview I believe.’
He strode off, claws clenching inside him. Then his phone was in his hand, and he was straight through to his own security team at his Mayfair property.
‘I need you to trace someone,’ was his terse command.
It was a simple order, but it took a frustratingly long time for the answer to get back to him. And when it did it stopped him in his tracks. Then galvanised him with the very first emotion he’d felt since he’d opened her email, in which she had refused to marry him.
Something that he could clutch at.
Hope.
* * *
Fran heaved a sigh of relief. The snow had not come, the road was still open, and day tickets were still available. She drove on between the dark conifers, all signs
of habitation long gone, and then finally she was there, leaving the car in the almost deserted car park, making her way to where she wanted to be.
To remember what had never happened. What now never could.
She sat on one of the many benches, huddled into the ski-jacket she’d bought en route, her feet warm in the solid boots she’d also bought. The cold nipped at her, and she glanced at some of the few hikers, even more warmly clad than her, ready to go backpacking even at this time of year.
The sky above was leaden, but that did not spoil the view.
Ten miles across. Ten miles to where she had stood in the summer heat. She sat and gazed across the unbridgeable distance from there to here, to where she was now. Here at this point in her life.
We can’t go back. We can’t get back to what has gone. That time has past.
Wasn’t that what she’d told herself in all those months since then? She told it to herself again—because she must. Because there was no alternative. This journey here, now, had been for one reason only. To finally say goodbye to that time. To finally let it go.
To let Nic go—the man she had come to say goodbye to.
Silently her hand went to her abdomen and she spoke to her unborn child, who still seemed so unreal, but who was there, secret inside her. Her voice was low, but clear in the cold air, here where there was no one else but the hikers starting their descent. So she spoke aloud the words she needed to say. To the child she needed to say them to. About the man she needed to say them for.