Sanctuary Read online

  JO slept into midday and woke alone. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept until ten, or when she had enjoyed such a deep and dreamless sleep.

  She wondered if she should have been restless, edgy, or weepy. Perhaps she’d been all of those things long enough, and there was no need to go on with them now that she knew the truth. She could grieve for her mother. And for a woman the same age as Jo was now who had faced the worst kind of horror.

  But more, she could grieve for the years lost in the condemnation of a mother, a wife, a woman who had done nothing more sinful than catch the eye of a madman.

  Now there could be healing.

  “He loves me, Mama,” she whispered. “Maybe that’s fate’s way of paying us all back for being cruel and heartless twenty years ago. I’m happy. No matter how crazy the world is right now, I’m happy with him.”

  She swung her legs over the side of the bed. Starting today, she promised herself, they were going to stand together and fight back.

  IN the living room, Nathan finished up yet another call, this one to the American consulate in Nice. He hadn’t slept. His eyes were gritty, his soul scorched. He felt as if he were running in circles, pulling together information, searching for any hint, any whisper that he’d missed months before.

  And all the while he dealt with the dark guilt that his deepest hope was to confirm that his own brother was dead.

  He looked up as he heard footsteps mounting his stairs. Working up a smile when he saw Giff behind the screen, he waved him in as he completed the call.

  “Didn’t mean to interrupt you,” Giff said.

  “No problem. I’m finished, for now.”

  “I was heading out to do a little work on Live Oak Cottage and thought I’d drop off these plans. You said how you wouldn’t mind taking a look at the design I’ve been working up for the solarium at Sanctuary.”

  “I’d love to see it.” Grateful for the diversion, Nathan walked over to take the plans and unroll them on the kitchen table. “I had some ideas on that myself, then I got distracted.”

  “Well.” Giff tucked his tongue in his cheek as Jo walked out from the bedroom. “Understandable enough. Morning, Jo Ellen.”

  She could only hope she didn’t flush like a beet and compound the embarrassment as both men stared at her. She’d pulled on one of Nathan’s T-shirts and nothing else. Though the bottom of it skimmed her thighs, she imagined it was obvious that she wore nothing under it.

  This would teach her, she supposed, to follow the scent of coffee like a rat to the tune of the pipe. “Morning, Giff.”

  “I was just dropping something off here.”

  “Oh, well, I was just . . . going to get some coffee.” She decided to brazen it out and walked to the counter to pour a mug. “I’ll just take it with me.”

  Giff couldn’t help himself. It was such a situation. And since he was dead sure Lexy would want all the details, he tried for more. “You might want to take a look yourself. Kate’s got that bee in her bonnet about this sunroom add-on. You always had a good eye for things.”

  Manners or dignity. It was an impossible decision for a woman raised on southern traditions. Jo did her best to combine both and stepped over to study the drawing. She puzzled over what appeared to be a side view of a long, graduated curve with a lot of neatly printed numbers and odd lines.

  Nathan ordered himself to shift his attention from Jo’s legs back to the drawing. “It’s a good concept. You do the survey?”

  “Yeah, me and Bill. He does survey work over to the mainland, had the equipment.”

  “You know, if you came out at an angle”—he used his finger to draw the line—“rather than straight, you could avoid excavating over here, and you’d gain the benefit of using the gardens as part of the structure.”

  “If you did that, wouldn’t you cut off this corner, here? Wouldn’t it make it tight and awkward coming out from the main house? Miss Kate’d go into conniptions if I started talking about moving doorways or windows.”

  “You don’t have to move any of the existing structure.” Nathan slid the side view over to reveal Giff’s full view. “Nice work,” he murmured. “Really nice. Jo, get me a sheet of that drawing paper over there.” Nathan gestured absently. “I’ve got men in my firm who don’t have the skill to do freehand work like this.”

  “No shit?” Giff forgot Jo completely and goggled at the back of Nathan’s head.

  “You ever decide to go back for that degree and want to apprentice, you let me know.”

  He picked up a pencil and began to sketch on the paper Jo had put in front of him. “See, if you hitch it over this way, not so much of an angle as a flow. It’s a female house, you don’t want sharp points. You keep it all in the same tone as the curve of the roof, then instead of lining out into the gardens, it pours through them.”

  “Yeah, I see it.” He realized that his working drawing seemed stiff and amateurish beside the artist’s. “I couldn’t think of something like that, draw like that, in a million years.”

  “Sure you could. You’d already done the hard part. It’s a hell of a lot easier for somebody to look at good, detailed work and shift a couple of things around to enhance it than it is to come up with the basic concept in the first place.”

  Nathan straightened, contemplated his quick sketch through narrowed eyes. He could see it, complete and perfect. “Your way might suit the client better. It’s more cost-effective and more traditional.”

  “Your way’s more artistic.”

