Footsteps(5)

So he’d find a way to make nice with highborn lowlifes like Anderson Temple. And James Auberon. And try to tell himself that he wasn’t getting tied up in their strings.





Though a man who beat his wife was the worst kind of man, and Carlo had a pretty clear picture now of James Auberon, Community Paragon, as that kind of man. How the fuck was he supposed to make nice with that?





Auberon had known his name. Well, it was a well-known name in Providence. In all the Northeast, really. He hadn’t had much to do with that notoriety personally. In fact, it was a hindrance at least half the time. But Carlo supposed it could be good for business if James Auberon respected his family name.





He stepped back into the loft and closed the slider. After he tossed his empty beer bottle, feeling cooler and freer, but no brighter, he went down the short hall and opened the door to Trey’s room.





His son was sleeping, rolled up into a snug ball, his blue stuffed dinosaur shoved tightly under his chin. The room was illuminated by a domed nightlight, throwing a rotating, glowing blue starscape onto the ceiling and walls. Even in sleep, Trey’s world was in motion. Carlo bent down and kissed his tousled blond head.





He had to make his way and give his son a life. It was just the two of them.





~ 2 ~





Her torn gown discarded in a heap on the bedroom floor, Sabina Alonzo-Auberon sat on the toilet in her black-and-white marble bathroom and dabbed a wet washcloth over her bleeding knees.





She’d thought at first that something had been broken or chipped. Her right knee complained bitterly when she put weight on it, but sitting here on the toilet, the washcloth bunched in her hand, she’d pushed around thoroughly, and it didn’t feel worse than bruised. And bleeding.





She was a strong woman. She told herself every day that she was strong. But here she sat. On a toilet, cleaning up new wounds delivered unto her by the man she’d once loved. And there was no way out, as far as she could see. Not until he was done with her.





Why he wasn’t done with her, she had no idea.





“Here. Let me.”





She jumped; she hadn’t heard James come in. The insulation in this house was impeccable, and sound did not carry from one room to another at all. But she had expected him to be late, if he came home at all. He’d seemed to have found ample distraction at the event tonight.





That he was home so shortly after she was boded ill for her, she thought.





Wearing his pleated shirt and his pants, he walked into her capacious bathroom and gently took the washcloth from her hand. He tossed it into the sink and opened the mirrored cabinet on the wall. He took out a bottle of rubbing alcohol and then collected a few cotton balls from the jar on the counter. Squatting before her, he smiled.





He was a handsome man. Tall and lean, compact muscle clinging to his frame. He was forty-five, with no sign yet of grey in his auburn hair, and just enough creasing around his eyes and between his brows to give his face gravitas. His eyes were an arresting shade of green and had the remarkable ability to transform from kind to terrifying with a blink.





She’d fallen in love with and married the kind eyes. She lived with the terrifying.





Now, though, he smiled sweetly and turned up those terrifying eyes, and she took a slow, deep breath as he soaked a cotton ball in alcohol and pressed it against the open wound of her right knee. The sting was sharp, was actual pain, but she didn’t allow herself to flinch or even blink. She knew it would be easier if she did. What he wanted was the flinch, the sign that he’d had an impact. He would press the point until he got it. That was the game he played.





That was what tonight had been. She’d grown used to his infidelity, and, in fact, she no longer cared. But he had not, until tonight, made public spectacle of his contempt for her. And his power over her. She had stopped reacting to his degradation of her in ways that satisfied him, and so he’d pressed the point until she’d reacted.





But the second time she’d found him with his hands up another woman’s dress tonight, she had been prepared, and she had reacted in a way that hadn’t satisfied him, simply walking away, leaving the theater. As a consequence, now she was sitting here with bloody knees, being tortured by the harsh drag of alcohol-soaked cotton over her abraded skin.





She wondered what he might have done if her Good Samaritan hadn’t interfered. Whatever it might have been, he would have gotten away with it. No one ever interfered with anything James Auberon did. He didn’t often make a public show of his dark side, but when he did, people let him. For the same reason that Sabina still lived with him, still wore the ten-carat canary diamond on her left ring finger. Because the power he wielded was vast, and his aim was true. Everyone knew it, and everyone let him have his will.