was monotonous and extremely lonely. I had to work hard to keep myself from making friends or being too noticeable so I could stay in disguise, and I never did get used to responding to the name David.
I also never stopped looking over my shoulder. Because I was positive that I would be found at any moment, and if Javier had sent people after me, I wanted to be able to see them coming before they got there. I didn’t think they’d do anything violent to me, of course, but I knew that if they found me, they would have one mission: Take me home. Get me back to my brother.
Return me to the position he’d decided I needed to take up. And, most likely, the faceless woman he’d decided was going to be my wife.
So yeah, if they were after me, I wanted to see them coming. I wanted at least a fighting chance at outrunning them.
Two weeks later, though, I got off the cruise ship still a free man, and went through the line at the port without any trouble, even managing to remember what my name was supposed to be when the guy at customs asked me for it. The fake passport worked like a charm, and before I knew it, I was in a cab and on my way to Grand Central.
And there, for just a moment, I let myself sit back and breathe. The streets of New York flew past me, all noise and color and crowds, and I thought for a moment about having the driver go to my favorite hotel in the city so I could check in and spend the night, an anonymous tourist in this city that held more people than my entire country.
Then I remembered the tickets at Grand Central, and the girl I was heading toward, and I kept my mouth shut. I might have been in one of my favorite cities in the world, and I might have felt like I deserved a night of celebration for having successfully crossed the Atlantic by myself—without my brother tracking me down—but that didn’t mean I got to take the night off. I had a destination in mind, and I meant to get there as quickly as possible.
Because the defeat in Erika’s voice when she’d called hadn’t left my mind since she’d hung up and I’d started planning how I was going to get to her. I didn’t know what was wrong, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to rest until I’d reached her and solved the problem.
Oh, and I’d added another thing to my list while I was on that ship.
Once I reached her, I was also going to tell her how I felt about her. Because that feeling had been growing with every passing minute, and I just wasn’t sure I could keep it inside any longer than I already had.
I wasn’t sure I even wanted to try.
“Twenty-two hours,” the girl at the counter said when I picked up my tickets and asked how long the ride was.
I actually gasped out loud. “Twenty-two hours on a train?” It seemed so outlandish that I thought she had to be kidding.
The girl gave me a confused stare, like she thought I might not be the sharpest tool in the shed, and tipped her head a bit. “You’re the one who booked these tickets, sir. Surely you knew that it would be a long trip.”
Actually, I wasn’t the one who had booked the tickets, and Isabelle, it seemed, hadn’t thought it necessary to tell me how long I’d be on the train.
Or… Well, she might have, honestly. It was probably all written down on that itinerary that she’d planned out. And which I’d never bothered to read. But that didn’t matter right now. What mattered was how I was going to get through nearly a full day on a train, with nothing to do.
“There will be a TV in your room, and some magazines,” the girl continued—seeking, I assumed, to make me feel better about the whole thing. “As well as a dining car.”
“My room?” I asked, even more confused. Trains had rooms?
The girl gave me another look of disbelief, and I started to think very strongly about just walking away without waiting for the question to be answered. I was supposed to be flying under the radar, traveling without drawing attention to myself. Instead, I was standing here making the ticket girl at Grand Central think I was certifiably insane—and