Footsteps (14 page)

Trey tore on ahead, Elsa loping after him.
Rosa, on her phone with a college friend, lingered roadside,
sitting on the hood of Carlo’s car. If she scratched his paint with
the rivets on her shorts, Carlo would have a serious talk with her.
He said as much, and she stuck her tongue out at him.

Just before Carlo came to the beachside
corner of Carmen’s little cottage, Luca met him and handed him a
beer.

“Gotta tell you, man,” Luca smirked. “I get
it now, and I’d better say this before you’re in a position to take
offense. I’d seriously consider blowing up the whole family, too,
for just one chance to get my hands on that.”

“What are you talking about?”

Luca nodded at the beer in Carlo’s hand.
“Drink that. You need it. You got company.”

As his heart picked up its pace, Carlo’s
feet did the same. He turned the corner and saw Bina, sitting in
one of the Adirondack chairs around the fire ring, her long, dark
hair loose and tossed by the breeze, her golden legs crossed. She
was wearing a black bikini that left virtually nothing to the
imagination and chatting amicably with, of all people, Carmen.

He opened the beer and drank it down.

When Carmen saw him, she stood and came
over, her smirk not much different from Luca’s. It was like his
siblings were all in on a joke together—one at his expense. “Okay,
big brother. I’m your cover. Sabina is my new bestie. She came down
the beach a couple of hours ago, looking all lost. So I made nice,
and she’s ‘visiting me’.” She made the air quotes. “You’re lucky—I
actually like her. Come sit with us, and try to pretend you don’t
want to pork her on sight, okay?”

Struck dumb, Carlo nodded and let Carmen
lead him to the fire ring. All the siblings were present. Even
their father was there, down the dune, bending over so that Trey
could tell him a story, probably about sailing. And there was Bina,
in the bosom of his family. The thought was exhilarating and
terrifying all at once.

He was wearing long, faded red shorts, slung
low on his hips, and nothing else, and he was beautiful. His chest.
Mother Mary, his chest. Long and muscular, the chiseled space
between his shoulders lightly covered with dark curls, a long, thin
line of hair bisecting his sculpted belly. Sabina lost her
breath.

He was staring at her as breathlessly, and
she indulged a little vanity. She was wearing her Keds to protect
her wounded foot, and she’d been worried that they ruined the look
of her bathing suit—and then she’d felt silly for being worried.
But seeing the hungry way his eyes took her in, lingering over her
chest and belly as she’d lingered over his, she’d known that she
looked fine.

She’d worn the black two-piece with the
fuchsia embroidered trim because she knew that it worked for
her—the top had the right support without being bulky, and the
bottom had enough coverage not to be indecent but no more than
that. It was James’s favorite, but she set that thought aside.

She’d wanted Carlo to see her. Like a
schoolgirl, she’d wanted him to find her beautiful. And now he was
coming toward her, his light brown eyes fixed on her, devouring
her, and she felt pride and hope. And fear.

“Bina.”

“Carlo.” She started to rise, but he held
his hand out, stopping her.

“No, sit.” He sat in the chair on her other
side; Carmen returned to her seat. “I’m glad to see you. Are you
all right?”

“Yes. You?” It was a silly thing to ask.

But he answered in a way that surprised her
and made her heart speed even more. Leaning toward her, his voice
low, he murmured for her alone, “Missed you.”

“Carlo.” She turned and looked into his
eyes. What she saw there was heat and need and care. Glad as she
was to see it all, she blinked and turned away. She didn’t like
this fear she felt with her hope. Things felt like they were moving
too quickly, out of control.

