Unafraid (Beachwood Bay)

by Melody Grace

  “I had something to do.” Hunter replies, still holding my hand. “You both remember Brit.”

  “Of course,” Richard smiles. “How are you, dear?”

  “Fine.” My voice quavers. “I mean, I’m doing great. This is a lovely party,” I add. “Congratulations.”

  Camille shoots me daggers with her eyes. “Hunter, a word.”

  “Sure, mom.” Hunter takes a glass of champagne from a passing waiter. “What do you need?”

  “In private.” She glares.

  “Sorry,” Hunter shrugs, totally at ease. “Anything you say, you say to Brit too.”

  “Very well.” Camille turns away from me, focused on Hunter like I’m not even standing here. “What are you playing at, bringing her? I thought you’d seen sense and ended things.”

  “You were wrong.” Hunter’s voice is deadly calm.

  “Darling, surely you have to see, she doesn’t belong here.” Camille’s voice rises, but Hunter steps forward, cutting her off.

  “Enough.” The word comes out a growl. Camille jerks back in surprise. “That’s the last time you insult her, if you ever want me to step foot in this house again.”

  “But—”

  “No.” Hunter’s jaw is set, determination blazing in his eyes. “I love Brit. We’re together, and you’re going to have to get used to that. She’s a part of this family now.”

  I turn to him, staring with amazement.

  Camille’s lips purse. “Nonsense.”

  “And I’m moving back to Beachwood,” Hunter adds. “I’ll still visit, and help dad out at the firm if he needs, but I’m going to live my own life, on my terms.”

  I squeeze his hand, warm with pride. I know how tough this must be for him, and it takes my breath away to hear Hunter standing his ground like this.

  “You don’t know what you’re saying,” Camille cries. “It’s all her fault, she’s poisoned you against us!”

  “No mom, you’ve done that all on your own.” Hunter snaps, then he softens, “I know this is hard, but I have to move on. We all do. It’s the only way, can’t you see?”

  “No!” Camille insists again, louder.

  People turn to stare, and I can see the ripples of whispers spreading out through the crowd.

  “Leave him be.” Richard puts a hand on her. “The boy’s suffered enough. We all have. He deserves to be happy now.”

  I tug on Hunter’s hand. “People are watching,” I whisper, embarrassed, but Hunter just gives me a grin.

  “Good, I’ve got something they need to see.” He pulls me into the very center of the dance floor, and then drops to one knee.

  My heart stops.

  Hunter reaches into his jacket and pulls out a tiny ring-box. “Brittany Ray,” he begins, looking adorably nervous. “Since the very first night I met you, I’ve known, you’re different from everyone I’ve ever known. You’re so brave, and strong, and beautiful. You make me believe in the good in the world—that there’s good in me too.”

  I can see the stares of amazement in the crowd: Hunter’s parents, Alicia, everyone watching us. A sob wells up in my throat, tears of pure, overwhelming joy. I can’t believe this is happening.

  He’s choosing me. The girl who was laughed at, and scorned, the girl who never came first. The girl they thought was nothing. Hunter never listened, or cared what the rumors said. He saw me, the real me, right from the start, and tonight, he’s laying claim to me, in front of everyone.

  “I love you, more than anything,” Hunter continues. He opens the box, revealing a perfect diamond ring, twinkling under the lanterns in the dark. “I told you once that I was going to prove you wrong, that I was always going to be there for you. I want to prove you wrong every day for the rest of our lives.”

  His eyes meet mine, shining and true. The only man I will ever love.

  “Marry me, Brit. Belong to me, always.”

  In a daze, I nod, “Yes!” I hiccup. “Yes, of course I’ll marry you!”

  Hunter breaks into the biggest smile. He slips the ring on my finger and then rises to his feet, lifting me off the ground and twirling me around in a deep, endless kiss.

  The crowd bursts into applause.

  “You and me, baby,” Hunter whispers. “Forever.”

  I hold him tight, panicked for a moment that this really is just a dream. That come midnight, the clock will strike, and everything beautiful will fade away again. Then I look up, into his eyes, and I know it’s the truth.

