Beach Reads Box Set

by Madden-Mills, Ilsa

  “Suits me.”

  An hour later, we sat on my porch love seat after finishing another bottle of wine and listened to my latest mix as Neil Diamond sang “Love on the Rocks.”

  Throwing myself into the song I mouthed the words, using my fist as my microphone and he chuckled and shook his head. A few minutes later, we were back to comfortable silence before he spoke up.

  “God, this is so true,” Ian whispered.

  “What?”

  “This song. It’s so true. Every bit of it. You get so high off love and then it all turns to shit.”

  I laughed inappropriately at his bluntness and glossy eyes before I saw brief emotion flicker over his face. I sat up and winced. “Sorry.”

  He pulled up to sit and clasped his hands between his legs. “Don’t be. I haven’t been upset about my wife in years.” He stood and looked over at me. “This was truly a great time, Koti.”

  “It was a unicorn type of night, right?”

  “Most definitely.”

  He looked over to me with a warm smile. “Goodnight, puffer fish.”

  “Goodnight, crocky.”

  I stood and leaned over to blow out the first candle.

  “Koti.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thank you.”

  I bit my lip and nodded before he disappeared out the door.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Koti

  Hours later, flesh burning from the wine, alcohol-induced insomnia had set in. I rose from bed still in my dress and washed my face in the bathroom. I cranked my AC unit up high and spent a few minutes in front of it, cooling my skin from burning thoughts.

  Ian’s eyes haunted me, and in being honest with myself, they were what kept me awake. His eyes, his voice, the way I felt at ease with him. He looked at me like I had something he needed. I wondered briefly if he saw the mess inside of me would he look at me that same way. I loved the heat of his stare when he thought I didn’t notice, and in my wine-induced haze, I felt sexy when I remembered catching that gaze before it flitted away. I opened my porch door in the pitch-black night and shut it softly instead of letting it snap close.

  As I tread across the sand, I glanced at the Kemp house where Ian slept. In the past few days, he unknowingly revealed so many truths about me and accepted them like no man in my life ever had. We’d been at odds a majority of his time on the island and in just a matter of days, he’d unearthed so much. I should have felt uncomfortable, instead all I felt was relief.

  Holding my dress to my thighs, I walked through the cool water in a daze, splashing around to cool the inferno that was building inside with thoughts of him. Finally able to feel some relief from my Ian-induced heat wave, I was taken by surprise when an unexpected wave had me scrambling to keep on my feet. Over the breeze, I could have sworn I heard his chuckle and narrowed my eyes in the direction of his house. I couldn’t see past his porch stairs, but I had the distinct feeling I was being watched. Before I had a chance to investigate, another rogue wave smashed into me and leveled me flat onto my back.

  Choking, I snapped to my feet before I was yanked in by the undertow. Freshly sober and trying my best to clear my throat, I heard Ian’s porch door and in seconds he stood in front of me as I made it to shore.

  “I’m trying—really, really trying hard not to laugh. Are you okay?”

  “Yes,” I answered, shaking off the pain like a wet dog before I looked at him accusingly. “You were watching me?!”

  Shirt-free, tousled and deadly sexy, Ian stood in front of me, his eyes hooded.

  Wiping my hands on my chest, I discovered one of my breasts was peeking through the shoulder of my dress. I twisted my body and righted it as Ian’s breath hit my face. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  “I was hot!”

  “Fucking right you were, until you wiped out,” he said playfully as he pushed a heavy wad of hair off my forehead. “It was a good start, shitty finish. If someone put a gun to my head, I’d give it a six out of ten!”

  “What is it with the freakish waves today? That came out of nowhere!”

  “Just obeying the moon, I suppose,” he said with a chuckle as I righted my dress while his eyes lingered on my bare shoulder.

  “Or their muse,” I whispered inaudibly, but he caught it.

  “Muse?”

  “I have a thing for Greek mythology,” I said defensively. “Nothing wrong with that.”

