Lights on the Far Horizon
The complete three book series
Sailor Stone
TCL Publishing L.L.C.
Lights on the Far Horizon Copyright © 2015 by TCL Publishing L.L.C..
Contents
Lights on the Far Horizon - the three books of the series - Synopsis
Image Credits
1. The Naked Sunrise - short story prequel to The Naked Sunset and the Naked Seduction
2. The Naked Sunrise
3. Book Two - The Naked Sunset
4. Summer Evening in Charleston
5. Kinsey, Three Years Later
6. Tanner Bodie
7. A Night not Forgotten
8. Jessica and Dale – Four Years Later
9. Tanner’s Story
10. A Sneak Preview
11. Staying with it
12. Sea of Tears
13. Carriage Ride through the Holy City on a Moonlit Night
14. Honeymoon
15. The Next Morning
16. The Naked Sunset
17. Book Three - The Naked Seduction
18. Sunset Kinsey
19. Let's go Scootering
20. The Broken-Hearts Club
21. Tanner on the Prowl
22. Kinsey Starts New
23. Sting
24. Seducing the Seducer
25. The Unexpected Morning
26. The Seduction
27. Lights on the Far Horizon
Other Books by Sailor Stone
Lights on the Far Horizon - the three books of the series - Synopsis
Book one – Naked Sunrise – A short story prequel.
In the moments before the dawn of a new day, on a deserted beach…
A young artist ready to change the world and a passionate surfer looking for a quiet and inspiring moment come together and connect in the beauty of the morning sun as it rises from the sea.
What he does – and she articulates – will take your breath away.
Book two – Naked Sunset – a novel.
After years of searching for their soul mate – a young man and woman meet and fall in love on a beautiful white beach as the sun sets behind them. They plan to spend the coming night and every day and every night that follows – together. But before the night is over and the sun has risen from the sea they will have lost one another – perhaps forever.
The Naked Sunset is a love story where hearts must wait and souls must search – always hoping – but never knowing – if fate will provide another chance to come together and stay together – this time, perhaps, forever.
Book three – Naked Seduction – a novel.
A marriage on the rocks, sleek yachts, a beautiful island, new friends, and a handsome and mysterious billionaire – forced from her home by her husband – these are the things Kinsey Brodie now finds herself running from and running toward in this novel about a husband and wife who will do whatever it takes to save a most prized possession: their marriage.
But after everything she has done to him, is it too late?
Image Credits
“Book cover design and layout by, Ellie Bockert Augsburger of Creative Digital Studios.
www.CreativeDigitalStudios.com
Cover design features:
Diamond Ring: © ikonacolor / Dollar Photo Club
Sensual Portrait of Cute Couple: © Aarrttuurr / Dollar Photo Club”
Book cover design and layout by, Ellie Bockert Augsburger of Creative Digital Studios.
www.CreativeDigitalStudios.com
Cover design features:
Diamond Ring: © ikonacolor / Dollar Photo Club
sunset on Seychelles beach: © Iakov Kalinin / Dollar Photo Club
Beautiful young smiling couple in love embracing indoor: © Aarrttuurr / Dollar Photo Club”
“Book cover design and layout by, Ellie Bockert Augsburger of Creative Digital Studios.
www.CreativeDigitalStudios.com
Cover design features:
Diamond Ring: © ikonacolor / Dollar Photo Club
Beautiful Seascape: © GIS / Dollar Photo Club
Sensual Portrait of Cute Couple: © Aarrttuurr / Dollar Photo Club”
“Book cover design and layout by, Ellie Bockert Augsburger of Creative Digital Studios.
www.CreativeDigitalStudios.com
Cover design features:
Diamond Ring: © ikonacolor / Dollar Photo Club
Ocean Storm: © Nejron Photo / Dollar Photo Club
Sensual Portrait of Cute Couple: © Aarrttuurr / Dollar Photo Club”
1
The Naked Sunrise - short story prequel to The Naked Sunset and the Naked Seduction
2
The Naked Sunrise
She saw the world through the end of a camera lens and the tip of a paint brush. She was a young and aspiring artist with big plans to show the art world and, indeed, the entire world, her interpretations of light, the universe and life. She lived in a world of dark shadows and bright colors and she wanted to bring everybody into the brilliance of God’s light. Her plans were grandiose, she knew, and to some people in her life they were bigheaded and arrogant, but that was who she was. Art, interpretation of the world around her, was in her nature, a gift from God, or perhaps, as her best friend Jessica said, maybe it was a curse from hell. She could in no way change what lived in her heart and she didn’t even want to – for her, being an artist was living life to the full.
She was beautiful and she was young. She had the world before her and she planned to give it her gifts and her love by being the greatest artist she could be. Then, one day far in the future, she’d find the man she was meant to love and she’d shower him with her gifts as well. It was such a simple plan. At eighteen years of age, anything was possible. Right?
