The Best Thing He Never Wanted.
A Standalone MacFarland Ranch Novel

A heartwarming, later-in-life, grumpy-sunshine romance. A warm, funny, later-in-life romance about freedom after loss, love across an ocean, and finding the real thing when you thought your chance had passed.

Some love stories start at twenty-two. The best ones start when you've lived enough to know exactly what they're worth.

Chapter One

Bea looked around the O2 arena, at the thousands of people, who were all here for good music, good times, and good company. The good music was guaranteed, and she was determined to have a good time. But she had no company.

She glanced at the chair beside her. It was doing its best, but it wasn’t fooling anyone — not even with her cool new leather jacket draped around its shoulders. She’d hung the jacket there when she first arrived, feeling a little self-conscious about coming to a concert like this alone. Then she’d felt foolish. But she’d left the jacket anyway. That chair deserved something if it couldn’t have Meg. They’d planned this and looked forward to it for months. It was their last hurrah before…

She’d splashed out on VIP tickets — which, here in London’s largest indoor arena, meant a single high row of bar stools with a narrow ledge for a drink, rather than a seat down in the vast banked rows below. The row in front sat lower, so that even when the crowd down there surged to its feet, Bea could still see the stage over their heads. Behind her there was no row at all — only a walkway where people danced when a song took them, and a little bar tucked into a dark corner. A woman in a fringed jacket was up there now, dancing with two strangers while her husband guarded four drinks and watched her with a long-suffering smile. She and Meg would barely have stayed in their seats. Perhaps by tomorrow night, Bea thought, the last of her self-consciousness would have worn off and she’d be up there dancing.

She grabbed her phone from her purse and did her best to look busy while the couple beside her returned to their seats. They seemed nice enough, but the last thing she needed was for them to take pity on her and adopt her. She reread Meg’s text — the one her oldest friend had sent at half past two that morning from a hospital corridor, with its abundance of capital letters and exclamation marks.

• Meg: OMG Bea! We’re at the hospital! Amy’s in labor! How many times did I tell her? This grandbaby was welcome to come early — just not until after we’d had our weekend. I can’t believe I’m standing you up! You’ll be at the hotel by now and everything. Go to the concert anyway!! You’ve wanted this for months. Don’t you DARE come home!! And DON’T go to that island even a day early just because I’ve abandoned you. I know you, Beatrice! I’m so, so sorry! I’ll ring you. xx

The message brought a smile now. When she’d first read it, in the dark of her hotel room, she’d laughed, delighted for her friend and her family — and if she’d cried a little, well, most of those tears had been happy ones, for Meg and her daughter and the new baby.

She hadn’t gone a day early. She’d thought about it. She could be in Crete by now — could be standing in the empty house that was somehow hers, listening to a language she didn’t speak drift up the hillside from the village below. She could have arrived five days early. Nobody would know. Nobody was waiting in either place.

But she’d bought these tickets back in October, when the whole crazy Crete plan was still just a shape in the dark and a concert felt like something to hold on to. Three nights. Country music, of all things — Meg had never let her hear the end of it, a woman raised on Radio 4 going weak at the knees for men in hats singing about trucks. Bea had told her, and meant it, that they were the only songs she’d ever found that said the enormous things plainly. Loss. Leaving. Loving someone across an impossible distance. Getting in the truck anyway.

There was even, God help her, a song about a dog. She steered smartly around the thought of the small warm weight that used to curl against her side, the sleepy thump of a tail when she said his name. No. Not tonight. Tonight, she was going to enjoy herself.

So she’d stayed. She’d come to the concert alone, walked in with no Meg beside her, and been — not fine. Fine was the wrong word; fine was for smaller things. She’d been free. Nearly sixty years old — Meg insisted it was silly to claim sixty when they still had a couple of years left to run — but sitting here, the bass thrumming up faintly through the legs of the stool and into her, with the leather jacket she’d bought for no one but herself as her only company, watching twenty thousand strangers sing about the exact thing she was doing, not one of them knowing her name, it seemed to Bea that denying sixty would be the sillier
thing by far.