  He’s mine, and I’m his. Forever.

  We’re quickly surrounded, all his family’s friends and guests offering congratulations and wishing us well. His father embraces us, patting Hunter on the back. “I’m proud of you, son,” he says, sounding choked up, and I can tell from the look in Hunter’s eyes that it means the world to him.

  “We’ll have to get started on the wedding plans right away.” Camille still looks annoyed, but she seems calmed by the thought of a big social event to plan. “We’ll need at least a year, of course, and bookings at the club are just ridiculous…”

  Hunter swiftly draws me a couple of steps away, turning to keep his body between me and his mother. “Thank you,” I whisper, as we’re intercepted by a fresh wave of well-wishers, this time a group of women all ooh-ing and ahh-ing over my dress.

  “Fabulous!” The ring-leader declares.

  “Where on earth did you find it?”

  “I, umm,” I blush, stammering, remembering the scorn of the girls in school every time I wore my own creations, but Hunter jumps in.

  “She designed it herself,” he says proudly. “Brit’s an amazing designer.”

  I wait for the sneers, but instead, the women look at me with a new admiration. “Do you take commissions?” one asks, interested. “I have a gala coming up, and it’s so hard to find something new.”

  “I don’t know…” I mumble.

  Alicia appears in the group beside me. “She has a waiting list,” she announces, giving me a quick wink. “Everything’s one-of-a-kind, you see.”

  “I don’t care how much it costs,” the woman adds, eager. “I have to have one.”

  “Me too!” One of her friends declares. “I’m not letting you have a monopoly on the new hot designers.”

  “And me!”

  I look around in amazement. These glamorous, rich women are all clamoring for a chance to wear one of my designs. I can’t believe it.

  “That’s enough, ladies.” Alicia laughs, shooing them away. “Let’s leave the happy couple to celebrate. Call me next week and I’ll pass on her details.”

  When the women leave, Alicia turns to us with a smile. “Congratulations, both of you. I’m so happy for you.”

  “Thanks, Ave,” Hunter embraces her in a hug. I catch sight of her face, pressed against his shoulder for a minute, and I swear, I see tears in the corners of her eyes. But when she pulls back, her smile is fixed back in place.

  “I won’t keep you any longer.” She tells us. “Go, dance, before anyone else pounces!”

  The band starts to play, and through my pounding heartbeat I realize, it’s our song.

  Meet me in outer space…

  When was it we first heard this play? It could have been a week, or a hundred years, I don’t know the difference anymore. There is only before Hunter, and now, with him.

  “May I have this dance?” Hunter grins at me, and just like that, the rest of the world falls away. The crowd melts back in my vision, and all I see is him, heartstoppingly beautiful as he pulls me into his arms.

  We slowly sway, holding each other close in the middle of the floor. I can feel his heart beating against me, my head resting on his chest. Happiness washes over me, a wave of pure contentment. This is where I belong, forever now. No matter what it takes, I’ve been given something too precious to ever let it slip away.

  “You were right,” I murmur.

  Hunter looks down with a puzzled expression.

  I smile. “About fairytale princes, and
happy endings,” I explain, tracing over his heart. My heart now. “Magic is real,” I tell him, “It’s you and me. Together. Always.

  “I believe.”

  Lacey James is wild, spontaneous and up for anything.

  Daniel Sullivan is careful, sensible, and nursing a broken heart.

  It’s a match nobody saw coming, but when the unlikely pair get stranded together on the way home for the holidays, Lacey finds her long term crush impossible to ignore. And as the snow keeps falling, and the temperature inside blazes hotter, Daniel discovers that the one girl he wants more than anything is the last person he expected.

  But when the snow melts, will their night together be more than just a memory? And will they make it to Beachwood Bay in time for the wedding of the year?

  Find out December 3rd!

  For more Beachwood Bay titles by Melody Grace, read on…

  Return to Beachwood Bay with Melody Grace. Available now!

  USA Today Bestseller

  UNTOUCHED

  Purchase your copy now from Amazon!

