CHAPTER 5When Annie needed to be alone, she always went to the same place.
The small gardener’s house that sat at the back of Quin’s estate wasn’t used for hired help anymore. The previous owners had had permanent staff that lived on-site, but Quin valued his privacy too much to allow such an arrangement. He only had a cleaning woman who came in twice a week and the gardener who spent Sundays getting the grounds in order. Quin handled everything else. When she’d first been hired, Annie had wondered about the eccentricity of owning such a vast estate if you didn’t have either a large family or a large staff, but she’d long since abandoned those questions. It was just another way to pad himself from the world.
What that meant, though, was the house would have fallen into ruin without regul