  “It isn’t always artistic that the client wants.” Nathan put his pencil down. “Anyway, you think about it, or show the works to Kate and let her think about it. Whichever choice, we can do some refining before you break ground.”

  “You’ll work with me on it?”

  “Sure.” Without thinking, Nathan picked up Jo’s coffee mug and drank. “I’d like to.”

  Revved, Giff gathered up the drawings. “I think I’ll just swing by and drop these off for Miss Kate now. Give her some time to mull it over. I’m really obliged, Nathan.” He tugged on the brim of his cap. “See you, Jo.”

  Jo leaned against the counter and watched as Nathan got another sheet of drawing paper. Finishing off her coffee, he started another sketch.

  “You don’t even know what you just did,” she murmured.

  “Hmm. How far is that perennial bed with the tall blue flowers, the spiky ones? How far is that from the corner here?”

  “Nope.” She got herself another mug. “You don’t have a clue what you’ve done.”

  “About what? Oh.” He looked down at the mug. “Sorry. I drank your coffee.”

  “Besides that—which I found both annoying and endearing.” She slid her arms around his waist. “You’re a good man, Nathan. A really good man.”

  “Thanks.” Normality, he promised himself. Just for an hour, they would take normality. “Is that because I didn’t give you a little swat on the bottom when you strolled out here in my shirt—even though I wanted to?”

  “No, that just makes you a smart man. But you’re a good one. You didn’t see his face.” She lifted her hands to his cheeks. “You didn’t even notice.”

  At sea, he shook his head. “Apparently I didn’t. Are you talking about Giff ?”

  “I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like Giff, and I don’t know many who think of him as anything more than an affable and reliable handyman. Nathan—” She touched her lips to his. “You just told him he was more, and could be more yet. And you did it so casually, so matter-of-factly, he can’t help but believe you.”

  She rose up on her toes to press her cheek to his. “I really like you right now, Nathan. I really like who you are.”

  “I like you, too.” He closed his arms around her and swayed. “And I’m really starting to like who we are.”

  KIRBY had a firm grip on her pride as she walked into Sanctuary. If Jo was there, she would find a way to speak to her privately. Her strict code of ethics wouldn’t
permit her to tell any of the Hathaways what she’d learned the night before. If Jo had come home after speaking with Nathan again, Kirby imagined the house would be in an uproar.

  If nothing else, she could stand as family doctor.

  But that wasn’t why she’d been summoned.

  She had planned her visit to avoid Brian, using that window of time between breakfast and the midday meal. And she’d used the visitors’ front door rather than the friends’ entrance through the kitchen.

  Since they had managed to avoid each other for a week, she thought, they could do so for another day. She wouldn’t have come at all if Kate hadn’t hailed her with an SOS after one of the guests slipped on the stairs. Even as she turned toward them, Kate came hurrying down.

  “Kirby, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this. It’s a turned ankle, no more than that, I swear. But the woman is setting up such a to-do you’d think she’d broken every bone in her body in six places at once.”

  One glance at Kate’s distracted face and Kirby knew that Jo had yet to speak of Annabelle. “It’s all right, Kate.”

  “I know it’s your afternoon off, and I hated to drag you over here, but she won’t budge out of bed.”

  “It’s no problem, really.” Kirby followed her up the stairs. “It’s better to have a look. If I think it’s more than a strain, we’ll x-ray and ship her off to the mainland.”

  “One way to get her out of my hair,” Kate muttered. She knocked briskly on a door. “Mrs. Tores, the doctor’s here to see you. Bill the inn,” Kate added to Kirby in an undertone, “and add whatever you like for a nuisance fee.”

  Thirty minutes later, and more than a little frazzled, Kirby closed the bedroom door behind her. Her head was aching from the litany of complaints Mrs. Tores had regaled her with. As she paused to rub her temples, Kate peeked around the corner.

  “Safe?”

  “I was tempted to sedate her, but I resisted. She’s perfectly fine, Kate. Believe me, I know. I had to give her what amounts to a complete physical before she was satisfied. Her ankle is barely strained, her heart is as strong as a team of oxen, her lungs even stronger. For your sake, I hope she’s planning on a very short stay.”

  “She leaves day after tomorrow, thank the Lord. Come on down. Let me get you a nice glass of lemonade, a piece of that cherry pie Brian made yesterday.”

  “I really need to get back. I’ve got stacks of paperwork to wade through.”

  “I’m not sending you back without a cold drink. This heat’s enough to fell a horse.”

  “I like the heat,” she began, then came to a dead halt as Brian walked in the front door.

  His arms were full of flowers. They should have made him look foolish. She wanted him to look foolish. Instead he looked all the more male, all the more attractive, with his tanned, well-muscled arms loaded down with freshly cut blossoms.

