Kate Hewitt - Mills & Boon Christmas Set

The kitchen cabinets revealed a rather impoverished selection of food. As she went through the cupboards, her grocery list was becoming quite extensive, especially since the thought of cooking for him now was imbued with her sense of altruism.

After she had finished in the kitchen, she went exploring. Off the kitchen was a laundry room. When she opened the washing machine it had wet clothes in it that had been sitting so long they smelled dank. She found the soap and restarted the cycle. The soap was in a cabinet sadly lacking in the cleaning supplies necessary to keep a house. She retrieved her list and added a few more items.

Moving on, feeling like something of a snoop, which was ridiculous, she showed herself around the house. Though from the outside it looked as if it was only one level, she took a stairway off the kitchen that led downward to the next level.

It was not really a basement, but a beautiful above-ground lower level, set up for entertaining. It had a billiards table and a bar, but the cover on the table and the dust on the bottles at the bar suggested no one had entertained down here for a very long time. There was a huge TV on one wall. It looked as if Jefferson did watch that, as there were several smudged drink glasses on the coffee table and a bowl that contained the crumbs of potato chips.

There were two guest suites off the entertainment room with fold-back doors out onto private decks that overlooked the lake.

She could choose one to stay in. Both would probably provide ample separation from the master of the house.

But it looked, she thought with a bit of trepidation, as if it would be very easy to break into this lower level. Besides, maybe the photo shoot crew would need a place to stay.

After making a thorough list of what needed to be done downstairs to make it habitable for the photo crew, should they decide to stay there, she scooped up the dirty dishes and went back upstairs. There was no room in the dishwasher for the dishes, and so she started it, stacking a second load above it. It felt beautifully satisfying to be doing these normal things.

Then, she crept down the hall the way Jefferson had gone. The first door was firmly closed, and she went on extra silent feet past it. She could hear him talking, and since he did not seem like the type who would talk to himself, she presumed this was the phone call he had scheduled.

And then she went past his office, farther down the hallway. The next door was open a crack to reveal the master bedroom.

She peeked in. There was a huge window that capitalized on the view. Like all the other windows in the house, it needed a thorough cleaning.

A door led to a private deck, where there was a covered hot tub. Another door, closed, must have led to the master bath.

The bed was king size, with a gorgeous solid headboard of gray weathered wood that looked as if it might have been retrieved from an old barn. Still, the room lost any semblance to boutique hotel chic because the beautiful linens on the unmade bed were rumpled. There were clothes on the floor and overflowing the dresser drawers. There was a heap of magazines sliding off the nightstand, and several empty glasses and plates were scattered about available surfaces.

She moved away from Jefferson’s open bedroom door, contemplating how relieved she was he had specifically told her to stay out of his room. She bit back a nervous giggle at the thought of what might be in there. Good grief, she’d been saved from picking up his underwear off the floor.

“My heart is overflowing with gratitude,” she said softly, out loud, and realized it was completely true. She felt as if she had been plucked from a terrible predicament, but more, she had been given a task to do, and she had a sense of being needed, of having a contribution to make.

She kept going.

There were two more guest bedrooms, and a guest bath. The opulence of these rooms was undisturbed. Except for dusting and freshening—and maybe a vase of flowers—they already looked ready for the cover of a magazine.

At the far end of the hall was a narrow doorway. She thought it was a closet, and opened it to see if this was where extra linens were kept.

Instead she found a narrow staircase, and, intrigued, she followed it.

As soon as she saw what was at the top of that narrow staircase, Angie knew this was where she would stay. Her sense of gratitude deepened. The room was a secret sanctuary, octagon shaped, encased in windows. There was even a tiny bathroom through one door. She peeked in at the claw-foot tub, and at yet more windows overlooking the lake. Then she turned back to the room.

It was a delight in whites: white bed, white linens, white walls. The white draperies, on closer inspection, were silk. She was delighted to see the room also had a small craft alcove with a sewing machine and neat cubicles full of fabrics and craft items.

Angie could not help herself. She went over and inspected the sewing machine. It was a very good model. Growing up as she had, in a single-parent household, there hadn’t always been money for the fashionable clothes she wanted. But a sewing lesson in a home economics class had changed all that. By the time she was in high school, she could copy any design she saw and was creating her own designs, too. She had made extra money sewing for her mother’s friends and for her own classmates.

At home, tucked away safely in a drawer was a sketch for the wedding dress she had designed herself and hoped to wear down the aisle.

That memory brought her back to reality with an unpleasant snap. She became aware it was also unbelievably hot and stuffy in this room, and she went across the bleached hardwood floor and threw open the windows. Within seconds a gorgeous, cool cross breeze was coming off the lake, fluttering in the curtains and cooling and freshening the room.

Though it was not 100 percent in keeping with her mission of making mental lists of what needed to be done in each room, Angie gave in to the temptation to flounce down on the bed. Her flounce created a cloud of dust, but she lay there, anyway, letting the fresh breeze from the windows carry the dust away. She allowed herself to contemplate the delicious sense of being 100 percent safe.

The windows were low, and even lying down she could see the lake. The view from this room was spectacular. She was looking down at the decks below, the one with the hammock on it, and the other with the hot tub.

She blushed at the thought she could spy on her boss while he sat in that tub. He did not seem like the kind who would wear a bathing suit!

“That’s exactly the kind of nosey parker he does not want around,” she told herself.

She looked away from the hot tub and could see that, beyond the decks, there were rough stairs carved out of the face of the huge stone the whole house sat upon. The steps led to a crescent moon of a beach and a dock with a sleek motorboat bobbing at its mooring. An afternoon wind was kicking up, and there was a chop on the water, the waves white capped.

She knew she could not go to sleep. She could not. But to find safety after experiencing so much tension? To have a sweet sense of mission after floundering in her own distress for so long?

Her eyelids felt as if they were weighted down by stones. She sighed, snuggled into the somewhat dust scented white of the duvet on the bed, and fell fast asleep.

* * *

Darkness fell, and Jefferson was edgily aware as he set down the phone after a long afternoon of conferences that he was not alone in his house.

The envelope she had passed him earlier, marked Urgent, caught his attention and he opened it.

Dear Jefferson,

As I mentioned to you in our recent phone conversation, the town of Anslow hopes to provide a picnic area where the Department of Highways widened the road after your wife’s accident. Our intention is to name the area the Hailey Stone Lookout.