Read Online Lost (Shifter Island Book 1) by Carol Davis - Free Book Online Page A

almost every single time, that feeling of being too small to have an opinion had sent her scurrying off somewhere. At home, while she was growing up, she’d gone to her room. At work, she’d sought refuge in the ladies’ room. With Lane, she’d all but stolen a boat and set off across the ocean.
    Now, she wanted very much to run back to the cabin. What had she been thinking? Carrying on like this with Aaron?
    No. NO, she told herself.
    “We’re two adults,” she said to Luca. “We decided to have a little fun. Yeah, I’ll be leaving at some point, I guess. I need to get back home. I have a job I need to get back to, and… and… stuff. But we’re—we can make up our own minds. We decided to have some fun. What business is it of yours?”
    “It’s entirely my business,” he said. “Much more so than it is yours.”
    “What are you, his keeper ?”
    It was an odd picture: Aaron standing there naked and dripping, arguing with a guy who was fully dressed while Abby stood there wrapped in an old blanket. It was nothing she’d ever imagined herself being involved in, for sure.
    She thought of her travel bag, that big yellow purse jammed full of clothes and toiletries, and wished she’d brought it out here with her. Her only tie to home, to her normal life.
    The life she’d run away from.
    “Can I talk to Aaron?” she asked Luca.
    He thought that over for a moment, then scowled at Aaron. Then he walked a short distance away and looked off into the trees, arms clamped so tightly over his chest that Abby thought he might squeeze out the contents of his body. He was red in the face with anger.
    “I don’t understand what’s happening here,” she told Aaron quietly.
    “I’m sorry.”
    She shrugged. “I guess that’s your business. Family stuff. He’s your brother, right? Is he your brother?”
    “Yes. My older brother.”
    “But we didn’t do anything wrong.”
    “It’s complicated.”
    “Do you want me to leave?”
    “Not at all.”
    “Maybe I should.” She looked down at her feet, frowning, feeling a little heartsick. “He said there’s a boat. Or if there’s gas for the boat I had—I can pay you for it. I should go.”
    “Luca is not the arbiter.”
    Abby frowned. The word sounded more like an official title than a description. “That’s—it’s like a court thing? Arbitration?”
    She felt like Alice, lost down the rabbit hole. Almost everything had felt surreal during the past few days (some of it a little, and some of it a lot), and it had gotten worse instead of better out here in the sunlight. None of this was anything she could get a handle on, other than that Aaron and his brother seemed like the type to argue all the time. She had the sense that they didn’t agree on anything, ever, and that they were usually pretty loud about it.
    Getting into the middle of that seemed like a bad idea.
    “I should go,” she muttered. “I don’t know what’s going on here, and I wasn’t going to stay here anyway.”
    “Abby. I don’t want you to go.”
    She looked over at Luca, who seemed angry enough to self-combust, ignite the woods and burn everything down around them.
    “Abby,” Aaron said.
    Shaking her head, she retrieved her dress and shoes from where she’d left them. “I think I can find my way back to the cabin,” she said. “I’ll get dressed and dry my hair, then I think we should go find that boat. It’ll be better that way.”
    “Let me talk to Luca.”
    “No,” she murmured, and bent down to slip on her shoes.
    She was gone before he could say anything more.

Eight
     
    “I suppose you’re going to blame me now,” Luca said.
    They’d both watched Abby disappear into the woods, wrapped in that old blanket and wearing her thin pink shoes, carrying her dress like a big bundle of cloth. The path wasn’t difficult to follow, so Aaron was relatively sure she’d reach the cabin without a problem—at least, not much of one. The shoes might trip her up, or the