The Last Time I Saw Paris by Elizabeth Adler

get us on it?” Dan demanded.
    The clerk tapped at his computer. “All flights for the next week are fully booked, sir. We would have to put you on standby. Meanwhile, we have two seats on the Frankfurt flight at eleven forty-five tonight, one in coach, one in business. Take it or leave it. And I might as well tell you, so many flights have been delayed or canceled because of the weather, there are no hotel rooms left in Cincinnati.”
    They stared silently at each other. It was a ten-hourflight to Frankfurt and they couldn’t even travel together. “We’ll take it.” Dan sighed.
    He put a comforting arm around Lara as they made their way up to the Crown Lounge with another six hours to kill before their flight. “I’m sorry, honey. We’ll soon be in Paris, though, you’ll see.”
    Â 
    They sat in the lounge, nibbling on unwanted sandwiches, drinking yet another cup of coffee, watching lightning stabbing through the ominous sky. I’m exhausted, Lara thought, and, darn it, I’m still only in
Cincinnati.
    It was hardly a great start to a romantic adventure. She stole a glance at Dan, immersed in a baseball game on TV. This was surely God’s punishment for an adulterous woman, she thought, especially one who’s taking her lover on her Second Honeymoon. I should never have left Carmel, never have asked him to come with me. And besides, she just
knew
this would never have happened to Bill.
    A couple of hours passed. Dan went off to check at the desk. After a lengthy conversation with the woman in charge, he returned smiling, with the first miracle of the day. They had seats together in business class.
    The second miracle happened when their flight was called, and the third miracle when, despite the weather, they actually took off on time.
    They smiled delightedly at each other, as they left Cincinnati behind.
“Finally,”
Lara said, relieved.
    The words
at last
and
finally
are becoming regulars in our conversation, she thought.
At last,
twelve hours after we left home, we are
finally
on our way to Europe,and she pushed the nagging reminder that they should have been in Paris by now to the back of her mind. She was with Dan, and they were on their way to Paris.
    Well, not quite, but at least they were en route to Europe. Even if it was only to Frankfurt.

CHAPTER 16
    L ara was wide awake the whole ten-hour flight, suspended in space and time with Dan dozing uneasily in the seat next to her. She glanced lovingly at him. He looked so
young.
    She knew she should have told him this was meant to be her Second Honeymoon, but somehow she had thought it better he didn’t know, and now it was too late.
    She thought about the last time she had flown to Europe, with her brand-new husband.
    They had been married the day before with Lara in traditional white—a fluid satin column of a gown with a long train it had taken four little pages to manage. She remembered it had been a size six and thought regretfully there was no way she would have been able to get into it now, though her daughter, Minnie, certainly could have. Lara had worn her glossy dark hair piled up to accommodate a circlet of fragrant gardenias, and with her winged eyebrows and golden brown eyes and the sweet glow of youth, she had looked even more like Audrey Hepburn.
    Bill, whom she had only ever seen in a doctor’s white coat or jeans and sweaters, had looked like a handsome, boyish stranger in a gray cutaway, his curly dark hair brushed flat and a white rosebud in his buttonhole.
    Her mother had insisted on the works: three hundredguests, the local country club for the reception booked a year in advance, all the little female cousins as flower girls, plus the Girlfriends as bridesmaids. Dinner and dancing, wedding cake and champagne, photographs and speeches. By the time it was all over, she and Bill had been eager to escape to their hotel room, not because they couldn’t wait to fall into