by Eden Butler
“I don’t think that’s possible.”
He kissed her forehead, hugged her against his chest. “Me either, but I got no problem waiting to find out.”
Kona felt relieved, unbelievably lucky that Keira hadn’t taken off again. He always expected it, anytime she got scared, anytime she let the worry overwhelm her. But lately, before now, everything had been going well, with the exception of missing her so badly his stomach ached when he was off commentating at a game. But then, naked Skype chats had helped dull that particular ache.
He was uneasy with her claim that he loved the spotlight too much. He couldn’t lie and say he didn’t enjoy it, but it was no comparison to her, to their life together. Still, Kona would have to have a long talk with Keira about their future, about his career and the new opportunity that Devon had brought to him earlier today in what had to be some of the worst timing, ever. He wanted to shove that conversation aside. Keira felt too good in his arms, seemed too content, for him to upset her.
But one aspect of that very prickly topic couldn’t wait, not with the concerns she had shared with him earlier. Keira had to be told before the wedding tomorrow. As much as he hated damaging her calm, Kona was worried that he’d have no other chance to break the news to her, especially since Ransom still hadn’t managed to find the nerve to talk to her about his unexpected wedding guest.
“Keira?”
“Hmm?” She snuggled closer, clearly comfortable resting against him. Kona had slept next to Keira every night for the past nearly five months. He’d already learned when she was drifting off by the rhythm of her heartbeat and the slowed breaths that tickled his chest.
“Baby, I need to talk to you about something. You awake?”
“Hmm… what?”
“I said are you…” Kona’s phone sounded, pulling Keira from drifting off completely and he looked down at her, giving her what he hoped was an apologetic frown when she sleepily glared at him. A quick glance at his screen and Kona hurried to accept the call. “Hey man, just a sec.” He shifted to the edge of the bed and pulled on his boxers, tilting his head at Keira when she turned away from him. “Baby,” he said, covering the phone speaker, “it’s the wedding planner guy. I have to take this.” Keira looked over her shoulder when he touched her, the line between her eyebrows disappearing as he kissed her. “I’ll just be a few minutes.” Keira nodded, seemed a bit less irritated and Kona took that as his cue to finish his conversation.
But a few minutes turned into close to an hour when Ronnie Christenson, the owner of Happily Ever After Events, wanted to profusely apologize for Nya’s inappropriateness and then wanted to go over, in precise detail, the agenda for the wedding day. Kona tried four times to tell the guy he had to go, but Christenson was resilient, insistent and highly anal about details.
By the time Kona returned to bed, Keira was sleeping soundly, small little snores coming from her. Kona leaned down to kiss her, stopping short when he saw that the wrinkle between her eyebrows had returned and a harsh frown pulled down her mouth as she slept.
During the flight to Hawaii, Keira and Kona had agreed that there would be no bachelor or bachelorette parties. They were long past drunken frivolity, strippers and having one final stab at decadence before they tied themselves to each other forever. So the rehearsal had been the night before the wedding, and instead of spending their down time relaxing and getting ready for the next day’s chaos, Keira and Kona were having make-up sex. Not that she was complaining.
Though they hadn’t wanted debauched parties with their friends, Kona insisted that Kiera be given some princess time before the ceremony, setting her up the morning of the wedding to be treated to a massage and pampering at the resort spa. So she left that morning early, leaving a kiss on Kona’s lips as he snored steadily.
The spa was mostly quiet, very relaxing and after her facial was completed and the deep tissue massage had her feeling like her bones had gone rubbery, Keira rested in the large massage room, thin curtains separating her from the rest of the bridesmaids as they enjoyed their own bit of pampering.
She felt relaxed, languid, had even gone so far as to turn off her cell and thought the quiet would continue until she heard the lower murmurs on the other side of the curtain, catching Kona’s name. She lay perfectly still, focusing on the private conversation Auntie Malia and another woman whose voice Keira couldn’t place whispered low to each other.
“Cancer, in her bones.”
“Terminal?”
