FRAN CLIMBED INTO the hotel shuttle bus at San Francisco airport. It had been a long flight, and it had come after a gruelling few days. She had flown out of Rome the very afternoon after confronting Nic, not able to bear to stay longer, then landed at Stanstead, taken the bus to Cambridge.
She had spoken to her professor the next morning, telling him she had to leave as soon as possible for urgent personal reasons. Replied to the email sitting in her inbox, accepting an invitation to an interview for a research position at a university in Southern California that she’d applied for when she’d discovered she was pregnant by a man who did not want her.
Her throat tightened unbearably. Now it was she who did not want him. Not the man he was.
And now, it seemed, with bitter irony, it was he who wanted her—or rather the baby she carried.
He was still determined on them marrying. And to that end there had come a slew of emails from him, and text messages, and voicemails, and calls she had ignored just as she’d ignored all his other attempts to communicate with her.
Because she knew what he was saying. The first message from him had said it all.
You’re emotional—I understand that. But we can’t leave it like this. When you’ve calmed down we can talk. For now, I’ll leave you in peace. Then I’ll come and see you in Cambridge and we can sort things out. We have no choice but to sort things out.
She’d deleted the message. And all the others. Only as she’d sat in Departures at Heathrow had she texted him. One final text before boarding.
She had flown quite deliberately to San Francisco. She had somewhere to go before she headed for LA. Somewhere she had to go.
As she checked in to her hotel, hearing the familiar American accents all around her, hearing herself being called Dr Ristori in the way she was used to here, she felt a sense of familiarity, of ease.
It comforted her.
But it brought memories too. Memories that she could not keep out. Memories that came of their own volition. That brought their own pain with them. It was a pain she would have to bear now. Memories of a tall, powerfully built, sable-haired guy with blue, blue eyes and a smile like a desert wolf.
Who was lost to her for ever.
And there was only one place to bear that. The place where she was going now.
Nic stared at the words on the phone screen as if they made no sense. But then, they didn’t. They didn’t make sense at all.
Nic, I’m not going to marry you. It would be a disaster for both of us. Neither of us is who we once thought we were. You aren’t the man I remember, and I am not the woman you remember. We are better off without each other. Please don’t try and make me change my mind, because I won’t. I can’t. We have well over half a year to sort out things like access rights. I’m sure we can come to a civilised arrangement. For now, I can’t cope with that.
He kept reading the words, re-reading them. But still they made no sense. How could they? The imperative of their marriage was paramount. Except... His eyes rested on the words on the screen. For her, that imperative was absent.
We are better off without each other.
He read the words, read them again. Something was building in him. Something he didn’t know, didn’t recognise. But it was powerful. As if pressure were building up inside a volcano—a volcano that had been consigned to dormancy. Mistakenly.
His eyes moved back to the sentence that came before.
You aren’t the man I remember.
He felt the pressure mount within him. His phone was ringing—his PA—but he lifted it only to slam the receiver down again. His focus was on the words, only on the words. And on the sense of pressure building in him. On the words that came next.
I am not the woman you remember.
And the pressure inside his head burst, flowing through his consciousness like lava racing down a mountainside, consuming everything in its path. He was remembering the woman he had once thought her to be. Remembering in absolute coruscating detail every single moment of their time together.
And with that came a realisation, blasting through everything else.
His phone rang again, and this time he snatched it up. ‘Charter a plane to Cambridge, England—now!’
Fran was deplaning again, this time in Las Vegas. To walk out of McCarran had been to feel her throat spasm, as if she could see herself there in the summer heat, backpack on one shoulder, that last hurried kiss with Nic...
The rental car she picked up was no luxury SUV. Thoughts flashed through her of how she’d been so concerned that Nic had blithely helped himself to a hotel vehicle to take off in—and how that other security guy had greeted him on their return from the desert sunset.
‘Evening, boss.’
‘He’s on my team,’ Nic had explained casually.
Yes, you might say that—you might also say that your team ran to thousands of people all around the world.
And all the time he was Nicolo Falcone, and I never noticed...
Getting out of Vegas occupied her mind, and she was glad to hit Route 15, out of the city, heading north-east. She would need to break her journey, stop off overnight, but that should be no problem. The problem would come later—closer to her destination.
Winter was closing in, and though she’d checked the forecast, and it had been sufficiently clement, snow would stop her in her tracks.
She drove on, determined to make her destination. Expression set.
Nic was throwing his weight around. He knew it and didn’t care. That was what it was for. He was shamelessly using a mixture of arrogant imperiousness and calculated charm to get the information he wanted. Needed.
His eyes flashed blue fire. Where the hell was she?
Because she wasn’t in Cambridge. Her departmental secretary was looking at him apologetically. ‘You’ve just missed her, I’m afraid. She’s gone to California—for an interview I believe.’
He strode off, claws clenching inside him. Then his phone was in his hand, and he was straight through to his own security team at his Mayfair property.
‘I need you to trace someone,’ was his terse command.
It was a simple order, but it took a frustratingly long time for the answer to get back to him. And when it did it stopped him in his tracks. Then galvanised him with the very first emotion he’d felt since he’d opened her email, in which she had refused to marry him.
Something that he could clutch at.
Hope.
Fran heaved a sigh of relief. The snow had not come, the road was still open, and day tickets were still available. She drove on between the dark conifers, all signs of habitation long gone, and then finally she was there, leaving the car in the almost deserted car park, making her way to where she wanted to be.
To remember what had never happened. What now never could.
She sat on one of the many benches, huddled into the ski-jacket she’d bought en route, her feet warm in the solid boots she’d also bought. The cold nipped at her, and she glanced at some of the few hikers, even more warmly clad than her, ready to go backpacking even at this time of year.
The sky above was leaden, but that did not spoil the view.
Ten miles across. Ten miles to where she had stood in the summer heat. She sat and gazed across the unbridgeable distance from there to here, to where she was now. Here at this point in her life.
We can’t go back. We can’t get back to what has gone. That time has past.
Wasn’t that what she’d told herself in all those months since then? She told it to herself again—because she must. Because there was no alternative. This journey here, now, had been for one reason only. To finally say goodbye to that time. To finally let it go.
To let Nic go—the man she had come to say goodbye to.
Silently her hand went to her abdomen and she spoke to her unborn child, who still seemed so unreal, but who was there, secret inside her. Her voice was low, but clear in the cold air, here where there was no one else but the hikers starting their descent. So she spoke aloud the words she needed to say. To the child she needed to say them to. About the man she needed to say them for.
‘I’ve brought you here so I can tell you, in years to come, that I made it here. But only on my own—only with you. And I want you to know that on that far side of here, ten miles away, I once stood—but not with you. I want you to know, my son or my daughter, that it was the most important time of my life. But I didn’t know it then.’
She had thought herself alone, unheard by anyone but the tiny being growing within her.
But she was wrong.
A voice behind her spoke.
‘And no more did I know it.’
A gasp broke from her. Instant recognition of that deep, gravelled voice, charged with so much.
She slewed around. Felt faint suddenly with shock. With so much more than shock.
It was Nic.