Sanctuary by Nora Roberts Page A

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 judging erosion, looking for any fresh buildup of sand.
    He left shells where the water had tossed them.
    He rarely ventured onto the interdune 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 itself, 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 everywhere 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. If man, whether with good intent or ill, set his own hand to changing that river’s course, what repercussions would it have in other areas?
    No, he would leave it be and let the land and the sea, the wind and the rain fight it out.
    From a few feet away, Kate studied him. He was a tall, wiry man with skin tanned and ruddy and dark hair silvering. His firm mouth was slow to smile, and slower yet were those changeable hazel eyes. Lines fanned out from those eyes, deeply scored and, in that oddity of masculinity, only enhancing his face.
    He had large hands and feet, both of which he’d passed on to his son. Yet Kate knew Sam could move with an uncanny and soundless grace that no city dweller could ever master.
    In twenty years he had never welcomed her nor expected her to leave. She had simply come and stayed and fulfilled a purpose. In weak moments, Kate allowed herself to wonder what he would think or do or say if she simply packed up and