“That’s what she told Malaine. My daughter the only one who still talk story with her.” Malia sighed, the exhale worrying Keira. She could hear the sadness in the woman’s voice, the defeated tone that told Keira whoever was sick had Malia fearful and worried. “She no a good woman. Never was even when I feed her boys, God rest Luka.”
Keira twisted her head, slipping off the table to hear Malia better. Kona’s mother was sick? Dying?
“She was hard, her whole life, yeah? No sweet in her.”
“Except for Kona, yeah.”
“Maybe but she even hurt Kona bad. I hate her for being no good to that boy.”
“Why she so mean?”
Malia sighed, adjusted her body and Keira could hear her body squeak against the chair. “That Samoan, Liam Kaino, he made her that way.”
“He Kona’s father?”
Malia clicked her tongue to the roof of her mouth as though the thought of Kona’s father disgusted her. “He made those boys. He no their father.” She released another disgusted sound, something guttural and annoyed, but adjusted again her seat, squeaking against the leather.
“Kaino said he love my sister, said he want to marry her. He come from money, from New Zealand and Lalei was so happy. Love him too much, I think. Then he goes back to New Zealand, tells Lalei he’ll send for her, but he never did.”
“She never talk to him?”
“Nah. He stay there, stay far from Lalei, but then my sister, she says she having his baby, she need tell him he gonna be a papa.” Malia exhaled again, made a distinct sound, sad and disappointed, then finished speaking. “She get there and Liam say he sorry but he marry this haole from the mainland.”
The sharp gasp of Malia’s friend moved around the room and Keira pulled her towel over her shoulders, frowning for the betrayal Lalei had faced. She could sympathize, though Kona had never known Keira was pregnant when he pushed her away.
“She no tell him about the babies.”
“Why?”
“She say he no have the right to them boys. She say he never know and he didn’t. His haole wife couldn’t get pregnant and my sister want Kaino to die thinking he had no babies. That made her hard, made her hate haoles, made her hate anyone who she think could take Kona from her. Even Luka. He look too much like Kaino. Kona look like our people. She marry that skinny Tonga, Alana and keep his name after he die. Our name, she no want. Lalei a sad, mean woman. So sad.”
“And now she sick?”
“She alone too for what she did to Kona and his boy and pretty haole Keira. Kona no speak with her.”
Keira couldn’t listen anymore. She slipped on her robe and left the room, walking out to the private patio overlooking the ocean. She wasn’t sure how to feel. She hated Kona’s mother, had harbored such a fierce dislike for the woman for all she’d done to Keira, what she’d tried to do to Ransom. A year ago, Keira wouldn’t have batted an eye about Lalei being sick. She doubted she could have even mustered the sympathy to feel bad for Kona at losing his mother. The woman had always been so selfish and vile to everyone but Kona and even then, she’d manipulated him for decades, trying to place him on whatever path she wanted him.
But Keira’s own mother had died six months ago. From what she heard, the illness was painful, lingering and her mother suffered for almost a year before her liver finally failed. When she got the call that the woman was dead, there had been no instant swell of grief, no overwhelming emotional display that leveled Keira. To Keira, her mother died the
instant she told Keira to get rid of her baby.
Sixteen years she had kept her mother out of her mind. Keira never thought of her, never wanted to be reminded of her life in New Orleans and her mother’s cruelty. Then after the death she returned to the Lake House. Keira was the only one left to rummage through her mother’s belongings, years of pointless memories sorted and organized into albums and scrapbooks that Keira had no desire to keep.
But one day, Keira came across a box in the attic with her name scrawled across the top. When Keira opened it, all that she thought she knew about her mother fractured.
Inside were pictures, newspaper clippings, sheet music, articles and copies of record charts filling up dozens of scrapbooks and they were all of Keira. Her successes, media and PR materials that the record label insisted she participate in, pictures of Keira accepting her Grammy, speaking quietly, shyly to the press with her trophy in hand. Her mother had documented everything, was proud. Keira knew that from the tiny, elegant handwritten labels, titles that said “Keira’s First Number One” or “My Baby on the Grammys”.