Country music, she was beginning to realize, was less a musical genre and more of an emotional posture. It was the specific, driving ache of being just about to get in a truck and drive away from everything you had ever known, even if you didn’t own a truck, couldn’t drive on the right hand side of the road, and were currently sitting in an arena in Greenwich

She was, she supposed, about to get in the truck.

She swirled her glass and took a sip before setting it back on the ledge. Around the arena the lights dropped a fraction, and a kind of anticipation moved through the crowd like a change in the weather — conversations faltering, faces turning to the stage. The second warm-up act came out beneath a burst of white light, and Bea clapped with everyone else, laughing as the sound struck her almost physically.

Then one of the lights swept out past the stage and over the audience, and for a second it caught the pale brim of a cowboy hat at the dark edge of the arena. The American. She didn’t notice him. She re-noticed. That was the trouble with him.

She’d seen him at the hotel — once as the lift doors were closing on her, him stepping out of the one opposite, there and then gone in the half-second before hers slid shut. And a second time she was less sure of: a big shape at the edge of the breakfast room she’d clocked and dismissed and then, annoyingly, not quite managed to un-clock. And once, she’d mostly heard him — the back of him at the front desk, that pale hat unmistakable above the crowd, some cheerful receptionist chirping a whole paragraph of welcome while a low American drawl answered in about four words, as though words cost money and he was careful with his. Two of those she’d filed away. The third, for reasons she declined to examine, wouldn’t quite file.

And here he was again — a very large, very still man in a cowboy hat, back at the dark edge of the arena where the light had found him, watching the crowd instead of the stage and doing a very good job, the rest of the time, of not being seen.

He was not, Bea thought, here for the music.

She turned back to the stage before he could catch her looking. She had a new life to walk into in five days, and it had precisely no room in it for a man who stood in shadows and watched the exits.

She was fairly sure about that. She was, in fact, about seventy percent sure.

~ ~ ~

Blane shoved his hands deeper into his pockets as he scanned the crowd. There was no need for him to be here. He knew that damn well. Not that he’d ever admit it to Cash — telling that man he was right about anything was never a wise move. But Blane had wanted to be here.

One of his teams was handling security for the artists on stage tonight, and he’d just wanted to see them at work without him. He didn’t have any doubts about their abilities. He’d just wanted… Who the hell was he trying to kid? He’d needed to get away for a while. Living back in Montana was good. It was great to be around his little sister every day again. It was great to be in the place where he’d grown up, and able to hang out with his old buddies whenever he wanted. What wasn’t so great was that he couldn’t tell them he didn’t always want to hang out with them. He preferred to work. And so here he was, working — even though no one other than Cash knew that he was.

He’d watched his team from the shadows, avoiding the places any threat might operate from. He’d trained them well; they’d be looking for shadows in the shadows. The spot where he stood gave him a better view of the audience — and any would-be threats — than it did of his team. He had to trust they were looking in all the right places.

He scanned the crowded arena, still kind of amazed that twenty thousand people would turn out for a country music concert here in London, England. If he’d been dropped into this arena blind, he’d have sworn he was stateside somewhere. He’d never have guessed he’d find such a concentration of cowboy hats and western boots anywhere this side of the Atlantic.

“Want me to get you a pint, love?”

The guy who said it walked by within three feet of Blane without noticing he was there. Of course, listening to the concertgoers left no doubt about where he was.

He turned back to scanning the crowd. The arena looked chaotic if you didn’t know how to read it. Twenty thousand people talking, drinking, singing, and squeezing past one another. Hats blocked sightlines. People abandoned their seats in clusters and came back carrying more cups than they had hands. Light swept across the tiers in broad arcs, turning faces white and gold before dropping them back into shadow.

