CHAPTER 1
The fog was so thick that Chloe didn't see the car until it was almost on top of her. Certainly, she didn't have time to react. One moment she was slogging along the road bent under the weight of her bags and suitcases, and the next moment she was eye to eye with a Rolls-Royce hood ornament.
The car ground to a halt inches from her, and she could feel the warmth of the engine against her face. Blinded by the headlights, frozen with shock, she stood rooted to the spot, not even sure for a moment whether she had been hit or not. Then she heard the car door open and a man's voice boomed out of the darkness. "What are you doing? Are you trying to get yourself killed?"
His voice penetrated the shock. Finally able to react, she let out a cry. She dropped her bags and staggered back from the car, only to trip over one of her suitcases and fall on her behind. "I . . . I didn't see you," she gasped. She raised her arm to shield her eyes from the glare of the lights, but still she could not see the owner of the voice.
Suddenly she became aware that while he wasn't visible, she was definitely in the spotlight. Her coat and skirt were bunched up around her hips, her legs spread at an immodest angle. She felt a hole open up in her stocking over her knee. One of her cases had sprung open, and bright white bras, slips, and panties spilled onto the road. Feeling her face flush with embarrassment, she grabbed at the escaped lingerie and stuffed it into her old suitcase as she scrambled to her feet.
Without the headlights shining in her eyes, she was no longer blinded, though what she saw almost made her fall over again.
He was standing by the side of his car, his hands in the pockets of his long black cashmere coat, opened to reveal a pair of expensive jeans and a designer sweater. He was not wearing a hat, and his hair was black and thick. Hair to run your fingers through, she thought absurdly. The dense fog and the dark night suited him. Sexy, dark, mysterious, exuding wealth, he was so handsome that she wondered for a moment whether the car really had hit her. Maybe she was dead. But was he some heavenly angel or the devil himself? He looked angry enough to be the devil. His eyes flashed fire and his movie-star features were set in hard lines. "What the hell are you doing here, anyway?" he asked, his voice low and cold. "This is private property. And you are trespassing."
Nervously, Chloe took a step back. "I'm looking for Widow's Cliff," she stammered. "It's the name of a house-"
"I know it's the name of a house," he interrupted impatiently. "It happens to be my house. And who are you?"
"You're Gaelan Byrne?" she asked in dismay. Perhaps she would have preferred him to be the devil. Preferable to meet the devil on a dark country road than to find out this man-so good-looking and yet so angry, downright rude, even-was her new employer!
"And who wants to know? You're not another damned paparazzo, are you? I'm sick and tired of you people-why do you think I live way the hell out here?" The night was cold, and his words came out in clouds, merging with the fog.
"Paparazzo? No, no, of course not. I'm Chloe Winters." As he still didn't seem to understand, she added uncertainly, "The new tutor?" She started to extend her hand but decided against it, instead putting them both in her pockets. He didn't look like he wanted to shake her hand. The interviewer had told her he was a widower, so she had expected someone older. Not even the fact that he had a six-year-old child had deterred her image of him as grey-haired. Old enough to be her father, old enough that a romantic relationship would be completely out of the question. After her last boyfriend, she wasn't sure she ever wanted to be involved with another man again.
He said nothing, his expression morphing from anger into distaste. Maybe she didn't need to worry-his bad manners were very quickly making up for his good looks. But then, bad manners were not very appealing in an employer, either. She felt a premonition of impending disaster.
"For your little girl," she explained further with a sigh. Did he even know he'd advertised for a tutor? "I thought someone was supposed to meet me at the St. John's airport. Nobody came. I figured maybe the car had broken down or something, and I didn't have your phone number . . . I had to take a bus . . ." She was on a roll now, reciting the litany of disasters that had occurred since she left Boston that morning.
Really-she was the one who should be angry. She was the one who had stood around the airport all afternoon before catching a shuttle to Puffin's Cove. Then the local bus driver had dropped her on the side of the highway, telling her the house was still a mile down a dirt road. Then this man almost ran her over with his fancy car. Her stockings were torn, she was freezing . . .
