Annoyed, Jo stabbed out her cigarette. "What would you like me to ask?"
"Don't take that snippy tone with me, young lady. If you're going to be under this roof, you'll show some respect for those who provide it. And you'll do your part while you're here. Your brother's had too much of the running of this place on his shoulders these last few years. It's time the family pitched in. It's time you were a family."
"I'm not an innkeeper, Kate, and I can't imagine that Brian wants me poking my fingers into his business."
"You don't have to be an innkeeper to do laundry or polish furniture or sweep the sand off the veranda."
At the ice in her long, Jo responded in defense and defiance. "I didn't say I wouldn't do my part, I just meant-"
"I know exactly what you meant, and I'm telling you, young lady, I'm sick to death of that kind of attitude. Every one of you children would rather sink over your heads in the marsh than ask one of your siblings for a helping hand. And you'd strangle on your tongue before you asked your daddy. I don't know whether you're competing or just being ornery, but I want you to put it aside while you're here. This is home. By God, it's time it felt like one."
"Kate," Jo began as Kate headed for the door.
"No, I'm too mad to talk to you now."
"I only meant . . . " When the door shut smartly, Jo let the air out of her lungs on a long sigh.
Her head was achy, her stomach knotted, and guilt was smothering her like a soaked blanket.
Kate was wrong, she decided. It felt exactly like home.
From the fringes of the marsh, Sam Hathaway watched a hawk soar over its hunting ground. Sam had hiked over to the landward side of the island that morning, leaving the house just before dawn. He knew Brian had gone out at nearly the same hour, but they hadn't spoken. Each had his own way, and his own route.
Sometimes Sam took a jeep, but more often he walked. Some days he would head to the dunes and watch the sun rise over the water, turning it bloody red, then golden, then blue. When the beach was all space and light and brilliance, he might walk for miles, his eyes keenly 'lldgfo ing erosion, looking r any fresh buildup of sand.
He left shells where the water had tossed them.
He rarely ventured onto the meadows. They were fragile, and every footfall caused damage and change. Sam fought bitterly against change.
There were days he preferred to wander to the edge of the forest, behind the dunes, where the lakes and sloughs were full of life and music. There were mornings he needed the stillness and dim light there rather than the thunder of waves and the rising sun. He could, like the patient heron waiting for a careless fish, stand motionless as minutes ticked by.
There were times among the ponds and stands of willow and thick film of duckweed that he could forget that any world existed beyond this, his own. Here, the alligator hidden in the reeds while it digested its last meal and the turtle sunning on the log, likely to become gator bait 'i-,self, were more real to him than people.
But it was a rare, rare thing for Sam to go beyond the ponds and into the shadows of the forest. Annabelle had loved the forest best.
Other days he was drawn here, to the marsh and its mysteries. Here was a cycle he could understand-growth and decay, life and death.
This was nature and could be accepted. No man caused this or-as long as Sam was in control-would interfere with it.
At the edges he could watch the fiddler crabs scurrying, so busy in the mud that they made quiet popping sounds, like soapsuds. Sam knew that when he left, raccoons and other predators would creep along the mud, scrape out those busy crabs, and feast.
That was all part of the cycle.
Now, as spring came brilliantly into its own, the waving cordgrass was turning from tawny gold to green and the turf was beginning to bloom with the colors of sea lavender and oxeye. He had seen more than thirty springs come to Desire, and he never tired of it.
The land had been his wife's, passed through her family from generation to generation. But it had become his the moment he'd set foot on it. just as Annabelle had become his the moment he'd set eyes on her.
He hadn't kept the woman, but through her desertion he had kept the land.
Sam was a fatalist-or had become one. There was no avoiding destiny.
The land had come to him from Annabelle, and he tended it carefully, protected it fiercely, and left it never.
Though it had been years since he'd turned in the night reaching out for the ghost of his wife, he could find her anywhere and every where he looked on Desire.
It was both his pain and his comfort.
Sam could see the exposed roots of trees where the river was eating away at the fringe of the marsh. Some said it was best to take steps to protect those fringes. But Sam believed that nature found its way.