Luca sat down across the fire pit. Sabina
wasn’t sure what to make of this brother. In the time she’d been
here, she’d caught him several times leering at her, but he never
seemed sorry or ashamed to be caught. He simply smiled, every time,
taking the wind out of her irritation. He was built in a way she
thought of as ‘thuggish’—like the men James hired to protect him
for some of his business. Like all the men here except their
father, Luca was shirtless, wearing long shorts. He had more hair
than Carlo on his chest, in a lighter shade of brown. He also had
tattoos on both biceps and across his belly. His brown hair and
beard were close-cropped. He looked like the kind of man she should
be afraid of.

But he had that disarming smile. So he
unsettled her. But Carlo’s ease with him told her that he was a
decent man.

He smiled at her now, his eyes on hers—they
were light, perhaps blue or green—as he spoke to his brother. “We
were just telling Sabina about the killer whale that beached a
couple of years back. Remember that?”

Sabina turned back to Carlo and saw him
nodding, still looking at her. “Yeah. That was pretty cool,” he
answered.

“Luca said you saved it. All of you.”

“Yeah. The whole town, really. We kept him
wet, dumping buckets of sea water on him, and then the fish and
wildlife people came and we helped ‘em dig a trench. When the tide
came in, we floated Shamu right back out. It felt good to see him
swim away.”

“Scary though, that such a fish would swim
so close to people.”

“Not a fish,” Luca jumped in. “Whales are
mammals.”

Sabina felt herself blush a little at her
mistake; she knew better. But Luca’s correction had felt
condescending. She lifted an eyebrow at him. “Thank you for the
biology lesson. Will there be an exam?”

A wide smile evolved across Luca’s face, and
Sabina could read surprise, then humor, then appreciation in the
movement of his mouth. Instead of answering her, he turned to
Carlo. “Nice. I might have to turn on the charm, brother. Take you
on.”

She cocked her head at that. “You think you
have so much charm?”

Luca’s response was a full-body laugh and
then a nod of surrender.

She spent most of her days making small talk
with other society people, and she excelled at party chat. She was
known for it, known to be a sparkling party guest, because she knew
the right mood to strike, with whomever she spoke, whether she’d
just met them or not. She could read people well—a skill she’d
honed of necessity, married to James and needing to read him
quickly and accurately and to make decisions about her own
responses.

But she’d rarely indulged in the kind of
barbed banter she’d just started with Luca. It was too much like
flirting, and James would have ‘corrected’ her for it. When she
cast a quick eye to Carlo now, feeling almost guilty, Sabina
understood for a final certainty that she was putting Carlo in
James’s place, gauging his responses as if she were accountable to
him. It frightened her. And it made her furious with herself.

But he was laughing, shooting his brother a
look that said he was enjoying their exchange, and she was so
relieved and enchanted by his carefree enjoyment that she set aside
her worries about becoming attached. Right now, she wanted to be
attached. She was already.

And wasn’t that why she was sitting here, on
his sister’s beach, surrounded by his family? Because she’d missed
him?

The Escalade had followed her back to the
house after her trip to Quinn’s the previous evening. She’d noticed
that it had tailed her more closely than before, and she decided it
meant that James was becoming impatient that she had not yet, as
far as he knew, noticed her stalker. It had made her smile.
Moreover, still feeling the heady pleasure of Carlo’s lips on hers,
and the warm way his large body had enveloped her, she felt a kind
of vituperative aggravation at her husband and his petty, vicious
games. For all his vast wealth, his power and influence, for all
the ways he had her under his thumb, he was at his core nothing
more than a cruel little boy.

So she continued to ignore the Escalade and
its wide-bodied operator. James’s latest innocuous text, that
evening, had read:
Checking in, Bina. All well? Miss you.
He
had never expressed those last two words in any way in fifteen
years of marriage. She’d responded,
All is well. Getting the
house ready.

Since their marriage, excepting public
expressions made for the benefit of an audience, he’d never told
her that he loved her or that he missed her, and he’d never
demanded those words of her, either. It was not love he required,
but submission. She had no idea how he’d now take the fact that she
had not reciprocated his faux sentiment. She assumed it would
provoke him, somehow, and that thought gave her a perverse and
reckless sense of pleasure.

