“You can wait until morning to go. There’s enough food here for the night.”
“I just thought you could show me around a little.”
“It’s not my job to show you around,” he said coldly. “I’m paying you for a service and that’s it. You have three choices. Take your chances alone in town tonight. Go in the morning. Or make a list of things you need and I’ll have them delivered. I’m not going into town.”
“Okay. I’m sorry. I’ll go in the morning.”
He nodded. “If you’re hungry, the frozen pizza isn’t bad.” He walked away then, leaving Virginia a little bit heartsore and a hell of a lot confused.
Carlos woke up the next morning feeling like a world-class asshole. He had been rude to Virginia last night. Incredibly rude, and if his father had heard him he would have smacked him in the mouth.
She’d just wanted to go to the supermarket. It wasn’t a strange request; it wasn’t something that would require a lot out of him. Buying groceries was something that normal people did, but he hadn’t been normal in a very long time. And he hadn’t been off his property since he’d heard that the team’s doctors weren’t removing him from the injured list.
There was no need to leave here. There was nothing he had to do. No schedule he had to keep. Even before he left Miami he’d never ventured into a store. Everything he needed was delivered to him. All he had to do was pick up the phone.
It wasn’t as if he could just leave the house and go to the supermarket like anybody else. He’d stopped being able to the day he’d been drafted to the majors right out of high school. He wasn’t able to go to the park with his siblings without somebody recognizing him. He hadn’t been able to go to dinner in a normal chain restaurant without being mobbed by fans.
He had loved it, at first. He was grateful for all the love and support from his fans, but when he’d got hurt all that had changed. Now all people wanted to know was when he was coming back. When he was going to take his team to the playoffs again.
He didn’t have an answer for them. His parents had both worked two jobs to move them to a better neighborhood. His sister taught at-risk kids. His little brother was studying to be a surgeon. All he had to do was play baseball. And now that he couldn’t, he felt a little like a failure. He had lost the ability to do the thing that had made his father swell with pride every time he saw him play. Maybe he was on Hideaway Island to escape all of that, the expectation, the disappointment, now that he couldn’t give people what they wanted. He couldn’t do the only thing he had ever been good at.
That was why he had balked when Virginia had asked him to go grocery shopping with her. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d left the house, much less gone out in public.
He went downstairs looking for her. She wasn’t in the kitchen, the dining room or the living room. Her bedroom was empty, her bed made up, the room clean as if no one had slept in it.
The house felt empty. Unlike last night. The house had felt different; it hadn’t felt as empty. He hadn’t felt as empty, knowing she was there. But now he wondered if she had gone, quit because he was the asshole who didn’t want to leave his house. He walked outside by the pool area, finding it empty, but then he spotted a little pair of gold sandals in the sand on the path that led to the beach.
As he walked down the pathway, seeing her footprints, his chest began to feel looser. And there she was, sitting at the edge of the water, her feet being splashed by the waves. Her dress was bunched up at her waist and she seemed lost in thought.
He kicked off his sneakers and sat beside her. The sand was damp, the water cool, but it was a shock to his system. He hadn’t done this before. He had what most people dream of—a private beach. Half an island to himself. Unspoiled nature surrounding him, and yet he had never sat outside and enjoyed it. Never felt the sand between his toes, never smelled the sweet, salty air, never looked out on the endless blue ocean that was right outside his home.
He felt guilty because he was here to enjoy this place when his father couldn’t. His father would be so disappointed to see that he hadn’t even bothered to go outside and just breathe it all in.
“I’ve never been on a beach alone,” she said to him after a moment. “Especially a beach like this. It’s truly something, isn’t it?”
“It’s beautiful. How long have you been out here?”
“Since the sun came up. I couldn’t sleep last night so I came out here to think.”
“To think,” he repeated. “About what?”
“About this job. About whether I’ve gotten in over my head. I was thinking about if maybe I should leave.”
He was quiet for a moment, knowing he needed to apologize for snapping at her last night, but not knowing how to begin. “Do you want to leave?”
“I feel as if I’m intruding, Mr. Bradley.”
“I feel as if you’re supposed to call me Carlos.” He stood up, extending his hand. “Come to the market with me.”
* * *
He had a Range Rover in the garage solely for her use, but she wanted to him to drive the old-school black convertible that was big as a tank and took as much gas. It had come with the house; the former owner had fixed it up himself.
“I’m feeling a little like Lena Horne in the 1950s,” she said as the ocean air whipped around them. “Just give me a big pair of sunglasses and a fabulous scarf.” She had her bare feet up on the dashboard, those long shapely legs stretched out before him, distracting his attention from the road. He was very tempted to run his hand up one of them, just to feel more of her softness, but he stopped himself. Never in his life had he met anyone he wanted to touch more; never in his life had he found a woman so tempting.
“I never would have thought to come here until you called me,” she said, looking at the scenery around her. “This doesn’t feel like Florida. It feels as if I’m in another country altogether.”
“My parents brought us here once, as kids. So when the opportunity came up to buy it, I did.”
“I would have loved to come here as a kid,” she said wistfully. “My parents aren’t the relax-on-the-beach, sand-between-their-toes type of people.”
“My mother is from Costa Rica. She had a hard time living in Maryland, away from the water, so every summer my parents would pack us in the car and drive us down to Florida. My father loved the beach. He saved all his vacation days for the year so we could spend two weeks down here. He would park his chair in the sand in the morning and wouldn’t leave until sundown that night,” he said, finding himself sharing more about himself than he meant to.
“What did the rest of you do?” she asked, smiling.
“Ran wild.” Memories came flooding back to him of Ava and Elias running around the beach with inflatable water tubes around their waists, and his older sister reading in the shade of an umbrella.
“I’m jealous.” She shut her eyes and leaned back in the seat, letting the rays of the sun hit her face. “My parents were all about culture and educational vacations. As an adult I can appreciate seeing Prague. As a seven-year-old, I’d much rather have gone to an amusement park on the Jersey Shore.”
“Your parents took you to Europe as a kid?”
“Yes, my mother is a mathematics professor who teaches courses with names like Complex Functions Theories and Partial Differential Equations. My father was a high-ranking military man and dealt with a lot of foreign officials. They wanted their children to be well-rounded individuals who could excel