“It’s home for me. My family has lived here for three generations. My great-grandfather used to joke that he was a Spanish pirate, but I think he was stationed here after World War II and liked it so well, he bought some land.”
“I like that story, though.”
Sofia laughed. “Me too. Either way, he’s my hero.”
“Who’s hungry?” asked Dutch.
“You are,” answered Malin, laughing.
He reached over and put his arm around her shoulders. “Let’s take a carriage ride before we have lunch. Sound good?”
“If you can wait,” she murmured.
Dutch kissed her temple. “I want you to be able to see Charleston before we leave for the island.”
When he kissed her temple again, Malin looked over to see if Onyx or Sofia were watching, and pulled away when she saw they both were.
It was easy to fall into the way things used to be between her and Dutch, but if she was going to keep the wall around her heart firmly in place, she needed to remember that they were no longer a couple and hadn’t been since the night he left her for Alegria.
He pulled her close. “I wish you wouldn’t keep shutting me out.”
“Don’t,” she said, pulling away from him again and feeling the same hurt in her chest that she saw in his eyes. She hadn’t put it there. He had. He had no one to blame but himself.
“Oh, I brought some more paella for you, and a few other things,” Sofia told them.
Dutch rubbed his stomach. “I can’t tell you how happy that makes me.”
—:—
Dutch had spent a lot of time in Charleston, but everything seemed new to him, seeing it through Malin’s eyes.
The carriage ride the four of them took went from Broad Street, where most of the shops and restaurants were, over near the inn where they’d spent last night. It was narrated by a man who was a fifth-generation Charlestonian. Along with the rehearsed narration, he threw in stories about his family, and opinions about what he felt the historical society did well and what he thought they fell short on.
Dutch was sure that he’d known about the 1886 earthquake that caused sixty deaths and millions in damage, but he hadn’t realized that, afterward, residents drilled steel rods from one side of their house to the other to shore them up. He wasn’t any more convinced the rods would prevent damage if another earthquake struck than their driver was.
The sheer number of homes that were over two-hundred years old also astounded him.
“Which one is your favorite?” he asked Malin when the driver turned down Meeting Street where the fanciest of all the homes were located.
“Not that one,” she answered, pointing at the Calhoun Mansion. “It’s too big and ostentatious.”
Dutch agreed, especially when the driver told them it was the largest privately owned home in all of South Carolina and one man lived alone in its thirty-thousand square feet.
“I like that one, with the big porches on the side.”
Dutch had to admit, it was his favorite too. The house was painted white with black shutters, and the porches were rounded instead of rectangular like most of the others in the historic part of town. It had a welcoming feel that Dutch couldn’t have described. It just spoke to him.
“Those are called piazzas, ma’am. And the family who owned that house, well, they couldn’t have children, so every Sunday, they’d go over to the orphanage and bring all the kids over for an ice cream social.”
“Wow, that was nice of them,” she murmured.
“Everything okay?” Dutch asked when it looked as though Malin might cry.
“Everything is fine, why?”
Dutch just shrugged, happy the driver was in the middle of another story to distract her.
They ended up back near the market when their tour concluded.