Footsteps (16 page)

When Carlo tried to set her down, Sabina
resisted, whining. She didn’t want to lose this. There was a part
of her brain that was appalled, at all of it—at her wantonness, her
recklessness, the way that even now her body would not let his
go—but that part, she supposed it was the sober part, was not as
strong as the part that had loved every feeling she’d had since
she’d come out of the bathroom. She was afraid that if she let him
go, she’d lose it all forever.

“Bina, come on.” He kissed her lips gently
and pried himself free of her.

When her feet hit the ground—and now there
was a little bit of pain in her sore foot—Sabina felt shame. “I’m
sorry. So sorry. I don’t…I don’t know…”

He caught her chin in his hand and made her
face him. “Don’t be sorry. That was beautiful. I would have loved
nothing better than to have taken you to bed.” He laughed. “I was
going to. But we can’t. My uncles will help us. They’ll help
you
. But they won’t help an adulterer. Do you understand?
What we did here was amazing.
You
are amazing, and feeling
you in my hands is… But we need to get you free of him before we do
more.” He bent down and brushed his lips over hers. “Besides, I
want you to be sober.”

That made her smile. “I
am
drunk. A
little bit, I think.”

“More than that, maybe.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve never before
been.”

He lifted his brows at her. “No?”

“No. For me, this is a weekend of new
things.”

“For me, too.” He pulled her into an
embrace.

~oOo~

She stayed with the Pagano family for a few
hours longer; Carlo did not want her to leave until she was sober
again, and she thought that was a wise idea. They gave her lots of
water. After dark, when a fire was blazing in the middle of the
ring of Adirondacks, Carmen brought out blankets, and Sabina curled
in a chair and chatted with the family. At some point, there were
hot dogs on sticks, to roast over the fire—actually
not
a
new experience for her, but one she hadn’t had in so long it might
as well have been. Carlo sat with Trey in the chair next to her,
bundled up in their own blanket. Sabina found herself entranced,
watching Trey drop slowly off to sleep, his eyes on the fire, his
blond head nestled under his father’s dark chin.

When it was time to go, Sabina helped Carlo
bring the blankets into the cottage, and he took the opportunity to
kiss her goodnight. Thoroughly. Being sober did not dampen her need
for him in the slightest.

Then Carmen walked her to her car, and
Sabina went back to the beach house she no longer thought of as her
home. She didn’t notice if the Escalade followed her. She didn’t
care.

That night, she dreamt vividly of Carlo. She
woke in the dark, startled and panting, and realized that she’d
climaxed in her sleep. Smiling, she lay back and dropped away
again, her hands tucked between her legs, still feeling the
tapering throbs of her pleasure.

~oOo~

The sun in the room was the vivid bright of
late morning when she next woke. She felt good. Before she even
opened her eyes, she reached back and tried to find the dream she’d
had. It was there, muted but still wonderful. She lay in the
beaming sun and relived both the dream and the reality. Finally,
she sat up and stretched. She opened her eyes.

James was sitting in the large, white
armchair across the room.

“Good morning, darling.”

Carlo was still awake when his father rose
and started his day. He’d spent the night reliving his evening with
Sabina. God, she was beautiful. And the way she’d felt in his
hands, her skin warm and supple, her mouth and tongue taking all he
could give her—intoxicating. Everything about that kiss—those
kisses—in Carmen’s cottage had been beyond erotic. He’d jacked off
twice in the night to the relived memories.

He’d come so damn close to just taking her.
She’d been coiled around him so tightly, so unwilling to let him
go. She’d all but begged him. Maybe it had been the beer, but her
complete lack of reserve—such a difference from before—had nearly
undone him. Thank God for Luca. Because they had to show some
restraint. They could not commit adultery, and they’d come close
last night.

Now that a deal had been struck, there was
nothing to do but wait. The Uncles had taken on the task of freeing
Sabina, and there was no checking in, no querying, no handling
things otherwise. They had to trust that the deal would be honored,
and Carlo would hear from them when it was done. He had quite
purposely only stated what he wanted for Sabina and not put any
bounds on how it got done. He didn’t give a fuck whether Auberon
lived or died.

They would wait, and Carlo would try to keep
his hands to himself. As much as possible. It might be a good idea
to limit their time together. But even as he thought that, he was
lamenting that he still did not have a number at which he could
reach her.

He lay in his bed in his childhood room and
listened to the hardwood floors creak as Carlo Sr. moved from
bedroom to bathroom, then down the hall, down the stairs. Elsa, who
slept in Trey’s room here, padded after him, the tags on her collar
jingling. He heard the squeak—faint from upstairs—of the kitchen
door opening, and knew that the dog had been put out in the yard to
take care of her morning business.

For as long as he’d worked, Carlo Sr. was up
for the day by four-thirty every morning. Since he’d started the
company, he was always at his office by six o’clock. He didn’t take
on day laborers—every job in the company was filled by a full-time
employee with benefits, and job crews were therefore stable teams.
It made for more overhead, more paperwork, but Carlo Sr. had felt
that people who worked together consistently worked together
better, and that had proved to be true. Pagano & Sons was known
for quality work and conscientious workers.

Job sites opened at seven—unless they were
in a location with neighbors who didn’t like that, in which case
the jobs started at eight or nine. Carlo Sr. hated those lost
hours. Though Luca was his chief supervisor and traveled every day
to check in at every job site, their father got restless indoors
and spent some of most days at a few—generally the more complex,
high-profile sites.

Their most high-profile job right now was a
small beachfront cottage development—fifteen units and a main
house, with four different layouts. Carlo was especially interested
in that project because he had designed it. For only the second
time so far, his career as an architect had dovetailed with his
family’s company. And this was the first time that he’d been
working independently when it happened. Pagano-Cabot was the design
firm of record.

