Trusting a Stranger Read Online Free

her seat. He imagined her now, leaning forward, craning her head to see what he was up to. Perhaps she would even stand and walk towards the door.
    Ethan took care that his footsteps were heavy on the stairs. He wanted to make this easy for her. He paused for a moment as though waiting for an answer, then, in an encouraging voice, called out.
    â€˜Almost there!’
    There was a closed door near the first landing. He knocked on it and turned the handle. The room beyond was empty apart from a narrow single bed and a white-painted chest of drawers. This room was closest to the centre of the house and it was where Ethan himself usually slept.
    â€˜How are you going, Katy?’ he asked, in a too-loud voice, directing the question towards the empty bed.
    Of course the bed had nothing to say to him. And Katy was hundreds of miles away, safe in a convent in the north of Italy. It was important that the woman downstairs not know this.
    â€˜That’s good,’ he said. He left another pause. ‘She’s just a photographer. She won’t be here for long. Then we can go for that walk, okay?’
    Something in his chest hurt because of the pretence. He would like nothing more now than to be about to take Katy for a walk out in the sunshine, perhaps towards the vineyards he had been tending earlier.
    How desperately he wished that circumstances were different! Katy could have charmed Hayley, perhaps then they could all have gone for a walk together…
    Then he steeled himself. He could not appear weak in front of the woman downstairs. It was because his enemies were able to hire people like her to do their dirty work — or at least, their spying work — that he had to keep Katy hidden so far away from him.
    â€˜All right. I’ll be back in a few minutes. Bye now,’ he said, backing towards the door. ‘Love you too, Katy.’
    He pulled the door towards him, closing it on an achingly empty room.
    Once upon a time, this had been a family house. He and Erica and Katy had been happy here, or so he had believed way back then. How was he to have known how badly Erica was craving something more? That the quiet family life that had meant so much to him, when he’d thought he’d found it for the first time in his life, had so little meaning to Erica? She had been willing to risk it all just for the sake of adventure. She had been foolhardy. And she had paid the ultimate price in the end, dying far from Ethan and Katy.
    His footsteps were heavy again as he walked back downstairs, but this time because he was thinking how unfair it was that Katy, too, was paying the ultimate price for her mother’s foolishness.
    Women who cared for adventure more than family were the very worst sort of human beings in Ethan McDonald’s eyes. Erica’s cravings for adventure had made sure that his daughter grew up motherless, as he had. And right now he had to concentrate on getting this new adventuress, this Hayley Wolfe, out of his house.
    But it wasn’t as simple as forcing her to leave the villa. It could only have been someone connected to Alvaro Tomasi who had sent her here, and Ethan knew the real reason that Tomasi wanted information about the interior of his villa. Perhaps Hayley actually believed that her photographs were wanted for some sort of magazine. She certainly couldn’t imagine what the truth was.
    Ethan shuddered, considering that truth. Alvaro Tomasi was an evil and dangerous man. When Hayley left the villa without the images she had been sent for — and she would leave without them, Ethan would make sure of it — she would be walking into serious danger herself. Ethan had lost count of how many former employees had disappointed him and wound up dead.
    It seemed pretty clear to him that Hayley had no idea who she was dealing with. No doubt she wasn’t even aware that the very first question she would be asked on her return was if he, Ethan, had been alone in the