Sanctuary

through his hair, ignored the uncomfortably loose sensation in his knees. Less easily ignored was the acute embarrassment as the woman continued to study him as if he were some alien smear on a microscope slide. “I didn’t know anyone else was around.”
    “Just finishing up my morning run,” she told him, and he noted for the first time that she wore a sweat-dampened gray T-shirt over snug red bike shorts. “That’s my cottage you were staring at. Or through.”
    “Oh.” Nathan ordered himself to focus on it again, the silvered cedar shakes, the sloping brown roof with its jut of open deck for sunning. “You’ve got a hell of a view.”
    “The sunrises are the best. You’re sure you’re all right?” she asked again. “I’m sorry to poke, but when I see a guy standing alone on the beach looking as if he’d just been slapped with a two-by-four and talking to himself, I’ve got to wonder. It’s my job,” she added.
    “Beach police?” he said dryly.
    “No.” She smiled, held out a friendly hand. “Doctor. Doctor Fitzsimmons. Kirby. I run a clinic out of the cottage.”
    “Nathan Delaney. Medically sound. Didn’t an old woman used to live there? A tiny woman with white hair up in a bun.”
    “My grandmother. Did you know her? You’re not a native.”
    “No, no, I remember, or have this impression of her. I spent a summer here as a kid. Memories keep popping out at me. You just walked into one.”
    “Oh.” The eyes behind the amber lenses lost their clinical shrewdness and warmed. “That explains it. I know just what you mean. I spent several summers here growing up, and memories wing up at me all the time. That’s why I decided to relocate here when Granny died. I always loved it here.”
    Absently, she grabbed her toe, bending her leg back, heel to butt, to stretch out. “You’d be the Yankee who’s taken Little Desire Cottage for half a year.”
    “Word travels.”
    “Doesn’t it just? Especially when it doesn’t have far to go. We don’t get many single men renting for six months. A number of the ladies are intrigued.” Kirby repeated the process on the other leg. “You know, I think I might remember you. Wasn’t it you and your brother who palled around with Brian Hathaway? I remember Granny saying how those Delaney boys and young Brian stuck together like a dirt clod.”
    “Good memory. You were here that summer?”
    “Yes, it was my first summer on Desire. I suppose that’s why I remember it best. Have you seen Brian yet?” she asked casually.
    “He just fixed me breakfast.”
    “Magic in an egg.” It was Kirby’s turn to look past the cottage, beyond it. “I heard Jo’s back. I’m going to try to get up to the house after the clinic closes today.” She glanced at her watch. “And since it opens in twenty minutes, I’d better go get cleaned up. It was nice seeing you again, Nathan.”
    “Nice seeing you. Doc,” he added as she began to jog toward the dunes.
    With a laugh, she turned, jogged backward. “General practice,” she called out. “Everything from birth to earth. Come in for what ails you.”
    “I’ll keep it in mind.” He smiled and watched her ponytail swing sassily as she ran through the valley between the dunes.
    Nineteen minutes later, Kirby put on a white lab coat over her Levi’s. She considered the coat a kind of costume, designed to reassure the reluctant patient that she was indeed a doctor. That and the stethoscope tucked in its pocket gave the islanders the visual nudge many of them needed to let Granny Fitzsimmons’s little girl poke into their orifices.
    She stepped into her office, formerly her grandmother’s well-stocked pantry off the kitchen. Kirby had left one wall of shelves intact, to hold books and papers and the clever little combo fax and copy machine that kept her linked with the mainland. She’d removed the other shelves, since she had no plans to follow her grandmother’s example and put by everything from stewed tomatoes to watermelon pickles.
    She’d muscled the small, lovingly polished cherrywood desk into the room herself. It had traveled with her from Connecticut, one of the few pieces she’d brought south. It was outfitted with a leatherframed blotter and appointment book that had been a parting gift from her baffled parents.
    Her father had grown up on Desire and considered himself fortunate to have escaped.
    She knew both of her parents had been thrilled when she’d decided to follow in her