Homeport

quieted, he walked down the hall, opened the closet, and pushed through until he found a jacket. “Here.” He held it out to her. “Let’s get some air.”
    She stared at him out of swollen and confused eyes. She’d simply forgotten he was there. “What?”
    “Let’s get some air,” he repeated, and because she was still largely helpless, he pulled her to her feet. He slid the jacket over her arms, turned her, and efficiently fastened the buttons.
    “I’d prefer to be alone.” She tried for coolness, but her throat was still raw, and she fell far short.
    “You’ve been alone long enough.” He grabbed his own jacket, shrugged it on, then pulled her out the front door.
    The air was bracing, the sun strong enough to sting her sore eyes. Humiliation was beginning to seep through. Tears were useless enough, she thought, but at least when they were private no one saw your control fail.
    “This is a great spot,” he said conversationally. He kept her hand in his even when her fingers flexed for release. “Privacy, a kick-ass view, the smell of the sea just outside the door. Grounds could use some work.”
    The Joneses, he concluded, didn’t spend enough time outside. Across the tumbling lawn there were a pair of grand old trees that begged to have a hammock stretched between them. He doubted Miranda had ever explored the miracles of a hammock in the shade on a summer afternoon.
    There were shrubs, ragged from winter, that he imagined bloomed beautifully—and without any care—in the spring. There were bare patches in the lawn, crying out to be reseeded and fed.
    But the fact that there was grass, shrubs, old trees, and an impressive windbreak of pines on the north side indicated that someone had cared enough once to plant—or at least to hire a staff to plant.
    He might have been an urbanite through and through, but he appreciated rural atmosphere.
    “You’re not taking care of what you have here. You surprise me, Miranda. I’d think a woman with your practical nature would insist on maintaining her property and guarding a legacy like this.”
    “It’s a house.”
    “Yeah, it is. It should be a home. Did you grow up here?”
    “No.” Her head felt stuffy and thick from the weeping. She wanted to go back inside, take some aspirin, lie down in a dark room. But she didn’t have quite enough strength worked up to resist when he pulled her along the cliff path. “It was my grandmother’s.”
    “Makes more sense. I couldn’t see your father choosing to live here as an adult. Wouldn’t suit him at all.”
    “You don’t know my father.”
    “Sure I do.” The wind whipped, circling them as they climbed. Centuries of its constant stroking had worn the rocks here, made them smooth, rounded. They glowed like pewter in the sunlight. “He’s pompous, he’s arrogant. He has the kind of narrow focus that likely makes him brilliant in his field, and an inconsiderate human being. He didn’t hear you,” he added when they’d reached the flattened ledge that speared out over the sea. “Because he doesn’t know how to listen.”
    “Obviously you do.” Now she jerked her hand from his and defensively wrapped her arms around her body. “I don’t know why it should surprise me that someone who steals other people’s property for a living should stoop to eavesdropping on private conversations.”
    “I don’t know either. But the real point is you’ve been left to twist in the wind. Now what are you going to do about it?”
    “What can I do? Whatever authority I might have at the Institute, it still comes down to the fact that I work for them. I’ve been temporarily relieved of my duties, and that’s that.”
    “That, if you have any spine, is never that until it’s the way you want it.”
    “You don’t know anything about it.” She whirled on him, and the self-pity that had been in her eyes flashed away into fury. “They run the show, and they always have. Whatever gloss you put on it, I do what I’m told. I manage the Institute with Andrew because neither of them wanted to bother with the day-to-day business of it. And we’ve always known that they could pull that particular rug out from under us whenever they chose. Now they have.”
    “And you’re going to tolerate being dumped on your ass this way? Kick back, Miranda.” He grabbed a handful of her hair while the wind tossed the rest of the hot red curls madly. “Show them what you’re made of. The Institute isn’t the only