Sanctuary Read Online Free PDF Page A

meringue and still prefer women for sex. He simply wasn’t inclined toward intimacy.
    And wasn’t that tendency toward distance from others a Hathaway family trait?
    Brian moved through the forest, as quietly as the deer that walked there. Suiting himself, he took the long way around, detouring by Half Moon Creek, where the mists were rising up from the water like white smoke and a trio of does sipped contentedly in the shimmering and utter silence.
    There was time yet, Brian thought. There was always time on Desire. He indulged himself by taking a seat on a fallen log to watch the morning bloom.
    The island was only two miles across at its widest, less than thirteen from point to point. Brian knew every inch of it, the sun-bleached sand of the beaches, the cool, shady marshes with their ancient and patient alligators. He loved the dune swales, the wonderful wet, undulating grassy meadows banked by young pines and majestic live oaks.
    But most of all, he loved the forest, with its dark pockets and its mysteries.
    He knew the history of his home, that once cotton and indigo had been grown there, worked by slaves. Fortunes had been reaped by his ancestors. The rich had come to play in this isolated little paradise, hunting the deer and the feral hogs, gathering shells, fishing both river and surf.
    They’d held lively dances in the ballroom under the candle glow of crystal chandeliers, gambled carelessly at cards in the game room while drinking good southern bourbon and smoking fat Cuban cigars. They had lazed on the veranda on hot summer afternoons while slaves brought them cold glasses of lemonade.
    Sanctuary had been an enclave for privilege, and a testament to a way of life that was doomed to failure.
    More fortunes still had gone in and out of the hands of the steel and shipping magnate who had turned Sanctuary into his private retreat.
    Though the money wasn’t what it had been, Sanctuary still stood. And the island was still in the hands of the descendants of those cotton kings and emperors of steel. The cottages that were scattered over it, rising up behind the dunes, tucked into the shade of the trees, facing the wide swath of Pelican Sound, passed from generation to generation, ensuring that only a handful of families could claim Desire as home.
    So it would remain.
    His father fought developers and environmentalists with equal fervor. There would be no resorts on Desire, and no well-meaning government would convince Sam Hathaway to make his island a national preserve.
    It was, Brian thought, his father’s monument to a faithless wife. His blessing and his curse.
    Visitors came now, despite the solitude, or perhaps because of it. To keep the house, the island, the trust, the Hathaways had turned part of their home into an inn.
    Brian knew Sam detested it, resented every footfall on the island from an outsider. It was the only thing he could remember his parents arguing over. Annabelle had wanted to open the island to more tourists, to draw people to it, to establish the kind of social whirl her ancestors had once enjoyed. Sam had insisted on keeping it unchanged, untouched, monitoring the number of visitors and overnight guests like a miser doling out pennies. It was, in the end, what Brian believed had driven his mother away—that need for people, for faces, for voices.
    But however much his father tried, he couldn’t hold off change any more than the island could hold back the sea.
    Adjustments, Brian thought as the deer turned as a unit and bounded into the concealing trees. He didn’t care for adjustments himself, but in the case of the inn they had been necessary. And the fact was, he enjoyed the running of it, the planning, the implementing, the routine. He liked the visitors, the voices of strangers, observing their varying habits and expectations, listening to the occasional stories of their worlds.
    He didn’t mind people in his life—as long as they didn’t intend