Ruth knew she was thirty thousand feet in the air and safe from everything on the ground below her. She knew that. But she could not stop the irrational panic that her troubles had followed her. That her new identity had not cloaked her in security as she had hoped. That the moment she walked out onto a Paris street, she would be taken back to the darkness she'd fought to escape.

The fact that she had escaped was a bloody miracle. If he knew who she really was, if he knew her background, he would not have let her out of his sight for a minute. But thankfully Renata Eder was no one important. Not very clever or very interesting or very noticeable. Renata followed instructions and blushed bright pink whenever a man smiled at her. Renata was simple and gentle and she knew nothing, and she was expendable.

At least that's what Ruth had thought. She did not think she'd let on how much attention she was paying. She assumed that no one suspected her at all.

Oh how wrong she was.

But for now, just for now, she was safe. She was flying high above the clouds and nervously sipping ginger ale. There was a film playing on the flight. It was American. Something with a blonde Sandra Bullock and a large boy playing football. The subtitles were in Romania, so Ruth assumed the audio would have been dubbed in French, given that she was on a flight between Bucharest and Paris. But she did not bother to ask for headphones and she had no interest in watching the film. She just let the moving colors wash over her glazed vision as she focused on her breathing.

She had concocted this scheme in a hurry, as she'd needed to figure out something—anything—in a hurry. She had no idea what was going to be waiting for her when she landed in Paris. But she knew that whatever it was would be better than what would have surely been her fate if she'd stayed in Bucharest.

It was a mad idea, to use this name for her false passport. Thank god Romanian border control wasn't too clever. She knew that all to well, thanks to the time she'd spent yelling in broken Romanian at a state police officer when they were trying to get an al Qaeda operative stopped at the port in Constanta after travelling across the Black Sea from Turkey. There had been no improvement in three years, so far as she could tell.

Simplicities of fooling the Romanian authorities aside, the name Ruth Pearce was sure to be flagged. And what were the odds of it being flagged by the right people? The right person, really.

In spite of her nerves, Ruth smiled to herself. Her heart fluttered in her chest at the very idea that, if every little detail somehow worked out, she might get to see Harry again. There was every chance he'd forgotten about her and moved on with his life. He was still alive and still at Five, that much she'd been able to discern from infrequent and untraceable internet searches over the last two years. But surely he had a life all his own in her absence. Surely he had not ached for her as she had for him.

Perhaps she'd built it all up too much in her mind, her memories of her time with him. Their heartbreaking goodbye on the London docks had all the melodrama of a great Jane Austen romance. Only there had been no happy ending for the lost lovers to reunite. Frederick Wentworth went off with the Navy and Anne Elliot was left with her unkindly father and sister.

But what if—and the thought barely warranted thinking about, it was so fanciful—this could be the triumphant return of Captain Wentworth with his fortune to the waiting Miss Elliot for them to rediscover their love for one another and to be happy together for all their days?

Ruth shook herself. This was not Persuasion. This was not some romantic novel. This was real life. Ruth was no lady fair awaiting her rescuing gentleman of means. Harry was no lovestruck hero. No, Ruth was running from violent arms dealers and Harry was probably safe in his office, none the wiser to her plight.

Because if this was a love story, Ruth would not be hoping the makeup she'd caked on had sufficiently covered the bruises all over her face, and she would not be sitting on a plane to make her escape with a hired assassin sitting three rows behind her, watching her every move.