Keeping Secrets: The Castaways Series, Book Three

by Land, Alexa

  Keeping Secrets

  The Castaways Series, Book Three

  Alexa Land

  U.S. Copyright © 2019 by Alexa Land.

  All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission in whole or in part of this publication is permitted without express written consent from the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either used fictitiously or are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, business establishments or locales is purely coincidental.

  This gay romance contains adult language and sexually explicit material.

  It is intended for ADULTS ONLY.

  Cover Design by Alexa Land

  Layout by Ron Perry Graphic Design

  rperrydesign.com

  Books by Alexa Land:

  Feral (prequel to Tinder)

  The Tinder Chronicles

  The Firsts & Forever Series:

  1 Way Off Plan

  2 All In

  3 In Pieces

  4 Gathering Storm

  5 Salvation

  6 Skye Blue

  7 Against the Wall

  8 Belonging

  9 Coming Home

  10 All I Believe

  10.5 Hitman’s Holiday (novella)

  11 The Distance

  12 Who I Used to Be

  13 Worlds Away

  13.5 Armor (novella)

  14 All I Ever Wanted

  15 Take a Chance on Me

  15.5 Once Burned (novella)

  16 The Rest of Forever

  Firsts & Forever/Castaways Series Crossover

  Making Merry

  The Castaways Series

  1 Kindred Spirits

  2 Starting Over

  3 Keeping Secrets

  Acknowledgements

  Special thanks to Bec, Anita & Jera

  for the brainstorming sessions

  Many thanks to my fantastic team:

  Anita, Melisha, Kim, Jera, Kelly, and Ron

  I truly appreciate your help and support!

  And thank you as always to my Facebook readers’ group

  for your suggestions, enthusiasm, and friendship!

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  1

  The buffaloes were back, and they’d brought friends.

  Tracy, Vee and I stood in the lobby and stared out at Seahorse Ranch’s courtyard, which looked like a sea of brown fur. Vee’s little blue parakeet Clementine was perched on my shoulder, and he exclaimed, “What the fuck?” That was the only thing the bird ever said, but his timing was uncanny.

  I muttered, “We’re probably the only resort in the world with this particular problem.”

  “There were a shitload of bison when I visited Yellowstone,” Vee told us, “but they failed to swarm the lodge.”

  “It wasn’t that bad when four or five of them invaded,” I said. “But there must be thirty buffaloes out there.”

  Vee tucked his purple-streaked black hair behind his ear and asked, “Okay, so what’s the difference between buffaloes and bison? Because those fuckers look identical.”

  “Technically, only bison live in North America. But people have been calling them buffaloes for more than two centuries, so I wouldn’t worry about getting that wrong,” Tracy explained. When we glanced at the tall, muscular former soldier, he looked embarrassed. “I read up on it when I moved to Catalina, because I wanted to know if bison or buffaloes lived on the island.”

  I sighed as I watched one of the big animals pull a shrub out of a planter, roots and all. “Well, whatever you call them, they’re eating my landscaping.”

  “I’d offer to shoo them away,” Tracy said, “but there are three calves out there, and I read the mothers can be pretty aggressive when defending their young. Also, I’m surprised there are that many babies, because the island’s conservancy gives the females birth control to keep the size of the herd in check.”

  Vee grinned at that. “I’m totally picturing some guy running after the bison with a huge, pink compact, yelling, ‘It’s time to take your pill, Karen!’”

  Tracy replied, in all seriousness, “They do it with a yearly injection,” and Vee shot him a look.

  “I have to go pretty soon, but I hate to leave this unresolved,” I said. “Fortunately, we don’t have any guests at the moment, but I’m worried about our staff. I don’t want anyone getting trampled.”

  “We’ll be fine,” Tracy said. “There won’t be anything left to eat by this afternoon at the rate they’re grazing, so they’ll probably move on. In the meantime, I’ll set up a few barricades to keep the path between employee housing and the two main buildings clear.”

  He headed for the back exit, and I murmured, “He’s right. There won’t be anything left but our palm trees by tonight, and that sucks. I really wanted this place to look good when Dante Dombruso arrives next week.”

  Vee asked, “Do you really need to worry about Dante? Since he’s a co-owner of this business, isn’t the landscaping as much his problem as it is yours?”

  “Not really. Dante is a silent partner, which means he doesn’t have to concern himself with shit like this. The day-to-day operations are up to Uncle Ren and me.”

  “Let’s be honest, they’re mostly up to you.” My friend glanced at my profile, and apparently he saw something that prompted him to say, “You know, when your uncle offered to make you a co-owner of this place last week, you seemed so happy. But ever since then, I’ve watched you become more and more stressed out, and I don’t get why.”

  “His offer was flattering at the time, but I’ve been thinking about turning it down, and I’m worried about how he’ll take that.”

  “Why on earth would you turn it down?”

  “Well, because Uncle Ren sank a fortune into building this place, and he already had to sell forty percent of it to Dante to try to keep us in business. Now he wants to give me a portion of what he has left, and that’s huge, Vee. How can I ever live up to such a generous gift?”