  “So that’s it? That’s why you walk around dressed like Aphrodite?”

  I rolled my eyes though I wasn’t sure he could see.

  “Old habits die hard I suppose,” he said before lifting the strap of my dress back to my shoulder. “You are a right mess, Miss Vaughn. I suppose it’s good fate we ended up on this island together.”

  “Agreed. But you must admit, you’re the victor of the mess this month.”

  “Not arguing with that,” he said softly.

  “Can’t sleep?”

  “Not tonight.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No, I don’t. So please don’t ask.”

  “Okay.”

  I didn’t get a chance to blink before he turned the tables. “You tell me. What brought you here?”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “No, it’s not.” He took a seat on one of the smaller boulders nearby. “But you did offer.”

  “I did, didn’t I?” I stood silent for several moments. It was hard to convey what happened to me, why I was there because it seemed so trivial to some. A few really bad days was the gist of it. A few really bad days was the sum of it. For a long time, so much of me believed my issues were trivial because I was told they were. I was told my attacks were just temporary setbacks. But they just kept coming. It had always seemed impossible to explain my circumstances to anyone other than my therapist. No one in my life, especially my mother, who heard about my condition gathered that my disorder wasn’t anything other than someone trying to seek attention. Even my ex-boyfriend, Trevor, had downplayed my attacks and told me I just needed to relax.

  I hated that word. As if it could really be so easily executed by a person with generalized anxiety disorder on demand. As if it was that simplistic. Relax.

  That word was a hundred percent of the reason why I left him holding the bag of our new relationship in New York. It took me a few months to start liking Trevor enough to commit to him and only minutes for me to decide that commitment was a mistake.

  “Trevor, I need you.”

  “Relax, Koti. Can this wait? I have a meeting in an hour and I need to concentrate. I’ll call you back.”

  Everyone close to me in New York, even the best of my friends never could grasp the reality of the hell I went through just to be present for them. Ginger, my friend since grade school, had dismissed my anxiety the way my mother had. Anger surfaced every time I thought about the day I left New York and the last time I’d reached out to her. She’d answered the phone while entertaining a few of our mutual friends and before I could get a word out, I heard her excuse for taking my phone call. “It’s Koti, she’s having one of her episodes.” I hadn’t spoken to her since. And I probably never would again. So much of my life I’d left behind, the day I boarded that plane. Everything. I’d left everything. And though it had taken me some time to open up to Jasmine, I didn’t have to force the words out for Ian.

  I’d watched him implode when he knew I was his audience. His breakdown, though not the same as mine, had been just as unavoidable. We were both matches on an island of fire and couldn’t be helped. For us, our ashes were all there was left to work with. But I wanted him to know there was something to be said for those ashes.

  “My parents started me early. I went to the best schools, got the grades, had the friends, the life everybody wants. I really can’t complain. It all worked out the way it was supposed to, mostly, but when it didn’t that’s when the trouble started.”

  Ian sat quietly perched on the rock and waited.

&n
bsp; “I had my first panic attack when I was fourteen. I didn’t know what was happening. And it was for the dumbest reason.”

  “Which was?”

  “I couldn’t get a stain out of my skirt.”

  Ian studied me briefly before his eyes drifted back to the sea. A spray of water pooled between us and covered our feet. I moved to stand in front of him. If he wanted to know my answers, I wanted his attention. He didn’t hesitate, his gaze landed squarely on mine. Even in the dimly starlit sky, I could see the storm in his eyes. If my story were only a mild distraction, I would give it to him. The odd part is that I wanted to tell him.

  He spoke low erasing my doubts. “Tell me. I want to know.”

