Jasmine offered him a wan smile when he moved closer. She didn't pull away but she didn't really encourage him either. She was wrapped up in her own thoughts and not really paying that much attention to her new companion. Her mind had drifted to the very place she had hoped to avoid with this little jaunt down to the beach.<br/><br/>"I appreciate the sympathy Richard. I lost my parents a few months ago in a car wreck. Damned drunk walked away with just a few scratches while he forced their car off the road and around a tree. I'm trying to figure out how to deal with it, but suppose it will take time. Perhaps I'll look up a grief therapist when I get back home."<br/><br/>She told him the truth. A drunk had forced her parents off the road and their car into a tree, the wreckage had been so bad they'd had to have a closed casket for her father. If he chose to look it up later, the pictures he would find from the newspapers were horrific, the tree bending over a car that had been nearly split in two from the force of the crash. In one you could see the drunks car, tilted but whole, above the crash site and the drunk himself, sitting by the side of the road looking down, stupidly, at the carnage he'd caused.<br/><br/>The courts hadn't sent the man to prison, and he had died of a suspicious fall from his building's tenth floor fire escape.<br/><br/>"When I think about it, I'm not very good company. You'd probably have a much better time out in the water with Cindy. She's the local assigned to my beach house and a very sweet girl, I'm sure she'd be much more entertaining then I am. I am sorry."<br/><br/>She felt the need to apologize because he was being so nice and to give him a way out. Surely he hadn't meant to sit down with some grief stricken woman. If he was on his own vacation then he'd want to have a good time, not spend it coddling her and Cindy was certainly bubbly and much more fun than herself. A far more suitable direction for his attention to be directed in her mind.