The Forbidden Touch of Sanguardo

Afterwards they repaired to the oceanside bistro for lunch, taking a table dappled with the shade of fronded palm trees towering overhead. Beyond the ocean lapped the shore in gentle waves.

‘Not much to surf on here,’ Rafael observed.

‘You have to go to the North Shore of the islands, in winter, to get the big swells coming down from the Arctic,’ Celeste replied. ‘That’s where all the best breaks are—like Banzai Pipeline, Jaws and Tunnels.’

Rafael glanced at her. ‘You sound very knowledgeable. Is that from personal experience?’ He cocked an eyebrow at her.

She gave a smiling, self-dismissive shake of her head. ‘No. I’ve never done more than bodysurfing.’

Rafael kept his enquiring glance on her. Had it been a boyfriend, then, in years gone by, from whom she’d learnt about surfing? Someone from before whatever had traumatised her in her modelling career.

‘Surfer boyfriend, then?’ he asked laconically.

Like a shutter coming down, her face closed instantly. Just as it had when Australia had been mentioned.

Frustration bit at him. He had no wish to probe into what he knew must have been some trauma caused by the likes of Karl Reiner early in her modelling career, but he wanted to know a little of the ordinary things about her—did she have family still? Where had she been raised?—just as he had told her of his own background, and how he’d won a scholarship to an Ivy League university that had given him the opportunity to make his way in the world, and how his parents had been killed in an earthquake when he’d still been an undergraduate.

Yet she had told him so little!

But now she answered him. It was done reluctantly, he could see, because she did not quite meet his eyes as she spoke, but let them flicker away out to the sea beyond their table.

‘My father,’ she answered. ‘My father surfed. My mother used to tell me tales about him when I was growing up.’

Rafael heard the past tense in her speech.

‘What happened?’ he asked quietly.

She looked at him. She bit her lip, her expression drawn. ‘One day there was too rough a sea—’

She broke off. The server was at their table, depositing their plates in front of them. Rafael could have cursed her, but it was too late. Celeste’s expression had changed. The sadness in her eyes was gone. She made an appreciative murmur at the exotic seafood salad, smiling at the server to thank her.

‘This looks delicious! Thank you!’ she exclaimed.

The server smiled back. ‘Enjoy,’ she said, and headed off.

They started to eat, but Rafael’s mind was racing. So she had lost her father young—how young he couldn’t tell, but young enough for her mother to have been the one who had told her about her father’s love of surfing. A love that had proved fatal?

Another thought struck him. Was that behind her clear reluctance—shown to him twice now—whenever Australia was mentioned? Was it because it had been while surfing in Australia that her father had died? He wanted to ask but felt it would be too intrusive, too inquisitive. Instead he chose another response. One that resonated with his empathy with her.

He looked across at her. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said quietly. ‘It is hard—hideously hard—to lose a parent, whatever our age.’ He took a breath. ‘I can still remember the day when I heard that my parents had not survived the earthquake that had hit my home village. I was at university, almost a grown man, but I broke down and wept like a child—’

There was a catch in his voice. He could not stop it. Found himself blinking. Then there was the touch of a hand on his wrist. Fleeting, momentary, but there all the same.

‘To be so far from them must have made it even harder for you,’ Celeste said softly. ‘But perhaps...’ She chose her words carefully. ‘Perhaps you can take a little comfort from knowing how proud they must surely have been of you for gaining entry to such a formidable, elite place of education, and how relieved they must have been to know that you were not caught up in the disaster yourself.’