Suddenly, he started to laugh, but there was no warmth in it, and his eyes still shot lightning bolts at her. He was definitely laughing at her, not with her.
"It's not funny," she protested, feeling a slightly hysterical edge creep into her voice.
He stopped laughing. "You're right, it's not funny," he said soberly. "It's infuriating." He threw up his hands. "I can't believe my assistant hired you. Not only do you walk down the centre of dark roads not paying any attention, you can't even arrive on the right day."
"It's the right day," she said defensively. "It's April the seventh today."
"And you were to start on the seventeenth."
"No, the seventh," she insisted. "The man in Boston who interviewed me told me the seventh."
"That man in Boston is my second-in-command. I can assure you he has never made a mistake in his life." He leaned against the car and crossed his arms. He looked her up and down as if he had never seen anything that disgusted him more. Chloe wouldn't have been surprised if he found the squashed bugs on his windshield more appealing. "Let me correct that. Never made a mistake until he hired you. What did you do? Flash those sexy legs at him?"
Well, at least she had scored points for having nice legs. Or had she? Wasn't he accusing her of seducing his assistant? She opened her mouth to make some sort of retort in her defence, but no words came to her.
He looked pleased that he had rendered her speechless. He opened the car door, then turned to her. Chloe was very aware of his dark, smouldering eyes locked on hers. "You've got half a mile more," he said coolly. "I have a meeting tonight, and you've made me late. The housekeeper will let you in. Now, pay attention to where you're going. If you miss the house, you'll walk right off the cliff. And you wouldn't want to do that-it's a three-hundred-foot drop onto the rocks, and it's been done before."
It was obvious that he was waiting for her to get out of his way. Mortified, Chloe grabbed her bags and struggled to the edge of the road. And while he had sounded as if he would be delighted if she fell off a cliff, the least he could have done was offer to take her bags!
"Consider it a chance to redeem yourself," he said, watching her impassively. "If you get to the house alive, I'll reconsider my decision to fire you on the spot." He got into the car and put it into gear. She stood among her bags and watched helplessly as the huge silver car rolled past her. He didn't even look at her, and within moments the tail lights were swallowed by the fog.
The sound of the car soon faded too, and in the quiet she could hear the distant roar of the ocean. Angry tears pricked at her eyes as she arranged her bags in her arms and continued on the road to the house. It was so dark and misty she couldn't see more than a foot in front of her. Conscious now of the threat of cars, she walked on the edge where the gravel met the grass. She wasn't too worried about dropping off a cliff-the bus driver had said to keep to the road and it would lead her right to the door. As she walked, she thought back to Gaelan's words. You'll walk right off the cliff, and you wouldn't want to do that. It was pretty obvious that if she did, it wouldn't bother him in the least.
How had she gotten herself into this mess? She hadn't even started her new job, and already everything was going wrong. That is, if she still had a job. It wasn't looking too hopeful at the moment. It surely wasn't what she'd pictured when she had answered the ad in the back of the magazine for retired teachers. Not that she was retired. She had, in fact, been fired. All thanks to Shawn.
But the ad had looked like the answer to her problems-a job and a way of putting distance between herself and Shawn. She had met Shawn on a whitewater rafting adventure trip in Maine a year earlier. He was a teacher too, and their relationship seemed natural. Before long, they were living together. A few months later, she lost her job at a private school due to declining enrolment. The financial crisis had hit the Boston banking community hard, with many families pulling their kids from the school. Out of a job and short of money, she was also forced to leave her master's in education program a few credits shy of her degree. Luckily, she found another teaching position at a nearby boarding academy. True, she lied on her resumé about already having that degree, but it was a requirement for the job, and what else was she to do? Her parents couldn't help-the stock market crash had wiped out almost all their retirement savings, and now they were forced to work at the Home Depot on Cape Cod to make ends meet. The headmaster never would have even known-if it hadn't been for Shawn.