Beach Reads Box Set

by Madden-Mills, Ilsa

  Jasmine perked up. “Really?”

  “Yep, the only stipulation is that I have to keep an eye on him and it looks like I have my work cut out for me.”

  Jasmine bit her hot pink lip. “Do you think he would… you know,” her eyes bulged, “hurt himself?”

  I bit the edge of my nail and she slapped it away, it was a peeve of hers. “The way he looked yesterday… it was awful. But no, I don’t think so. Not after the fight I saw in him this morning. He seems as angry as he is hurt. He’s divorced, but his mother said he was the one who wanted it. I don’t think it has to do with his ex, but who knows.”

  “Huh,” Jasmine said as she looked at me thoughtfully.

  “He probably just needs a break. I’m bringing his groceries in a few hours and I intend to tread lightly. I’m going to make sure we get this commission.”

  She lifted a brow. “Going to get creative?”

  I shouldered my purse as she gave me a suggestive wink. “You are such a backhoe.”

  Chapter Five

  Koti

  I parked my Jeep as Banion came out of his flower shop to greet me.

  “Hey yank, you still look fresh from the boat.”

  “Liar!” I accused, as he opened my door. “I passed the one-year mark. I’m officially a local.”

  “Yank-key,” he said, adding more charm to the word with his thick island accent. “What ya need today?”

  “Three bouquets please, we have a busy day.”

  “Maybe four?” He looked over at me with a knowing smile. “One for you.”

  “Perfect.” Ushering me inside he began to gather the bouquets, taking stems from various buckets he kept in a small cooler. He had the roughest looking florist shop in St. Thomas but made the most beautiful bouquets. I always told him if I ever struck it rich, he would be my lone investment. He was highly underrated and undervalued due to the state of his shop, but the locals knew. And though I’d spent six summers in St. Thomas over the course of my life, I could honestly say I was becoming an expert at navigating the potholed pavement.

  “When are your parents coming, yank?”

  “Thanksgiving, I pray.”

  “You have not spoken to them?” He peered at me over a handful of orange and purple stems. One desperate and lonely night when I had first arrived on the island and just gotten my job with Jasmine, I’d spent a few drunken hours with Banion spilling the events that led me to St. Thomas. He hadn’t let me forget the night of verbal diarrhea, nor the physical vomit I had christened the floor of his store with. Not my finest hour, or week, or month.

  “We talk.”

  “But do you really talk?” Banion was ridiculously tall to the point of being intimidating. His charcoal-colored skin and dark eyes were only softened by the sincerest of white smiles and a smooth voice.

  “We talk. They still badger me to go back.”

  “And you want to stay?”

  “I’m staying,” I insisted, adding a few pink sprays to the mix. Banion shook his head. “No, the green.” I pulled a few green stems from the basket as he wrapped the leaves around the flowers and tied them without a binding.

  “Beautiful,” I said, amazed at his handiwork.

  “One day, when you have the time, I’ll show you how to tie the flowers.” He pushed the bouquets into my hand as I handed him the cash. Banion was old school, person-to-person was his motto. It was also one of the reasons his flower shop wasn’t as widely known. But I understood it. My motto was very much the same. In fact, if you googled Koti Vaughn, you would see closed social media accounts. Being connected used to be the bane of my existence.

  Years of conditioning—prep school, followed by a five-year stint in college to get my masters—had been wasted. I was one business move away from making myself immortal before I choked. Well… before I got a reality check. And in the Virgin Islands, on one of the mountains, surrounded by sea, I was a property manager dolling out bottles of wine and Banion’s bouquets to the ones who had gambled and won.

  One day-poof. Dream job, gone, swanky apartment, stripped away. I went from being the real estate wolf of Manhattan to the black sheep of St. Thomas.

  My piece of the Big Apple had a worm in it.

  Like Ian, I spent the first day in St. Thomas staring at the ocean in the safety of my parents’ rental house.

  Life was fucked in New York.