  “You’ve been running this place for Ren since it opened, and you’ve always put your entire heart and soul into it. On top of that, you don’t even collect a paycheck. I’d say you more than deserve this.”

  “I guess.” I turned to Vee and changed the subject with, “I need to go get ready so I can catch the next ferry. Can you convince your bird to abandon my shoulder?”

  “Maybe, but you know as well as I do that he calls the shots.” He stuck his finger in front of the parakeet and said, “Come here, Clementine.”

  But the budgie stood his ground and told his owner, “What the fuck.” It was a statement this time.

  “Well, he can hang out with me for a few more minutes. Why don’t you come upstairs with us?”

  Vee fell into step with me as we crossed the lobby and climbed the stairs. When we reached my room, he asked, “Why haven’t you relocated to the house yet?”

  The past few days had seen a lot of changes in my uncle’s life, including moving in with his boyfriend Colt. Ren owned a huge, gorgeous house on the property, but the new couple had opted to live in one of the ranch’s guest cottages while they built a home for the two of them. Since the house had belonged to Ren and his ex-boyfriend, I understood their desire to start fresh. The surprising part was when my uncle offered the house to me and the rest of the staff, as ridiculously upscal
e employee housing. Everyone who lived on-site had moved in last week, except for me.

  “I like living here. I can keep an eye on everything,” I said, “since the balcony overlooks the courtyard.” It was more than that, too. Sure, it was a bit cramped, but the hotel room had been my home for more than three years, and I was comfortable there.

  Clementine had food and water stations all over the hotel, including a paper-lined tray on my dresser. After luring the little, blue creature to his dish of birdseed, I turned to the rolling racks of clothes that lined one wall of my room. Lack of closet space was the main problem with living in a hotel, especially for someone like me who owned outfits for every mood.

  I changed from shorts into my nicest pair of jeans and swapped my T-shirt for a black button-down. After I rolled back the sleeves, I replaced my baseball cap with a Panama hat and slipped my feet into a pair of black loafers. Meanwhile, Vee tried on some of the hats in my massive collection and made faces at himself in the full-length mirror by the door.

  I added a sweater to my messenger bag, and as I slung it over my shoulder, I asked, “What are your plans for this weekend?”

  “Sage and I are supposed to visit some friends of his in San Diego, but I have a feeling he’s going to flake on me. He’s been crazy busy and has canceled this trip twice already.” Sage was a graduate student at a marine lab on the other side of the island, and Vee wasn’t kidding about the busy part. We’d barely seen our friend over the last two or three months.

  I stood beside Vee and checked out my reflection in the mirror. It was obvious why he’d made that comment about me being stressed out, because I looked like shit. My blue eyes were underscored with dark circles and my tan had faded, making me appear washed out. In fact, next to my vibrant companion in his neon green shorts and yellow sequined T-shirt, I seemed wilted. Then again, most people would probably suffer by comparison, since Vihaan Khatri was colorful in every sense of the word.

  He turned to me with a wide smile and asked, “And what about you, Beck? What are your plans for the weekend?”

  “We’ve been over this.”

  “I know, I know. You like to keep your private life private, blah blah blah. But we’ve been friends for what, four or five years now? So if you can’t tell me what you’re up to on these monthly weekends away, who can you tell?” When I didn’t say anything, he tried a different approach. “What if something were to happen to you on one of these excursions? We wouldn’t even be able to find you! Shouldn’t at least one person know your whereabouts?”

  “I always check in with a local friend when I’m in L.A. He’d know if anything happened to me, and he’d call the ranch.”

  “By friend, do you mean a hot guy who’s boning you?”

  “Definitely not.”

  “Do I at least get to know his name?”

  “It’s Will Smith.”

  “Fine. Don’t tell me.” That had actually been the truth. It wasn’t my fault that my friend shared his name with a famous actor.

  Vee knit his dark brows and waited for more details, but all I said was, “Grab your bird. I’m ready to head out.”

  He sighed and picked up the dish that Clementine was perched on. The budgie was holding a sunflower seed in his curved claws, and he cracked it open and threw the shell on the floor as Vee followed me out of the room.

  When we were back in the lobby, Vee asked, “Do you need a ride to the ferry dock?”

  “No thanks. Uncle Lorie is taking me.” Technically I was driving, but he’d agreed to return the golf cart to the ranch so it wouldn’t sit unattended all weekend. Also, he wasn’t really my uncle, but he’d been friends with Ren forever and I’d known him since I was fifteen, so I felt like he deserved the title.

  Lorenzo Costa joined us a few moments later, and Vee became uncharacteristically tongue-tied. It was easy to see why. The forty-one-year-old was tall, muscular, and gorgeous, with dark hair and a flawless smile. In fact, he’d worked his way through college as a model, and it was no wonder that most of my friends had a bit of a crush on him. I gave Vee a hug and told him I’d see him Monday morning. Then I ran a finger over the parakeet and told him to be good before Lorie and I exited through the side door and skirted the edge of the herd.

