The Heart of a Hero Read Online Free PDF

awe of Julia and Trisha’s resiliency. Hell, he didn’t know many
men
facing what these two women faced every day who would keep fighting like they did.
    He waited until their breathing had evened out in sleep, then quietly exited the church back down through the basement. But instead of heading to his truck, he turned and entered the woods. As he’d expected, he found Trisha’s dark green SUV parked down an overgrown path far enough to be hidden from the main road.
    Which suggested this wasn’t the first time they’d sought sanctuary in the church.
    Pulling his hat lower on his brow, Nicholas nevertheless found his mood lifting as he walked back to his truck. But instead of getting in when he reached it, he stood staring through the rain at the church and actually felt a grin threatening to form at the realization that far from being afraid of men, Julia Campbell was merely fed up with them. Well, most of them, anyway, he thought as his grin broke free, as she apparently didn’t mind getting a little taste of passion from a giant trying to help her.
    But before he got too excited, Nicholas decided as he climbed in his truck and headed toward Nova Mare, he really should find out if the woman liked cats.

Chapter Three

    Julia took three aspirin, chased them down with a long swig of water from her work-issued aluminum water bottle, then wiped her mouth on the back of her hand with a fortifying breath. “There is no problem,” she said out loud, unwrapping a peppermint candy and shoving it in her mouth as she looked around the main room of the cabin she was halfway through cleaning. “Olivia just wants to tell me that I’m in the running for the Inglenook position.” Yeah, Julia decided as she carefully slipped on her coat; she’d turned in her application two weeks ago, and Olivia just wanted to set up an interview.
    That was why she’d called and asked Julia to meet her at Foxglove Cottage, and
not
that Nicholas had told their boss what had happened last night when he’d given an employee a ride home, so Olivia was
not
going to ask why her top security guard had been forced to
kiss
his way out of a humiliating situation.
    Julia locked the door behind her and walked down the steps to the compact electric cart fully equipped with everything she needed to service her cottages. She loved driving around the forested paths that led to the various-sized cabins scattered over the east side of Whisper’s summit—each cottage named after a local wildflower. The most secluded cabin that she cleaned was almost half a mile away from the resort’s common green, and every day Julia felt like the luckiest girl on the planet to be working in such a beautiful setting while taking care of the priciest, prettiest cabins in Maine. But she couldn’t help wondering what it must have cost to build Nova Mare and also completely refurbish Inglenook, because it appeared as if Olivia’s funds were as substantial as the inland sea sitting nearly two thousand feet below—especially considering it was rumored that Olivia’s husband, Mac, had also bought up all the timberland around the fiord all the way to Canada.
    But even though Nova Mare commanded an entire mountaintop and catered to the very wealthiest people in the world, Inglenook had its own charm for being right on the shoreline. Julia had biked up the Inglenook road on one of her days off a few weeks back and had been blown away by the renovations being done to the old family camp where she’d worked summers from high school up to four years ago. Where crooked old leaky cabins had once stood there were now charmingly rustic but very modern two- and three-bedroom cottages. The old dining hall had been torn down and replaced with one that included a state-of-the-art commercial kitchen and a dining room large enough to seat a small army. The main lodge had been completely refurbished and the old groundskeeper’s cottage spruced up—including a new fence surrounding it and a