Eternal - Chapter One
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.
“Goddamn 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 she needed 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 I found her on her knees.
Call me a fool
in love.
But don’t make
me look like one.
I push my half-empty
bottle into the sand, reminding myself it’s been over a year and time to move
on. Sounds great in theory, but a man’s pride 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 also wearing a heavy coat. 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 across 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, knowing full well 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 around his
ankles and that the missus was only partially dressed when they arrived.
“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 all I went through, and she doesn’t like it one bit.
It was bad
enough Bernadette 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 breathing becomes 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 repeats.
“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.”
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 the worry behind it
dulling her soft brown eyes. “Even though you may not be.”
The sun sets
behind her, calling an end to another day. 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. Back to Eternal