by Wendy Silk
My Own Island
(A Blue Shore Novel)
By Wendy Silk
Text Copyright © 2018 Wendy Silk
All Rights Reserved
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Alice
Chapter 2: Grant
Chapter 3: Alice
Chapter 4: Grant
Chapter 5: Alice
Chapter 6: Grant
Chapter 7: Alice
Chapter 8: Grant
Chapter 9: Alice
Chapter 10: Grant
Chapter 11: Alice
Chapter 12: Grant
Chapter 13: Alice
Chapter 14: Grant
Chapter 15: Alice
Chapter 16: Grant
Chapter 17: Alice
Chapter 18: Grant
Chapter 19: Alice
Chapter 20: Grant
Chapter 21: Alice
Chapter 22: Grant
Chapter 23: Alice
Chapter 24: Grant
Chapter 1: Alice
I was only two drinks into my evening when I tripped in the sand at the Royal Beach Resort and landed directly at the feet of the handsomest man I’d ever seen. It was too bad that I couldn’t blame my clumsiness on having had too many margaritas, but the upside was that my flirting abilities were at their peak when it happened. The tequila had made me just outgoing enough to be charming, but I had not yet reached the level of incoherence that I was aiming at for the evening. It was the third day of my tropical honeymoon as a single woman, and I was planning on several more margaritas before I called it a night.
“Oops, I’m sorry!” I chirped brightly at the tall, muscular man whose swim trunks I was currently looking up. “Can you give me a hand?”
He was already extending his tanned arm, holding his hand out to me. He grinned, almost laughing. “I was watching you walking my way, and I’m not at all surprised that you ended up on the ground. You’re not looking so steady on your feet right about now.”
“This is nothing,” I protested. “I’ve been here for three days now, and I’m just feeling relaxed from being at the beach. That’s all it is.”
He nodded, his blue eyes crinkling at the corners. “Yeah, me too. I’ve been here at the resort for five days now, and I don’t think I’ve ever been as relaxed as this. I wish I could stay forever. It’s been like a dream.”
“Well for me, it’s been a bit like waking up from a nightmare and feeling a rush of relief at realizing that none of it was real,” I answered. “The nightmare was that I was engaged to a real jerk. The kind of guy that would dump his fiancée right before the wedding and leave her with a ton of bills to pay and embarrassing explanations to think up.”
“Ah.” He looked a bit nonplussed at my vehement response.
Damn it, I had done it again. I’ve always heard from my friends that sharing too much information too quickly looks a little weird. Not that I was looking for any new connections here. All I wanted was to get through another day without making a complete fool of myself. It had been almost four days since my life had come crashing down in humiliation, so I was definitely on a roll.
The day of the wedding was the last time I felt like a competent woman. I was sure I was having the best day of my life, right up to the point where David told me he was in love with somebody else. Then he walked out on me, leaving me with a brand new white dress, lots of pretty food, and tickets to this Caribbean resort.
But this random hot guy on the beach didn’t know any of this, nor did he need to know. I tried again, this time sure I could make myself sound normal.
“Sorry, let’s start fresh.” I held out my right hand to shake. It was the same hand he had just grasped to pull me back on to my feet, but it seemed like I could make a more respectable impression if I brushed the sand off on my slightly askew sarong, and offered it again. “I’m Alice,” I spoke the words with more certainty than I felt. After all, I had recently been through a lot of gyrations about what my last name was going to be. I had just gotten used to the new name I was going to take after the wedding, when the whole thing evaporated right in front of me. Now I was back to my old name, I guess. My own name, the one I liked best anyway. “I’m Alice Hamilton.”
The hot stranger mirrored my actions, brushing the sand from his palm by quickly running his hand across the t-shirt that barely hid his six pack of a stomach. He gave me the kind of smile that starts slowly, then lights up the eyes. He hadn’t planned to be so friendly, I could tell, but something about my natural awkwardness was thinning his reserve. I’ve never been sure if it counts as “charm” when I meet people and they like me. I know perfectly well that my usual first impression on people is something along the lines of “scatterbrained” or “total goofball.” This was true long before I turned into the jilted basket case I was on this vacation.
“It’s nice to meet you, Alice. I’m Grant Bedloe.” He quirked an eyebrow at me and asked, “If you aren’t meeting anybody else, do you want to sit down together for a drink?”
I held myself back from another wry answer. Of course I wasn’t meeting anybody. I still loved David. The fact that he had been cheating on me for months, and that he literally left me at the altar--well, those were minor details in the grand scheme of our love.
“I’d really like that.” I heard myself answering Grant’s invitation, although I wasn’t sure why I was agreeing to sit down with him. I hadn’t been good company for days. Why would I start now?
Grant gently brushed my elbow and gestured to the patio behind me. “Let’s hang out here for a minute. Maybe just until you get your balance back?”
“Oh, I think I’ll go in the other direction, if you don’t mind,” I said. “I’m more interested in having a couple more margaritas than I am in having good balance.”
