He processed his error and nodded. He really was in a good mood. He opened the door in a credenza under the breakfast nook window and pulled out a stack of work, his tablet on top. Setting the stack on the table, he took a seat just as Gloria brought his plate and coffee over and set it before him.
“Looks wonderful, Gloria. You’re an artist.”
“Thank you, Mr. James.” Gloria nodded and stepped back to the safer side of the kitchen.
“I’m cancelling the fitting. You needn’t attend next weekend.”
“What? But—” A storm cloud moved into his eyes at her questioning, and she silenced herself. As soon as she did, his sky brightened again. She wasn’t even sure why she’d challenged him. The chance not to go to yet another ball in yet another gown was a beautiful dream. Yet her brain began to churn over the possible snares he might be setting for her.
“I was thinking. You should go to the cottage. Spend a week. We need to get it open for the season anyway, and I won’t have time myself until the clambake.” He forked a piece of his breakfast and put it in his mouth.
Sabina’s head was very loud, now. Something was up. Fifteen years of marriage, and she had never been alone for more than an overnight. When he had to travel longer, she came with him. He was maniacally possessive and trusted no one with anything. If he wanted her to go off alone for a week, then…what? Was he finally wearying of his game with her? If so, that could be very, very good. Or it could be very, very bad. Depending on what he meant to do with her when he was finished.
The “cottage” was their beach house near Narragansett. By most people’s standards, it was hardly a cottage. More like a manse. It was her favorite place in her world. Even with James there, she found some peace. To be on her own there for a week? A whole week? If he was going to kill her, she hoped he’d wait to do it until after that.
Now to indicate that she thought it was a good idea without expressing so much enthusiasm that it either made him suspicious and decide that she was up to no good, or, worse, perverse, and decide that he didn’t want her quite so happy. “That’s a good idea. I could get a head start on planning for the clambake.”
The clambake, on the Fourth of July, was their big event of the summer. All of James’s associates came. It was really a massive business meeting dressed up like a beach party. James might occasionally take on the trappings of leisure, but truly, the only ‘playing’ he ever did was the kind he’d done to her last night. And whatever it was he did with other women. She assumed that he treated his casual women differently; his reputation wouldn’t have survived otherwise, no matter how powerful he was.
She’d answered well, and he beamed at her. “I think that’s a grand idea. Come here.” He pushed his chair back slightly, and Sabina knew what he wanted. With a deep but subtle breath, she stood and walked to his place at the table.
He patted his lap. “Sit. Straddle me.”
She did as she was told. His smell was still potent from his run, but the sweat had dried, leaving a sticky film on his skin.
“Take off your shirt.”
She did. From the corner of her eye, she saw Gloria back quietly out of the room.
“That, too.”
She took off her sport bra. Her breasts were ample; even for yoga she needed support—not that she’d intended to do yoga today.
His eyes bright, he lifted her breasts in his hands and plumped them gently. “Not as high as they once were, but lovely yet. Still, it might be time to consult with a surgeon.” His eyebrow lifted as he examined the worth of her breasts.
Oh, Mother Mary. She had to find her way out of this before he decided she needed to be surgically improved. One ‘improvement’ had been more than enough.
He leaned forward and pressed a tender kiss to one nipple, then released her breasts and slid his hands down her arms until he could wrap them around her wrists. He lifted them both and brought them between their chests. He then raised each one in turn to his lips, kissing the bruises he’d left there last night. “So beautiful,” he murmured.
Her breasts needed improving. The bruises he’d left on her skin? Those he thought beautiful. How on earth had she found herself married to this man?
Because she had been young and naïve—stupid—and because he had not shown her this side of himself, this real self, until he had made her well and truly trapped.
No, that was wrong. He’d shown her this self, but he’d wrapped it in a cloak of past pain. She’d seen a tortured soul. He’d told her she could save him, that she was the only one who might, and she had believed him. She hadn’t seen a man who took pleasure in giving pain, a man who could only value that which he possessed utterly, a man who considered trust itself to be a grievous weakness.
She’d seen Heathcliff.
Well, now she understood that Heathcliff was an evil bastard, too.
As he laved her bruises with his tongue, Sabina felt him harden between her legs. He looked up at her, smiling, and reached behind her to the table. When his hand came back, he held his knife, and her pulse began to skitter. What was this fresh horror now?
The knife was a simple, silver table knife, but with a sharp point. It was scummed with hollandaise sauce and egg yolk. James pushed the point lightly into the notch between her collarbones. She could tell by the slant of his eyes that he was watching her pulse throbbing in her throat. She could also tell that he liked it. Oh, lord.
