heart attack.
‘You have to go now,’ Ginny had said innocently. ‘I mean, how can you let your aunt down?’
‘I can’t, I guess,’ Danielle had said.
But she could have, she thought now, shifting in the hard plastic chair at New York’s Kennedy Airport. The simple truth was that she’d hidden behind Ginny’s urgings and Aunt Helen’s delight—she’d wanted to accept Val’s offer all along, she just hadn’t wanted to admit it to herself. Teachers were as underpaid in Missouri as they were everywhere else. This might be the only chance she’d have to spend eight weeks in France, at least in the foreseeable future.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, good day. We are now ready to begin boarding Air France’s Flight 010 direct to Nice. Will first-class passengers kindly…’
Danielle’s heartbeat quickened in anticipation. She rose, clutching her shoulder bag in one hand and her carry-on in the other. Her ticket was for a seat well in the rear of the plane, but it didn’t hurt to begin moving towards the gate. The flight would be crowded, she could see that. There were hordes of vacationers jostling each other, lots of squalling babies and—
She stumbled to a sudden halt, her gaze inexorably drawn to the first-class passengers as they moved towards the gate. There was only a handful of them, but the man who’d shared the lounge with her earlier stood out clearly.
Perhaps it was the way he held himself, with a reckless kind of arrogance, or the angle of his shoulders, squared as if he were ready to take on the world. Or was it something far less obvious, some subconscious awareness that drew her to him as it had from the start, some message carried in the darkness of her blood?
Danielle’s breath caught as he came to a sudden stop. The crowd parted and surged past him as he stood still, his head cocked as if listening. He turned slowly, his eyes scanning the huge room, and an electric tingle danced along her spine.
She knew, without question, why his eyes searched every face. He was looking for her, waiting for her.
She took a step back, blending quickly into the crowd. Her heart raced as she watched him.
‘Mesdames et monsieurs…’
The crowd surged past her, blocking him from view. When she looked again, he was gone.
THE plane was as crowded as Danielle had expected. Passengers jammed the tourist-class aisles, some peering at seat numbers, others elbowing each other aside as they tried to get at the overhead storage hatches.
Her seat was in the rear of the plane, the centre seat in a group of three, and the other two were already occupied.
‘Excuse me,’ she said to the heavyset woman on the aisle side. The woman glanced up, then nodded. Her face was shiny with sweat.
‘Are we going to take off soon, do you think?’ she whispered as Danielle struggled past her.
Danielle smiled politely. ‘I hope so.’
The man in the window seat grumbled something. ‘We’d damned well better,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a connection to make at Nice.’
But their take-off was delayed for almost an hour. Technical problems, the captain announced over the loudspeaker. The phrase sent the heavyset woman into little gasps of anguish and the irritated man into even louder grumbles. By the time the plane was finally airborne, he was fairly twitching. But as soon as the ‘fasten seat belt’ signs blinked off, he put back his seat, closed his eyes, and fell soundly asleep.
To Danielle’s surprise, her white-knuckled companion on the aisle side did the same. The woman’s head lolled back and, within minutes, she was snoring delicately.
Danielle sighed with relief. She’d been afraid the woman’s nervousness would make her want to chatter, and the last thing she felt like doing was making small talk. There was a dull pain in her temple that threatened to work itself into a full-blown headache. And she was as tense as a coiled spring. She couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened at the boarding gate. The scene kept playing in her mind like a loop of film that would run over and over until it wore out.
There had to be a way to make sense out of it. She knew what seemed to have happened: the man she’d met in the lounge had expected to see her at the boarding gate. When she hadn’t appeared, he’d looked for her.
End of story.
But she knew that it hadn’t been that simple. She’d felt the intensity of his gaze across the room. And then there had been her own reaction, that thrumming pulse of her blood—
‘Excuse me.’
The low-pitched masculine voice startled her. Her pulse leaped as she looked up. But it was only the man from the window seat, apologising as he made his way past her to the aisle. Danielle sighed and laid her head back. Who else would it have been? The stranger wasn’t going to come looking for her. He was hidden behind the curtains that separated first-class from the rest of the plane. And anyway, why would he want to find her? He’d probably forgotten the whole thing by now.
Which was precisely what she would do, she told herself firmly as she dredged the Frommer’s guidebook that Ginny had given her from the depths of her shoulder bag. She’d be in France soon, and seeing all the lovely old places she’d read about would be a dream come true.
She was deep in a description of Versailles when the woman beside her yawned loudly.
‘My goodness,’ she said with a little laugh, ‘did I fall asleep? I didn’t think I’d—’ Her breath caught. ‘Excuse me,’ she whispered as she leaned heavily across Danielle and stared out of the window, ‘do you see that wing? Is it supposed to look like that?’
Danielle followed the woman’s trembling finger and then she smiled. ‘It looks fine to me,’ she said gently.
Her neighbour touched her tongue to her lips. ‘Are you sure? I—I know it sounds silly, but I thought it looked loose. Just at the end there, you see? Where the metal is so thin.’
Danielle smiled again. ‘I’m sure it’s fine.’
‘Well, if you think so…’ The woman touched her tongue to her lips again. ‘I won’t bother you any more. I’m sure you’d rather read your book.’
Danielle sighed. ‘You didn’t bother me at all,’ she said, closing the Frommer.
‘Are you sure? Well, that’s nice to hear. I’m Alice Davis. Have you been abroad before? I have. One time. Two, really, if you count the trip I took to Bermuda. But that’s not going abroad, is it? Not like Europe, I mean. I always say…’
* * *
Hours later, when the plane finally touched down at the Nice-Côte d’Azur Airport, Danielle almost groaned with relief. Somehow she managed to smile at Alice, who’d talked, almost non-stop, across the entire Atlantic.
‘Aren’t you getting off?’ Alice asked as she eased her bulky self into the aisle.
Danielle looked at the passengers already crowding the narrow space and shook her head.
‘I’ll wait,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t look as if anyone’s going anywhere for a while anyway.’
Alice laughed. ‘You’re probably smart to avoid the crowd. But I can hardly wait to get my feet on solid ground again. And my niece is waiting—I haven’t seen her in a year. You understand.’
Danielle smiled and waved her hand as Alice moved into the queue, and then she settled back into her seat. The man in the window seat had already trampled her toes in his rush to disembark, muttering that he’d never make his connecting flight, thanks to the delay back in New York.
Everyone was in