He liked being on the edge and he was drawn to where the land met the sea. He liked to be in, on, and even under water. For him, being on a sailboat, a surfboard, a ski, a kayak, a longboard or gliding along on a skim board, was both good and pure and he tried hard to live his life on a beach – for that, to him, was the ultimate and most dynamic edge.
He loved people and people loved him. Girls especially loved him and he loved them back. He was surrounded by good friends and a loving family and he tried to always give back, to shine back, his love for them as well. He liked to read late into the night, and though he never told anybody, he liked to write. He wanted to experience the world and he wanted to do it with someone – someone special – a girl he could love with all his might while knowing she was doing the same for him. He wanted to gift his life and share it with this special girl, but that would come later, after he figured out what he was called to do with his life. It was such a simple plan. At eighteen years of age, anything was possible. Right?
First Light
Kinsey
The sign on the entranceway to the pier read: Closed, under repair. We will reopen next spring for the new season. Thank you for your patience.
For Kinsey Appleton this was a big disappointment. She stood, camera in hand, wishing her day was getting off to a better start. She’d just have to make do. She turned and made for the beach, walking quickly so that she’d have time to adjust to her new situation and be ready for the sun – when it erupted from the waters of the great Atlantic and started the day anew.
She had planned to take her photos from the end of the pier where she could concentrate on the raw colors of the light – that unique revelation of beauty that light brought to the universe. To do that, her artistic mind had intuited that she needed to be above the plane of the horizon and beyond the shore’s edge. Her vantage should be as floating over the water itself, not on it or
behind it, but as the sun would be – as it looked down on the sea and dominated the color spectrum and obliterated any false pretenses as to where beauty originated.
For Kinsey, God revealed his beauty with light, and, on this new day, as a painter and a photographer, she wanted to get as close to his source, the sun, as possible. To catch the light of the coming dawn would now be difficult but still doable, for Kinsey had a backup plan.
She came off the gangplank that led up to the pier and headed south to the beach. She stopped short of walking onto the beach itself, and, instead, looked quickly around to make sure she wasn’t being watched, then, she stepped past the sign that said Do Not Enter and made her way into the dunes that rose up behind the predawn shadow of the beachscape.
She knew that the reason the authorities didn’t want people walking in the dunes was to protect the sea-oats that grew delicate and vulnerable within the dune’s ecosystem. The last thing Kinsey would do is hurt the sea-oats and she made sure to keep from brushing through them or stepping on them as she made her way to the top of a high dune. Sometimes art called the artist into a place she shouldn’t be, but for the sake of the art it had to be done. No harm, no foul is how Kinsey saw the situation. By the time people made their way to the beach on this day, this fall day, that promised to be beautiful and perfect, Kinsey would be back on the young artist’s tour bus with her friends and classmates and long gone, with the sea-oats still growing and pure images of the ocean dawn in her camera, with no one or no thing being the worse for it. In fact, she hoped the art world would embrace her new images and the world would be better for what she was trying to do. What could be more important than revealing the mysteries of light and color, her young mind thought.
Kinsey was eighteen and beautiful. God’s light loved to shine down on her and illuminate her to the world. But Kinsey didn’t care about the attention of the world, she cared about art, and though she dreamed of sharing it with one man, a soulmate, that time, for her, would be later. For now, she just wanted to chase beauty, catching its reflection in the spectrum of light within her camera and then paint her interpretation of it on a canvas. One day, when she was older, she dreamed of meeting the perfect man; a smart, handsome, gentle and good man to marry and shower with her art, but today, she needed to create that art.
She came to the top of the highest dune that she could find and looked out to sea where the sun was knocking on the door of the distant horizon with its first rays of light. She checked her camera’s settings and adjusted them to her liking. Then she settled her body, stilled her mind, and she waited.
Tanner
Soon the sun would rise and Tanner wanted to swim toward that sun as it rose from the sea. He stepped from the bed, and careful not to wake his friends sleeping in the other bed and on the floor of their hotel room, he put on a pair of board shorts, brushed his teeth, and slipped quietly out of their hotel room and made for the beach.
He came out from the hotel and walked quickly past the vacant pool, stepped through the gate and headed down the path through the dunes to the beach beyond. It was dark, the stars still shining gently above his head as they prepared to fade from view and let the sun take over for the coming day. Tanner looked out to sea. He could see the first weak coloring of sunlight on a strip of thin clouds that lay just over the top of the ocean’s far horizon. He had to hurry. He looked north to the pier and began to run in its direction.
As he ran, he remembered his accomplishment the day before and how it was now making him feel. He remembered how he and his friends, on the spur of the moment, had driven up to Myrtle Beach from their home in Florida to compete in a surf contest. And what a surf contest it had been. God must love surfing Tanner remembered thinking as he was handed the first place trophy. Usually the waves weren’t that big in Myrtle Beach but a tropical storm had been passing by, far out to sea, as the contest was being held and the waves it sent toward shore had been enormous and in perfect form, with huge hollow barrels that sparkled and shined green in the light of the high sun, and they made for a contest filled with incredible surfing.