“That sounds good to me,” he replied. “I haven’t really had the chance to sit down for drinks like this since I arrived. I keep getting up early to hit the best snorkeling spots, then collapsing from exhaustion at the end of the day. I guess that sounds a little strange, but it must be my idea of a vacation.”
We got a table, right there at the beach. It overlooked the stunning pink and red streaked sunset, and it was so close to the water that you could hear the sounds of the waves gently cresting on the sand and then withdrawing.
I leaned across the table, figuring I’d ask my question right away. “Grant, why are you here by yourself? I mean, I’ve already told you how I came to be at the most beautiful honeymoon destination in the Caribbean all alone, but what’s your story?”
He chuckled, “Well, it’s nothing like yours. Nothing so interesting.” His hand closed on his tall glass of beer, and I checked it for a wedding ring, or a faded line where one had been. Neither were there. “Nope, I’m just a guy who works a lot. I own a family business, and I’m there just about every day of the year. It was starting to get to me, so I promised I’d take a real vacation. Not just some quick trip down to LA or Seattle, but a proper getaway for a whole week.”
“Wow, a whole week off, for somebody who works every day of the year.” I was teasing him, the same way I used to tease my little brothers. “Who’d you promise?”
His lips compressed briefly, as if he was sorry he’d worded it that way. “I promised my brother. That’s all.”
“I have two brothers myself,” I said. “I know how important it is to keep your promises to them. For example, I had promised both of mine that they would be groomsmen at my wedding. They’re still waiting for that one.”
“Yeah, about that,” Grant said. “Are you serious? Did you really get left at the altar and now you’re taking the honeymoon by yourself? I thought that only happened
in movies.”
“I’m sorry to say that it happens in real life, apparently. The thing is, the travel arrangements were non-refundable. Actually, most of the whole damn wedding was non-refundable. And on my credit cards.”
“Ouch.” Grant winced in solidarity. He was trying to be polite and supportive, I could tell, but he was also amused. How could I blame him? Here I was, a half-drunk oversharing nut job who had literally fallen at his feet.
“OK, let me tell you what happened. I’ll give you the short version, then I swear I won’t talk about it anymore. Sound good?” I asked.
Grant was becoming even easier to look at as he relaxed across the table from me. His clean white t-shirt made his tan glow. His dark hair was disheveled on top, as if he had a habit of running his hands through it without caring what he looked like. The best part, though, was that hadn’t stopped smiling at me since we’d met. Sitting right in front of me was an easygoing, sexy, sporty guy, who owned his own business, and who just plain liked me. So what did I do? I started telling him all about my past relationship, and how David had dumped me.
“My fiancé, David, has always been a little high maintenance,” I explained. “I mean…my ex-fiancé, of course. He’s just a bit high strung, you know, the kind of man who likes things the way he likes them. He’s very driven in his career. Doctors don’t have a lot of free time; I always understood that. He’s the one who proposed to me, at a beautiful dinner date a year ago. He was always the one who decided what we’d do next, or how fast our relationship would move.”
Grant had downed his beer as he listened to me, and he signaled the waiter for refills for us both. He didn’t interrupt, but he wasn’t tuning me out, either. He was kind of the perfect listener. It suddenly occurred to me that he might be gay.
“So, fast forward to the big wedding at the church, with all the trimmings, right?” I said. “You can probably guess all the rest. David waited until I was actually about to walk down the aisle, then he stopped the ceremony, and pulled me aside to tell me he was in love with somebody from his office. Wow, it does sound like a movie, doesn’t it?”
Grant chuckled, but he looked at me sympathetically as well. “Alice, I don’t know what to say. I can see you’re trying to make light of it, but what a horrible thing to do to somebody. What a jerk.”
I managed to collect myself just before I dissolved into a puddle of tears right there at our table. “All right, that’s enough of that. I’m all done talking about it. Tell me more about yourself now. You mentioned your other trip ideas were Seattle or LA. Does that mean you live on the West Coast?”
He shifted in his seat a little, but he answered. “Yeah, I’m on the West Coast. I live near Seattle, so those cities are some of my easiest getaway spots. But I’ve always wanted to travel more. Sometimes it seems like I’ll always be stuck in one place.”
“Is this your first time coming to a beach resort like this?” I asked. “I’ve always wanted to go to one of these all-inclusive luxury places, but David always wanted us to save it for our honeymoon.”
Grant shook his head slowly. “No, it’s not my first time. I’ve actually been here before. It was where my wife and I spent our honeymoon ten years ago. It was just as beautiful then as it is now.” He looked away, but he continued. “We had a wonderful time, the best we ever had in our marriage.”
I wasn’t sure how to read this man. “Are you saying you got divorced?” The margaritas were making me too bold. “I mean, if you don’t mind me asking.”
He shook his head. “No. There was a car accident. She died.”
“I’m sorry.” I couldn’t think of any words besides those. Here I was, complaining about catering bills, and he was dealing with the pain of revisiting the resort where he had taken his wife before she died.
