Chapter One

Landon

 

The wind picks up, brushing the gritty sand along the shore in that graceful way it only seems to do during winter. Kiawah is always bustin’ at the seams in the summer, drawing tourists from as close as North Carolina to as far away as Sweden.

I take a long pull of my beer and dig my feet further into the sand. This time of year there are two a kinds of people: the locals and the lonely. I was always the former and only mildly entertained the latter. That changed when I caught my wife blowing her manager with the same wild enthusiasm she blew me.

“God damn it,” I mutter.

I’m not sure which part was more disturbing. Her blowing him in the kitchen, the same place we’d fucked earlier that morning; or her finishing him off while I stood there like an idiot.

I’m going to go with her finishing him off.

I can still picture her rising from her kneeling position, the front of the four-hundred-dollar blouse she insisted on buying flapping open, exposing her bare breasts with each step she took.

“It didn’t mean anything, Landon,” she told me, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

Maybe. But his teeth meant something to him. I could tell by the way he kept batting his face looking for them when the police finally pulled me off him.

The pathetic way he looked bordered on comical. Shit, the whole damn thing was comical. I might have even laughed if my heart wasn’t busy joining his teeth on the floor.

Bernadette wasn’t a perfect person. I knew that long before I put a ring on her finger. But I’m not either so I thought we’d be perfect together. She needed someone to help her after the rough life she’d had, and someone to take care of her, seeing how bad she still had it when we first met. I was willing to do it. Hell, I was willing to do anything for her.

Up until that moment when I found her on her knees.

Call me a fool in love.

But don’t make me look like one.

I push my half-drunk bottle into the sand, reminding myself it’s been over a year and time to move on. Sounds great in theory, but pride to a man is as important as working hard, decency, and family. That’s how I was raised. That’s how it should be. Bernadette, however briefly, was family. She kicked my pride almost as hard as I nailed Blaze (nice fucking name, by the way) in the jaw. All that left me to do was work hard, and damn, didn’t I give that shit my all?

The wind picks up, creating swirls of bleached sand and ghosting them across the water. Mother Nature is doing her best to soothe me, gifting me with the peace and quiet I need and luring my focus to the vast ocean where the cresting waves build and crash along the shore.

Peace, I repeat in my head.

“Quiet,” I say out loud.

“Trin,” I mumble when my phone vibrates in my back pocket.

I pull it out, sure enough it’s my baby sister Trinity. The peace and quiet on Kiawah is no match for her. “Yeah?”

“Now, Landon,” she says, her South Carolina accent as thick as mine. “Is that any way to say hello?”

She doesn’t wait for me to answer. “What if I was Miss Universe, calling to tell you I had the cure for global warming, and whether or not I shared it with the Environmental Protection Agency depended on how well you answered the phone? Wouldn’t you feel bad for all those polar bears out there, floating on some crumbling glacier ice because you answered the phone with ‘Yeah?’ sounding broodier than shit, crankier than a leprechaun shoved up some poor unsuspecting bull’s ass, and about as pleasant as the matador trying to coax him out—”

“What the hell does that even mean, Trin?”

“It means you should go to Becca’s New Year’s Eve party tomorrow night,” she explains like it’s obvious.

“I’m busy,” I tell her.

“Doing what? Besides drinking a beer and looking out at an ocean that’s not going anywhere?”

I pinch the bridge of my nose, muttering a curse when she plops down beside me.

Like me, she’s barefoot. Most people wouldn’t dare walk on the beach in the middle of winter. But ever since we were little, Trin and I have always loved the feel of the sand sliding beneath our feet, even in the cold.

Her jeans are rolled up like mine and she’s wearing a heavy coat like me. Hers is burgundy; mine is navy. I didn’t bother with a hat. She did, sporting a gray beanie tight enough to keep her long black hair away from her small face. Even after having my nephew, she’s still stick thin, lacking the bulky muscles keeping me warm.

She motions to my beer. “Sir, where are your manners? Aren’t you going to offer me a drink? I am a lady after all.” She huffs. “Your momma raised you better than that.”

I pass her the bottle. She takes a sip and makes a face. “It’s warm.”

“I kept rolling it in my hands,” I admit. “I suppose it’s hard to keep it cold that way, even in forty-degree weather.”

She nods like she understands. “How long have you been out here?”

I lie. “Not long.”

“How long have you been out here?”

I smirk. “A while.”

“How long have you been out here?”

“I guess long enough.”

I start to stand when her slender arms wrap around me, keeping me in place. “Landon, as your favorite and only sister on God’s green earth, I owe it to you to tell you that dark, hairy, and cranky doesn’t fit you.” She rubs the scruff on my jaw like she’s trying to swipe it off. “Lord, it’s like an opossum crawled up your chest and spit out a litter of babies across your jaw.”

I edge away. “Your husband has the same damn beard,” I remind her.

“Oh, that’s not true.” She smiles and turns her attention toward the ocean, her gaze getting that dreamy look it always gets when she thinks of Callahan. “My man’s beard is alpha and sexy.” She makes a face. “Yours is, well, possumy.” She holds out her hand. “And if that’s not a word, it should be. At least when it comes to whatever the hell is laying on your face.”

