A Perfect Stranger by Danielle Steel Page B

secretary returned with the answer to his question. His eyes desperately combed the constantly moving crowd. In a moment, despite his attempts not to lose sight of her, she had passed beyond him and once again disappeared. The secretary came back on the line a moment later, only to give him an unsatisfactory answer to his question and tell him that she had to return to another call. “And for this I waited on the phone all this time, Barbara?” For the first time in a long time, the receptionist noted, he sounded angry, but she only had time to mutter “Sorry” and then had to answer two more calls.
    And then, as though he could still find her if he hurried, he found himself rushing through the crowd, looking for the fur coat and the black hat with the veil. But it was obvious within a few moments that she wasnowhere in sight. But what the hell difference did it make anyway? Who was she? No one. A stranger.
    He chided himself for the romanticism that made him chase some mystery woman halfway through an airport. It was like looking for the white rabbit in
Alice in Wonderland
, only in this case he was looking for a beautiful woman with dark eyes, wearing a mink coat and a black hat with a veil and of course carrying
Lovers and Lies
by Charlotte Brandon. “Cool it,” he told himself softly as he passed through the crowd to the airport desk, where people were already lining up for their seat assignments and boarding passes. There seemed to be mobs ahead of him, and when at last he got to the counter, the only seats they had left were in the last two rows of the plane.
    “Why not just put me in the bathroom while you’re at it?” He looked ruefully at the young man at the counter, who only smiled.
    “Believe me, whoever gets here after you will be, and after that we’ll be sticking them in the cargo hold. This one is filled to the gills.”
    “That ought to be pleasant.”
    The airline’s representative smiled disarmingly and held out both hands. “Can we help it if we’re popular?” And then they both laughed. Suddenly Alex found himself looking around for her again, and once more to no avail. For an insane moment he wanted to ask the man waiting on him at the counter if he had seen her, but he recognized that that temptation was more than a little mad.
    The airline rep handed him his ticket, and a moment later he took his place on line at the gate. He had enough on his mind as he stood there: the client he was planning to see in New York; his mother; hissister; and Amanda, his niece. Still, the woman in the mink coat once more began to haunt him, just as she had the night he had seen her crying on the stairs. Or was he totally crazy and it wasn’t the same woman at all? He grinned to himself, his fantasies even bought his mother’s books. Maybe it was all very psychotic and he was finally losing his mind. But the prospect seemed to amuse him as the line moved slowly forward and he pulled his boarding pass out of his pocket. Once more he pushed his thoughts ahead to what he had to do in New York.
    Raphaella took her seat quickly as Tom stowed the tote bag under her seat and the stewardess quietly took the beautifully cut dark mink coat. All of the personnel on board had been warned that morning that they would be carrying a VIP on the trip to New York, but she would be traveling in coach instead of first class, which was apparently her standard choice. For years she had insisted to John Henry that it was much more “discreet.” No one would expect to find the wife of one of the richest men in the world lost among the housewives and secretaries and salesmen and babies in the coach section. When they preboarded her as they always did, she settled quickly into the next to the last row, where she always sat. It was discreet almost to the point of being invisible. Raphaella also knew that the airline’s personnel would make every effort not to place any other passengers in the seat beside her, so that it was