Quiet Cove’s town council was persnickety
about large developments. The town was known for its quirky,
intimate, small-town charm, and there were no big hotels or resorts
on the beaches within its borders. There might never be. The
developer (
not
James Auberon) had fired its first design
team after more than a year of fights with the council over
environmental footprint and architectural compatibility. When the
new requests for proposals went out, Carlo and Peter, still
unpacking their new office, had put together a proposal that leaned
heavily on Carlo’s intimate knowledge of the town. What they’d
proposed, and what he’d ultimately designed, were cottages that
looked like they might have been erected hundreds of years ago, but
had the highest-end appointments. The buildings were nestled in
natural space, designed by yet another Pagano, and had the perfect
balance of charm, history, luxury, and privacy.

This project was the first time Carlo and
Carmen had gotten to work together. It was going well; he hoped
they would be a regular team.

The project had been delayed by a long,
ferocious winter, and they were a little more than a month behind
schedule, with a new grand opening projected for the Independence
Day weekend. Despite the delay, the project was now humming, and
his part in it was largely done. Still, he thought he might take
Trey out to that site today and poke around.

He needed to fill his damn day and keep
himself occupied so he didn’t do anything stupid.

But for now, he turned onto his side, pulled
a pillow over his head, and tried to get at least a nap’s worth of
sleep before Trey woke.

~oOo~

After breakfast and a long trip to the park
with Elsa, Carlo asked Trey if he wanted to have lunch with Pop-Pop
at work. Trey shouted “YEAH!” and ran off, up to his room, and came
running downstairs with his little, bright red hardhat on his head
and his tool belt, with its plastic tools, in his hands. Laughing,
Carlo helped him buckle the belt, then went to the pantry and
pulled out three black metal lunchboxes—there was a whole shelf of
them in there—and packed lunches for his father, Trey, and
himself.

He’d made a calculated guess that his father
would be at the cottage job site, and he’d been right. Carlo pulled
up near his big, red Dodge Ram. He hadn’t figured on his brother
being around as well, but Luca’s matte black H3 was parked nearby,
too. Oh, well. No lunch for Luca. Served him right for getting Bina
drunk the night before.

Not that he’d minded the result.

As Carlo helped his enthusiastic son out of
his car seat, a voice called to him from the site. “Hey,
Carlo!”

Recognizing the voice, Carlo rolled his
eyes, set his son down, turned and closed the door. “Vince.”

Vince Abandonato was a cousin, their
mother’s nephew. He was also basically a shithead. Too much of a
loser in life not to be harmless, he’d been the kind of kid who
hung out all night at the mini-mart with a couple similarly
uninspiring cohorts. Raised on the shore but had never learned to
swim, much less surf, he simply never got anything done. But he had
a chip on his shoulder about it, as if he hadn’t been given his
due, and
that
was why success had eluded him. So he was a
loser and an asshole. As a favor to his dead wife’s sister, Carlo
Sr. had put him on a crew as a gopher right out of high school, and
he’d sort of accidentally worked himself up to drywaller, a job at
which he’d been good enough to keep. He was doing okay, as far as
Carlo knew.

He was in the Pagano sibling shithouse,
though, because at the most recent Christmas party, he’d made a
very heavy pass at Rosa—more than a pass, in fact. His first
cousin. And the Pagano baby. Luca and Carlo had had to pull him off
her. Then all the Pagano boys had taken him outside and beaten the
shit out of him in the snowy back yard, while Dean Martin and Doris
Day sang about how cold it was outside. When they’d sent him off,
bloody and limping, they’d gone back inside to find that their
father had seen the whole thing. He’d nodded, once, and turned
away, his arm around Rosa.

Why he had not fired Vince was beyond Carlo,
but here Vince was, hailing him like they were buds.

“How you doin’, man?” Vince looked down at
Trey. “Hey, little guy! You good?”

“Yes I am. We came to see Pop-Pop.”

Carlo nodded and put his hand on Trey’s
hardhat. “Yeah, we did. Let’s go find him.”

From behind him, Vince called out, “You ever
gonna let up on me?”

“No.” He answered without turning back. He
put his own hardhat on as they entered the job site, going into the
main house to look first.

Carlo had started working for his father
while he was in high school. He still loved job sites—the smells of
sawn wood, poured concrete, drywall, spackle, paint, the sounds of
tools and machinery, the shouts and calls of workers, all of it
made him feel at home. He’d enjoyed the work, too, for the most
part. What he’d hated was building to plans he could tell were
flawed or substandard. It had made him feel compromised and
indignant. He could see the flaws—he could read a blueprint almost
from the first time he’d ever seen one, and he could read between
its lines. He could see the finished, three-dimensional building on
the page. And he was usually disappointed.

Now, he designed buildings that didn’t
disappoint him. And he got on the job site and out of the office,
away from boardrooms, as often as he could.

He heard his father before he saw him—in the
kitchen of the main house, arguing with Luca, voices raised. Carlo
grabbed Trey’s hand and held him back. Before he called out, he
heard enough to know that they’d already learned that they’d lost
the bid Luca had talked to him about, the one he’d thought their
father had underbid. Carlo Sr. was on the warpath.

Great timing for a visit, then.

He wanted to hear more, because he was
worried about his father. It wasn’t like him to shave a bid too
close. He protected his company, and he protected his workers. The
company had never struggled to win bids, often over lower bids.
Their reputation for high quality work, on time and on budget, had
always given them an edge. Even during the really hard years of the
recent housing crash, Carlo Sr. had kept things moving—slowly, yes.
Painfully. But he’d gotten everyone through, and that was because
he’d never cut things too close. So why had he tried now?