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Despite being stung by her rejection, he persisted. “Where in South Africa are you heading?”
“Pretoria.”
“Where are you staying?”
“I haven’t decided.” It wasn’t like her to be so unprepared.
“I have a friend at the Pretoria Capital Hotel. Ask for Giles Dumas. He’s the executive chef for their restaurant.”
“Thank you.” Gratitude softened her lips into a smile for a second. “I have to go. I can’t miss my flight.”
Staying put and letting her walk away from him was the hardest thing he’d done in a long time. When she disappeared through the sliding glass doors of the terminal, Ashton slid into the back of the town car and focused his attention on the traffic visible through the windshield.
She had her path to follow. He had his. If only he could shake his thoughts free of her. He had his own problems to worry about. The network folks would expect him to make a strong showing during his taping. He needed to be completely focused to impress them.
Eight
With the first and shortest leg of her long journ
ey behind her, Harper fastened her seat belt and stared out the window with dry, scratchy eyes. By flying business class, she’d saved eight thousand dollars on her ticket, but she’d found herself incapable of sleeping sitting up during the nearly ten-hour flight to London. Nor had she been able to nod off during her five-hour layover. Pair that with her sleepless night the previous evening and Harper estimated she’d been awake around forty-eight hours.
At least on the leg between London and Johannesburg she wasn’t stuck in a middle seat. She propped a pillow between her head and the wall of the cabin and let out a huge breath as a wave of exhaustion flowed over her. She fell asleep not long after the plane stopped climbing.
The popping of her ears woke her as the plane reduced altitude. She checked the seat back monitor that kept track of the distance traveled and saw that they were a little over an hour from touching down in South Africa. Her pulse jumped. She was about to land in a foreign country and go in search of a man she hadn’t known existed two days earlier. The town where he lived was a forty-five minute drive from Johannesburg and she had yet to receive a response to her email requesting information on the seven-day safari he was leading the day after she arrived.
She thought it might be a good idea to get to know him a little before announcing that she’d traveled halfway around the world to see if she was his daughter.
From his bio she knew that he’d never been married. Dedicating his life to his passion for Africa, he’d won several prestigious awards and had his work published in more than two dozen magazines. For the past day and a half she’d tried to find herself in this man she shared genes with. They shared a focus on their work and a determination to achieve greatness, but when it came to their careers, Greg LeDay had more in common with Ashton than her.
Both men were creative geniuses. LeDay’s photography was brilliant in the same way Ashton’s culinary masterpieces won him notoriety.
By comparison, what had she done? She’d worked hard and had nothing she was proud to display as her body of work. Her passion involved planning, organizing and making things happen. She was good at telling people what to do, being ruthless. How many of her employees called her a bitch behind her back?
Harper wasn’t feeling all that organized or ruthless at the moment. She was drifting on a sea of uncertainty. Impatient with herself, she pulled out her phone and logged on to the plane’s Wi-Fi network. It was time to reconnect with her organized self. She hadn’t yet planned her trip beyond booking her flight to Johannesburg. She needed to figure out how she was going to get to Pretoria and where she was going to stay once she got there.
To her delight, the two cities were linked by a high-speed train line that she could pick up at the airport. She would have to change trains, but after doing so she would arrive in Pretoria in less than half an hour. Harper then turned her attention to finding the hotel Ashton had suggested and booked a room for two nights. By the time the plane’s doors opened to allow the passengers to disembark, she was feeling completely in charge once more.
Finding the train was easy. She’d exchanged dollars for rand along the way and arrived at the platform just as the train was pulling in. As adventures went, this trip was feeling awfully mundane. She stepped onto the train, secured her bag and settled into a clean, comfortable seat by the window. Despite getting sleep on the plane, the train’s rocking motion made it difficult to keep her eyes open. She fought the pull. The distance between the stations wasn’t great and she could miss her exchange if she wasn’t careful.
As it was, she wasn’t fully awake when the train pulled into Marlboro station. Yawning wearily, she got to her feet and waited for an opening in the crowd of exiting passengers so she could step into the aisle and collect her bag. Something hard clipped her temple, knocking her sideways. Stunned by the blow, on the verge of losing consciousness, she didn’t fight the hands that shoved her into the seat and stripped away the bag that held her cash and passport.
Before her head cleared, her assailant was long gone and the last of the passengers had disembarked. Harper staggered to her feet, but before she could reach her luggage, the door closed and the train moved forward. The pain in her head made Harper’s thoughts thick and sluggish. She dropped into the closest empty seat and closed her eyes. What was she supposed to do now?
* * *
Ashton stepped out of a cab on the corner of Ninth Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street in Chelsea and saw his old friend Craig Turner waiting for him by the curb. Since the Lifestyle people weren’t expecting him until two that afternoon, Ashton had decided to check in with his old mentor and wasn’t surprised to learn that Craig was still volunteering at Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen.
“Ashton, good to see you.” The sixty-five-year-old restaurateur wrapped Ashton in a tight bear hug. “You’re looking wonderful. Television suits you.”
“It has its moments.”
When Ashton had first come to New York before landing his first television series, he’d spent two years in Craig’s kitchen learning everything there was to know about what it took to run a successful restaurant. He’d gleaned a lot. And yet, with four restaurants under his belt, Ashton knew he still had plenty of Craig’s wisdom left to absorb.
“And now you’re stepping into the big time with a show here in New York.”
It shouldn’t have astonished him that Craig knew this; little happened in New York having to do with food that Craig missed. “We’ll see. Nothing’s finalized yet.”
“And your restaurant in Las Vegas. That’s set to open next week. Things going okay?”
