Dune Road by Jane Green Read Free Book Online Page B

costume of black latex, as she and several others tied Richard up and smacked him until he was sore and red; and soon she began to find Richard rather ridiculous.
    She no longer needed saving from Jed, and she no longer needed Richard. The prenup she had signed was indeed watertight, but his reputation was not, and when Tracy decided the time had come for them to move on with their lives, all she had to do was produce some photographs she had taken over the course of some of their more . . . elaborate parties, and Richard was offering her whatever she wanted.
    His manager stepped in. Tried to tell Tracy he would ruin her, but Tracy had laughed and said she was only a housewife, what did she have to lose.
    In the end she got a settlement she was reasonably happy with, and a chance to reinvent herself. She grew her hair long and highlighted it blonde, let her skin tan in the sun, carried on learning more and more complicated yoga, Hatha, then Vinyasa, then finally Ashtanga, the yoga she had started all those years ago when she first moved to California.
    And then, when her past threatened to catch up with her—it started with an associate of Richard’s, a regular presence at his parties, turning up at her house and requesting, no, in a menacing way demanding her continued participation, and this was followed by her phone ringing in the dead of night and no one being on the line—she decided to move.
    She had had enough of California by that time, enough of Los Angeles, of the movie scene, and she went to New York for a couple of weeks, and found herself, one weekend, accepting an invitation to a beach house in Highfield, Connecticut.
    She parked in the car park by the marina, walked down some of the cobbled streets in the old part of town, right by the beach, and stepped onto Main Street, where she saw the pelargoniums in full bloom, tumbling from the window boxes outside the high-end stores that lined the street; there were laughing teenagers strolling past with ice creams in their hands, sand on their ankles and flip-flops on their feet.
    She had forgotten quite how much she had missed the East Coast. Not that she would ever go back to Long Island—God knows she had worked hard to lose that particular accent. But Highfield felt . . . right. It felt like home. She stood in the middle of Main Street with a broad smile on her face, and when she reached her friend’s beach house with a view of the water, she knew her days in California were over.
    Tracy bought an old 1950s ranch out at Sasquatchan Cove and, thanks to her divorce settlement, promptly knocked it down and rebuilt a classic shingle beach house, with large picture windows that looked out over the water, and a huge open-plan kitchen/living room, with big squashy sofas for people to sink into with a glass of wine.
    Some time after she moved to Highfield, she took over the lease at Navajo Hall. A former movie theater, it had been a pizza parlor, a video arcade, and in its last incarnation a hangout for teens, complete with pool tables and no-alcohol bar, but the wealthy teens in Highfield were far too busy taking drugs and throwing excessive parties at their parents’ huge houses while said parents were in Nantucket or Block Island for the weekend to bother with the shabby and somewhat decrepit Navajo Hall, and when Tracy made the owner an offer he couldn’t refuse, he didn’t refuse.
    She had a vision for Namaste. A yoga center that would be more than a yoga center. A yoga center that would bring people together, become a center for the community. A place where people could hang out, have lunch, connect. A place that would attract all the best people in Highfield, Connecticut, and if any of them happened to be wealthy single men, well, what was wrong with that?
    If only it hadn’t been for Facebook. If only it hadn’t been for one of those nights when she couldn’t sleep, when she decided, just for fun, to look up some ex-boyfriends. Her life was going so