The Welcoming

understanding. It would be better, he thought, and certainly safer, if he simply let her pull out the sandwiches. They could talk about the weather, the water, the people at the inn. There was so much he couldn’t tell her. But when he looked into her eyes he knew he had to tell her enough about Roman DeWinter that she would be able to make a choice.
    “Sit down.”
    Something in his tone sent a frisson of alarm down her spine. He was going to tell her he was leaving, she thought. “All right.” She clasped her hands together, promising herself she’d find a way to make him stay.
    “I haven’t been fair with you.” He leaned back against a rock. “Fairness hasn’t been one of my priorities. There are things about me you should know, that you should have known before things got this far.”
    “Roman—”
    “It won’t take long. I did come from St. Louis. I lived in a kind of neighborhood you wouldn’t even understand. Drugs, whores, Saturday night specials.” He looked out at the water. The spiffy little sailboat had caught the wind. “A long way from here, baby.”
    So the trust had come, she thought. She wouldn’t let him regret it. “It doesn’t matter where you came from, Roman. It’s where you are now.”
    “That’s not always true. Part of where you come from stays with you.” He closed a hand over hers briefly, then released it. It would be better, he thought, to break the contact now. “When he was sober enough, my father drove a cab. When he wasn’t sober enough, he sat around the apartment with his head in his hands. One of my first memories is waking up at night hearing my mother screaming at him. Every couple of months she’d threaten to leave. Then he’d straighten up. We’d live in the eye of the hurricane until he’d stop off at the bar to have a drink. So she finally stopped threatening and did it.”
    “Where did you go?”
    “I said she left.”
    “But . . . didn’t she take you with her?”
    “I guess she figured she was going to have it rough enough without dealing with a ten-year-old.”
    Charity shook her head and struggled with a deep, churning anger. It was hard for her to understand how a mother could desert her child. “She must have been very confused and frightened. Once she—”
    “I never saw her again,” Roman said. “You have to understand that not everyone loves unconditionally. Not everyone loves at all.”
    “Oh, Roman.” She wanted to gather him close then, but he held her away from him.
    “I stayed with my father another three years. One night he hit the gin before he got in the cab. He killed himself and his passenger.”
    “Oh, God.” She reached for him, but he shook his head.
    “That made me a ward of the court. I didn’t much care for that, so I took off, hit the streets.”
    She was reeling from what he’d already told her, and she could barely take it all in. “At thirteen?”
    “I’d been living there most of my life anyway.”
    “But how?”
    He shook a cigarette out of his pack, lighting it and drawing deep before he spoke again. “I took odd jobs when I could find them. I stole when I couldn’t. After a couple of years I got good enough at the stealing that I didn’t bother much with straight jobs. I broke into houses, hot-wired cars, snatched purses. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
    “Yes. You were alone and desperate.”
    “I was a thief. Damn it, Charity, I wasn’t some poor misguided youth. I stopped being a kid when I came home and found my father passed out and my mother gone. I knew what I was doing. I chose to do it.”
    She kept her eyes level with his, battling the need to take him in her arms. “If you expect me to condemn a child for finding a way to survive, I’ll have to disappoint you.”
    She was romanticizing, he told himself, pitching his cigarette into the water.
    “Do you still steal?”
    “What if I told you I did?”
    “I’d have to say you were stupid. You don’t seem stupid to me, Roman.”
    He paused for a moment before he decided to tell her the rest. “I was in Chicago. I’d just turned sixteen. It was January, so cold your eyes couldn’t water. I decided I needed to score enough to take a bus south. Thought I’d winter in Florida and fleece the rich tourists. That’s when I met John Brody. I broke into his apartment and ended up with a .45 in my face. He was a cop.” The memory of that moment still made him laugh. “I don’t know who was more surprised.