Judith Bowen - The Wild Child

Eva waved her hand, smiling. “Don’t worry. I won’t hurt you.”

The child raised one hand in a hesitant response to Eva’s gesture and then slipped off the boulder. Eva stumbled forward, cursing the pebbles that hurt her feet and slowed her progress. Where were they—behind the boulder? Across the creek? Into the woods on the other side?

If not, they’d vanished into thin air again!

Eva didn’t know what to do. This was just too strange. Who was this little kid, out yesterday and today just—just wandering! Where was the mother? The father?

“Oh, how I love Judith Bowen’s stories! Such gutsy heroines and such lovable men! You can’t put the books down and you remember them with a fond, tender feeling. Now, that’s romance!”

—Bestselling author Anna Jacobs

Dear Reader,

The Sunshine Coast of British Columbia is a special place for me. My husband and I met there while I was working for the Sechelt Press and he was working for the Coast News. True love—over a village council meeting!

Liberty Island is fictitious, of course, but most of the other places and islands mentioned in The Wild Child are not. If you take a ferry from Horseshoe Bay today and get off at Langdale, you can meander up the rugged coast on your way to Earl’s Cove, stopping at Molly’s Lane and visiting the gravesite of the mysterious Danish prince at Roberts Creek. You can even poke your head in at the Half Moon Bay store and buy a loaf of bread made by the lightkeeper’s wife.

Eva and Silas meet on an island peopled by ghosts—the legendary but never seen Liberty Island goats, the tangled relationships from the past, living only in dusty love letters and old jewelry now, the remembered games of happy childhood summers spent on the island.

Silas shares his life with his secret daughter now, the wild girl of Liberty Island. Eva knows where her duty lies—but can she betray Silas, the man she’s come to love? I hope you enjoy Eva and Silas’s story. It’s a story very close to my heart.

Judith Bowen

P.S. Write to me at P.O. Box 2333, Point Roberts, WA 98281-2333 or visit me at www.judithbowen.com.

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To fellow BICC Trainsters:

Cherry Adair, Chris Pacheco, Eileen Wilks, Susan Plunkett, Pam Johnson, Lynn Johnson, Ruth Schmidt, Karen Barrett, Myrna Temte and Cheryl Harrington. Thanks, gals! I couldn’t have done it without you.

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

EVA HAINES hadn’t been on the island a week before she realized she was being watched.

The feeling was unmistakable. Creepy. Eyes on her back, watching her from the forest on the other side of the creek as she scythed the knee-high grass near the house. Or from the wooded area behind the old, overgrown garden as she nailed plywood over broken windows. Or…from somewhere.

The first few days she hadn’t paid much attention. She was too busy getting set up for the summer to worry about weird feelings and imaginings—too busy dusting, cleaning, ferrying over foodstuffs and supplies from Half Moon Bay in the aging fiberglass runabout with its tattered dodger and temperamental Mercury outboard. Besides, she was quite sure she was alone.

The weather had been fine, which had made her frequent trips to the mainland easier, and if there was one thing she’d learned from a childhood spent on or near the water under her sea dog father’s demanding eye, it was how to fiddle with a temperamental outboard. Her unseen companion? Most likely an owl hidden in some monumental cedar tree keeping track of the intruder from the city. Or a vigilant nesting osprey. Or a rabbit. There were no bears on Liberty Island and Eva didn’t believe in ghosts.

Eva was spending part of her summer vacation tidying up affairs for an eccentric distant relation, a cousin of her mother’s, who’d broken her hip in the spring and who, at eighty-six, would not be returning to Liberty Island to live. Be prepared. Eva didn’t want any surprises, so her first task had been to get everything shipshape for the two or three weeks she’d be occupying Doris Bonhomme’s ramshackle house. That meant laying in plenty of oil and wicks for lamps, a spare propane tank for the kitchen range and refrigerator, among other necessities.

She wasn’t bothering with gasoline for the emergency generator, which she didn’t expect to have to use. What constituted an emergency on Liberty Island, where she and her sisters had spent the happiest summers of their childhood? Not being able to get Jeopardy on the ancient rabbit-eared black-and-white Motorola that Doris fired up occasionally to, as she put it, “keep in touch”? Definitely not!

But kerosene and candles were necessary. Jack Haines, who’d spent as much of his life as he could on or near the sea, had taught her well: only fools depend on luck.

Alone? Hey, what was she talking about—she had Andy to keep her company. She smiled, recalling how the ancient donkey had kicked up his heels, baring worn yellow teeth in a joyous hee-haw welcome when she’d first arrived. Then he’d bucked and galloped in an awkward circle just to show her how frisky he still was. Andy had been left to fend for himself when his mistress had been airlifted to the hospital and taken from there to a care home at the insistence of her doctor. Although Doris had reluctantly agreed that she could no longer look after herself in her isolated island home, she insisted that her beloved donkey was too old to uproot.

“I’m not putting that poor dumb creature through what I’ve been through,” she told Eva, during a visit to Saint Mary’s Hospital, shortly after Doris’s accident. “He’s too loyal. He doesn’t deserve such a fate at his time in life. Your dad will know what to do.”

And he had. Jack had arranged for a farmer from a nearby island to check on the animal, dumping off hay weekly, and treats like apples and carrots.

It wasn’t as though either he or Doris would dream of requesting assistance from Doris’s actual neighbor at the other end of Liberty Island. If, indeed, anyone still lived there…

It was so stupid, really. Eva’s gaze strayed to the long thin crescent of land that stretched eastward, curving south, thick dark woods all the way to the rocky headland. The Bonhommes and the Lords hadn’t spoken for fifty years, not since Doris had quarrelled with Hector Lord. What about? No one knew. There’d been a house once, nestled in the trees somewhere. Eva had never actually set foot on the Lords’ side of the island. As a child, she hadn’t dared; as a grown-up, now, she hadn’t gotten around to exploring yet. Her mother, who’d been a girl at the time of the upset, had divulged various details—that the Lord house had been grand, that Hector had been a tall, dark, handsome man, wildly attractive to women, that the family had money, pots of money, as Eva recalled her mother’s expression. Eva and her sisters had always imagined the Lords’ money—pots of it—like pirate booty, gold and jewels spilling out of thick oaken sea chests and massive porcelain Chinese jars.