  USA Today Bestseller

  UNBROKEN

  Purchase your copy now from Amazon!

  My mom always said there are two kinds of love in this world: the steady breeze, and the hurricane.

  The steady breeze is slow and patient. It fills the sails of the boats in the harbor, and lifts laundry on the line. It cools you on a hot summer’s day; brings the leaves of fall, like clockwork every year. You can count on a breeze, steady and sure and true.

  But there’s nothing steady about a hurricane. It rips through town, reckless, sending the ocean foaming up the shore, felling trees and power lines and anyone dumb or fucked-up enough to stand in its path. Sure, it’s a thrill like nothing you’ve ever known: your pulse kicks, your body calls to it, like a spirit possessed. It’s wild and breathless and all-consuming.

  But what comes next?

  “You see a hurricane coming, you run.” My mom told me, the summer I turned eighteen. “You shut the doors, and you bar the windows. Because come morning, there’ll be nothing but the wreckage left behind.”

  Emerson Ray was my hurricane.

  Looking back, I wonder if mom saw it in my eyes: the storm clouds gathering, the dry crackle of electricity in the air. But it was already too late. No warning sirens were going to save me. I guess you never really know the danger, not until you’re the one left, huddled on the ground, surrounded by the pieces of your broken heart.

  It’s been four years now since that summer. Since Emerson. It took everything I had to pull myself back together, to crawl out of the empty wreckage of my life and build something new in its place. This time, I made it storm-proof. Strong. I barred shutters over my heart, and found myself a steady breeze to love. I swore nothing would ever destroy me like that summer again.

  I was wrong.

  That’s the thing about hurricanes. Once the storm touches down, all you can do is pray.

  I’m doing eighty on the highway with all the windows down, my dirty blonde hair whipping like crazy in the wind. I’ve got my Ray-Ban sunglasses on, and the radio playing country classics as loud as my beat-up old Camaro will go, trying to drown out the whispers of memory that started the minute I took the freeway exit onto the familiar coastal road.

  45 miles to Beachwood Bay.

  45 miles to Emerson.

  I shake it off. We were coming here for years before I met him, I remind myself sternly. Every summer when I was a kid. Months filled with playing in the surf and reading out on our shady back porch. I should have other, better memories of this place without him.

  But you haven’t been back here since.

  I block out the treacherous voice in my head, yelling along with the radio instead.

  “Gone like a freight train, gone like yesterday…”

  The song is right, I decide. It’s gone. That summer is so far behind me, I couldn’t see it in my rearview mirror if I tried. I’m a different person to the screwed-up, headstrong girl I was the last time I drove down this sandy road. I’m twenty-two now, just a month away from graduating college and starting out a whole new life. I’ve got a perfect boyfriend back in the city, and a great career all lined up. Despite everything that happened here that summer, I made it out—made myself into the person I wanted to be—and even though coming here to Beachwood Bay makes me feel sick and dizzy, like I’m about to jump out of a plane in total freefall, this weekend won’t change any of that.

  It can’t.

  Besides, I tell myself, trying to calm the shiver of nerves in my stomach, I don’t even know if he’s still here. I don’t know anything about Emerson anymore. My idle midnight searches online always come up blank. He could be half-way around the world by now, trekking in the African jungle, or knocking back beers on some beach in Australia with a tall, stacked bikini model at his side.

  Tucked under his arm, the place I used to be…

  I crank the radio even louder, the country twang ringing so hard I don’t even hear my cell-phone, I just see the screen light up from where I tucked it in the cup-holder on my dashboard. Lacey. My best friend. I answer, struggling to turn the volume down and keep a hand on the steering wheel. I know I shouldn’t talk and drive, but way out of the city out here, I won’t see a cop for miles.

  “Hey Lacey, what’s up?”

  “Are you there yet?” She demands.

  “Close.” I check the clock again, “About a half-hour away.”

  “I still can’t believe Danny boy didn’t go with you.” There’s a muffled noise as she gets comfy, and when she speaks again. I can just picture her, curled up in our student apartment in Charlotte, looking out of the window over the bustle of downtown. “Isn’t this the kind of thing future fiancés are legally obligated to do?” she asks, “Packing up the summer house you haven’t stepped foot in since… Well, you know.” she trails off.