Sitting on the veranda late that night,
eating leftover Chinese and watching night waves bringing the tide
in, Sabina had realized that she had lost her fatalistic acceptance
of James’s plan for her. She was not willing to die, not even for
freedom. She wanted freedom, and she felt a seedling of hope, as
yet a frail tendril only, that she might have it and live.

Whether that hope would whither and die
remained to be seen. But if James succeeded in killing her, it
would only be after a fight.

She’d woken this morning still suffused with
the same strength of purpose. She would fight James. She would not
simply let him kill her; neither would she go back, not willingly,
and not cowed. One way or another, she would make her stand
here.

Perhaps it was Carlo’s concern for her, his
desire to help her, which had planted the seed, but she would not
sit back and wait to be saved. Without yet knowing how she would
accomplish it, Sabina knew that she had to save herself—not alone,
she was no idiot and knew that she would need help, and she was
happy that Carlo had offered his, but she would be active and
present in her freedom.

It was with those thoughts making her
muscles thrum that she’d decided to drive to Quiet Cove’s public
beach. She’d known that the man in the Escalade would follow her,
and she’d known that she might very well, therefore, be declaring
herself by action. But Carlo had told her he was going to seek help
for her. She was not alone. Even if he came away without the help
of his family, he was with her. She had tried to dissuade him, and
he had knocked her discouragement away. He was with her. For the
first time since she was eighteen years old, there was someone in
her corner.

She felt strong. She even felt as if she had
a little bit of power. Not much, but enough to make her stand. Let
Mr. Escalade see her with the Paganos—let him even see her with
Carlo. Let him report back to his master. Let James come.

Let him come.

When she’d gotten to the beach, packed with
people on this Memorial Day afternoon, she’d wavered a little. Her
fight was no longer her own. Because she could not fight alone, she
had, albeit inadvertently, brought others into the line of fire.
Carlo, yes. But also his family. Perhaps even his young son. James
loathed children and would not hesitate to hurt a child if he
thought to do so would be the most expedient path to his
victory.

That thought of Trey had stilled her
progress toward Carmen’s cottage, where she could see several of
the Pagano family—the brothers she’d met, Carmen, their father, and
another man Sabina assumed was the other brother—milling about,
doing various beach-y things. Neither Carlo nor Trey was there—nor
the younger sister, Rosa. Sabina had been standing there, losing
her fight, deciding to turn back but unable to make her feet move
her away from that pleasant family scene, when Carmen had spotted
her and recognized her. She’d stood for a moment, facing Sabina,
her hands on her hips, looking both elegant and wild in a red
two-piece with gold rings at the hips and cleavage, and her long,
black hair wet and madly tousled, and then she’d strode over,
moving smoothly even through the thick sand.

After a few direct words of greeting, she’d
led Sabina into the circle of the Pagano family, where she’d been,
for the most part, welcomed warmly but as a curiosity. Their
father, however, had ignored her, save a few considering glances in
her direction. Shortly after Carmen had brought her over and
renewed her introductions, Carlo Sr. had taken a beach chair and
gone to sit with his feet in the surf, where he’d stayed until Trey
had bounded onto the scene, that Yeti of a dog loping behind
him.

Over the course of the two or so hours she’d
been there while Carlo was not, Sabina had been able to turn that
air of curiosity into one of comfort. Because she was adept at
party chat, because she could read people, she had quickly found
the right rhythm to be present in this group. Most of their talk
was playful banter. Every now and again, one of the siblings would
say something, and a couple of the others would roll their eyes at
each other—private communications, in-jokes, and the like. None of
it made Sabina feel excluded. Instead, she basked in the vibe of a
fractiously loving family. She’d been a part of such a family, long
ago. Not quite so large, and she had not had them quite so long. To
watch the Paganos made her feel a kind of homesickness she’d
thought had died in her ages before.