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.