Free Five Days in Paris by Danielle Steel Page A

to have drifted even farther from her group after a while, and even the bodyguards seemed to have lost track of her and paid no attention whatsoever to her. And the senator had had his back to her ever since they'd come out of the hotel, he never spoke to her once, as he and his entourage settled into chairs, and Olivia moved even farther to the rear of the several hundred guests in the Place Vendome to get another cup of coffee. She looked quite peaceful standing there, and didn't seem in the least bothered that her husband's entire party ignored her. And as he looked at her, standing there, Peter was more and more fascinated, and couldn't help staring.
    She offered an elderly American woman a chair, and patted a little dog, and eventually set her empty cup back on a table. A waiter offered Olivia another cup, but she smiled and shook her head graciously as she declined it. There was something wonderfully gentle and luminous about her, as though she had just drifted to earth and were really an angel. It was hard for Peter to accept the fact now that she was just a woman. She looked too peaceful, too gentle, too perfect, too mysterious, and when people came too close to her, too frightened. She was obviously ill at ease under close scrutiny, and she seemed happiest when no one was paying attention to her, which no one was that night. She was so unpretentiously dressed, and so unassuming standing there, that even the Americans in the crowd didn't recognize her, although they had seen her hundreds of times in every newspaper and magazine in the country. She had been every paparazzi's dream for years, as they leapt out at her, and caught her unprepared, particularly in the years when she had been with her sick and dying child. But even now, she intrigued them, as something of a legend, and a kind of martyr.
    And as Peter watched her continually, he couldn't help noticing that she was drifting farther and farther back, behind the other guests, and he actually had to strain now to see her. He wondered if there was a reason for it, or if she had just moved back there without thinking. She was far from her husband and his entourage by then, and they couldn't have seen her at all, unless they moved back themselves and tried to find her. More guests had returned to the hotel, from late night restaurants or nightclubs like Chez Castel, or simply from dinners with friends, or the theater. And gawkers had come to see what was happening. The whispers in the crowd blamed it all on King Khaled. There was an important British minister in the hotel too, and there had been a rumor that it could have been the IRA, but someone had supposedly planted a bomb, or said they had, and by order of the police, no one was going back into the hotel until the CRS found it.
    It was well after midnight, and Eastwood had long since left to sleep in his trailer on the set. He wasn't going to waste the next few hours standing in the Place Vendome, waiting around until morning. And as Peter glanced around he noticed Olivia Thatcher slowly move away entirely from the guests of the hotel, and drift nonchalantly to the other side of the square. She had turned her back on the people standing there, and then suddenly she seemed to be walking smoothly and swiftly toward the corner. And he couldn't help wondering where she was going. He looked to see if she had a bodyguard in tow, he was sure that if anyone knew what she was doing, they would have sent one. But she was clearly on her own, as she began to hurry, and she never once glanced over her shoulder. He couldn't take his eyes off her, and without thinking, he moved away from the crowd himself and began to follow her to the corner of the Place Vendome. There was so much activity outside the hotel, and spilling everywhere, that it appeared that no one had seen either of them leaving. What Peter didn't realize was that for a few steps at least, a man was following him, but at the sound of a flurry in the square, he