Page 1 of Bound By Her Baby Revelation (Hot Winter Escapes)

CHAPTER ONE

KAYAQUIETLYLETherself into the house. Frankly, she didn’t have the energy to be anythingbutquiet, because she was dead on her feet and brutally cold.

She could feel the February freeze seeping through the layers and pinching her fingers and toes through her boots and gloves. Her cheeks were stinging. She hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours and all she wanted to do now was throw herself into her bed and sleep for a hundred years.

The hall light was on. Why was the hall light on? Had she left it on? She’d done a checklist before she’d left Canada for New Zealand two months ago. Would she have written, “remember to switch hall light off”? Unlikely. But Mrs Simpson, who was her nearest neighbour, had keys to the house. Maybe she’d come in to check and forgotten to switch it off.

None of that mattered.

What mattered was sleep.

She dumped the suitcases on the ground along with her coat and shoes, flexed her sore muscles and padded up the stairs.

Kaya knew this house like the back of her hand because this had been her home for the past three years, all thanks to Julie Anne’s kindness and generosity. She’d just about managed to make ends meet at university, picking up part-time jobs wherever she could find them to cover her accommodation and her expenses. Then she’d returned back home, clutching her well-earned degree, to find the cost of renting somewhere without much money in the bank and a job yet to materialise beyond her grasp.

Had her mother still been renting their apartment in town, things would have been just fine, but Katherine Hunter had decamped to New Zealand six years ago with her newly acquired husband. Going to her with a begging bowl had been out of the question, the sort of last resort that hadn’t even featured on Kaya’s radar.

Her mother had finally found her Mr Right, after a lifetime of disappointing relationships with rich guys who’d had no real interest in her, and there was no way Kaya was going to test the marriage by asking for favours. It wasn’t as though her mother had any money of her own to throw around and her flamboyant, adorable husband—kind and lovely as he was—simply wouldn’t have the means, or probably the inclination, to help out a stepdaughter he barely knew.

So the offer from Julie Anne to lodge with her rent-free had been manna from heaven and Kaya had never, not once, stopped thanking her lucky stars for the older woman’s kindly intervention.

Heading upstairs, she paused and took a moment to think about Julie Anne, pushing away the tears pricking the back of her eyes. How could someone so fit, so vibrant, so healthy...sogood...have died without warning?

Kaya had been working when she’d got the call from the halfway house that Julie Anne had been rushed to hospital—and not the small, local hospital but the one in Vancouver that was over an hour away.

Julie Anne had been talking to Louise, the manager, chatting and laughing, doing the round at the halfway house as she always did on a Friday, when she’d suddenly collapsed. Just like that. Louise had barely been able to talk through her hysteria and tears.

Kaya had rushed to the hospital and had just about made it there to hold her friend’s hand and tell her how much she loved her before the life force that had inspired so many over the years had been snuffed out. She had barely taken in the details: an aneurysm...nothing could have been done...a genetic time-bomb waiting to go off... In the end, what had the details mattered when Julie Anne was no longer there, whatever the reason?

She felt as if she’d spent so long crying. There’d been weeks of tears as Julie Anne’s death had sunk in, tears for the friend she’d lost—and, as she’d discovered to her confusion and shock, the friend she had not known half as well as she’d thought she did.

So many disclosures and revelations had come in the wake of her untimely death, disclosures she had accepted because there had been no optionbutto accept them. And, anyway, how well did she ever know anyone when she got right down to it? She had resigned herself to the sadness of knowing that Julie Anne had not been the open book she had thought and had focused on all the good she had brought with her instead—focused on the wonderful woman she had been.

In truth, Julie Anne had been her mentor and best friend, despite the age gap. Kaya had known her since she and her mother had moved to this part of the country north of Vancouver and close to Whistler, where her mother had worked. She could barely remember the distant mists of time before that, because she’d been very young, not quite six. She and her parents had lived in Alaska, her father’s homeland.

When he had died, they had migrated here, and Julie Anne had become part of both their lives. She had babysat a young Kaya and then, later, taken her under her wing and covered all those times when Katherine Hunter had been out and about with her rich suitor. Katherine had always been more of a pal to Kaya than a mother and never one to curtail her social life to accommodate a child.

Within minutes of decamping to Canada, to this part of the world where she had grown up, Katherine had vigorously contacted all her old connections—not that there had been that many after more than a decade’s absence. With single-minded focus, she’d caught up with the town news in record time and concluded that, if help was needed with her young child, then Julie Anne—well known, active in the community and with no ties of her own—would be a very handy babysitter indeed. And so she had been: cheerful, obliging and happy to pick up the slack.

In a lot of ways, their lives had been entwined for so long and in so many ways that she’d been more like a mother to Kaya than Kaya’s own mother had been.

Kaya fought back surging memories.

As she quickly and quietly headed to her bedroom on autopilot, she removed layers of clothing. She’d dumped the thick waterproof coat and her fur-lined boots in the hall, and now she wriggled out of the chunky cardigan and slung it over the banister, then the thin, long-sleeved top she wore underneath.

This just left her in a tee-shirt and the baggy, comfy jogging bottoms she had donned for the flight over from New Zealand. Being cooped up in cattle class on a fourteen-hour flight required the sort of clothes that allowed for a lot of body contortions in a confined space, especially when she was as tall as she was.

It was warmer in here than she’d expected. She had returned to freak weather conditions that had dumped inordinate amounts of snow from Alaska down to Florida. The hour and a half that it should have taken the coach from Vancouver had stretched to three, battling blizzard conditions for much of it. But at least she wasn’t half-freezing to death in here, and she wasn’t going to think too hard about that one.

With thoughts of bed, and forgetting about the shower because that could wait until morning, Kaya pushed open the door, yawning and rubbing her eyes and not bothering to switch on the light. All she wanted to do was fall onto the mattress, pull the duvet over her and close her eyes.

She wasn’t expecting anything to be amiss, so it was with delayed reactions that she realised that someone else was in the darkened bedroom...that someone else was sleepingin her bed...and that that someone else was a man...

What the hell was a man doing in her house, in her room, in her bed? Flight or fight?

No question. Fight.

Leo hadn’t heard the soft opening of the front door or the swift gust of wind that momentarily blew through it but hehadheard the sound of footsteps stealthily approaching the bedroom along the carpeted corridor that hived off into various rooms, including one that was locked for reasons unbeknown to him.

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