Tanner loved water, ever since he was born, and riding a wave came as easy to him as learning to walk. From the moment the contest started he felt himself becoming a part of the sea, as one with the waves, and he let himself fuse with the latent, coiled energy of the great walls of water as they rolled to shore and then he ripped them open and brought to life the graceful lines of their fluid geometry. He felt like a man riding on Nature’s back when he surfed.
As Tanner approached the pier and stopped running, he remembered the day before, after the contest, and how the attention – all the girls, the newspaper and TV reporters, the crowds of people standing around him – as he was asked how he won, and his answer, “I try to make the waves notice me,” went viral and then he found himself trending on Twitter and other social media and how uncomfortable it made him feel. That’s why he was here, on the dawn of the new day, at the edge of the continent, where liquid met solid, a place where he felt comfortable and where, for him, the problems of the world went out with the falling tide, leaving his heart to feel right and his life true. He needed to find himself and swimming to sea as the sun lifted from the far and wet horizon was how he planned to do it.
Tanner had seen the workers on the pier pulling the worn planks out for replacement the day before and so he knew that it was closed to the public and that was perfect for what he planned to do.
Was it illegal? Hell yes, but he didn’t care. That particular law, the one he knew he’d have to break, was only there to protect people from themselves and he could take care of himself just fine. Tanner needed, on this morning, before he got into a car for the long drive home, to feel the rush of being gravity free – even if the rush was only for a few seconds. He wanted to surround himself in the cool splash of saltwater as he dove, head first, into the ocean. So, for the next few moments, slipping out onto the closed pier and diving from the rail of its high and far end was the only thing he cared about. Tanner needed to shed the attention of the world from his back and what better way to do it than to swim in the ocean as the sun rose and shined its light on the new day.
Girls had been all over him the previous night and he knew they were attracted to him because of the media attention he’d received for winning the surf contest and it bothered him. Those weren’t the type of girls he wanted to be around. His friends and fellow surfers thought he was crazy. They wished they had his problems – too many girls hanging on them – and they kidded him the night before when he’d told them he needed to get away from all the girl’s chasing him. He missed his girlfriends back home who liked him for who he was and he found himself thinking that perhaps one girl was all he’d need in life, but he wasn’t ready for that commitment either. He was young and he had too much searching and living ahead of him to be tied down as yet.
Tanner made his way up the gangplank of the pier and looked around. No one in sight. He jumped on the side rail, grabbed onto the chain link fence that had been erected to stop people, like himself now, from getting onto the pier while it was being repaired and he climbed to its top and then down to the other side. One more look around to make sure he wasn’t being watched and he turned and started for the end of the pier and a few moments of the purest kind of freedom.
As Kinsey looked through the viewfinder of her camera, working to frame the sun as it rose from the sea, she saw a dark flash of movement out of the corner of her eye near the entrance to the pier. She pulled her eye back from the camera to see what it was and found herself transfixed as she watched a man, a young man about her age, climb the fence on the side of the pier and drop himself down onto the pier in an area where construction equipment had been congregated for use in the coming work day.
The sun was close to breaking the bonds of the night and so the morning was now lighted enough for Kinsey to see with some detail.
He was in nothing but board shorts, he wasn’t even wearing shoes, and
Kinsey could see the thin but strong outline of his physique silhouetted against the brightening sky as he pulled himself over the fence and dropped down to his feet on the other side of the entranceway. He moved in a rhythm that suggested he was at peace with the elements of the world around him. He stepped under a construction light that had been placed above the work equipment for security and Kinsey caught a glimpse of his face in profile in the moments that he was revealed by its light. Kinsey felt her stomach flutter; her heart began beating strong and loud in her chest and then her breath left her.
He was gorgeous! This became her only thought and it almost crashed her mind, so strong was its volume within her consciousness. Kinsey felt like the artist within her was meeting the woman, the sexual woman, within her and melding into one. This male, the beautiful vision, this unknown man, was changing her understanding of what beauty in a man could be. There was a purity and a sexuality to him that made her skin tingle, her mind launch to a higher plane, and her heart pause, like it needed to swallow back the feelings of love and passion that were beginning to pour from its four chambers.
She watched, not daring to breathe, as he stepped onto the wide, high rail of the pier and began walking down its length to its far end and toward the sunrise that she had come out into the early morning to witness for herself as well.
Now, she decided, she’d witness the sunrise with him. She pointed her camera to him and began to work to bring his silhouette into her shots of the coming sunrise. It was an event that was only moments away and the heart of the artist within her soared with anticipation at the images that might be captured within her camera.
This man was sure of his steps and he never wavered in his trek toward the end of the pier. When he came to where he could step no further, he didn’t jump down onto the decking of the pier as Kinsey thought he might and she then knew that he had the heart of an artist beating within his athletic body and she felt the temperature of her excitement rising higher for what might happen in the coming moments.
Lights on the Far Horizon Trilogy Page 1