Land's End. Marta Perry

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      “What have you been up to while I was gone?” He hated his inability to carry on a simple conversation with this child he loved and didn’t understand.

      “Nothing.” Melissa crossed her arms over her chest defensively. “School’s out. You’re not supposed to have to do stuff when you’re on vacation.”

      “See any of your friends lately?” Every interaction with Melissa turned into a game of Twenty Questions.

      She shrugged, a curtain of brown hair swinging forward to hide her face. It was becoming a characteristic posture. “No.”

      “Wouldn’t you like to invite some of the girls from school over?” He hated the desperate note in his voice.

      “I just want to be by myself. Okay?” She did look up then, hazel eyes darkening. She glared pointedly at the door.

      He valued privacy himself too highly to argue. “No, I guess not.” He said it quietly, because the only other choice was to shout, and shouting just drove Melissa deeper into the shell she’d constructed around herself, like a conch hiding in its beautiful labyrinth. “I’ll see you at dinner.”

      He closed the door and stood for a moment, hand resting on its panel as lightly as if he touched his daughter. He’d like to believe this was normal behavior for a twelve-year-old, but he couldn’t. How much damage had they done, he and Lynette, to the child they’d created? How much more waited for her?

      He straightened, hand dropping from the door. Sarah Wainwright might not intend harm to Melissa, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t cause it. And that was something he intended to prevent. No matter what he had to do.

      Sarah lay across the bed, staring at the shadows cast by the lazy revolving of the ceiling fan. Images flickered in the shadows. Miles’s face, glowing with excitement when he told her about the offer to become second in command of Donner’s conglomerate of software and engineering companies.

      “I owe it all to you, Sarah. If you hadn’t pushed me to blow the whistle on the scam in the Atlanta office, Donner would never even have remembered my name.”

      She’d been surprised that she’d had to push. Even if the rot at Donner Enterprises had gone all the way to Donner himself, exposing it had been the right thing to do.

      Miles had seen that, once she pointed it out. Donner hadn’t been involved, and his appreciation of Miles’s integrity had taken a tangible form.

      Brilliant, creative, iconoclastic…Every word applied to Trent Donner was a superlative. Trent had risen from poverty to parlay a shoestring operation into a multimillion-dollar empire. Miles’s appointment as his assistant had been a plum, but it had meant a move to the isolated, moneyed environs of St. James. Trent preferred to run his empire from the island, flying—as need took him—to Atlanta or Singapore. His assistant had to be on call twenty-four hours a day.

      Of course she’d been happy for Miles, but moving meant leaving behind her position at the pediatric clinic in Atlanta. Where was she going to practice medicine on St. James?

      That had worked out, after a fashion. She’d found an emergency room position at a hospital in Savannah, the closest city. It was only part-time, but before she had time СКАЧАТЬ