  But in St. Thomas…

  “Don’t forget yours,” Banion said, handing me another armful of beautifully tethered stems.

  Thankful to be jerked out of the debilitating cold of my past life, I hugged him before I stepped out into the warming sun.

  * * *

  I set the bags down on the porch one by one before I knocked and got no answer. “Ian?” Knocking again, I pressed my face to the living room window. The house looked abandoned. “Shit.” I gripped an extra key that I’d taken from the office since Ian had stolen mine the night before and let myself in. Aside from a crumpled blanket on the edge of the plush white couch, the place was empty. In hopes that Ian was somewhere wandering the beach, I began to unload the groceries and replaced the bottle of red I’d stolen and added an extra. I skipped the customary liquor bottles to avoid a drunken tirade. The man was already off the rails, I wasn’t about to add strong alcohol to the mix.

  I was a hypocrite of sorts. I drank like a fish when I arrived on the island in ashes. I added a few things to the list to keep Ian fed and put out several items I knew he hadn’t brought with him—shaving cream, a razor, deodorant, body wash, shampoo, and extra toilet paper. Just as I’d finished unloading, he walked through the door with several shopping bags in hand. He paused when he saw me standing next to the counter.

  “Hi.”

  Eyes averted he spoke low. “Seeing as how my parents own the home, I won’t be needing your services, Koti.”

  “Well, this request came directly from your mother.” I surrendered the last rental key on the counter. “And I told you I’d be by with groceries.”

  “And I rather hoped you’d left by now.”

  I bit my tongue as he moved past me and set his bags down. I eyed the contents and saw several shirts and pairs of shorts with tags. I hid my excitement that he was staying. Not because he was ideal company, but because of the financially worry-free months ahead of me.

  “I’ll leave you to it. Just let me know if you need anything.”

  Gray eyes met my blue briefly. “I won’t.” Devastation. It was clear as day. Anyone who looked at the man could never question what he felt. His eyes were a window, though his features remained stoic.

  “You know, Ian, I came here about a year ago a complete mess—”

  “I’d like some privacy, please.”

  Swallowing my pride, I walked out the door without another word.

  * * *

  Thwack.

  Thwack.

  Thwack.

  “Fack!” It was another one of the hundreds of curses that erupted from the Kemp kitchen.

  With wide eyes, I watched the wood fly across the porch and onto the sand and heard another loud crash as I stalked the house next door with my phone pressed to my ear.

  “So how is my son?” His mother asked as I saw more of Rowan Kemp’s kitchen fly over the railing, off the porch, and into the sand. “Is he adjusting well?”

  “Damnit! Oh, fack your motha,” Ian’s voice rang out in frustration. Giggling, I covered the mouthpiece of the phone as another cabinet door hit the sand. He’d been at it for a few hours. It started with an explosive phone call that I managed to avoid, mostly due to my taking cover in the shower and ended with a bang.

  “He… is. It looks like he’s remodeling the kitchen.”

  In a flash, Ian stood on the porch only in shorts, his chest heaving, a bottle of the red in his hand. He studied the wood in the sand before he glanced at my house. I ducked out of his line of sight and answered her before more banging started. “He’s fine.”

  “Oh, that’s wonderful new
s. Maybe you could put him on the phone?”

  More growling ensued and then a clear, “Damn you! EISH!”

  “Well, at the moment, I think it would be impossible, he’s in the midst of demolition.”

  I cringed at the ripping sound and poked my head out of my screen door just as he hurled more wood over the railing.

  “You know he’s always been so good at things like that. He built his father a beautiful bookshelf for his study.”

  “That’s wonderful,” I said, as Ian unloaded an entire can of lighter fluid on the discarded wood. I raced around the bottom floor of my house and collected every fire extinguisher I had before I sat them next to my front door. Seconds later I heard the whoosh of the wood go up in flames. The rising inferno seemed to fuel him as he added more of his mother’s kitchen to it piece by piece.