  “The first time it happened, I blamed it on PMS, but they just kept coming. My mother was completely intolerant of my ‘weakness’. And I felt the expectation every day, her expectation. She set the bar so high, it began to choke me. It was both physical and mental, I just couldn’t get to her kind of normal. But, oh, how I faked it, or tried to. I held it inside even though every day I struggled. I’d watch my friends and their reactions to certain situations and I would do my best to imitate, and then I would find a bathroom or a place to hide and have my freak out. There was no end to it. I just worked through it, all day every day, but worked as in an act of labor, I exhausted myself. I passed out a lot. I hid a lot, I faked illness, so I could hide and it would buy me just a few blissful days alone and away from the world. When I missed so much school, to the point of my parents being summoned by the headmaster, my father suggested therapy. My mother grudgingly agreed after years of telling me it was all in my head.”

  Soaked from my fall, I crossed my arms and gripped the tops of my shoulders as I shivered in the breeze, feeling heavy with my confession.

  “My psychiatrist used to tell me to fold my fears into fourths. To mentally write down what I was afraid of and memorize and recognize it for what it was and then treat it like a piece of paper and fold it in half and then fourths and so on until it was so small I could put it in my pocket and forget about it.”

  “Your pockets overflowed,” he said slowly as he picked up the hem of my skirt and rubbed it between his fingers.

  I nodded. “I tried everything. I counted. I took the meds. I did the breathing exercises. All of it.”

  “Nothing worked?”

  “No, because despite my mother’s permission to let me get help, her expectations outweighed my progress. I couldn’t keep up. I couldn’t be the daughter she expected, and anxiety-ridden, so I scrambled, and I hid it the best I could. I pretended the medication helped, for her, for my father and eventually convinced myself that I was capable of handling it.”

  I moved to sit next to him but he caged me between his legs. “Go on.”

  “So… then…” Ian kept busy dusting the sand off the bottom of my dress. I felt the low burning fire stir up again with the accidental brush of his fingers along my thigh.

  “So, I faked my way through high school and college, feigning progress up until the time I got my job.”

  He dropped the dress and wiped the sand on his shorts. “What did you do?”

  “Real estate. Biggest firm in New York. I was one of their best brokers.”

  “That’s ludicrous. How did you manage that stress?”

  “Sometimes I think I purposefully put myself into that mess to self-destruct.”

  “Did you?”

  “I don’t know. Probably. I was working so hard and to my own detriment, I didn’t stop for anything. My parents were so proud while inside I was screaming. My health got so bad. It was all. So. Bad. I started drinking heavily and went from having an attack every few weeks to daily. I spent years conditioning myself to stop listening to my body, and in a matter of days all my fears came to light and I mean all of them. Everything was gone, every single damn thing I’d worked for since I was in grade-school up to that point vanished.”

  “What happened?”

  “I was in the midst of setting up one of the biggest real estate deals in New York. I was showing a property to a slew of investors. It was a billion-dollar deal. My job was to sell a set of high-rise buildings that were going to be turned into high-value condos, posh, exclusive, that sort of thing. I worked on it for a year. The day before I was set to pitch I was doing a walk-through of one of the buildings and I got attacked by a squatter.” I shivered at the thought of that day. “He pulled a knife on me.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I barely made it out of there with my life and that’s no exaggeration. One of my associates walked in and that’s what saved me. But that incident opened up a whole different can of worms.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Let’s just say, I’ve done more research on the hereafter than most theologists.”

  “Fear of death?”

  “Yes.”

  Ian grabbed my hand and I let him hold it between his.

  “A majority of my anxiety comes from lack of control. I have to have things a certain way, not so much OCD but to the point where I know what will happen in my every day. I’m not a fan of surprises. Routine is crucial to me, I’d never experienced anything like I did that day. And as you can imagine the realization about death, well let’s save that conversation for a rainy day or never.”

  I was shaking as I remembered the man on the beach chair that morning. Ian read my thoughts.

  “Today, you had a horrible attack.” It was a statement. “And you joked about it. That’s what you do with everyone else?”

  Tears sprang to my eyes. “Yes.”

  “I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize.”

  “You couldn’t have. It’s not your place.”

  “My job as much as it is yours, right?”