But crowds had patterns. They opened around an argument and tightened around a celebrity. They surged toward the doors and the bars and the bathrooms between acts. They shifted before trouble started, the people closest to it registering the threat before they understood what they’d seen.

This crowd felt easy—excited, loud, half-drunk in places, but good-natured. He’d have put money on nothing bad happening in it tonight.

He resumed his scan. The bass rolled in deep enough that he felt it come up through the concrete and into the soles of his boots, and another roar climbed from the floor. Across the arena, thousands of people rose as one when the singer stepped to the front of the stage. Arms lifted. Phones flashed to life. The light off the big screens washed the nearest sections blue, then amber.

His gaze moved steadily over them, then stopped. His chin came up.

The woman from the hotel. It was her. He wasn’t imagining things. She sat above the section in front of her, a glass of wine resting on the ledge by one hand. While everyone around her sang and moved, she watched the stage with a slight smile on her face. She seemed comfortable enough to be there but not comfortable enough to forget she was alone.

He’d noticed her at the hotel, too — at breakfast, across the lobby, a near miss in the elevators when hers left as his arrived — and, unlike most things he cataloged and set down, he hadn’t yet managed to set her down. He’d guessed she was alone. Alone and not completely comfortable. So it surprised him that she was here— no, wait. That wasn’t an empty seat beside her — there was a jacket on it. She wasn’t alone.

Disappointment hit him, sudden and heavy enough to piss him off. He pushed it away. What the hell did it matter to him anyway? She was just a face from the hotel, that was all. He should be glad she wasn’t here alone. He’d have to worry about her safety if she were.

He watched for a while, but no one came to take the empty seat. No husband, no date — no girlfriend, for that matter, either. Still, the jacket said it was waiting for someone. If it had been a truly empty seat, he might have been tempted to claim it. Sitting in the crowd beside a woman would be the best cover he could think of — no one would ever think to look for him there.

But even if that seat had a big VACANT sign on it, he wouldn’t have gone over, and he knew it. He didn’t know how to approach a woman like that—or any woman. He didn’t have the smooth lines or the charming chatter. He was, as Cash had once told him, about as charming as a granite cliff.

As he watched, the couple on the other side of the empty seat turned to talk to her. Maybe they were all there together, but no. The woman gave them the polite smile people used with strangers, chatted for a few minutes, then patted the jacket and said something that made them nod. She rose and headed for the doors that led out to the concourse.

He was tailing her before he knew he’d moved. The narrow walkway swallowed her into the flow of people circling the arena, and Blane stepped out of the shadows after her, immediately too aware of his own size beneath the bright concourse lights.

What the hell was he doing? She was no threat to anyone, of that he was sure. And there was no other reason for him to follow a stranger out into the concourse.

She passed the concession stands without slowing, the air thick with beer and fried onions and perfume and too many warm bodies in too small a space. Music from inside followed them as a muffled pulse, swelling every time one of the doors swung open. She didn’t slow at the bar or the merchandise stands, didn’t look around as though she was searching for whoever should have been in that empty chair.

His stride faltered when she joined the line for the women’s bathrooms. Of course that was where she was headed. He stopped in the middle of the concourse, and the crowd divided around him like water around a rock. Maybe Cash was right about him. Maybe he really did need a vacation. What other explanation could there be for stepping out into the open without a thought, when he was supposed to be here undercover?

He turned on his heel and walked straight into three young guys. They scattered around him like bowling pins and then apologized profusely to him for the collision he’d caused.

~ ~ ~

Bea stayed all the way to the end, right till the very last encore had died and the lights came up gold and ordinary. Then she let herself be carried out on the tide — twenty thousand people all deciding at once that they needed the same three trains.

North Greenwich station took them the way a drain takes a flood. She shuffled down through the tunnels in a press of cowboy hats and warm coats and someone’s fading perfume, not unhappy about it; there was a kind of anonymity in being one body among thousands, nobody’s responsibility, nobody’s guest. She let the crowd decide her pace and thought about very little, the songs still playing in her head, the music still reverberating in her chest.

