Going through security was as non-eventful as ever, though for some reason Alex always felt like a master criminal, slipping past undetected and now able to move freely among the duty-free sunglasses shops and kitschy Irish whiskey displays. Not that she’d ever done anything remotely criminal in her life but she liked to think that if she did, they’d never catch her.
The best part about airports, however, were the books. Namely hers. She always got a kick out of seeing her books in the wild, especially those placed beside more famous authors. Today her latest novel,Midnight, was displayed between John Grisham and Lisa Jewell, and directly under Stephen King. Delighted, she snapped a photo to share online because this was as close as she’d ever get to any of them in real life.
Her road to success had been a tricky one, getting turned down by almost every publisher until finally getting a deal with only a three-thousand-pound advance to publish her first thriller,The Forgotten. No one expected it to sell as well as it did, let alone Alex.
‘That one’s really good.’
Alex turned towards the voice to see a guy, mid-thirties, in a black hoodie, gesturing towards the shelf. He looked like he had just woken up.
‘Really? Which one?’ she asked, finding herself transfixed by his messy brown hair. It was bloody awful and somehow, stupidly attractive.
‘Midnight,’ he replied. ‘A.S. Moran. It’s excellent.’ Dear Lord, his accent was charming. American? Canadian maybe? Did Canadians sound like cowboys? Regardless, it was distracting enough that she hadn’t even noticed that he’d just said the name of her own novel.
‘Great,’ she replied. ‘Hope you enjoy it.’
‘Enjoy what?’
‘The book.’
He looked confused. ‘I did. I just said it was great.’
Did he? Alex felt her cheeks burning. Actually, she felt her entire body start to burn from the inside out but in a nice way, not like that time when she was seventeen and had a suspected appendicitis on a school trip to Stratford-upon-Avon. As disconcertingly exciting as this feeling was, she had learned that glistening red was not her colour.
‘My flight,’ she managed to say, starting to walk backwards. ‘I’d better go.’
He watched in apparent amusement as Alex turned and scurried off, her shoes making a wonderfully loud click-clack as she scarpered.
