Read By The Sea, Book Four: The Heirs for Free Online Page A

hear the running steps along
the Persian-carpeted hall outside her room.
    "Cindy! For God's sake! Why didn't you
answer me? Are you all right?"
    Sweeping her damp, straw-straight hair from
her face, Cindy turned slowly and vaguely to the breathless, angry
figure in the doorway. He was soaked completely through, and his
khakis and Shadow -emblazoned windbreaker clung in wet
hollows to him, making him seem to loom even taller.
    "Alan? Why are you here?" Cindy looked
genuinely puzzled.
    "What happened? Cindy, what happened?" His
voice was anxious, but he made no move to come into the room that
had been hers exclusively, at her insistence, after the first
month.
    "Happened? Nothing," she answered
briefly.
    "Then why the hell is the front of
the Mercedes covered with blood?"
    "Blood? Oh, that. I hit a dog."
    "A dog? How fast were you going? The grill
is bent."
    "It was ... a big dog." She bowed her head
to her knees, her arms still wrapped tightly around her shins.
    "How is it?" he asked quietly.
    "It's dead."
    "Did you do anything? Call anyone?"
    "There was nothing to do, Alan. It's dead.
No lights were on in any of the nearby houses. It can wait until
morning," she said wearily into the soft folds of cashmere. "I'm
very tired." She heard him take two or three steps across the
marble floor and her head jerked up. "No, Alan."
    He stood still. His face was haggard with
fatigue, and wet dark curls tumbled over his forehead nearly down
to his eyebrows. The bloodlines of his English ancestry were
apparent in the Roman nose and in the square jaw, but most of all
in his bearing. There was something indomitable about the way he
carried his extra inch over six feet. Surrounded as he was by all
the stained-glass windows, it flashed through Cindy's mind that a
knight who had shed himself of a suit of armor after heavy battle
might look as Alan Seton did now: soaked through, exhausted, but
with an unmistakable sense of destiny.
    "You need a haircut," she said.
    "Cindy—"
    "And a shave. Alan ... you shouldn't be
here," she said. "Nothing's changed."
    "Cindy, it must have been bad. Don't tell me
it wasn't. You look terrible. I can't leave you like this. You're
shivering, wet—"
    "Not wet!" she interrupted with
sudden ferocity. "Damp. You're wet, clear through! I had
enough sense to come in out of the rain. What's your excuse?" It
frightened her, the seething anger in her voice. She had to
maintain control, now if ever.
    "You knew we had to keep working—"
    "Of course. Of course." It was a
dismissal, but she couldn't help adding, "And did you finish work
on your precious new mast?"
    "No," he admitted. "There's no way we can be
ready to sail tomorrow. I've asked for a day's postponement. The
Race Committee was very good about it."
    "So you could have gone to the Ball
tonight, after all," she said instantly.
    With that Alan parked his hands on his hips
and gave her a look of wonder, blurred by a half-smile of sorrow.
"You just don't get it, do you? Why I'm in Newport."
    "I know perfectly well why you're here: to throw two years of your life and most of your fortune
after an eight-pound silver cup with a hole in the bottom. What I
don't know is why I'm here. I'm getting out, Alan. Out of
this godforsaken marriage." Her voice had risen high, like a
cresting wave, and was about to break. One more word and she would
burst into tears. Slowly she swung away from him and resumed
staring at her favorite window panels. And to think she once had
thought she loved him.
    "Cindy," Alan said softly, and he was beside
her, lifting bits of blond hair between his strong, blunt fingers,
rubbing the strands over one another, trying to reconnect the
frayed ends of their torn relationship. "Poor Cindy."
    She pulled her head away, but softly,
gently; the strands he was holding tugged at her scalp, sending
little shock waves of pleasure-current over her head and shoulders.
"No, Alan," she said, but there was confusion in her voice. This
was how she'd become