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 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 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 and 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 at 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, to take of her, and 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 a year, and it’s 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 brief, was family. She kicked at my pride almost as hard as I nailed Blaze (nice fucking name by the way) in the nuts. All that left me to do was work hard, and damn, didn’t I give that shit my all?
The wind picks up, stirring swirls of yellow and sending them to ghost over the water. Mother Nature is doing her best to soothe me, reminding me of the peace and quiet I need and pulling my focus to the vast ocean and the cresting the waves that 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 anyway 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 diabetes, and whether or not I shared it with the world depended on how you answered the phone? Wouldn’t you feel bad that all those people out there with diabetes wouldn’t have a cure 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 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 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 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, a gray beanie tight enough to keep her long black hair away from her pixie face. Even after having my nephew, she’s still thin, lacking the muscle that’s keeping me warm.
She motions to my beer. “Landon, 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 thin arms wrap around me, keeping me in place. “Landon, as your favorite and only sister on God’s green earth, I owe it 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 stare getting that dream-like look it always gets when she thinks of Callahan. “My man’s beard is all 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 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 this year, 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, 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 had 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 and auction to help raise money for the children’s hospital, Bernadette would drop a few grand on herself.
My parents insisted on an air-tight pre-nup. It pissed me off at the time, especially since they didn’t insist the same thing when Trin was marrying Callahan. But they saw Bernadette for who she was, not like me. Love makes you blind, but it doesn’t make you deaf when the woman you thought you knew calls you a wife-beater to your face.
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 her manager’s busted up face and put the police officers who responded on the stand. Those fine members of law enforcement admitted they pulled me off Blaze (again, nice fucking name), but they were more than happy to mention Blaze’s pants and drawers were down to his ankles when they found him.
“Landon,” Trin says, her voice sad.
It’s never a good sign when my sister grows quiet, and the way she wraps her arms around mine and leans her head against my shoulder. The last time she did that, our granddaddy Palmer had passed.
She knows I’m remembering, and she doesn’t like it one bit.
It was bad enough Bernadette had accused me of hitting her, something I’d never do to any woman for any reason. But to try to make me out to 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 messing with me, she was messing with my folks, two of the best most generous people I know.
“She said I was hitting her,” 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 start drawing closer, but it’s not until a large one slaps hard 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: her hair dryer, the damn crystal jewelry box, or all those dishes she smashed when she wasn’t getting her way. But 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 that 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 all that money on lawyer’s fees. No way was I giving her more than she was entitled to after she pulled that.
“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 and look after her with your life. They assume you weren’t man enough where it counted, and where it counts is in the fucking 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 that 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 then you can leave.” She inches up to me. “Please, Landon. Show me and everyone that’s there you’re okay.” She smiles although 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, and that she’s wasting her time. But Trin, she’s trying, and the only person I’ve allowed in this whole year.
“It’s just down the beach,” she says like I already don’t know. “C’mon, Landon. What could happen?”
What could happen? It’s what I thought. The thing was, everything did.