Marta Perry - Land's End

“I’m sorry.” He brushed a strand of black hair from his forehead with a swift, economical movement, and she saw that his hair was touched now with white at both temples. The year had aged him, as it had her. “I’ve never had much in the way of manners.” His mouth twitched in what might have been a smile. “I’m forgetting myself. How are you, Sarah?”

The reluctant concern in his voice disarmed her, touching something that seemed to reverberate to the timbre of his voice.

“I’m…all right. I went back to work. That helped.”

“At Boston General?”

She nodded, vaguely surprised that he remembered the name of the hospital where she’d interned before she’d moved south and married Miles. But Trent had always had an encyclopedic memory, as well as an unerring ability to rearrange odd pieces in unexpected ways. That gift that had fascinated Miles’s more prosaic intelligence.

“How is Melissa?” His daughter would be twelve now, a crucial age for a girl. How had she coped with the tragedy?

Trent’s face tightened, if marble conceivably could. He’d never looked his nearly forty years, until bitterness and grief etched their mark on him. “She’s all right.”

The shortness of his answer told Sarah Melissa was not all right, and fresh pain gripped her heart. Poor child. She’d had problems enough before tragedy had shattered all their worlds.

Well, little though she’d wanted to see Trent today, he’d given her the opportunity to get on with what she had to do. “I’d like to see her…”

“No!” Trent’s eyes blazed, and her heart lurched into over-drive. She’d always felt something wild lurked under that expensively tailored gray business suit, and now it seemed about to surface.

“Trent, just hear me out.” What could she say that would make him listen?

“I don’t want you anywhere near my daughter.” A muscle twitched at the corner of his mouth and was ruthlessly stilled. “I don’t want you anywhere on St. James at all.”

The momentary truce was over, the brief span of shared emotion banished. Sarah stopped attempting to control her anger. When Trent had been Miles’s employer, she’d had to be polite to him. That constraint didn’t exist anymore.

“Or anywhere in Georgia? I’m not sure my whereabouts is your concern.”

“It is when it affects me. When it affects my daughter.” The words shot at her like bullets. His hands knotted into fists and then unwound with what appeared a superhuman effort.

“Don’t you think I’m affected by being here?” Hurt edged her voice. “I had to come.”

He shook his head, as if to clear it. “I know you’re as much a victim of what happened as we are.” He clearly tried hard for a reasonable tone. “I’m sorry for you. But your being here will only stir up things that are better left buried.”

“Better for whom? Not better for me!” If only she could make him see. “Don’t you understand? I’ve spent a year trying to bury the past. It can’t be done. I can’t leave it alone until I know what really happened.”

For the space of a heartbeat the words hung in silence between them. Then Trent made a sudden, violent motion that sent Sarah back a step.

“Is that what this is all about?” His hands shot out to grasp her wrists, and he looked as if he’d rather have them around her throat. “You want to dig it all up again, make us relive it. For what? So you can satisfy that strict Puritan conscience of yours? That’s it, isn’t it? You have to prove to yourself that you’re not to blame.”

“No!” Sarah felt her pulse pound against the warm hard grip of his hands. He was too close. She was suffocating, as if his pain and anger drew all the air out of the room. “This isn’t for me. This is for Miles. I don’t believe it. I’ve tried, and I can’t believe it.”

“Try harder.” Eyes blazing, he thrust his hard face toward her. “It happened.”

Sarah had a sudden vivid image of a wolf, eyes gleaming, closing on its prey. People said Trent Donner never forgot and never forgave. She could believe it.

“No.” Stubbornness seemed her only refuge against his intensity. “Miles wouldn’t betray us, betray you, that way.”

Something bleak closed over Trent’s anger, and he pushed her hands away as if he couldn’t stand to touch her anymore. “If you think that, you’re even more naive than I thought you were. Anyone is capable of betrayal. Anyone.”

Sarah rubbed her arms, chilled in spite of the sunlight slanting through the open windows. She hadn’t prepared enough, obviously, for Trent’s reaction to what she intended to do. Maybe because she tried so hard not to think of him at all.

“Not Miles,” she insisted. “I don’t mean to hurt you, or Melissa. But I’m here, and I intend to stay until I find out the truth.”

His dark, winged eyebrows lifted slightly. “And if I tell you you’re not welcome here?”

“Then I’d say that you don’t own St. James Island. Not all of it, anyway.”

Something, perhaps faint, bitter amusement, crossed Trent’s face. He moved toward the door. “You may be surprised.”

“You can’t force me to leave.”

Trent pulled the door open, then paused, a dark silhouette against the rectangle of sunlight. “Goodbye, Sarah. I don’t expect I’ll see you again.”

Trent hadn’t taken more than a few steps from Sarah’s room when he spotted Ed Farrell lounging on the patio, probably within earshot of the open windows. Plant security wouldn’t have sent Farrell to serve as Trent’s driver-cum-bodyguard unless he’d passed all their stringent tests, but the man still annoyed him. Farrell’s curiosity grated on Trent’s nerves in much the same way his harsh New Jersey accent grated on his ears.

