Chapter Two - Paxton - Eight Weeks Ago
Malibu Colony is a haven for somebodies. My house rents out for two hundred thousand dollars a month in the summer. But I didn’t rent it out this year. I’m enjoying it. I’m enjoying the gate that keeps the world away a mile down the road. I’m enjoying the movie stars who jog on the sand when the tide is low. I’m enjoying the breeze, and the sunsets, and the salty mist that finds its way onto my face while I’m drinking a beer and watching the Rams play a pre-game.
This place is my castle. My home. My world.
And no one knows about it but me.
Not my father, who hasn’t bothered to call me in more than a decade. Not my friends, who have no idea what I’m doing nine days out of ten. Not even my mother, who only visits me in the Del Mar house because if she’s going to set foot in the state that birthed my bastard of a father, she wants to hear the horses run as she drinks on the terrace.
It’s big, and modern, and has six lounge chairs lined up in front of the glass terrace wall that separates me from the Pacific Ocean. It’s got a rooftop terrace with a fire pit. And a lap pool surrounded by tall palms that make music when the wind catches the long, slender fronds in just the right way.
There are solar lights along the polished concrete walkway that leads from the front of the lot on the street all the way back to the beach. And there are surfboards leaning up against the wall of the house next door. All I have to do is walk by, grab one, and slap that sucker down onto the foam.
And the light. Holy fucking shit, the light. You never know what color it will be. Maybe pink in the mornings, coming from the east—it shines in through the front bedrooms and lights up the whole upstairs. Or deep red, or orange, or yellow in the evenings when the world moves west towards the night.
It’s like a fucking fairy tale.
And the best thing of all is the constant roar of the monster outside. The power the ocean commands. It’s like a general barking orders twenty-four hours a day. Orders like, Hear me. See me. Know me.
I don’t take orders very well, but those kinds of orders I can handle.
Hear me. See me. Know me.
I can relate to that.
People know me as Mr. Mysterious. The tall one. The dark one. The scary one. But only one person on this earth understands Paxton Vance. And she is tucked away on the breeding farm she bred me on. She hears me. She sees me. She knows me.
My mother is the only woman I trust.
I have heard it all, seen it all, known it all when it comes to people.
And none of it is good.
People are bad. That is the lesson she taught me early using my own father as an example.
People are bad.
You keep your head down, you do your job, and you go to bed alone for as long as you can stand it. Those are the truths of my world.
And she was right, wasn’t she? Three years out of the protective environment of private education and rolling hills covered in gourmet grass and I was looking straight down the barrel of a very dirty reality of prison, public shame, and regrets.
The front door buzzer rings out into the house, so I set my beer down on the coaster protecting the glass-top end table and shuffle my bare feet past the dining room, down the stairs into the courtyard, past the lap pool and the palm trees, up the stairs into the front house, and cover the distance to the door at a jog.
Don’t want her to think I’m not home.
I smile at that.
Don’t want her to think I stood her up.
I chuckle at that.
Don’t want to keep her waiting.
I get to the door, stop and look at myself in the hall mirror—tanned golden brown, muscles making the perfect outline, hair tousled and messy from surfing this morning—and open it up.
“Hey,” I say.
“Mr. Brown,” she says, with a wink. “Nice to finally see you again.” She holds a large paper sack with a receipt stapled to it out for me to take.
I grab it, then move aside. “Come in, let me find my wallet.” I make a half turn, then turn back. “Hey, you’ve never seen the house, have you?”
“Nope,” she says, blushing a little.
We’ve been flirting all summer. A little wink here. A coy smile there. I have no idea who she is other than the take-out girl from Buster’s Surf Subs. I don’t even know her name. All I know is that she drives a classic powder-blue VW Bug and she smells delicious every time I see her.
“Well, look around if you want. Go find the view. I’ll just be a second. I think my wallet is upstairs on the beach side.”
I jog away, knowing full well she is checking out my ass, my tightly muscled back, the curve of my shoulders.
The ladies can’t help it. I’m quite a specimen.
I don’t ever leave the Colony in anything other than a suit or tactical gear. But when I answer the door for take-out girl, I am nothing but a half-naked surf bum.
“OK,” she says, a little excitement in her voice.
I know where my wallet is. It is upstairs on the beach side. I know that because I put it there on purpose.
Take-out girl has been coming here all summer to drop off my food. I order from Buster’s at least once a week. More, if I’m home. Work has been pretty busy recently, so I’ve missed her the past two weeks.