  Rowan went on, speaking of her pride and joy. “From boy scouts all the way through college, my boy excelled at everything he did. Honor student, swimming, tennis. I had to beat the women away with a stick.”

  Ian chose that moment to snap another cabinet door in half over his knee and used his empty wine bottle to bat it into the burning pile.

  “You don’t say.”

  “Oh, yes, he was such a ladies’ man before he met Tara, his ex-wife.”

  Only mildly prepared, I walked out onto my porch at the same time Ian returned to it. He had several photo books in his hand. Rowan whispered in my ear as if he could hear her. “I was never really that fond of her, she seemed a little cold compared to his warmth.”

  Ian pulled pictures from the books and began to burn them one by one. Something in my chest split as he walked around Rowan Kemp’s burning kitchen cabinets, tossing away what I was sure were irreplaceable pictures.

  He had lost his shit. It was, without a doubt, Ian’s doomsday.

  “Don’t!” I screamed from where I stood.

  Ian ignored me as he tossed an entire book into the fire before shaking another so that the pictures fed the flames.

  “Koti? What is it?” Rowan said anxiously on the phone.

  “Oh nothing, I was just…”

  “Is everything okay?”

  “Oh, fine,” I said, as I paced the porch watching her son destroy his mother’s memories. He must have found the pictures in the linen closet. The Kemps had very few of their own things in the house.

  “Rowan, I’m going to ask him if he needs any help.”

  “Okay,” she said hesitantly. “But please ask him to ring me.”

  “Will do.” I was already running toward the small bonfire just as Ian tossed another picture into it.

  “What are you doing!?”

  “Privacy,” he said through thick lips. “That’s all I asked for.”

  “Kind of hard to ignore you, Ian. Since you’ve gone all Tom Hanks Cast Away—me man, me make fire!” I reached for the picture in his hand as he tossed it in. I watched it burn. It was a shot of a woman in her wedding dress who I assumed was Tara. She looked beautiful as she smiled at her groom. I was only able to admire Ian in a well-fitted tux for seconds before the fire engulfed the photo.

  Jesus, what could have happened?

  “Ian, if you want to talk about it…”

  He picked up another book and took a few pictures out shoving them into his pocket before he tossed it into the pile.

  “Leave.”

  “Please stop. You don’t understand what you’re doing.”

  Blazing eyes scoured me before he looked back at the fire. “I know exactly what the fuck I’m doing.”

  Sweat pooled on his forehead. He was covered in splintered wood. Ian Kemp had cracked, and he wasn’t coming back until he was ready.

  Way too far into his headspace, he ignored me standing next to him.

  I walked back to my house and watched him dismantle years of memories as he stared at the fire until it went out.

  And then the house next to mine went completely quiet.

  Chapter Six

  Ian

  I sat in the dark living room staring out the window at the brightly lit ocean. Thousands of stars littered the night sky as the sea swept the shore. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t temper the anger. I couldn’t bring myself back to some semblance of the man I was just days before. It was a new beginning I didn’t ask for—that I hadn’t planned on—but I could feel a part of me coming to the surface, a part of me that I had ignored for years. The selfish part.

  The last fifteen years of my life had been a series of compromises, and mostly on my part to be the man I was raised to be—a good husband and doting father. The things I swore I wanted. Another crack deep within bled freely when I thought of all that time I spent believing my family was a gift and purely my own. The irony is my ex-wife had been lost to me for years, a stranger before I left her and asked for a divorce. And my daughter… I scrubbed my face as I fought the threatening explosion within.

  I would give anything to take those minutes at that hospital back. With everything in me, I wish I would have played dumb, instead of recognizing Tara’s guilt and figuring it out. Not only did I have the knowledge that Ella wasn’t mine, her mother was now threatening to tell her the truth. Threatening to reveal to my little girl she didn’t belong to me in the biological sense. This was no doubt Tara’s plan in an attempt to transition her boyfriend into being a family man. I didn’t need a paternity test to know that Daniel was Ella’s sperm donor. Tara had been dating him her whole life up until the month we met. It seemed as though their relationship didn’t end when ours started.

