Page 133 of The Best Thing He Never Wanted

If he’d turned around, she would have seen him do it. And turning around would have told her something that he couldn’t. He couldn’t ask her to wait for him. She’d spent too much of her life arranging herself around a man already, and he’d sooner cut off his own hand than ask her to put her new life on hold for him. But damn him, he watched her every step of the way in the reflection, right up until the mirrored panels ran out. Then he turned the corner, and she was gone.

The FBO was a short walk from the main terminal, and Bear was there waiting for him, the way Bear always was. There was a question in his eyes, but Blane only grunted, and the two of them headed toward the jet. Blane climbed the steps and took the seat he always took, the one facing the way they’d come.

When they lifted off, he looked out the window at the blue sea and the dusty island below. Bear must have known somehow—instead of turning immediately northwest, he banked into a wide, easy loop over the island. As the jet climbed, Blane looked toward the cockpit but didn’t say anything.

A minute later, familiar shapes resolved below him. He saw the mountains, the olive-covered slopes, the folds of the land he’d spent the last few weeks learning almost without realizing it. Then he found the valley—her valley. He kept his eyes on it for as long as he could, until a bank of cloud moved between them and took it away.

He pulled out his phone and stared at the screen. There were a hundred things he could send her. Miss you already. This was a mistake. When can I— His thumb hovered over the screen, but he put the phone away without writing any of them. Every one of those messages felt like a hook, something that might ask her to hold still for him while he figured out what the hell he was doing. And if the last three weeks had taught him anything, it was that loving Bea meant never once asking her to make herself smaller so there’d be room for him.

He’d watched her in the mirrors until he couldn’t see anymore. He’d held her valley in his sight until the cloud took it. But he wouldn’t hold on to her by asking her to wait; he wouldn’t do that to her.

~ ~ ~

Bea stood there like a fool watching the doors he’d gone through. She’d deliberately promised herself that she wouldn’t stand like a fool watching the doors, and yet here she was. Those doors had swallowed him the way automatic doors swallow everyone. They did it quietly, with nothing dramatic enough to match what it felt like, just a quiet swoosh of rubber seals, and then all that was left was her reflection in the tinted glass and the ordinary bustle of a small airport carrying on around her.

Standing so still while everyone else flowed past somehow made her feel closer to him again. As though, if she didn’t move, perhaps she hadn’t quite reached the part where he was really gone.

She brought a hand up to shade her eyes from the sun. The same sun that had been half her reason for choosing Crete today beat down harshly, almost unforgivingly. She could still picture the shape of him disappearing into the terminal, striding away toward wherever the private planes left from. And he hadn’t looked back.

She’d watched for it, even while she hated herself a little for watching for it, but he’d walked those few steps between her and the terminal with his usual unhurried, unbothered stride, and not once had he turned his head.

Perhaps that was why she was still standing here, peering through the tinted glass at the place where she’d last seen him even though there was nothing left there to see. She drew in a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. What had she expected? They’d agreed, hadn’t they? In all the ways that mattered, even if they hadn’t said so out loud, that this was it. They weren’t going to stand there making promises neither of them knew they could keep, and his vague possibility of coming back because the terrain might be useful for training was about as close as Blane was going to come to offering her something he couldn’t guarantee.

Eventually, she made herself turn around. The alternative was standing in the drop-off lane until a man in a high-vis vest came over to ask whether she was all right, and she really didn’t want to become the woman someone in a high-vis vest had to rescue from airport departures.

She patted the roof of the Vitara, dusty and dented as it was, silently thanking it for waiting so patiently. As she climbed behind the wheel one last time, tears rolled down her cheeks again. It was ridiculous, and she knew it, to cry over a car she’d only known for three weeks. It was still too big for her, and of course it had always been too small for Blane, and yet somehow over those weeks it had become perfectly right for the two of them. She sat for a moment with her hands in her lap, not starting the engine, just breathing in the smell of diesel and warm plastic and, underneath it, the faint lingering scent that was distinctly Blane. Then she started the engine because sitting in a car inhaling what was left of a man who’d just flown out of her life probably wasn’t the healthiest possible start to the next chapter of it.

It was only a couple of hundred yards to the smaller car park where they’d left her car the day before, and she didn’t know whether to smile or cry when she saw that the space beside it was empty. She switched off the Vitara, patted the steering wheel once and sat for another moment, not wanting to get out. Then she checked the door pockets and glove box again even though she’d emptied them that morning, putting everything into the bag that was still riding in the back. Its final journey beside Blane’s duffel was over now too. She made herself get out and left the keys on the driver’s seat, just as Cash had instructed. When she opened the back of the Vitara, she had the keys to her new car in her hand, and her throat tightened at the sight of the little bee keyring Blane had given her.

Transferring her bag from the Vitara into the back of her own little car took all of eight seconds, and somehow it felt like the hardest thing she’d done all morning.

She stood there afterward with one hand resting against the warm metal and realized she was doing the whole goodbye again in miniature, only this time there was no Blane standing in front of her and no kiss to soften it. It wasn’t simply another goodbye, though; it was a rehearsal for what came next too. She was moving herself physically from the life that had him in it to the life that now didn’t. She gave the roof one last pat, then got into her new little car and closed the door without looking back. She’d had quite enough for one morning of watching things she’d grown to love being left behind to be taken away.

She reversed carefully out of the space, navigated her way between the Mercedes parked around her, and eased into the airport traffic. There was no need to worry about which side of the road she ought to be on; the crush of cars didn’t give her much choice.

Once she was clear of the airport, though, the road opened up again, and she pointed her lovely little blue car toward home. She’d been so frightened of this drive. Not because she didn’t know how to make it—she knew the road now, knew which lane she needed, knew where it narrowed and where the impatient drivers would try to squeeze past. Blane had helped with that, certainly, but somewhere along the way she’d learned it for herself, too.

She patted the steering wheel. “Come on, then,” she murmured. “Just you and me.”

The words caught in her throat because that was the problem, wasn’t it? For three weeks, you and me had meant something entirely different. She blinked hard and kept driving.

The mountains were still there. The sea was still there, even when the road turned inland and she couldn’t see it. The house was waiting for her, and the garden, and Katerina, and the village, and all the things she’d come here to build before Blane had ever appeared in London and changed the shape of them. None of that had disappeared because he’d left. It only hurt because now all of it carried the memory of him.

She tightened her hands briefly around the steering wheel, then made herself loosen them again. The road home stretched out ahead of her, and that was where she was going.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Blane leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the desk, turning his head to stare out the window at the mountains. It’d been a crazy couple of days since he got back. Mav had decided he wanted all the teams in ahead of time for the meetings he’d set up. They had a lot of new contracts starting over the next few months, and it made sense, but Blane still wished Mav could have waited a little longer.

Cash stuck his head around the door of the meeting room where Blane was still sitting. The guys had all filed out ten minutes ago, and Blane should have followed them.

“There you are. What are you doing?”

“What does it look like?”

“Like you’re not doing a whole hell of a lot, which isn’t like you.” Cash came in. “Everything all right?”

“Yeah. Just taking a minute.”