Page 132 of The Thing About My Prince

“Well? What didthe personsay?” Agnetha asks.

“The person says to wait until Miss Lane changes her mind.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Now some of the eyes are on me. “He knows I’ll worry you’re in danger and that I’ll go with you to get you out of here, right?”

“The response was to just wait, ma’am.” Dane’s tone remains utterly flat.

“I’m assuming you know whothe personis,” Agnetha says.

“Yes.” I drop my face into my palms. “I do.”

“And is the person a good person? Someone you’re certain you’re safe around?”

I nod into my hands.

“And are you worried that someone might, at any second, shoot this dude who seems to have an armored car with a driver parked outside with its engine running?”

“He has what?” I swing around to look out of the windowand there is indeed a large black SUV with dark windows parked outside this most inconspicuous of restaurants. He might as well have slapped a bull’s-eye on the front door.

“Fuck.”

I drain my glass, a few more seconds thinking time.

“Okay.” A confused mixture of excited butterflies, dread, and bafflement at what my life has become, mix with the still-fresh shock of seeing Dane here as I pull the strap of my bag over my head. “I’m coming.”

“Chicken for one then, huh?” Agnetha says as I follow Dane to a car that’ll take me to the man I thought I’d never see again.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

OLIVER

“They’ll be fine,” Cole says as I pace the plane from the cockpit door to the flight attendant’s station at the back. “Dane did tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. And he’s worked with that driver before. Miss Lane will be fine.”

“I know. But this is my first time in a war zone.”

“That’s why we wouldn’t let you leave the plane and kept you at the airport. It’s the safest place in the city.”

A black shape moves toward us across the tarmac.

“Is that them?” I kneel on the sofa to peer out of the window.

“Yes.” Cole moves toward the front door, the flight attendant right behind him.

I thought my heart was racing before. Now, it’s like a bunch of little men with hammers are banging on the inside of my ribs but all are completely out of time with each other.

And someone somewhere has pressed the delete key that’s erased from my brain everything I’d prepared to say. All the words I’ve practiced over and over in my mind are gone and have been replaced by a big white hole of blinding light.

I race back to my chair and grab my bottle of water to moisten my now desert-dry mouth—at least enough for me to unstick my tongue from the roof of my mouth so I can attempt to form sentences, even if I don’t know what words to put in them.

The flight attendant cracks the door open, Cole sticks his head through the gap to check who’s there, then tells the attendant she can open it fully.

My heart lurches. Then there she is. Just feet away from me. Hot and sweaty, with dirt on her pale, loose pants and shirt.

I debated long and hard whether I should hug her when we met. And decided I’d walk up to her slowly and see if she showed any sign of wanting to hug me, allow her to make the first move.

Once the flight attendant has locked the door again, she, Cole, and Dane quickly move past us to the back of the aircraft and pull a dark curtain behind them.

Now there’s only the two of us.