Free Homeport by Nora Roberts Page A

there. She asked how you were.”
    “And you told her I was just dandy.”

    Miranda watched him pour the first drink. “I didn’t think you wanted me to tell her you were turning into a brooding, self-destructive drunk.”
    “I’ve always brooded,” he said, saluting her. “All of us do, so that doesn’t count. Is she seeing anyone?”
    “I don’t know. We never got around to discussing our sex lives. Andrew, you have to stop this.”
    “Why?”
    “Because it’s a waste and it’s stupid. And frankly, though I like her, she’s not worth it.” She lifted her shoulders. “No one’s worth it.”
    “I loved her,” he murmured, watching the liquor swirl before he drank. “I gave her the best I had.”
    “Did you ever consider that maybe she didn’t give her best? Maybe she was the one who didn’t measure up?”
    He studied Miranda over the rim of his glass. “No.”
    “Maybe you should. Or maybe you should consider that the best you had and the best she had didn’t equal the best together. Marriages fail all the time. People get over it.”
    He studied the liquor, watching the light flicker through the glass. “Maybe if they didn’t get over it so easily, marriages wouldn’t fail so often.”
    “And maybe if people didn’t pretend love makes the world go round, they’d pick their partners with more care.”
    “Love does make the world go round, Miranda. That’s why the world’s so fucked up.”
    He lifted his glass and drank deeply.

five
    T he sky shimmered with a cold, gray, angry dawn. Restless, dark, and full of sound, the sea hammered against the rocks and rose up to punch its white fists into the raw and bitter air. Spring would have a fight on its hands before it could beat back winter.
    Nothing could have pleased Miranda more.
    She stood on the bluff, her mood as fitful as the churning water below. She watched it spew up from the rocks, ice-edged and mean, and drew in the ancient violence of its scent.
    She’d slept poorly, tangled in dreams she blamed on temper as much as travel fatigue. She wasn’t one for dreaming. It was still dark when she’d given up on sleep, and had dressed in a thick green sweater and dun-colored slacks of soft wool. She’d scraped out the last of the coffee—Andrew wasn’t going to be pleased when he awoke—and had brewed herself half a pot.
    Now she sipped that coffee, strong and black, out of a big white mug and watched dawn claw its way to life in the unhappy eastern sky.
    The rain had stopped, but it would come back, she thought. And as the temperatures had dropped sharply through the night, it would likely come back as snow and sleet. That was fine, that was dandy.
    That was Maine.
    Florence, with its white, flashing sun and warm, dry wind, was an ocean away. But inside her, in her angry heart, it was close.
    The Dark Lady had been her ticket to glory. Elizabeth was right about that at least. Glory was always the goal. But by God, she had worked for it. She’d studied, pushing herself brutally to learn, to absorb, to remember, when her contemporaries had jumped from party to party and relationship to relationship.
    There’d been no wild rebellious period in her life, no thumbing her nose at rules and traditions while in college, no mad, heart-wrenching affairs. Repressed, one roommate had called her. Boring as dirt had been the opinion of another. Because some secret part of her had agreed, she had solved that problem by moving off campus and into a small apartment of her own.
    She’d been better off, Miranda always thought. She had no skill for social interactions. Beneath the armor of composure and the starch of training she was miserably shy with people, and so much more comfortable with information.
    So she had read, written, closed herself into other centuries with a discipline fired by the hot light of ambition.
    That ambition had one focus. To be the best. And by being the best, to see her parents look at her with pride, with stunned