Free Homeport by Nora Roberts

channel on TV, huddled in conversations.
    There was a pretty fire burning in the little stone hearth and someone had plugged in quarters and Ella Fitzgerald on the juke.
    It was her kind of night. Warm, friendly, easy. This was the reason she’d been willing to risk every dime, to work her hands raw and lie awake in bed worrying night after night. Not many had believed she could succeed, a twenty-six-year-old woman whose only business experience had come from serving mugs of beer and counting tips.
    Seven years later, and Annie’s Place was a Jones Point standard.
    Andrew had believed, she remembered with a tug of guilt as she saw him stomp out of the bar. He’d lent her money when the banks wouldn’t. He’d come by with sandwiches when she’d been painting walls and staining wood. He’d listened to her dreams when others had ignored them.
    He figured he owed her, she thought now. And he was a decent man who paid his debts.
    But he couldn’t erase the night sixteen years before when, lost in love with him, she’d given him her innocence, taken his. He couldn’t make her forget that in doing so they’d created a life, one that had flickered only briefly.
    He couldn’t make her forget the look on his face when, with joy leaping under terror, she’d told him she was pregnant. His face had gone blank, his body stiff as he sat on the rock on the long stretch of beach and stared out to sea.
    And his voice had been flat, cool, impersonal when he offered to marry her.
    Paying a debt, she thought now. Nothing more, nothing less. And by offering to do what most would consider the honorable thing, he’d broken her heart.
    Losing the baby only two weeks later was fate, she supposed. It had spared both of them overwhelming decisions. But she’d loved what had been growing inside her, just as she’d loved Andrew.
    Once she accepted the baby was gone, she’d stopped loving. That, she knew, had been as much a relief to Andrew as it had been to her.
    The hum of friendship, she thought, was a lot easier to dance to than the pluck of heartstrings.
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    Damn women were the bane of his existence, Andrew decided as he unlocked his car and climbed behind the wheel. Always telling you what to do, how to do it, and most of all how you were doing it wrong.
    He was glad he was done with them.
    He was better off burying himself in work at the Institute by day and blurring the edges with whiskey at night. Nobody got hurt that way. Especially him.
    Now he was much too sober, and the night ahead was much too long.
    He drove through the rain, wondering what it would be like to just keep driving. To go until he just ran out of gas and start fresh wherever that might be. He could change his name, get a job in construction. He had a strong back andgood hands. Maybe hard, manual labor was the answer.
    No one would know him, or expect anything of him.
    But he knew he wouldn’t. He would never leave the Institute. It was, as nothing else had ever been, home. He needed it every bit as much as it needed him.
    Well, he had a bottle or two at the house. There was no reason he couldn’t have a couple drinks in front of his own fire to lull him to sleep.
    But he saw the lights winking through the rain as he drove up the winding lane. Miranda. He hadn’t expected his sister home, not for days yet. His fingers tightened on the wheel as he thought of her in Florence, with Elise. It took him several minutes after he’d stopped the car before he was able to relax them.
    The wind whipped at him as he shoved the car door open. Rain slapped at his face and streamed down his collar. Directly over the peaks and gables of the house, the sky exploded with sharp forks of lightning.
    A wild night. He imagined Miranda was inside enjoying it. She loved a good storm. For himself, he would take peace, quiet, and oblivion.
    He dashed toward the door, then shook himself like a dog the minute he was inside