  “Oh, Brian, I’m so glad you got to that.” Kate hurried down with her mind racing at light-speed. “I was going to cut for the fresh arrangements myself this morning, but this crisis with Mrs. Tores threw me off my stride.”

  She chattered on as she transferred flowers from his arms to hers. “I’ll just take it from here. You don’t have any sense at all about how to arrange them. I swear, Kirby, the man just stuffs them into a vase and thinks that’s all there is to it. Brian, you go fix Kirby a lemonade, make her eat a piece of pie. She’s come all the way out here just to do me a favor, and I won’t have her going off until she’s been paid back. Run along now, while I take this upstairs.”

  She headed up the steps, willing the two of them not to behave like fools.

  “I don’t need anything,” Kirby said stiffly. “I was just on my way out.”

  “I imagine you can spare five minutes to have a cold drink and avoid hurting Kate’s feelings.”

  “Fine. It’s a quicker trip home through the back anyway.” She turned and started down the hall at a brisk pace. She wanted to be away from him. When he found out about his mother, she would do what she could for him. But for now she had her own pain to cope with.

  “How’s the patient?”

  “She could dance a jig if she wanted to. There’s not a thing wrong with her.” She pushed through the door and stood stubbornly while he got out a pitcher of golden-yellow lemonade swimming with mint and pulp. When her mouth watered, she swallowed resolutely. “How’s your hand?”

  “It’s all right. I don’t really notice it.”

  “I might as well look at it while I’m here.” She set her bag down on the breakfast table. “The sutures should have been removed a couple of days ago.”

  “You were leaving.”

  “It’ll save you a trip out to see me.”

  He stopped pouring her lemonade and looked at her. The sun was streaming through the window at her back, licking light over her hair. Her eyes were a dark, stormy green that made his loins tighten.

  “All right.” He carried her glass to the table and sat down.

  Despite the heat, her hands were cool. Despite her anger, they were gentle. She saw no swelling or puffiness, no sign of infection. The edges of the wound had fused neatly. He would barely have a scar, she decided, and opened her bag for her suture scissors.

  “This won’t take long.”

  “Just don’t put any new holes in me.”

  She clipped the first suture, tugged it free with tweezers. “Since we both live on this island, and it’s likely we’ll be running into each other on a regular basis for the rest of our lives, perhaps you’d do me the courtesy of clearing the air.”

  “It’s clear enough, Kirby.”

  “For you, apparently. But not for me.” She clipped, tugged. “I want to know why you turned away from me. Why you decided to end things between us the way you did.”

  “Because they’d gone farther than I’d intended them to. Neither one of us thought it would work. I just decided to back off first, that’s all.”

  “Oh, I see. You dumped me before I could dump you.”

  “More or less.” He wished he couldn’t smell her. He wished she’d had the decency not to rub that damned peach-scented lotion all over her skin to torment him. “I’d see it more as just a matter of simplifying.”

  “And you like things simple, don’t you? You like things your way, in your time and at your pace.”

  Her voice was mild, and though he wasn’t sure he could trust it, particularly when she had a sharp implement in her hand, he nodded. “That’s true enough. You’re the same, but your way, your time, and your pace are different from mine.”

  “I can’t argue with that. You prefer a malleable woman, a delicate woman. One who sits patiently and waits for your move and your whim. That certainly doesn’t describe me.”

  “No, it doesn’t. And the fact is I wasn’t looking for a woman—or a relationship, whatever you choose to call it. You came after me, and you’re beautiful. I got tired of pretending I didn’t want you.”

  “That’s fair. And the sex was good for both of us, so there shouldn’t be any complaints.” She removed the last suture. “All done.” She lifted her eyes to his. “All done, Brian. The scar will fade. Before long, you won’t even remember you were hurt. Now that the air’s all clear, I’ll be on my way.”

  He remained where he was when she rose. “I appreciate it.”

  “Don’t give it a thought,” she said with a voice like frosted roses. “I won’t.” She left by the back, quietly and deliberately closing the screen behind her.

  She didn’t start to run until she was into the shelter of the trees.

  “Well, that was fun.” Brian picked up Kirby’s untouched lemonade and downed it in several long gulps. It hit his tortured stomach like acid.

  He’d done the right thing, hadn’t he? For himself and probably for her. He’d kept things from stringing out, getting too deep and complicated. All he’d done was nick her pride, and she had plenty of it to spare. Pride and class and brains and a tidy little body with the energ
y of a nuclear warhead.

  Christ, she was a hell of a woman.

  No, he’d done the right thing, he assured himself, and ran the cold glass over his forehead because he suddenly felt viciously hot inside and out. She would have set him aside eventually and left him slackjawed and shot in the knees.

  Women like Kirby Fitzsimmons didn’t stay. Not that he wanted any woman to stay, but if a man was going to start fantasizing, if he was going to start believing in marriage and family, she was just the type to draw him in, then leave him twisting in the wind.