“No, it’s ok.” he said. “It all happened a long time ago. I don’t grieve for her anymore, for any of it. But it’s why I’m here. I do love to snorkel, and I thought that if I came here and put myself in the midst of everything we did together, at a time we were happy, I could put it all behind me. So I’ve gone out in the water every day, keeping myself as tired as possible, and you know what? It’s been working. I think I am reclaiming something that I had lost.”
Without warning, we had reached the end of our confidences. Like wild animals, we had each revealed a weakness that allowed us to trust each other. As silence fell around us, we had nothing more to say. In the quiet moment, however, I felt sure of one thing. I liked this man more than I had liked anybody in a long time.
Chapter 2: Grant
When I booked the trip to the Caribbean, I had snorkeling on my mind, and that was all. After so many long days at work, I knew I needed to follow the advice I’d been hearing for years, and do something just for myself. Too many long days indoors had made me wonder if I was missing the real world out there, the one I had been sure I would conquer back in my younger days.
It had only been ten years since I was last here, but it seemed longer. I felt far older than my thirty years. All the responsibilities at home had closed in on me until I couldn’t remember what it was like to walk with the white sand under my feet, or to hear the sound of palm trees rustling above me. Now that I was here, I couldn’t imagine how I could have let it go so long before I returned to the snorkeling off the shore. The way the light filtered through the surface of the water, shining on the brightly colored fish, made me remember that I was part of an amazing and beautiful world. I just needed to get out and see it more often.
After days of keeping to myself, focusing on nature, I had stumbled into a meeting with a woman unlike anybody I’d ever met before. Well, she had stumbled. Now she sat across from me at the little table at the beachfront bar. She was the kind of person who had no idea what impression she made on others. Her idea of small talk was to tell me about having been dumped by her fiancé. I was interested in hearing her story, but at the same time, I was enjoying getting a better look at her. Her long brown hair looked like it would be like silk to touch. As she spoke, I watched her full lips move, wondering how they would feel against mine.
Without meaning to, I said what I was thinking. “Alice, I think you see yourself as sort of awkward, right?”
She blinked at me. I could tell she would have been offended if she had been more sober. “I can’t believe you just said that to me. I don’t think that’s the kind of thing you’re supposed to say out loud,” she responded.
“No, hear me out,” I protested. “I just wanted to say something. You’re not.” I reached my hand across the table to touch hers. “You’re beautiful. I can’t understand what this guy could have been thinking, to leave you like that.”
Alice stared at me. “I can see you’re trying to make me feel better, but you don’t need to resort to pick-up lines.” Her face broke into a smile, despite herself. “Has that ever worked?”
I couldn’t help laughing as well. “You mean, has it worked on the many women that I’ve met who have just been left at the altar? I have to tell you, this is the first time I’ve ever used that line. You’re in a class by yourself.”
She didn’t move her hand away, though. She left her long fingers curled in mine, as we sat there, grinning at each other. The warm breeze was picking up, bringing the smell of flowers toward us. As the night had gotten later, the crowd had dispersed, so we were among the last vacationers still seated.
How could I have been so stupid as to have brought up the fact that I had honeymooned here so long ago? I’m sure there was another way I could have said I had visited before. The last thing I wanted to do was to think about Margaret, and the way it had been between us. Without meaning to, I measured her against the vulnerable yet funny woman whose hand I was still holding.
Nothing between me and Margaret had ever been as easy as this single evening had been with Alice. What did that say about me, that I had married a woman who felt more distant from me that somebody I had just met that day? We had never gotten along, tha
t was the plain truth.
Margaret had been full of complaints about every last thing in our lives. The small town, the strictures of endless days of high school; all those years that we had known each other had been about her and what she wanted. She had planned to be a model. She was pretty enough, sure, but she never had any interest in working long days or trying to improve her skills at anything. She just thought she would get discovered and immediately become a rich and famous star in the modeling world.
Margaret’s overblown dreams of fame were what fueled her interest in me, I had long since realized. She wanted to use my family business as a cash cow to get herself signed with an agency. I had been just a temporary step toward what she thought was her real place in the world.
The years of putting up with her selfishness had created a habit in me of always watching out for her. Of the two of us, only I had gone away to college. But when she called me during my junior year, saying she needed me, I quit school and came running back to her. And when she told me that she was pregnant with my child, I whisked her away for a romantic, crazy elopement. The catch was that she had made it all up. There was no baby, and there would be none in our future.
All that we would have together would be nights of endless bickering, then raised voices and finally evidence of her affairs that became impossible to ignore. I was ready to confront her about it one winter night, and she knew it. That was the night she took our car to pick up my family. I don’t think she meant to run into the tree. I’ve always preferred to think it was just black ice and dark roads that led to the accident. Of my parents, my only brother, and Margaret, only one person made it out of the wreck alive.
It had taken ten years, but I was now realizing that I’d been stuck for a long time. My mistake of getting involved with Margaret so many years ago had shaped my life from then until now. Wasn’t it time that I did something for myself?
I had been watching Alice to see if she was going to order anything else. When the waiter came by again, however, she waved her hand to decline his offer. I squeezed her other hand, which was still in mine, and I caught her eye.