Page 9 of The Best Thing He Never Wanted

He caught himself smiling at the phone and shut it down—shut himself down—fast.

Blane: What’s the point? I’m heading back Sunday night.

The reply didn’t come right away.

Cash: We’ll see how it all pans out. Be in touch, bud. See ya.

He scowled at that. We’ll see how it pans out? Maybe Cash was just distracted—another call, something with the team.

The second act finished their set, and as the applause rolled through the arena, people started spilling out of their seats and past his spot in the shadows, heading for drinks and bathrooms before the next act came on.

When he checked on Bea, he found her looking right at him. Her smile faltered for a fraction of a second, embarrassed at being caught. Then it came back, warmer this time, and she raised one hand in the hint of a wave.

He smiled back, he couldn’t help it. But before he could raise his own hand in greeting, the smell of a very sweet perfume filled his nostrils, and a breathy “oh my gosh” made him turn.

Two girls stood in front of him. Maybe twenty-five. Bright, friendly, completely harmless—and radiating the specific determination of young women who’d decided a big, quiet older man in a genuine cowboy hat was the most interesting thing at the concert.

“Okay, this is so random, but—are you security? You’ve so got the security look. My friend said no way, but I said—”

Neither of them was over five and a half feet, but Blane had already taken a step back, wishing the shadows would swallow him. One of them had her phone out, the other was doing something with her hair.

And Blane Wilder—who had gone through doors other men didn’t come back out of—felt the particular cold sweat of assessing every exit and finding no way out.

“Ma’am, I’m not—” He scanned around him, desperate, finding nothing—until relief swept through him.

Bea.

She was his only hope.

He took three steps forward out of his dark corner, and the crowd adjusted its flow just as he’d counted on. Bea hadn’t been headed his way, but she felt the shift and looked up, her gaze finding his instinctively. It was as much of an opening as he could dare hope for.

Now all he could do was commit to the leap and pray.

“Sorry, ladies.” He said it easy, certain, already lifting a hand toward Bea like a man who’d done it ten thousand times. “There’s my wife.”

And then he committed—the way he committed to everything, fully, without a visible seam—and walked straight at a woman whose last name he didn’t know, having just told two strangers she’d married him.

The whole play lived or died on her now.

He watched her clock him coming. Watched her clock the two younger women behind him, the raised phone, the word wife still hanging in the air. Saw her assemble the entire situation at speed—and understand that he was a man who’d just stepped off a cliff and was holding his hand out to her on the way down, betting everything on a stranger’s mercy.

Crossing toward her, he had just enough time to grasp what he'd done. He'd handed her the power to leave him standing there. She could laugh in his face, tell them she'd never seen him before in her life, and watch him hang for it—and he'd have deserved it.

He kept his face easy and his hand up and walked into the fire he’d set, with the flat clarity he got right before something went bad.

Your move, lady.

~ ~ ~

Bea watched him coming and understood the whole situation before he’d closed half the distance. She’d heard the word wife. She could see the two girls behind him, the lifted phone, the word still hanging in the air—and the man himself, large, certain, walking toward her with his hand out like they’d done this ten thousand mornings. Making a beeline for a woman he’d exchanged perhaps nine words with. Because something behind him had frightened a man who did not look like he frightened.

He’d jumped. That was the thing she saw that the girls couldn’t. A decisive man had leapt clean off a cliff and put his hand out on the way down, and he was betting everything he had that she would catch him.

She could not have said in that moment why she did it. Only that she knew the look on him.

She let him hang for exactly one heartbeat, long enough that he’d feel it, long enough that he’d know she’d chosen. Then she stepped into him like she’d been doing it for thirty years and laid a hand flat against his chest. His heart was beating like a much younger man’s. She filed that away, delighted, and tipped her face up with all the fond, weary patience of a wife retrieving a husband who’d wandered off.

“There you are. I leave you alone for five minutes.”