“Bring the car around. I’m going home.”

“Yes, suh.”

One of Farrell’s more annoying habits was this attempt to assume a Southern drawl. Maybe he thought the drawl, the paunch and the sunglasses made him into the media version of a redneck cop. It didn’t.

“And in future, stay with the car unless I tell you otherwise.”

Farrell’s stolid face showed no emotion except mild stubbornness. “It’s my job to protect you.”

“I’m in no danger from Dr. Wainwright.”

No physical danger, anyway. He stalked toward the car, ignoring Farrell’s quick dance to get there first and open the door.

Small, slender, blond, Sarah looked as fragile as a piece of fine china. When he’d grasped her wrists, his fingers had entirely encircled them—like holding a child’s small bones within his grasp.

He slid into the car. Nothing else about her was childlike, however. Not the warm, peaches-and-cream glow of her skin. Or that steel structure she called backbone.

Sarah Wainwright reminded him of someone, and for a moment he couldn’t think who. Not Lynette. That was certain. His hand tightened into a fist, and he deliberately relaxed it. Lynette had been all fireworks and talent and temperament.

Contained, self-possessed Sarah, with her single-minded devotion to medicine, was not remotely like Lynette. He’d been alternately annoyed and amused by Sarah once.

His head moved restlessly against smooth gray leather as the car took the winding, narrow road to Land’s End. Amused. Annoyed. Attracted. The word gave a bitter edge to his thoughts. He’d never have acted on that feeling, of course. Unlike Lynette.

He’d handled the news of Sarah’s presence badly. If he hadn’t already been beat from three days’ worth of meetings in San Francisco followed by the red-eye back to Savannah, he might have coped more rationally. He’d called the house to check his messages, intercepted the news that she was at the inn and barged in without thinking.

Once he was in the room with her, it was too late to think. The complex feelings she sparked in him hadn’t left space for thought. It hadn’t seemed the time for civilized niceties, but a few of those might have gotten him further.

Or maybe he shouldn’t have gone near Sarah at all. He could have let Derek handle the situation. His half brother’s easy charm had smoothed difficult patches more than once.

The car rolled past the security gate, one of those unfortunate necessities of life for corporate heads. He might be willing to take chances with himself, but he wouldn’t take chances with Melissa.

His heart clenched at the thought of his daughter. Sarah posed no physical danger, but her very presence on the island was still a threat. A threat that would have to be dealt with.

He got out of the car onto the shell-encrusted drive, suddenly realizing who Sarah reminded him of. His grandmother. Just as tiny, just as iron-willed, she’d immigrated from Ireland, headed for New York and ended up, most improbably, the wife of a dirt-poor shrimper on the Georgia sea islands.

Sarah, with generations of New England upper-crust breeding behind her, probably wouldn’t appreciate the comparison. But Mary Elizabeth O’Neill Donner had had backbone, too. Once she’d made up her mind to do something, she never turned back.

Trent paused for a moment on the veranda, letting the breeze that accompanied the rising tide cool his face. His pulse slowed in rhythm with the roll of the breakers and the undulating wave of the sea oats on the dunes.

The house he’d worked with the architect to design spread accommodatingly on a narrow strip of land between ocean and salt marsh, its pale yellow, shallow wings built in true Low Country style to catch every breeze. He’d been happy here once. Maybe he could be again.

But not until he got rid of Sarah Wainwright.

Geneva Robinson waited in the foyer, ready to take his briefcase and hand him an iced glass of her raspberry tea.

“Did you have a good trip this time?” The housekeeper’s voice retained the melodic, singsong cadence of Gullah, the language born on the vast rice plantations that once covered the Low Country.

“So-so.” Trent shrugged out of his jacket, stretching. He’d probably sleep better tonight if he took one of the boats out. Get the smell of cities and airplanes out of his lungs and replace it with the lush, fecund aroma of the salt marsh. “Is my brother here?”

Geneva shook her head. “Mr. Derek hasn’t come in yet.”

She called him Trent when they were alone, but his brother was always Mr. Derek. He’d never known why. “What about Melissa?”

“In her room.” Geneva’s smile faltered, and he saw the worry in her eyes. “That child’s hardly been out of her room since you left. I tried to get her to call her friends, but she wouldn’t.”

The burden of Melissa’s unhappiness settled over his shoulders, weighing him down like a hot, humid Georgia day. “I’ll see what I can do.” They both knew he could probably do very little, but he had to try. Had to pretend his being here might make a difference.

He took the wide, shallow staircase two steps at a time. Music boomed from behind the closed door of Melissa’s room, rattling the panels. Trent grimaced. If he could understand the words, he’d probably be appalled. He tapped twice, then opened the door. “Melissa?”

His daughter shot bolt upright on the bed, swinging a startled, angry face toward him. “Can’t you knock?”

If he took issue with every rude thing she said these days, they’d never talk at all. “I did.” He felt as if he mouthed the words. He gestured toward the speakers. “Will you turn that down, please?”

Melissa snapped the switch and silence fell. Trent’s eardrums still throbbed. Now was probably not the time to discuss hearing loss.