Footsteps (7 page)

But she could not have allowed it.

Over the rush of surf, she thought she heard
something else, or at least sensed something, and she looked over
her shoulder to see Carlo running toward her. Knowing full well she
couldn’t outrun him, she didn’t even try. Instead, she wheeled
around and stood akimbo.

“What are you
doing
?”

He pulled up a few steps from her. “I’m
walking with you. It’s too dark to go alone. I just needed to talk
to my sister for a minute before I joined you.”

“And if I don’t wish for your company?”

He shrugged. “Public beach—actually, where
we’re standing isn’t public. My other sister, Carmen, owns this
stretch. That’s her house there.” He pointed up the rise to a sweet
little shake-shingle cottage, its windows beaming with happy,
golden light. “Technically, you’re trespassing right now.”

“Why?”

He grinned. Crinkly eyes. “Because you’re on
Carmen’s beach.”

Impatient with his willful obtuseness, she
huffed. “No. Why are you following me?”

“Because I’m a decent guy? Look, I don’t
want to read the
Quiet Cove Clarion
in a couple of days and
see that your body washed up down the coast. It’s dark. You won’t
let me drive you. So I’m taking a walk at the same time you are, in
the same general direction.” He held his hands out as if to show he
was unarmed, harmless.

“You understand who my husband is?” She knew
that he did, but her point was made in the question.

“Just walking you home. Mrs. Auberon.”

“And then you’ll walk back? Alone? In the
dark? Because the dark is safer for you? Do you have the night
vision or something? Are you the Batman?”

He laughed at that—a bark of surprise and
then a full, rich laugh that made his baritone voice deepen to
bass. She had no idea why what she’d said seemed to him so funny,
but she waited, her fingers drumming her hips, until he’d collected
himself.

“No. Not Batman. Just Carlo.” He pushed his
hand into the pocket of his shorts and pulled something out. “With
a phone. I’ll call my brother for a ride back.”

“Sisters, brother—how many is your
family?”

“Our little branch? There are six of us.
Four boys, two girls. Do you have siblings?”

It wasn’t a question she wanted to think
about, let alone attempt to answer. “You may walk. Only that.” She
turned and continued on. He trotted a few more steps until he was
abreast of her, and they walked along the beach in silence.

The woman walking alongside Carlo had
surprised him. He’d made some judgments about her last night. She
hadn’t focused his thoughts enough then for him to have realized
it; he was much more focused on her husband. Those judgments he’d
made about James Auberon he’d recognized right away and had allowed
to form fully. Auberon was an abusive asshole who felt entitled to
it. But as Carlo had made that determination, he’d also decided
that Auberon’s wife was weak in will and in body. Despite walking
up to them last night on some kind of hero’s mission, and despite
her arresting beauty, he’d barely given her another thought. He’d
spent his attention on his contempt for Auberon and his distaste
for the reality that in order to find success as an independent
architect in Providence, he’d have to make nice with a man like
that.

He hadn’t spent more than a few seconds
wondering what Sabina Alonzo-Auberon might have gone home to, or
what her life was like in general. He’d thought ‘beautiful,’ and
he’d thought ‘weak,’ and he’d set her aside.

Well, ‘beautiful’ was certainly accurate.
Carlo thought she was more beautiful the way she was tonight, in
jeans and a sweater, her hair loose and losing its battle with the
night breeze off the water. But in just the limited exchanges
they’d shared this evening, he could tell that ‘weak’ did not
apply. There was fire and strong will in her. When she’d wheeled on
him just now and asked him what he was doing, her eyes had flashed
hot beams of anger at him, and it had pulled him up. It hadn’t been
the desperate kind of fretful anger he might have expected from a
woman who lived with an abuser. It had been fight. She’d turned on
him and shoved her hands down onto her hips, and she’d been all
confidence and attitude. She might as well have said out loud, ‘you
think you can take me?’ She’d followed it up with sass, and she’d
been comfortable in it.

So she wasn’t weak. How a woman like this
ended up letting a man like Auberon hurt her was beyond him. And
hurt her he clearly did. When she’d reached up to take the water
bottle from him, the sleeve of her sweater had pulled back from her
wrist. The firelight had illuminated dark bands of bruising at the
join of her hand to her arm and up for about three inches.

But it wasn’t his concern. His only concern
was getting her safely to her door.

They walked in silence for at least half a
mile. Once, when she’d put her foot down into deeper sand than
she’d realized, she’d wobbled a little, and he’d reached out
without thinking about it and taken her hand to steady her. She
yanked it back immediately. Very clearly, she did not want him to
touch her; she shrank and jerked away from even helpful touches. So
he put his hands in his pockets, determined to let her go ahead and
fall next time.

The silence, though, was becoming oppressive
and awkward. Usually, Carlo was perfectly comfortable in silence.
Having grown up in the house he had, loud was a constant state,
everybody talking at the same time, nobody having what might be
called a civilized conversation, but everybody managing to get
their point across nonetheless. So Carlo had grown to like quiet
and to appreciate people who could be together in silence. Now,
though, the silence between him and Sabina was like an actual
presence, and it felt strange.

As much as he abhorred small talk, he
finally caved and asked, “Have you had a house on the beach for
long?”

She flinched a little, looking surprised
that he’d spoken after so long. With a suspicious glance his way,
she answered, “Ten years.”

“You spend much time out here?”

“No.”

Okay. So no chitchat. They walked on in
silence again for another hundred feet or so, and then she
surprised him.

“If you had one week only to live, what
would you do?”

He grinned. She was better at small talk
than he was—probably part of the job description for a socialite.
Maybe it was a little clichéd, and it was definitely morbid, but
that was a pretty good conversation starter.

