One Wild Night with Her Enemy by Heidi Rice

Author:Heidi Rice
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2021-04-12T14:29:21+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

CASSIE STEPPED OUT through the back door of the housekeeper’s annexe wearing the raincoat she’d borrowed from Mrs Mendoza’s dwindling supply of clean clothing.

Sun shone off the dew clinging to the ferns and rhododendrons lining the path and burned away the last of the morning mist. After a whole day yesterday spent hiding out in her room, in between sneaked trips to the kitchen to heat up food whenever the coast was clear—which had been most of the time, because Luke seemed to be avoiding her with the same dedication with which she was avoiding him—she was going stir crazy.

She zipped up the raincoat, settled the borrowed backpack on her shoulders and set out along the path which, according to the map, led to a trail that circumnavigated the island.

Worrying about her inability to contact her office—or anyone, for that matter—and how long it might be before she got back to San Francisco, not to mention the job of avoiding her reluctant host and any more too revealing heart-to-hearts at all costs, wasn’t helping with her sleep deprivation. Or her stress levels.

She needed to get out of the house. Perhaps she was not the outdoors type, but the only way to take her mind off Luke and the things she’d learned about him two days ago was to fill her time with something else. And a hike was pretty much her only option.

From what she could remember when they’d flown into the bay three nights ago, the island was more than big enough to contain both of them without there being much chance of her bumping into him. She’d managed to find a small guidebook to Oregon’s bird life. She would tour the area, scope out the terrain, and see if she could spot some of the birds indigenous to the Pacific Northwest. Because staying holed up in his house all day yesterday had given her far too much time to mull over the conversation they’d had about his childhood.

‘After she died I was on my own. But that was the way I wanted it.’

Did he really believe that? She frowned. And why did she care whether he did or not? She’d had no business probing, or offering him advice about a relationship with the father he’d never known, when her relationship with her own father could best be described as barely functional. She couldn’t even sort out her own daddy issues, so what made her think she could sort out his?

One thing she did know, though: keeping busy had always kept her sane—especially when she was dealing with a problem outside her control, such as the loneliness she’d fallen into when her father had pushed Ashling and Angela Doyle out of her life without any warning, or the fact that she’d got stranded on a taciturn billionaire’s private island and started to delude herself into believing they had something in common, when they clearly did not.

Avoidance had always been her great go-to strategy. So, having stuffed the backpack

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