  Rage boiled again, refusing to let me feel anything else in that moment. If the look on Koti’s face when she watched me unravel the last few days was any indication of my well-being, I was safer sitting in the dark dealing with my temperament alone.

  I left a loveless marriage for the sake of all three of us. Though Tara fought the divorce and claimed to love me even after the papers were signed, I still cared for her enough to set her free to find something more than the shackle of obligation we felt.

  I wouldn’t let my daughter suffer another needless argument. I refused to stay together and set that horrible example for her. It wasn’t blissful or comfortable. It was waged war and over the simplest things. Everything I’d ever done, including the dissolution of my marriage, had been for Ella. I had no woman waiting.

  But that was now the case. I had a little woman waiting. I had to go back. I had to go back and fight for what was right for Ella, but I had nothing inside me but hate and the taste of betrayal coating my tongue and clouding my vision. I would not abandon my daughter, but she would not recognize the man I was now.

  As starlight struck the water and twilight hit, I couldn’t see the beauty. I couldn’t fixate on the awe-inspiring light, I only saw the darkness in-between.

  Soft music drifted from Koti’s bedroom as I slapped the water away from my eyes. I moved to the kitchen to see her bedroom clearly lit. On her stomach with a book in hand, her knees bent and bare feet up, she swung them back and forth to the melody. In that moment I envied her ability to live only for herself and the freedom that came with it. I wanted that. I’d just been granted that freedom in the cruelest of ways by Tara’s confession. But I could never embrace that freedom because of the loss I would surely suffer. Still, the idea of it appealed to me more than anything. Not the loss of Ella but the need to do things differently, to finally make my life my own, about me. Anger blurred my vision as I sat back in the shadows of the house. The dark would have to do for now.

  Chapter Seven

  Koti

  A day went by without a glimpse of him, and then another. I spent a good amount of time staring into the darkness watching for any movement, a trickle of light, but came up empty.

  I tried to muster up any excuse to check on him but had none. He asked for privacy and I had to admit when I arrived on the island, I wanted the same.

  Rowan called nightly and I assured her with a false update that her son was fine.
>
  But after a third day, I no longer felt safe in assuming the best. When my alarm went off that morning, I grabbed some clothes and made my way to the house next door. After my knock went unanswered, I began to pound. “Ian?”

  Nothing.

  Fear crept through me as I stood on the porch for a solid five minutes knocking. Desperate, I glimpsed through the window and saw him lying on the couch with his eyes to the ceiling. “Ian. Open the door, please.” His eyes drifted to mine and my heart skipped a beat. Reluctantly, he moved to get up and a few seconds later, we were face to face. His jaw was covered in dark stubble, his hair a scattered mess, expression unreadable. I scoured him from his sad gray depths to his shirtless chest, to his bare feet. He was fine, aside from looking completely desolate.

  “What is it, Koti?” It was a different tone, equal amounts of defeat and exasperation.

  I lifted my folded clothes. “I’m out of water and running late for work.” It was a lie but a damned good excuse. I peered into the house behind him, before I made my case.

  “Can I please borrow your shower? I’ll be quick.”

  He let out a long breath and opened the door stepping back to let me in. With quick appraising eyes, I looked around the war zone. The kitchen was torn to shreds, the wood splintered. On the floor of the living room lay several empty boxes, one for a laptop that sat on his coffee table. Curious, I braved a look at the screen and saw nothing but a generic screensaver. I decided I’d made a good call about the absence of liquor when I saw the empty wine bottles on the floor. Walking down the hall, I noticed the holes in the ceiling from his attempt to silence the alarms and bit my lips to keep from laughing before I closed myself in the guest bathroom and made quick work of taking a shower. Under the warm water, I decided I’d had enough of his intimidation. There were people worried about him who needed assurances directly from the source. I never made my parents wait for word from me, even in my worst headspace.