“Um, I don’t know. I’m not really somebody
who keeps a ‘bucket list.’ I guess…I guess I’d come home. Here.
This is my favorite place. With only a week to live, I’d come here
and sit on the beach with my dog and my kid and just…be. Not very
exciting, but I’d want peace before I died, and this is where I
find it. Home.”

She’d turned during his speech and now was
watching him. “You have a child?”

“Yeah. A son. Trey—well, Carlo III, but he’s
called Trey. He’s three—four in August. Do you have any kids?”

Her brow creased, and then she shook it
away. “No. Do you have also a wife?”

Sabina had the kind of accent that lingered
after a long time away from the culture and language in which it
belonged—subtle but noticeable. Every now and then, he’d noticed,
her syntax broke a little, and she phrased things clearly but a
step out of the ordinary. It was in that phrasing that she seemed
to him most exotic. Charmed, he smiled, despite the viper pit of a
question she’d phrased in that not-quite-typical way. “No. I did.
Our marriage was annulled a couple of months ago.”

“Annulled? With a child?”

And now she was nosy. Instead of being
offended, though, he was charmed by her directness. Anyway, he had
a suspicion she might have more insight than most about why. She
was Latina. It wasn’t a stretch to ask, “Are you Catholic?”

Her head swiveled quickly to him, and he was
surprised by her surprise—and by her hesitation. It was a couple of
seconds before she answered, “I was born Catholic, yes.”

“So am I. I didn’t want a divorce. She left
us. It’s not so hard to make a divorce an annulment, really.” If
you knew the right people, it was easy. And the Paganos knew all
the right people. Realizing the ease with which he was talking
about this, Carlo was surprised at himself. Stunned, actually.
They’d gone from tense silence to him telling her things he didn’t
talk about outside his family.

She nodded. “I apologize.” With a brush of
her fingers along her pretty nose, that big ring glinting in the
moonlight, she added, “For my nose in your business.”

“It’s okay. Hey—what would
you
do if
you had one week to live?”

That made her laugh. She had a lovely laugh.
Melodious. “I think I would do this. Walk on the beach at night.
Sit and watch the waves in the day. As you say…just be.”

Somewhere in the middle of her words, the
humor with which she’d started to speak made a turn, and there was
a tinge of sadness in her tone as she stopped speaking. His sense
was strong that she was, simply, done speaking. So he didn’t reply,
and they walked on down the beach in a silence that had become
companionable.

~oOo~

Sabina was limping a little by the time she
pointed up the dunes toward a large, traditionally styled home.
Carlo had spent the past few hundred yards engaged in an internal
conflict—staving off the strong urge to pick her up and carry her.
James Auberon’s wife brought out the gallant in him, it seemed. But
he had a suspicion that she would take it ill if he suddenly swept
her up into his arms. So he walked alongside her and tried not to
notice how carefully she set her feet down with every step. He
sighed heavily with relief when she indicated her house.

Having surfed all over the Rhode Island
coast, Carlo had seen the house often. It was both beautiful and
nothing particularly special. Two stories and a loft, facing the
water, with an enclosable veranda across the front of the first
floor and a balcony across the second floor. The precise kind of
moderate opulence one would expect for a wealthy man’s beach house.
Auberon probably called it his “cabin” or something similarly
obnoxious in its faux modesty.

All the lights in the house were on—people
around here had a tendency to do that; the aesthetics of a
brightly-lit beach house at night were hard to top.

Carlo stopped at the tideline as Sabina
turned up to climb the dunes to the house. After a few steps, she
realized he wasn’t following her and turned back. She cocked her
head. “Come up.”

“Are you sure?”

“You may sit on the veranda. I’ll bring you
a drink, and you can call your brother. Come.” Without waiting to
see if he would, she turned and continued her climb to the house.
He followed.

As he climbed behind her up the steps onto
her veranda, he noticed that she was leaving a dark footprint with
every step of her right foot. She was bleeding. She’d been limping,
but not to the extent he would have thought, seeing these
prints.

“Sabina?”

In the act of opening her front door, she
turned. “Yes?”

He gestured to the plank floor of the
veranda. “You’re bleeding.”

“
Ai
. Yes. I think found a piece of
shell in the sand. No matter. I have bandages.”

“May I help?”

Her eyes narrowed to slits. “No, I think I
don’t need your help.”

She took everything he said as if it were a
move of some kind. It wasn’t. She was beautiful and charming, but
she was married. And he wasn’t back in the game yet after Jenny. He
had no ulterior motives at all—in fact, he wanted to get back to
Quiet Cove and check in on Trey. But he supposed it wasn’t paranoid
of her to think that a man she barely knew might have bad intent
when he was trying to get into her house.

“Okay. You’ve been walking on it for a
while, haven’t you?”

She didn’t answer. She didn’t move.

“Okay. It’s probably pretty deep if it’s
still bleeding. You need to make sure you get all the sand out of
it. Soak your foot in hot water for a while. Do you have a washtub
or something? And lots of antibiotics.”

Still she didn’t move.

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sliced
my feet up around here. I’m happy to help. Just help.”

Expressions moved across her face with
surprising speed. She was the very definition of conflicted.

“I’ll just wait out here, if you want. I
have no other intent, Sabina.”

“Bina.”

“Hmm?”

“Bina. I am Bina.”

He smiled. “Bina. May I help you?”

With a single bob of her head, she conceded.
Then she turned and stepped up into her house, leaving the door
open behind her. He followed her in.

The house was as handsome, and predictable,
on the inside as it was on the outside. It had obviously been
professionally decorated in the kind of tasteful eclecticism that
predominated among the affluent summer-home dwellers in the area.
Lots of weathered whitewash, all the accent hues ocean blue and
sage green.