Face the Fire by Nora Roberts Read Free Book Online Page B

me, though you’d rather have hung me by my toes. So instead of charming, I’m charmed.”
    He glanced around the kitchen. It had always been a warm and friendly room. Once, he’d been welcome there. “I admire you, for what you made out of your life. And I envy you your clear vision and your happy home. Zack’s important to me.”
    He looked back at her as she said nothing. “It’s hard, I imagine, for you to buy that, but it’s fact. I don’t intend to do anything that complicates his relationship with you. I’ll go out the back while he’s busy with his Lucy.”
    Nell dried her hands. “I haven’t made coffee yet.”
    He turned at the door, just looked at her.
    And she saw why Mia had fallen for him. Not just the dangerous good looks. But in his eyes she saw so much power, so much pain.
    “I’m not forgiving you,” she said briskly. “But if Zack considers you a friend, you must have some redeeming qualities. Somewhere. Sit down. We’re having trifle for dessert.”

    She had humbled him, Sam thought later as he walked back to the cottage. The pretty blue-eyed blonde who’d been bitingly polite, then brutally frank, then cautiously understanding all in one evening had brought him to his knees.
    It was rare for him to want to earn someone’s respect, but he now wanted badly to earn Nell Todd’s.
    He walked the beach as he had walked it as a boy. Restlessly. And turned for home, as he had as a boy. Without any sense of pleasure.
    How could he explain that while he had loved the house on the bluff, it had never been his place? He’d had no regrets when his father had sold it.
    The cove, the cave, they had meant a great deal once. But the house itself had just been wood and glass. With so little warmth inside. Demands, yes. To be a Logan, to succeed, to excel.
    Well, he’d learned to do all three, but he wondered now what it had cost him.
    He thought again of the spirit in the Todd house. He’d always believed houses had spirits, and theirs was warm, affectionate. Marriage actually worked for some people, he decided. The commitment, the unity, and the promise—not just for convenience or status but for heart.
    That, in his mind, was a rare, rare gift.
    There’d been little affection in his house. Oh, no neglect, no abuse, no meanness. His parents had been partners, but never, in his memory, a couple. And their marriage was as coldly efficient as any merger.
    He could still remember being baffled, fascinated, and vaguely embarrassed when he was a boy by the open displays of affection between Zack’s parents.
    He thought of them now, traveling around in their house on wheels and reportedly having the time of their lives. His parents would be appalled at the idea.
    How much, he wondered, did who we came from form us? Did Zack’s staggeringly functional childhood predispose him to create his own functional family?
    The luck of the draw?
    Or was it all, in the end, what we made of ourselves? Each choice leading to another choice.
    He paused now, looking out and watching the swath of white light sweep over the water. Mia’s lighthouse, on Mia’s cliffs. How many times had he stood and studied that hopeful beam and thought of her?
    Wanted her.
    He couldn’t remember when it had started. There were times when he thought he’d been born wanting her. And it had been terrifying, that feeling that he’d been swamped by some tide that had begun forming before his existence.
    How many nights had he ached for her? Even when he’d had her, even when he’d been inside her, he’d ached. Love, for him, had been a storm, full of boundless pleasure and abject terror.
    For her, it had simply been.
    Standing on the edge of the beach, he sent his thoughts winging over the black water, toward the beam of light. Toward the cliffs, the stone house. Toward her.
    And the wall she’d built around what was hers rejected them, bounced them back at him.
    “You have to let me in,” he murmured. “Sooner or later.”
    But