The worst thing she could do would be to beg. She could show pain. She could show anger, resistance. Either of these would please him—resistance only to a certain degree, enough to make his play interesting. Either of them would cause her greater pain, but that was not avoidable. But she could never beg.
Luckily, it was not in her nature to beg. She waited.
He dragged the point of the knife down between her breasts, pushing firmly enough to scratch her skin, but not enough to draw blood. Then he made a left—or, for him, a right—turn and dragged the point over her left breast. When he arrived at her nipple, he stopped and pushed harder, his eyes on hers.
That hurt. That hurt a lot. Finally she whimpered and shrank back, unable to stop. His eyes caught fire at that, and took on the dangerous look of a bad boy pulling the wings off flies. He pushed harder still, and she felt blood begin to trickle.
His hips flexed under her. “Ah, yes,” he purred. He took the knife away and cast it aside on the table, then leaned forward and sucked her wounded nipple, drawing all the blood from it he could.
He stood and pushed his dishes away from behind her. Then he set her on the table, pulled her pants off, and fucked her while her head lay in his half-eaten breakfast.
She made sure to come. She always had to come.
~ 3 ~
Elsa rode with her head out the window the whole way, her ears sailing and her jowls flapping, leaving long stripes of drool on the side of the car. When Carlo turned onto Caravel Road, she started to bark, with volume and vigor.
“Elsie wants to see sharks, too, Daddy!” Trey had to shout over the dog’s ear-splitting din, but he was hardly averse to shouting.
Carlo was going to have a little chat with his baby brother. It was hard enough keeping Trey close by at the beach without worrying that he’d go in search of sharks—which, in fact, swam these waters occasionally. In all his surfing years, he’d seen maybe three fins breach the surface, so he wasn’t worried that Trey would actually find a shark. But he was becoming quite worried that his three-year-old adventurer would get himself in trouble looking.
Knowing that Elsa wouldn’t quiet until she’d been freed from the car and could run off to greet the family, and not in the mood to shout over her din, Carlo only met his son’s eyes in the rearview mirror and smiled. Trey grinned back, his bright, almost triangular smile so like his mother’s it caused conflict in his father’s heart.
Jenny had been gone nine months, since the night after Trey’s third birthday party. And Carlo had found the place in his anger and betrayal where l
ove and loss had been killed. That was a good place, a place from which he could move forward. Now he waited for the day when he could look at his beautiful, adored child and see only Trey and not the woman who’d given him nearly every physical feature—blond hair, green eyes, that angular smile. Trey was Jenny’s doppelganger.
Shortly after she’d run off, Joey had made a crack about whether Trey might not be Carlo’s. He’d meant it as a joke, a stupid joke, Joey’s specialty, but Carlo had broken his nose for him nevertheless.
Trey was his. He knew that was true. Jenny had been twined around him when Trey was conceived and born. Whatever had happened later, during that time, there had been no room for anyone but them. So Carlo knew that Trey was his.
He also knew that even if there had been the remotest chance that he was wrong, he was still right. They shared more than a name, whether they looked alike or not. That child in the back seat was his. Period.
He pulled up to his family home, behind John’s pickup, Elsa by now so excited that she was almost bouncing on the seat next to Trey, turning back and forth from the window to his booster seat, licking him and then hurrying back to shove her head out the window and bark at the people on the walk—Rosa, Joey, and John. The gleeful dance of her hundred-and-fifty-pound body had Carlo’s Porsche Macan rocking back and forth. He parked and let her out first. She bounded onto the walk, and Joey patted his chest, inviting her to jump up on him—which she did. On her hind legs, she was nose to nose with his six-foot-tall brother.
Joey took it as his special mission in life to see to it that everyone misbehaved as much as he did.
As soon as Trey was released from his booster and had his feet on the ground, he ran over to his uncles and aunt. Elsa had moved on to cuddles from Rosa, the youngest sibling, and Joey dropped to a squat to accept into his arms the tornado that was Trey.
“Hey, Three-peat! How’s it hangin’?”
Trey looked down and around at himself. “How’s what hangin’, Uncle Joey?”
“Joey.” Carlo raised his voice just enough to catch his brother’s attention. When he had it, he shook his head, and Joey grinned with faux innocence. He looked back at his nephew with the same puckish smirk.
“The sun in the sky, little bro. The sun in the sky.”
“The sun doesn’t hang. That’s silly. It’s faaaaaaar away in space.” He raised his hands high over his head. “It’s a star that comes out in the daytime.”
“Well, you’re smarter than me, that’s for sure. Wanna go in and see Pop-Pop?”
“Yeah! And sharks! Will you show me sharks?”
