Chapter One
GENEVIEVE WILSON COULDN’T claim that setting sail on her own across the Aegean was her stupidest mistake ever—clearly that honour rested on the day she’d said ‘yes’ to marrying her sadistic bastard of an ex-husband—but it was definitely in the top three.
After all, she hadn’t sailed since she was a child.
Though she’d sailed then often, and had been very good at it, it turned out sailing was nothing like riding a bike.
Some parts were muscle memory, of course.
Others common sense. And if the waters had stayed calm, as they’d been when she set off, then most likely she would have been okay—if a little shaken by the experience.
But the storm that whipped up almost out of nowhere, turning the placid Aegean into a turbulent, washing-machine-like high tide, quickly began to rock her small craft from side to side in a way that was instantly terrifying.
The rain made it almost impossible to see, and her hands kept slipping on the ropes.
Every lesson her father had taught Genevieve, as a girl, seemed to wash out to sea.
Helplessness gripped her. Helplessness and misery.
Would anyone even care if the boat capsized and she was lost to the depths of the ocean?
Not her now ex-husband. There was no one else.
Her father had died when she was little more than a girl, her mother a few years ago, after a series of strokes that had seen her hospitalised for more than a year, before she passed away in her sleep one night.
Any friends she’d once been close to had fallen by the wayside as Genevieve had turned herself inside out to become the perfect political wife her senator husband had required, not even missing a step after her mother’s death, when her world had been knocked completely off course. Who was there to miss or mourn her?
The frigid and brutal reality of that was, if anything, a talisman to Genevieve.
She’d been through too much to give up now.
Finally, she had her freedom. At least, in a sense.
Courtesy of her mother’s eye-watering hospital bills, she was too financially indebted to her ex, who was paying off the instalments, to know exactly how to explore her freedom.
At least she was no longer under his complete control—no longer the perfect, submissive trophy wife to be used and humiliated by him depending on his whims and needs.
She was setting out on the second phase of her life, a time of rebuilding.
She wouldn’t die friendless and alone here, where no one would even think to look for her.
There was nothing for it. She needed to bring the boat to shore somewhere.
A port in the storm, literally. She cast about, her eyes squinting against the hard-falling rain, until finally, a lightning bolt seemed to burst almost directly overhead, making her scream at the same time she recognised something silhouetted against the storm-darkened sky.
A mountain. And mountains in the middle of the ocean could mean only one thing: an island.
Tacking the boat to the south, she prayed that she could make it there, even as she continued to be rocked violently from side to side, so it was almost impossible to hold her course, let alone stay on board.
Enormous waves crashed over the sides, dousing her, and then, finally, she was close enough to shore to jump from the boat.
She leaped over the rail, and just in time!
As she watched, and tried to work out how to get the boat aground enough to shore, it rocked high on a wave and then capsized, the sail snapping against the seafloor, so she cried out and pressed her hands to her mouth.
It wasn’t her most pressing concern, but in the back of her mind she hated to think how much it was going to cost her in damages to the hire company.
She had no idea if the insurance policy she’d taken out would cover this sort of act of stupidity.
What kind of person rode a sailing boat right into a storm?
That was a bridge she would cross down the track.
If she lived to make it that far. For now, she needed shelter.
She looked around, helplessly, eyes chasing the rugged coastline of this mountain.
She’d become disorientated some time ago, and the map she’d taken from her small, mid-century hotel’s lobby, showing the Greek islands, had blown out to sea long ago.
She had no idea which island she’d landed on, but she had a sinking suspicion that it might be one of those tiny, uninhabited ones.
Which did not bode well for a woman who now had no phone, no handbag and no boat.
She couldn’t panic, though.
It had taken grit and determination to extricate herself from her marriage; these were skills she now knew she had in abundance.
Genevieve began to walk. She was so wet that her shorts and long-sleeved shirt were plastered to her body, and her shoes squelched as she moved away from the shallows and began to look around once more.
She was in a cove, and there was no sign of habitation.
But that didn’t mean the whole place was deserted.
Ignoring the dark fears in her mind, that she was indeed stranded on the unluckiest island in the entire Aegean, she began to traipse along the sand, figuring she could start tracking a perimeter, looking for both signs of life and some kind of shelter.
Whichever came first. Dark clouds were rolling over the island, which, combined with the pouring rain, made it impossible to see too far in front of her.
It took a monumental effort to hold onto hope, but more than an hour after crashing onto this island, while the storm continued to rage and her body was exhausted and covered in goosebumps, she finally saw something to give her hope.
Even just the tiniest flicker of it. The storm felt like a metaphor for her whole freaking life.
One thing after the other, and just when she was at her lowest ebb, bam. Something worse.
Some way in the distance, high up on a hill, was a light.
Warm and golden, and not a trick conjured by her desperation.
She changed direction immediately, picking her way across the sand and onto the grass behind it.
Dense forest followed, which flooded her with terror.
Because here, she heard animal noises, and she couldn’t help but imagine she’d gone from the frying pan and into the fire.
She might have escaped death at sea, but between herself and the golden light stood miles of forest, and it was not implausible to imagine being mauled by whatever animal was making that persistent call.
With the same determination she’d employed in her marriage, to ignore her husband’s affairs and the cold brutality with which he treated her, she went on, one step after the other.
There was no path to follow, and she slipped, many times, cutting her leg and badly hurting her arm, but eventually she came to a clearing and saw, to her immense and all-consuming relief, that the golden glow was indeed a dwelling.
A house! Well, a house of sorts. Four walls and a roof, and it clearly had electricity.
She didn’t stop to think about who might be inside, but rather rushed gratefully towards it and lifted a hand, banging on the door as though her life depended on it.
Which, come to think of it, it did.
Silence met her thumping. She kept knocking.
And minutes later, with the rain still gushing over her and the sky lighting up every few minutes with blades of white, as thunder rolled right into her ear canal, she knew she had little choice but to push open the door.
After all, the cabin could well be empty, the light left on by whoever had last occupied it.
Either way, she wasn’t going to stay standing out here, getting more and more sodden by the minute, all but inviting lightning to fry her innards.
She pushed the door tentatively at first and then all the way, stepping in with a small grimace at how much water she was dripping onto the rustic timber floor.
But there was a fire across the room, glowing warm and golden, so she knew two things immediately: firstly, she wasn’t alone. Secondly, she was too cold to care.
Walking quickly across the room, she made it to the hearth and turned her back on it, still dropping huge amounts of water on the ground, as she let the heat wrap around her, comforting and reassuring.
She’d been standing there only a moment when another door, on the other wall of the cabin, opened, and a man strode from what her brain quickly suggested must have been a bathroom.
Why? Because he was as naked as the day he was born, and every bit as rugged as the forest she’d hiked through to make it to his cabin.
She could only stare as he stopped walking and stared right back.
Stare at his height and breadth, at arms that were muscular and a broad, hair-roughened chest that was rippling with abdominal muscles, wide shoulders that almost seemed to suggest he could carry the weight of the world on them.
His hips were narrow, compared to his broad chest, but his legs were as muscly and sinewy as his arms, all strength and formidable power in those limbs.
He was tall—easily six and a half feet—and handsome in a raw, animalistic sort of way, with features that were chiselled and rough, symmetrical and completely pleasing.
His eyes were a dark grey, like the stormy ocean that had tormented her hours earlier, and his hair wasn’t cut fashionably short—it might have been, once upon a time, but now it caressed his neck, though it was wet and brushed back from his brow.
As for his very masculine anatomy, her cheeks flushed pink at the way he stood before her, glorious, uncaring, and huge all over.