Page 7 of Undoing His Innocent Enemy (Hot Winter Escapes)

But you’re not trying to seduce him, Cara, you’re just going to ask him for a favour. So it’s all good.

After taking a hot shower in the adjoining bathroom—another striking, intimidatingly masculine and scrupulously clean architectural marvel made in quartz and glass and hand-carved stone—she found an oversized sweatshirt in the chest of drawers. On her it made a passable mini dress. At least it covered her backside, so she felt less naked once she’d put her tights back on. Finally, she felt human again.

But as she ventured out of the bedroom in search of her host, she could feel the hot brick dropping further into her stomach and jiggling about like a jumping bean. Which was just plain peculiar.

She didn’t get nervous around men. It was surely just that she owed this guy more than she’d ever owed any man. And now she must ask for more.

But then, she’d never see him again after today. And she had a feeling he would be more than happy to see the back of her. So there was that.

Logan dumped the coffee jug back on the plate, sloshing the fresh brew over the kitchen counter. He gulped down a mouthful of hot black liquid and swallowed, focussing on the burn in his throat.

He was so damn mad his hands were shaking. He clasped the mug tight and willed them to stop, not caring that the hot china scalded his palms.

He’d found the camera in her gear on the disabled snowmobile—and left it there. Just as he’d figured, the girl’s appearance on the edge of his land hadn’t been a coincidence. The hypothermia and the snowmobile’s engine failure had been real. But she had risked her life to get a shot of him and his home—that had to be the explanation.

His grandfather had warned him long ago, the press was his enemy—that it was the media who had put a target on his parents’ backs twenty years ago, reporting on their volatile marriage—the endless cycle of public arguments, private feuds, bitter silences, attention-seeking reconciliations—in minute and exploitative detail.

Logan thrust his fingers through his hair, the memory of the camera flashes like lightning bolts, the shouted demands for him to look up, to tell them how he felt about his parents’ deaths hitting him like body blows all over again. He shuddered, remembering the sight of the muddy earth of their graves on that cold November morning. Panic assailed him, as another more visceral memory pressed at his consciousness.

He shoved it back.

He hadn’t been able to cry at their funeral—had struggled to feel anything at all—cast into a media storm that had terrified him.

He’d been ten years old. An orphan. Trapped alone on the Coltan estate in Rhode Island with a staff of people paid to care for him. His life had been ruled and administered by a board of trustees until the Finnish grandfather he’d never met had brought him here.

And saved him. Protected him from all the people, so many people, who had wanted to exploit his loss.

He stared at the furious storm building outside the glass. And his hands stopped shaking at last.

His sanctuary. A place disconnected from the outside world. A place he’d built himself—in secret—at nineteen, because he couldn’t bear to stay in his grandfather’s A-frame house any more, without the old man there.

And now she had invaded it.

Hell, she hadn’t just invaded it, she’d tricked him into bringing her here.

Into exposing himself all over again to the questions he couldn’t answer as the memories tore at his chest.

‘Hiya.’

He swung round to see the cause of his fury standing in his kitchen. She wore one of his sweatshirts, which didn’t do much to cover the long, toned legs he’d noticed last night. The strange sensation in his gut flared, right alongside his anger.

He stared at her. Having someone—anyone—sharing his space felt wrong. An intrusion that he had never allowed, but there was something about having her standing on the other side of the kitchen counter, after the night he’d spent tending her, that felt wrong and yet also... Not.

‘You don’t need people, Arto. Nature is better. It does not scheme and exploit. It just is. Your mother was weak—she sought the limelight and was punished for it. You are not weak. You don’t need those things.’

He ruthlessly ignored the flicker of exhilaration in his gut as his grandfather’s voice echoed in his head.

Johannes Makinen had not been a talkative man. Never tactile or nurturing. But as austere as he had always been, he had also been as steady as the seasons, and fiercely protective of the broken boy Logan had been when he had first arrived in his mother’s homeland, crippled by a fear of people that had taken years to become manageable.

The solitude, the silence here, had helped him survive those early years when he had been scared of every sound, every voice, except his grandfather’s. He could not bear to be touched for so long, he had learned to survive without that too. And eventually the nightmares that tore him from sleep and dragged him back into the middle of that terrible night had died.

And that was when he’d understood, his grandfather was right. Even as his physical needs had changed as a teenager and eventually a man, he had learned to deny them—because he never wanted to be that broken again.

Something this woman would never understand.

But even as he tried to convince himself he did not want her here, he found himself studying her lithe physique and the flicker became a warm weight in his abdomen.

She cleared her throat, her pale skin bright with colour.

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