Joey looked up at Carlo and gave him a Who me? shrug. Yeah. Great.
“We’ll have to see if we can find one.” Then he picked Trey up and carried him up the steps and into the house.
As Carlo opened the hatch to grab their bags, Rosa and John both came back. Rosa, twenty years old and the pampered baby princess of the family, wrapped her arms around his waist. He turned and hugged her back, leaning down to kiss her temple. “Hi, there. You good?” She’d had a big, angsty breakup a month or so ago and had almost bailed on her spring semester at Brown.
“Yeah, I’m okay.” She stepped out of their embrace and raked her long hair back from her head. Rosa was always doing something funky to the color of her naturally dark hair. Now it had heavy blonde highlights, sort of the color of honey. “Might not go back to the dorm in the fall, though.”
Their father had not brooked any discussion of Rosa going to college far from home, so she was at Brown, barely an hour’s drive from this house. She was the only of the brood to have attended college after their mother died—only Carlo and Carmen, the eldest, had attended before that—and their father couldn’t stand the thought of his baby being far away. With the allied efforts of her siblings, she’d wrested from him the concession that she could live on campus. Giving up that concession, Carlo thought, would quickly be something she’d regret.
Carlo was seventeen years older than Rosa. She’d been only nine when their mother died, and their father had been a different man since. It would not be a stretch to say that during those first years after their mother’s death, Carlo had developed feelings for his baby sister that were more fatherly than brotherly.
“Don’t make any snap decisions, Peanut. Give yourself some time first.”
She gave him a little smile and a nod, and he handed her Trey’s pack and duffel. Then she headed toward the house, Elsa trotting behind her.
Carlo watched for a second, feeling wistful at the thought that the little imp who’d never tired of carrying home buckets full of broken shells, despite being born and raised on a beach, was a grown woman. Or nearly grown, anyway. Depending on one’s perspective.
He turned back to the hatch to see John reaching in for the last of the bags. “Thanks, man.”
“No sweat. Forewarned? He’s on a tear today.”
Carlo closed the hatch, and they followed after their family up and into the house. “What kind of tear?” Their father’s moods had become erratic lately. A ‘tear’ could be anything from a high to a low, from hilarity to fury. He wasn’t crazy, and he was certainly not dysfunctional, but he was definitely fucking moody. Carlo thought it was due to spending too much time alone. Their parents’ marriage had been stormy and far from perfect, but it had been symbiotic, each completing the other. Carlo Sr. on his own was a man missing a vital organ and feeling that loss more, not less, with each passing year, especially as their huge house emptied of their children.
Since Rosa, the youngest and last home, had gone off to Brown nearly three years ago, the moods had been markedly moodier. Their mother had been the family balance. Things were off-kilter without her. Even eleven years later.
“Maudlin. Feeling his mortality, I guess. I’d say you’re center stage today. You and Luca, if he ever shows.”
Ah, yes. The old ditty about the disappointing son who didn’t want his father’s legacy and the disappointing son the father didn’t want to leave the legacy to. As he opened the wide, heavy front door to the home he’d grown up in, Carlo laughed. At least that one came with less yelling and crying. “Let’s get him to the beach, then, and throw some raw meat in his way.”
~oOo~
The Pagano house wasn’t directly on the beach; Quiet Cove was a popular tourist destination in the summer, and Teresa, their mother, had not wanted to be so close that beachgoers would be tromping over her garden and crowding the street in front of the house. And she’d wanted a garden, not a sandpit, for a yard. So Carlo Sr. had bought her a house not quite a mile from the shore.
It meant a bit of a trek when they headed to the beach. When the kids were young, they’d walked it happily, even carrying their boards. As soon as they could drive, of course, they’d stopped trundling barefoot down and up the hill that was Caravel Road, their wetsuits folded down around their waists and their boards under their arms.
For more than thirty years, Carlo Sr. had thrown a beach party on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. It was a crazy weekend to throw a big party on a public beach, because there were people everywhere, but that had been part of the brilliance of it, too. What happened every year was that the entire town of Quiet Cove, its residents and its tourists, ended up partying with the Paganos, drinking beer out of cups emblazoned with the Pagano & Sons Construction logo, loading up plates at a table under a Pagano & Sons banner. It looked like the Paganos owned the beach. It cost a fortune, but he’d made it up in name recognition and goodwill. It was nice to have the Pagano name associated with something good.
That was Carlo Sr.’s family role. To be the good brother.
These days, Carmen, the eldest daughter, second-born, lived in a little house right on the beach, with a private swath of it to call her own. It was down some from the crush of the public area, and the family met there, using her house as a staging area for the big do.
Footsteps Page 3