She changed at Bond Street for the Central line, and it was on that platform — the crush thinning, the air close and warm off the tunnel — that she saw the hat.

It was a weekend of hats, of course. Half of London had apparently decided to dress like Nashville, and there were still a dozen of them dotted along the platform. But this one was pale and sat higher than the others, on a man who stood a clear head above the crowd around him, and who was — she was fairly sure, from the back, at forty feet, on a train platform — very still.

She found she had drifted a step toward him. Purely practical, she told herself. If it was him, he was staying at her hotel, and she was, now she thought about it, not
entirely certain of the walk from Tottenham Court Road at this hour with Meg not beside her to march them both along like she owned the pavement. One could, quite reasonably, keep a fellow guest in view. Follow at a sensible distance. Arrive safely in his wake and never say a word. That was just sense.
That was not — she was very clear with herself on this point — the behavior of
a woman who wanted a second look at a large American she had already decided
had no place whatsoever in her new life.

She took another step and told herself it was the crowd moving her. She was close enough now to say something — not that she would, she was only checking — when the man turned to look at the board, tipping his hat back, and it wasn’t him at all. This man was younger, rounder, with a cheerful, sunburnt face. He caught her looking and gave her a friendly “All right, love?” in an accent that placed him
firmly and unmistakably as being from no further west than Basildon.

“Fine, thank you,” Bea said, with tremendous dignity, and scurried onto the very next train whether it was hers or not.

It was, mercifully, hers. She found a pole to hold and stood very straight and refused, on principle, to examine why the disappointment sat quite so heavily — why finding out it wasn’t him should feel like anything at all, when the entire
point of the exercise had been that she didn’t care one way or the other. She was, she decided, tired—that was all. It had been a long day, and an emotional one, and a tired woman could be forgiven a small irrational sag over a stranger in a hat. It meant nothing. She would not be giving it another thought.

She gave it several more thoughts all the way to Tottenham Court Road.

There, the warning to mind the gap sounded rather disapproving as she stepped out onto a quieter
platform.

The crowd here was thinner, the late-night kind, everyone moving with the looseness of people whose evening
was over. She followed the signs for the way out, already bracing herself for the walk, rehearsing the turns — left out of the station, or was it right? and then — and lifted her gaze to the steep escalator rising ahead of her.

And there he was, near the top, a clear head above everyone on the moving stair, that pale hat unmistakable, riding up and away from her without the smallest backward glance — a man entirely unhurried, entirely unbothered — a man who, she imagined, had never once in his life worried about being followed, because it had simply never occurred to him that anyone would dare.

It was him. She was — she checked herself and then stopped bothering to check — quite certain it was
him.

She stood at the foot of the escalator like a fool while a teenager tutted past her.

He must have been at Bond Street, after all — half the arena had been at Bond Street. And a man had to get back to his hotel the same as she did, and there was absolutely no reason on God’s green earth to imagine that a stranger had noted where a woman was standing on a crowded platform, worked out where she’d likely be getting off, and gone on ahead so that he might, without ever being seen to do it, make sure she came up the escalator and out into the London night in one piece.

No reason at all; the thought was preposterous.

She stepped onto the escalator and let it carry her up after him, and did not, at any point, examine why the preposterous thought had settled somewhere under her ribs and made itself quietly, warmly, infuriatingly at home.

By the time she reached the top, he was gone — out through the barriers and into the dark, a big still shape one moment and no shape at all the next. She walked back to the hotel alone.

She was fine the whole way. Perfectly fine. She knew every turn, as it happened.

And if the pavement felt a little less lonely than she’d feared — if some foolish, tired, sixty-in-two-years part of her walked the whole way half-expecting to look up
and find a cowboy hat waiting at the next corner, just in case — well. That was nobody’s business but her own.