Free Sanctuary by Nora Roberts

all.”
    â€œSummer was over,” Brian said quietly. “For all of us.”
    â€œYeah.” Her hands had gone trembly again. Jo reached in her pockets for cigarettes. “Do you ever think about her?”
    â€œWhy would I?”
    â€œDon’t you ever wonder where she went? What she did?” Jo took a jerky drag. In her mind she saw long-lidded eyes empty of life. “Or why?”
    â€œIt doesn’t have anything to do with me.” Brian rose, took the plate. “Or you. Or any of us anymore. It’s twenty years past that summer, Jo Ellen, and a little late to worry about it now.”
    She opened her mouth, then shut it again when Brian turned and walked back into the house. But she was worried about it, she thought. And she was terrified.
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    LEXY was still steaming as she climbed over the dunes toward the beach. Jo had come back, she was sure, to flaunt her success and her snazzy life. And the fact that she’d arrived at Sanctuary hard on the heels of Lexy’s own failure didn’t strike Lexy as coincidence.
    Jo would flap her wings and crow in triumph, while Lexy would have to settle for eating crow. The thought of it made her blood boil as she raced along the tramped-down sand through the dunes, sending sand flying from her sandals.
    Not this time, she promised herself. This time she would hold her head up, refuse to be cast as inferior in the face of Jo’s latest triumph, latest trip, latest wonder. She wasn’t going to play the hotshot’s baby sister any longer. She’d outgrown that role, Lexy assured herself. And it was high time everyone realized it.
    There was a scattering of people on the wide crescent of beach. They had staked their claims with their blankets and colorful umbrellas. She noted several with the brightly striped box lunches from Sanctuary.
    The scents of sea and lotions and fried chicken assaulted her nostrils. A toddler shoveled sand into a red bucket while his mother read a paperback novel in the shade of a portable awning. A man was slowly turning into a lobster under the merciless sun. Two couples she had served that morning were sharing a picnic and laughing together over the clever voice of Annie Lennox on their portable stereo.
    She didn’t want them—any of them—to be there. On her beach, in her personal crisis. To dismiss them, she turned and walked away from the temporary development, down the curve of beach.
    She saw the figure out in the water, the gleam of tanned, wet shoulders, the glint of sun-bleached hair. Giff was a reliable creature of habit, she thought, and he was just exactly what the doctor called for. He invariably took a quick swim during his afternoon break. And, Lexy knew, he had his eye on her.
    He hadn’t made a secret of it, she mused, and she wasn’t one to resent the attentions of an attractive man. Particularly when she needed her ego soothed. She thought a little flirtation, and the possibility of mindless sex, might put the day back on track.
    People said her mother had been a flirt. Lexy hadn’t been old enough to remember anything more than vague images and soft scents when it came to Annabelle, but she believed she’d come by her skill at flirtation naturally. Her mother had enjoyed looking her best, smiling at men. And if the theory of a secret lover was fact, Annabelle had done more than smile at at least one man.
    In any case, that’s what the police had concluded after months of investigation.
    Lexy thought she was good at sex; she had been told so often enough to consider it a fine personal skill. As far as she was concerned, there was little else that compared to it for shouldering away tension and being the focus of someone’s complete attention.
    And she liked it, all the hot, slick sensations that went with it. It hardly mattered that most men didn’t have a clue whether a woman was thinking about them or the latest Hollywood pretty boy