Page 54 of Undoing His Innocent Enemy (Hot Winter Escapes)

She took the phone back, feeling numb, the smell of the elderflowers starting to grow in the nearby hedgerow doing nothing to stem the nausea in her gut.

What was the money for? Her silence? The sex?

Why would he think he owed her anything at all?

And why hadn’t he contacted her to tell her about the money? Did he hate her that much now? He couldn’t even speak to her?

She’d received no messages from him, even though she’d been stupid enough to check the post and her emails every day, just in case. Stupid enough to hope, against all the odds, that he might reach out to her, might need her.

If you change your mind, I will be waiting.

The phrase echoed in her head, only making her heart hurt more. But it fuelled her anger too. Why did she have to be the one to make the move? Why did it have to be her decision to make, and not his?

‘It doesn’t matter where it comes from,’ she said, slowly, carefully. Her heart pulsed so hard in her chest she was surprised it didn’t burst through her ribs. ‘Because I’ll be sending it back.’

She headed back across the fields she’d spent three solid weeks wandering in like a ghost, feeling guilty and compromised and heartbroken and alone, anesthetising herself against the vivid emotions Logan had awakened.

But they weren’t anesthetised any more.

Connor jogged alongside her. ‘Are you an eejit? That’s a fortune. You can pay off all your debts and work on your pictures again. Why would you be giving that back now?’

She gathered pace, the purpose she’d lacked for the past three weeks, ever since he’d left her with that damn note, finally returning. He’d given her over ten million euros, a ridiculous amount, but hadn’t even bothered to contact her, to tell her what it was for. Was it a bribe? A payment for services rendered? Because whatever way she looked at it, it was insulting. To her and to what they’d had, what they’d built together over those two glorious weeks in Lapland.

‘Because I don’t want his money,’ she said, feeling scared and raw still, but also fierce and increasingly furious. ‘I want him.’

Logan stared out at the rocky outcropping and the bay beyond from the roof terrace of the Colton Mansion in Rhode Island.

Built in the Colonial style in the nineteen hundreds, as a summer residence for his robber baron great-grandfather, the house had sixteen bedrooms, ten bathrooms, indoor and outdoor pools, tennis courts, a golf course—now covered in a sprinkling of snow—and a stone guest house on the edge of the ten-acre property where he had been living since his return to the US three days ago.

But he couldn’t sleep in the stone guest house, any more than he had been able to sleep in his home in Finland...

Everything here was different from the steel and glass structure he had built in Lapland. The ornate furniture that had been covered in dust sheets for over twenty years, until a week ago. The dull, expensive pieces of art his father’s mother had packed the house with long before he was born. The carefully manicured lawns and gardens that had been cared for by a ground staff of forty people for twenty years while no one lived here.

Even the light was different from the light in the Arctic Circle, not clean and bright but dull and grey. There were no Northern Lights here, no flashes of brilliant colour amid the startling starry night...

He had run here, believing he could somehow escape the pain...

But here as in Finland one crucial thing was exactly the same.

There was no Cara.

He turned away from the view as he heard ColtonCorp’s managing director, Grant Andrews, step out of the terrace doors.

‘Logan, how are you doing?’ the older man asked, his breath frosting in the winter air.

‘Good,’ he lied smoothly. He did not want any more sympathy. Or suggestions on therapists that could help him ‘adjust to his new role’.

The truth was, he hadn’t made the decision to return to the US because the press had finally discovered his home. He had already made up his mind—less than a day after leaving Cara at the cabin—that he couldn’t live in Lapland any longer, because everything had changed.

And she was the cause.

What had once been his sanctuary, his fortress, had become a prison. Because he couldn’t hear her voice, couldn’t see or touch her, and yet her presence suffused every space, every room, every single scent and sound.

At first, he’d resented her. And blamed her for his misery, the loneliness that had never been a problem before she had appeared in his life.

Why hadn’t she taken what he had offered? If she loved him, why wasn’t she prepared to do anything to be with him?

Memories of her and their time together had tortured him—so he’d taken the decision to leave Finland. To come back, to prove that it had always been a choice to live in isolation, that she had been wrong to suggest there was something about the way he lived that needed to be fixed.

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