“Trin, if you’re trying to use your charm to talk me into going to Becca’s party, it’s not working.”

“Why? She was nice enough to invite you.” She shrugs. “Besides, it’s almost New Year’s Eve. Time for a fresh start and a new beginning.”

Her voice quiets at her last few words. She doesn’t mention Bernadette. But after everything that happened, I suppose I’ve mentioned her enough, and so has Trin.

If hate were a super power, Trin’s hate for Bernadette would have crushed the Fortress of Solitude and slapped Superman upside the head for being a little bitch. And Trin, she likes everyone.

My family is from money. It’s not something I really think about, or obsess over, it’s just always been there. We were taught to take care of it, add to it, but most of all be generous with it since we have so much. Maybe that’s why it was easy for me to give as much as I did to Bernadette. I wanted to see her happy and maybe give her the life she always dreamed of. But where Trin and our Momma would drop a few grand setting up an auction to help raise money for the children’s hospital, Bernadette would drop a few grand on herself.

My parents had insisted on an air-tight pre-nup. It pissed me off at the time, especially since they didn’t insist on the same thing when Trin married Callahan. But they saw Bernadette for the gold-digger she was, not the victim I did. Love makes you blind, but it doesn’t make you deaf when the woman you thought you knew accuses you of hitting her, even knowing you’d never harm any woman.

It should have been an easy divorce. Sign here, initial there and then walk away. Instead I dropped close to a hundred grand defending the abuse charges she filed against me.

“He’s always been violent,” she cried to the judge. “Look at what he did to my manager.”

Her attorney was more than happy to present the pictures of Bernadette’s manager’s busted up face and put the police officers who responded on the stand. Those fine members of law enforcement admitted they hauled me off Blaze (again, nice fucking name), but were more than happy to mention Blaze’s pants and drawers were down to his ankles when they found him, and that the missus was only partially dressed.

“Landon,” Trin says, her voice sad.

It’s never a good sign when my sister grows quiet. The way she wraps her arms around mine and leans her head against my shoulder . . . Christ, the last time she did that, it was at our granddaddy Palmer’s funeral.

She knows I’m remembering what all I went through, and she doesn’t like it one bit.

It was bad enough Bernadette had accused me of abuse. But to try to make me look like a monster, and get all the gossip mags talking about Landon Summers, wealthy son of Owen and Silvia Summers, accused of threatening his wife’s life, and soiling the Summers name, it was more than I could take. She wasn’t just messing with me, she was messing with my folks, two of the best people I know.

“She said I hit her, and that it wasn’t the first time,” I say aloud, before giving it too much thought.

“I know,” Trin says. She adjusts her hold. “But Landon, anyone who knows you didn’t believe her.”

“But there are a lot of people who don’t know me, Trin.”

She sighs. “I know that, too.”

The waves draw closer, but it’s not until a large one breaks like an insolent slap against the shore that she speaks again. “Did she ever hit you?”

I don’t bother telling her about all the shit Bernadette threw at me, including her hair dryer and the damn crystal jewelry box, nor do I mention all those dishes she’d smash when she wasn’t getting her way. I don’t need to. When Trin lifts her head, it’s clear she knows enough.

“Landon, why didn’t you say anything?”

“I couldn’t do that to her.”

Trin scrambles to her feet, knocking over the beer, her face pink with rage. “But she did it to you—even when it wasn’t true!”

“That doesn’t make it right,” I say. “To be accused of something like that, it’s total horseshit.”

“Horseshit she was more than happy to fling your way.” Her breaths come quick. “She didn’t even blink on the stand. You saw that, right? She wanted money and she didn’t care what she had to do to get it.”

Which was why I spent as much as I did on the best divorce attorney in the state. Messed up childhood or not, no way was I giving her more than she was legally entitled to.

“You should have said something,” she says again.

“Anything I said would have made me look weaker than I already was.” I shake my head. “Trin, when a man marries a woman who looks like Bernadette, he’s supposed to keep her happy at all costs, and in every way possible. If she’s fucking around on him, and other men find out, they don’t care that you gave her a home, more money than she needed, or that you’d protect her with your life. They assume you weren’t man enough where it counted, and where it counts is in the damn bedroom.”

“You’re not weak.” It’s what she tells me, but the way she says it, I think she understands as much as she can.

I tilt the bottle, letting what little beer remains pour into the sand. “It sure didn’t feel like that when I found her, and who I found her with.”

The foam dissipates, like it never was. It reminds me too much of my marriage, making me mad, bitter, and probably sad too, despite the fact I’m tired of feeling all three.

I rise and brush the sand off my jeans.

“One drink,” she says.

I do a double-take. “Now?”

She shakes her head, looking about as happy as I do. “No. Tomorrow night, at Becca’s. One drink, a few hellos, and you can leave.” She inches up to me. “Please, Landon. Show me and everyone that you’re okay.” She smiles despite how the worry behind it dulls her soft brown eyes in the setting sun. “Even though you may not be.”

I’m ready to tell her to go home and be with her husband and child, that she’s wasting her time. But Trin, she’s trying, and she’s the only person I’ve allowed in this whole year.

“It’s just down the beach,” she says like I don’t already know. “C’mon, Landon. What could happen?”

What could happen? It’s what I thought. The thing was, everything did.