Page 52 of The Best Thing He Never Wanted

“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.”