  The silence sits in the air between us, heavy with grief. Emerson isn’t the only ghost lurking in this town. The pain he caused me was only half my broken heart.

  I gulp a lungful of fresh, salty air and force the demons out of my mind. “First of all, we don’t know he’s planning to propose.” I shift the phone to a more comfortable position under my ear.

  “Please.” Lacey snorts. “His parents love you, you’re moving in together after graduation, and he’s been dropping not-so-subtle hints about your taste in jewelry for months now.”

  “You didn’t tell me that!” My stomach kicks, but this time, it’s with a whole different kind of nerves.

  “It’s been kind of hilarious,” Lacey adds. “So, do you think Juliet prefers modern, or art deco styles?” she mimics Daniel’s careful East Coast voice.

  “What did you say?” I ask, curious. Even though Lacey is right—I’ve figured this was coming for a while now—it still feels strange to talk about it like this. Marriage. The future. Forever.

  With someone who isn’t Emerson.

  Lacey continues, oblivious to my thoughts. “Princess-cut, classic setting, nothing under two carats. Duh.”

  “Lacey!” I flush.

  “What? You said, you wanted to build a life with him,” Lacey reminds me. “That you could picture growing old and grey together.”

  “I did. I mean, I do,” I correct myself quickly. “Daniel is great. He’s kind, and sweet, and smart—”

  “—and perfect, I get it!” Lacey cuts me off. “So I don’t get why he’s not going with you. Not just for all the heavy lifting and packing, I mean. If my girlfriend was going back to see her ex—”

  “I’m not here to see Emerson!” My protest comes way too loud, and I flinch, swerving wildly on the road.

  Lacey whistles. “Easy there. I’m just saying, Danny boy must be super-secure in your relationship if he’s not even curious about the first guy you ever loved.”

  I catch my breath, trying to calm myself. The last thing I need is to wind up dead, crashed in a ditch before I even reach the county line. I slow my sp
eed, and focus on the road ahead. “Daniel isn’t coming because I told him not to. I said I need the space to study in peace. And… he doesn’t know about Emerson.” I admit in a rush.

  “What?” Lacey’s screech makes me swerve all over again. “You said you told him ages ago!”

  “I did,” I protest weakly. “I said there was a guy I dated, before college. But I didn’t say he was here. Or how serious it was.”

  “Serious?” Lacey’s voice is dripping with sarcasm. “Try, like a fucking anvil.”

  “What was I supposed to say, Lace?” I sigh, feeling that familiar wash of guilt that always settles over me whenever I think about the half-truths I’ve told my boyfriend. “That I had my heart broken so entirely, it took everything I had not to slash open my wrists just to make the pain stop?”

  My voice is light now, but the words are true. For the longest time, it felt like I was teetering on a precipice, like one wrong step could send me tumbling into the darkness. The worst part was, there were moments I wanted to take that leap, to just end the pain for good.

  “Oh, babe…” Lacey’s voice softens. She knows what it was like for me: as my freshman roommate, she had a front-row seat to the damage that summer left behind. The days when all I did was curl in a ball, weeping; the weeks I barely ate, or left my room at all except for classes. She was the one who finally sat me down and staged a one-girl intervention: dragging me out to parties and coffee-breaks and the campus therapist, who prescribed me a whole list of anti-depressants and anti-anxiety meds.

  The pills helped—too much, I think sometimes—but Lacey was my real lifesaver, forcing me to fake at being OK long enough that I finally began to believe it for myself. I didn’t meet Daniel until my junior year, and by then, I could almost believe that those dark days were behind me for good. The only scar I had left you could see was the tiny blue jay tattoo on my right shoulder blade. I’ve thought about getting it removed, wiping the slate clean completely, but something makes me leave it there to glimpse in the mirror every time I step out of the shower. A lasting reminder of all my dumb, fucked-up choices, and the road I swore I’d never take again.