  He turned my palm up and slowly brought it to his lips, kissing it softly. A small moan escaped me, and I wasn’t sure if he heard it.

  “What happened? With the deal?” He rested my hand on his shoulder as if it was the most natural thing. I was itching to run my fingers through his hair. My breaths came out faster, his subtle seduction was wrecking my train of thought.

  “What happened?”

  “The next day I was expected to move on as if it never happened. Unsympathetic boss, the show must go on, that type of thing. Anyway, I blew it. As soon as I entered the building with the buyers, I had the mother of all attacks. I was fired because I’d potentially blown one of the biggest deals in real estate history, though we all knew the real reason why. I had my first public meltdown on what should have been one of the best days of my career, a huge milestone for me. With that deal put to bed, the possibilities were endless, my commission would have made me wealthy, I would have made a name for myself, yadda, yadda. But in the blink of an eye, it was gone.” Tears blurred my vision as he looked up to me and I smiled. “In a way, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I didn’t see it then when I was racing down snow-filled streets with a box full of my shit, having the worst day of my life. I didn’t see it hours later when I abandoned my apartment in New York, my friends, my boyfriend, my family and took a cab to the airport. And I didn’t see it in the weeks after as I stared at this ocean, or a month after that when Jasmine discovered me cowering in a bathroom of a Mexican restaurant after another attack. It’s now, now where I truly understand what a blessing it was to give up the charade. Instead of continuing to live a life I couldn’t live, I chose me.”

  “You chose wisely.”

  “I did. But you don’t understand, Ian. I wanted that life. I did, so badly, for myself, for my parents, but I couldn’t be that Koti and I never will be. There’s a difference between can’t and won’t. Can’t sucks. And I was good at it. I was really good at it. I loved my job, that part of it was never a lie. I loved my apartment. I loved New York most of the time. This, living here, wasn’t supposed to be my life.”

  “Koti,” he said softly, “no part of you reeks of a mogul. Not that I don’t think you were capable, but I just don’t see y
ou as that type. And your parents must not know you at all.”

  “My dad, he knew. He just let my mother do most of the parenting and I know it breaks his heart and my leaving New York broke the rest of it. He feels like he failed me, he thinks I’m punishing him, but I came here to save myself. I don’t ever want to go back. I don’t resent him. I’m not even that angry with my mother. All of it, everything that happened, even my brush with death was a means to an end. It was my one and only warning to rid myself of a life that was slowly killing me anyway. I obeyed. I yielded to that warning. And so, I’m here living someone else’s life, in someone else’s house staring at someone else’s ocean.” I sighed. “Anyway, it’s over, I’m here. I’ve made peace with it and I’m not wasting any more time pretending to be someone I can’t be.”

  Ian’s body shook with an ironic laugh. “You really are a good muse.”

  “Glad you seem to think so.” I sighed. “So, there’s my five-minute sob story. Surprised?”

  “A little,” he said as he stared up at me from where he sat. We were close, very close to the point I was hovering above him. Even with that awareness, I didn’t move.

  “So welcome to the island of misfit-humans. It’s pretty cool here. And, by the way, Ian, you aren’t broken.”

  “No,” he agreed quickly. “I’m not. I’m just really, really fucking mad.”

  “Whatever’s wrong now, will make sense later. I hope you believe that.”

  “I don’t.” He stood then, forcing me to take a step back. Water sprayed our feet as we stood there getting lost in the other. Ian was the first to break the connection.

  “Goodnight.”

  “Wait, Ian—”

  “Don’t invite me into your life, Koti, or your heart, or your bed because I’m a selfish man right now and I’ll take you up on it without a second thought. If you move a single inch closer to me, I’m going to fuck you. And as much as we both want that, we both don’t need it. I will use you and it’s not because I don’t think you’re beautiful, or intelligent or worth more. It’s because right now, I’m incapable of being anything other than the man that uses you. And because I do think you are worthy of better, I’m not going to let it happen. So, goodnight.”