Lucky for her, she wasn’t heading for the house — she was heading awayfromit.
The lawn was sweeping in every direction, punctuated by the swell of small knolls and old trees once used for shade by Victorian women with delicate constitutions looking for a place to read orpaint.
She couldn’t even spot the guards from the carriage house. Making her way around it to the wooded tree line surrounding the property was easy. There hadn’t been any significant snowfall, and the ground was hard but clear as she headed for thetrees.
She entered the woods, calling up her image of the land survey she’d found online when she’d been researching her escape from the house. It was less than a half mile to the road, and she hurried through the forested buffer, grateful for the afternoon sun and the clear ground covered only by dead leaves left behind byautumn.
She spilled onto the road all at once. It was narrow and winding, and she looked both ways to make sure there was no one coming before opening the maps app on her phone. When she had a handle on her location, she used the app she’d downloaded to schedule a car with the credit card Damian had given her to purchase anything she neededonline.
The app dinged and she looked at the ETA of the car: twentyminutes.
She ducked back into the cover of the treesto wait.