Keira had taken those scrapbooks and held them close to her chest, confused that her mother hadn’t really hated her, that after all these years and everything she tried to force on Keira, she’d really loved her, was proud of her. And it broke Keira’s heart. Cora Michaels, her mother, had been abusive, horrible to Keira, angry that the girl had turned out too much like her father. She’d driven Keira away, kept her away because she hated the baby growing inside her daughter’s belly. She’d hated even more the boy who had put that baby there. It was her rearing, the small-minded bigotry that was engrained into her generation. Her parents, theirs, had only cared about social standing and money—how much they had, how much they could get, and that attitude had left Cora expectant, cold. She’d landed Keira’s father in college, then left him when he no longer wanted to pretend he believed in what she did. Keira had never understood her mother, but those clippings, those proud labels told a different story, and convinced Keira that she’d never really known the woman, either.
Keira had spent years trying to forget that her artistic, free-spirited father had loved her mother, that there had been something about her that he’d found irresistible once. That love hadn’t ever left her mother, not really. It had become displaced, hidden by expectation and ignorance, but it still lived in her and in a small, undeniable way, had been reserved for her daughter.
Keira had never forgiven her mother for all those years of criticism, for the abuse, the pain she had caused. She had never even told her mother goodbye when she walked out to start a life on her own with her unborn baby. So she sat in that attic that day with those scrapbooks around her and for the first time in sixteen years, Keira cried out for her mother. She’d told her she loved her, no matter what a vicious, entitled, racist woman she was, that Keira couldn’t help but love her. And she realized, with shocking clarity, that’s what real love is; loving blindly, loving despite flaws, despite the horrible things we all do to each other. Keira hated everything her mother believed in, she’d hated it so much that she’d purposefully run from it. Still, that drunk, ignorant woman had been her mother. She’d given Keira life. She’d made Keira the stubborn, determined woman she had become.
She didn’t want Kona to have to live with that same regret for his manipulative mother. Keira certainly wasn’t ready to hug Lalei Alana and tell her all was forgiven; in fact, she doubted her hatred for the woman would ever cool, but Lalei was Kona’s mother, he needed to tell her goodbye while she was around to hear it. Maybe after the wedding, once they returned to the mainland, they could make one last visit to his mother and make some kind of peace.
Keira relaxed against a plush patio chair, her feet reclined on a cold fire pit as she watched the empty beach in front of her through the spaces in the brick privacy fence. She would marry Kona in a few hours. Finally, they’d be always officially and that thought made her smile, had her pushing back the news about his mother, the memory of the heartache her own mother had caused her. She closed her eyes, smiling at the thought of Kona’s body over hers the night before, how hard he took her, how desperate he’d been to touch her.
The sudden sound of a rapid fire shutter clicking had Keira jerking alert, heart pounding, as she reactively pulled her robe closer together and let Mark stand in front of her when he stormed out onto the patio. Behind the bushes just a few yards beyond the patio, a lone photographer was snapping shot after shot.
“What the hell is the matter with you?” Mark screamed, pulling Keira from her stunned silence. “Get the fuck out of here you sick bastard!”
“You Keira’s fuck buddy? Does Kona know?”
Mark picked up a glass vase from the console table by the door and flung toward the slick-haired photographer as he continued to shoot picture after picture, moving around the fence to get a better shot of Keira as she hid behind Mark’s back.
“Move, you asshole! Fucking parasite!”
“Hey man, I’m just trying to feed my family.”
“No, motherfucker,” he said, pushing Keira further back, “you’re leeching off people who’ve actually done something with their lives. Get out of here!”
Mark slammed the glass door behind them, darting to the spa workers as they hurried toward his shouting voice. “Where the hell is the damn security your people said she’d have?”
Keira flinched as two small spa workers stepped back from her best friend as though his head might explode. “Sir, I’m sorry…” one started, but then pressed her lips together tight when Mark shot her a glare.
