Rogue's Revenge - By Gail MacMillan Page 0,57

her husband were to leave to return to Toronto, she came to see me down at the boathouse. She said that if I could convince Jack to sell the Chance, she’d buy it—at a generous price, mind you—and put me in full charge. I thought she was talking a lot of nonsense. Now I’m beginning to believe she meant every word.”

“Another CEO under her control,” Allison muttered. “Or, more accurately, a bought-and-paid-for lover in their own secluded love nest.”

“I guess.” He moved in the darkness, and Allison sensed the discomfort the honesty of their discussion was causing him.

“Of course, Gramps refused.”

“Right. But within days the mythical sasquatch first sighted by Candace began to put in regular appearances to the wives and children of our guests. After that, business began to fall off.”

“Surely you don’t think Candace is impersonating that thing?”

“She was safely back in Toronto. But with her kind of money, people can be hired to do just about anything. The question is who.”

“And can we manage to elude him until we get back to civilization? Why is it taking us so long to travel by water from the Chance to Adams’ Landing? By road it’s an hour’s drive.”

“The North Passage horseshoes between those two points,” he said. “It loops far back into the wilderness, winding and twisting for miles. The road runs as the crow flies.”

“What point on this horseshoe do you think we’ve reached?”

“We’ve come over the top and are about one third of the way down the other side…one good solid day’s walk from the Landing. Nowhere near a difficult hike if we didn’t have to worry about whoever is out there trying to make trophies of us.”

Chapter Eleven

“This is cozy.” Allison snuggled against Heath’s shoulder. “No one could possibly find us under all these branches.”

She looked up at the huge spruce towering above them, its wide lower limbs spreading out to form a thick, arched canopy over them before bending gracefully down to touch their tips to the ground and conceal the couple.

“They will if you don’t keep your voice down.” He quieted her with a kiss that left a warm feeling of invitation coursing through her.

“Remarkable.” Allison snuggled closer and sighed.

“Not nearly as remarkable as I am,” he muttered against her hair, “spending the night sharing a sleeping bag with you and remaining celibate.”

“You promised Mom, remember?”

She put a finger lightly to his lips and smiled in the darkness, admiring his integrity and hating it all at the same time. “As for anyone finding us, I don’t see how that’s humanly possible. After we left that bear den, we traveled miles away from the river, backtracking and circling and jumping across brooks before we ended up back on its banks again.”

“You forget…whoever is on our case is obviously an experienced woodsman. We can’t be too careful.”

“Okay, okay.” She adjusted herself against him again and lowered her voice to a near whisper. “Heath, tell me about you…about your life before you came to live with my grandfather. You know everything about me, and I know so little about you.”

“Not much to tell. My grandmother was a war bride. She’d run away from home to marry a Canadian soldier, and her parents apparently had nothing to do with her after that. She came to this country with my grandfather after the war. Shortly after they arrived in Canada and settled in Halifax, my mother was born. Not long after that, my grandparents were killed in a boating accident.”

“Heath, I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t have a chance to know them.” Regret seeped into his voice. “My mother was sent to live with an uncle and his wife. They already had six children and weren’t anxious for another, but they took her in since she had no other place to go. She grew up feeling unloved and unwanted. When, at seventeen, she met my father, she married him within a couple of months. I think she’d finally found all the love that had been missing from her life. At least, that’s what I gathered listening to her talk about my father.”

He paused and Allison stroked his cheek. “Go on.”

“He was a high steel worker…bridges, high-rises, that sort of thing. I was born ten months after they were married. Two days after their first anniversary, my dad slipped and fell from where he was working on the bridge over Halifax Harbor. He died instantly. My mother, with little education, no family to help her, and next to no money, was