  Fortunately, there weren’t any bison on the long, private road leading off the property. I got behind the wheel of one of the ranch’s golf carts and glanced at the beautiful, Spanish-style resort in the rearview mirror as we drove away. Leaving when something that disruptive was going on made me nervous, but I trusted my staff to keep the situation under control.

  After a while, Lorie said, “From what I hear, these monthly jaunts of yours are a big secret.”

  He’d spent the last four years in Mexico City and had arrived at the ranch just last week, so I said, “I know this is a new topic for you, but everyone else has already been over this with me. Repeatedly. In fact, Vee just brought it up. Yes, I spend one weekend a month in L.A., and no, I don’t want to talk about it. Can we please leave it at that?”

  He pushed back the sleeves of his gray Henley and said, “Sure, but this isn’t like you. Since when do you have something to hide?” That made me feel awful, because the answer to that was actually several years.

  “I know it’s asking a lot to trust me, but I’m just not willing to discuss this.”

  “I’ve always trusted you, Beck, but I worry about you, too. I need to know you’re okay, and that whatever is waiting for you in L.A. can’t hurt you.” He was being kind, but it still broke my heart. When he saw I was becoming emotional, he said, “Hey. Pull over for a minute.”

  I parked on the side of the road, and Lorenzo turned to me and asked, “What’s going on?”

  “You don’t have to tell me you trust me,” I told him. “You had a front-row seat to what happened when I was twenty-one. I know I don’t deserve anyone’s trust after that.”

  “You need to let that go, Beck. It’s in the past.”

  “How can I let it go when my family still hasn’t forgiven me?”

  “To hell with them! You’ve still got Ren, and you’ve got me. The real question is, why can’t you forgive yourself?” When I didn’t say anything, Lorenzo continued, “Let’s look at what happened objectively. You fell in love with the wrong man, and you trusted him. How is that a crime? Okay, so he turned out to be a thug and stole from your grandmother, and you sided with him over your family, but that’s just because you believed him when he told you he was innocent, right? You didn’t know the truth at that point, and you didn’t want to believe the man you loved was a criminal.”

  I whispered, “You’re right. When I sided with him, I didn’t think he was capable of something like that.”

  “He’s not back in your life, is he? Please tell me that’s not the reason you won’t talk about these trips to L.A.”

  “God no! I haven’t seen Hal in years. He’s probably dead or in jail by now.”

  “Okay.”

  I looked into Lorie’s kind, dark eyes and almost told him the truth about my trips to L.A., but I just couldn’t ask him to keep my secret for me. More than anything, I couldn’t let it get back to Ren. I might call Lorie my uncle, but Renaldo Medina was the only real family I had left. Even if he didn’t disown me like the rest of my family had, I knew he’d be so disappointed in me, and that would break my heart.

  I whispered, “Can we please change the subject?”

  He looked sympathetic as he squeezed my shoulder and said, “Of course.”

  I pulled away from the curb, and to Lorenzo’s credit, he did as I asked. He was a veterinarian, and he told me about contacting the island’s conservancy to help with the resident buffalo herd. The animals had been brought to Catalina almost a hundred years ago for a movie and then left behind. Since they weren’t indigenous to the island, they needed a little help, both to stay healthy and to keep them from destroying the island’s delicate ecosystem.

  He kept up his bison monologue for the remainde
r of the trip, and eventually, we reached the ferry dock. When I climbed out of the golf cart, Lorenzo slid behind the wheel and said, “Take care of yourself, Beck, and please call me if you need anything.” I thanked him and slung the messenger bag over my shoulder before making my way down the dock.

  Once I boarded the ferry and picked out a seat, I exhaled slowly. Since I was early, I had the top deck to myself, at least for now. It took some effort to make the transition from my life on Catalina to the one in Los Angeles, so I always tried to give myself extra time to ease into it.

  The hardest part was convincing myself not to worry about Seahorse Ranch during my brief absence. That place meant everything to me, and I knew I was a total control freak when it came to keeping it running smoothly. Among other things, my weekends away were a great exercise in letting go and trusting other people to take care of any issues that might crop up.

  As a few more passengers boarded the ferry, I found my earbuds and pulled up the most relaxing playlist on my phone. Then I put my feet up on the white plastic bench and tilted my face toward the sun. After about half an hour, we pulled away from the dock. The ferry moved slowly while it was in the harbor, but as soon as we reached the open ocean, it shot across the water.

  I had the ability to retreat into my imagination whenever I needed a break from reality. It was a skill I’d honed throughout my lonely childhood, and one I’d never actually wanted to outgrow. So when I closed my eyes, I was transported to a yacht in the Aegean, which was gliding over sapphire waters. It was an easy illusion, since the sun was warm on my skin and the sea air was fresh and crisp. I could picture Santorini off the port side, with its rugged coastline and exotic white buildings crowding the hillside. It was a place I’d only seen in photos, but it was vivid and beautiful in my mind’s eye.