“This is the worst place…”
“Mark, that’s enough,” Keira said, pulling on his elbow. “Calm down.” To the workers at her side, Keira smiled, tilted her head when they didn’t return the gesture. “You’ll have to forgive my friend. He’s a little overprotective and has been without his boyfriend for a few weeks now.” That well timed nugget of information earned a grin and a small laugh from the workers and they nodded, moving behind Mark to close the curtains and lock the patio door.
When Keira had returned to the main spa room where the cousins and aunties and Leann were all sitting around getting their hair flat ironed or curled and their faces made up, Mark was at her heels, pulling her back. “Kona promised me this shit wasn’t going to happen again.”
“When did he say that?”
The sharp malice that bunched up Mark’s face eased and Keira folded her arms, cocking an eyebrow at her friend when she realized he and Kona had been plotting behind her back. She didn’t need to say anything to Mark. A small curl of her lip and the man rubbed the back of his neck and stared down at the floor, looking like he was trying to think of something to say that wouldn’t piss Keira off.
“Um, last night, after you took off. I, ah, yelled at him for abandoning you all day and for whatever he did to piss you off last night.”
“Mark…”
“I know. I know it’s none of my business and you don’t want me getting between you and that damn gorilla when you’re fighting.”
“No. I don’t and do not call him that.”
Mark’s shoulders lowered and he pulled Keira further away from those prying bridesmaids. The loud conversation and cackling laughter had quieted as Keira and Mark’s little tiff continued. “You’re my oldest friend, Keira and I know when you’re worried and stressed. I see it written all over your face. You’re anxious. All this shit,” he waved a hand around the room, “it’s not you. Why haven’t you told Kona that? Why have you just let this damn train wreck keep pushing forward?”
It was a question she asked herself last night, had been asking since the fiasco at the airport. She’d seen the wedding and the over-the-top ridiculousness swelling for days now and had kept quiet, never mentioning to Kona that it was all too much for her. Coupled with their arguing, making up and Keira’s annoyingly incessant worry that she would get lost in the shuffle while Kona took Ransom along with him in his search fo
r the spotlight, she hadn’t found the nerve to speak up. Things were already so stressful, so chaotic, and Keira simply didn’t think she could add more tension to an already tense situation.
The knot that had been so expertly rubbed away during her massage returned, pinching down into Keira’s shoulders and, without really thinking about it, she rubbed her fingers against her skin, watching over the activity in the crowded room while Mark stared at her, his gaze focused and scrutinizing.
“We can get through this. Once we do, things will get back to normal.” Mark didn’t seem convinced and Keira closed her eyes, moving her head in a shake when Mark’s frown only deepened. “Would you please do me a favor and stop stressing me out?” He began to speak, even opened his mouth in some weird variety of an appalled, insulted gasp, but Keira shook her head, stopping him before he could bicker back. “Mark, please. Shit is already more than I can handle. I know you’re worried and I love you for it, but I don’t need you getting in my business. Okay?”
He cleared his throat, looking unhappy and pissy, but nodded once to Keira. “Fine. But if shit like that,” he pointed to the closed glass door behind them, “happens again and Hale isn’t there to handle it, I’m personally going to get in his face.”
“Oh, sweetie, I’d hate for you to get your ass handed to you on my wedding day.” When Keira winked at him, Mark laughed, hugged her tight. She let herself rest against his chest, just for a moment, just for a second so that the pressure mounting in her mind didn’t consume her. It was a brief reprieve, one that Keira appreciated, one she hoped would help her with the escalating storm her wedding day had become.
Keira couldn’t breathe.
Literally.
“Malaine, I think the corset is too tight. I feel like my face is blue. Do I look blue?” Keira’s head felt like it weighed fifty pounds.. That didn’t help her as she looked around the large room just outside the hallway that led to the resort venue. A fifty pound head and a fifteen pound gown made movement nearly impossible and she wasn’t quite ready to test her mobility.