Time to make up for it.
I pass the pool, take the stairs three at a time back into the beach-side house, then hook a left up more stairs where the master bedroom is.
My wallet is on the bed.
I walk over to it, pick it up, and I’m just about to go out onto the terrace to wait for her to find the ocean so I can look down at her from above when she says, “Wow. Look at that fucking view.”
I whirl around.
Now… I planned how this might go. And while I did place the wallet on the bed on purpose, it wasn’t done with the presumption that she’d follow me up here. I figured she’d linger in the hallway for a minute, get a glimpse of the pool on the other side of the guest house, then wander down that way, admiring the palm trees as she looked up at the sky. Then make her way towards the living room and kitchen where the money shot lives.
Once you see the waves crashing twenty feet away, your feet have no choice. You move towards that call of hear me, see me, know me.
Her feet do indeed travel and cross the required distance. As she brushes past me, I catch her scent. It’s something sweet. Almost innocent. Strawberries, maybe. A milkshake. A bakery.
Sugar, I realize. She smells like sugar.
It’s so opposite of everything she appears to be. She’s got a black biker jacket on, cut to the shape of a woman. It’s been cool the past few days, some afternoon rain, but it’s not cold enough for this jacket. It hangs off her shoulder a little, giving me a glimpse of honey-bronze skin and the thin strap of her tank top, which has tiny silver spikes as accents. The jacket has patches sewn on it. Colorful ones, mostly with skulls and motorcycles. But only pictures, no writing on them. And it has zippers. They jingle, along with the zippers on her black leather boots. Not Doc Martens. Something flashier than that. Some kind of cross between a biker and a cowboy boot. Her tanned legs are bare and long. Her thighs disappear under a short black and white tartan skirt that reminds me of an inappropriate school-girl uniform.
When she reaches for the top of the glass railing, a million little silver bracelets slip out from under her cuff and sing to me.
She sighs. Long and soft. “God, I love the ocean. I grew up in the mountains, mostly. On a farm.” She laughs—loudly—and turns away from the water, leans back against the railing. Like she’s posing for a photo.
She’s so damn pretty, she could be a model.
“You’re so lucky.”
“Yeah?” I ask, wanting very badly to tuck a stray piece of jet-black hair behind her ear so I can see her face better. Her makeup matches her outfit. Dark, dramatic eyes. Eyelashes so long, I’m not sure how she sees past them. And full, glossy pink lips.
The pink lips throw me a little. It’s like her scent. Something counter to what she appears.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
“Cinderella,” she says.
And maybe, coming from anyone else, at any other time, that might come off as ridiculous. But now, right here in this moment, it seems… inevitable.
“Of course it is,” I say, walking towards her. She has to tilt her head up as I approach because I’m tall and she is just average height for a woman. Her neck is long and graceful, like a ballerina’s.
How many other things can she possibly be? All wrapped up into this one unique package?
“Why am I lucky?” I ask, leaning on the railing, trying my best not to let her know how interested I am.
She draws in a deep breath and turns with me. We study the beginnings of a sunset for a moment. “This place, right?”
“I like it,” I say. “But it’s just a place.”
“Yeah, but not everyone gets to have all this, you know.”
“Where do you live?” I ask, turning my head to look at her. “It can’t be that far away. No one drives into Malibu to work as a take-out girl.”
“I was sharing a house with some friends for the summer.”
“Summer’s just about over,” I say.
“Yeah.” She sighs. “I know. I’m leaving tomorrow.”
“Oh,” I say, surprised at the level of regret I feel. “Where to? Back to school? You go to college? UCLA?”
“No. I’m done with college.”
“Oh,” I say again. “You look young.”
“I know.” She laughs. “I’m twenty-three. Just turned.”
“Where did you go to college?”
“UCLA,” she says. “You guessed right.”
And I don’t know why, but I know it’s a lie. “What did you major in?”
“Mechanical engineering.”
I spit out a laugh.
“What?” she says, turning to face me. But even though her protest comes off slightly offended, her eyes come off totally playful. “I don’t look like an engineer?”
“Not even a little bit, sugar.”
She tries to hold in a grin, fails, and turns her head away. “Well, I am,” she says firmly.
“Then why the take-out job? Shouldn’t you be working for some firm or something?”
“I’m not ready to settle down yet.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Where will you go tomorrow?” I ask.
She looks at me. Dead straight in the eyes. And says, “I’m moving in here with you.”