Total pages in book: 59
Estimated words: 56970 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 285(@200wpm)___ 228(@250wpm)___ 190(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 56970 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 285(@200wpm)___ 228(@250wpm)___ 190(@300wpm)
That he loved you. That you trusted one another.
Adorably sentimental my sex-deprived arse.
I laugh. At this point it’s that or cry, so. “Should I get some chalk for dividing rooms or are you already carrying?”
“I spoke to my lawyer last week. We have two options.”
Last week? He slept beside me every night since, and . . . what? Dreamed of this moment?
He initially wanted to discuss this at La Grande?
I spent all day designing a break-up suit?
“The first option,” he says, ticking off his fingers, “we sell all our combined assets, pool our property, and split the money—”
“Combined?”
“I came into the relationship with a new car.”
“And I, millions, and a villa.”
“Don’t forget the bach. It might be dilapidated, but the land is worth just as much as this place.”
I hiss in a breath. That bach belongs to family. Family and friends. And friends of friends. It’s for anyone to use over summers, weekend holidays. A place to gather for births, deaths, and marriages. It’s my childhood. My adolescence.
I haven’t been back there in years.
Thoughts of why that is try to sneak to the forefront of my mind but I cast him aside and focus on the problem: just last year, I bought the bach off my great aunt so she could age with sufficient funds. That bach has papers in my name. Bought while Karl and I were officially together, from our combined account. With Karl’s enthusiastic consent.
That bach is relationship property. He has a right to half the value.
But . . .
It’s also a place I need to protect.
“What’s the second option?” I croak.
Karl whips open the other suitcase, jostling the shelves, and a hard leather loafer falls onto my head, smacks my nose, and drops onto my cat-themed pyjamas.
The other shoe has dropped.
Karl agrees not to go after everything he’s legally entitled to, as long as he gets the villa. That leaves me the bach, and whatever I have left in the bank. Lawyers will soon make our agreement official.
I take my sewing machine, suitcases, and mannequins, and hit the road. I’m eager to put space between Karl and me, and my foot is pedal happy. At least it is until I draw close to my destination and start encouraging grannies to overtake me.
It’s just . . . it’s been three years.
More specifically, it’s been three years since I last ran into local pride Damon Conroy.
God damn beautiful Damon Conroy. There are just some men who go about their lives unaware they’re ruining romance for an entire generation. No normal bloke can live up to that level of divinity—and sexual prowess.
Every year Damon and I splashed about in the same waters under the same blazing sun. Every year we waited in the same line for the ice-cream truck. Every year we attended the same Christmas church services, but we never looked twice at one another as kids. We looked twice later. After I stopped coming with family and started coming up alone. After he stopped coming with family and decided to move there. Kōpuha Bay.
Population three hundred, swelling to five in summer; one small Four Square supermarket; one old tea rooms & bakery; a library, quirkily clad in corrugated iron; and a petrol station. Weatherboard houses nestle around the main streets and disperse into grand holiday homes—and ramshackle baches—along curving stretches of beach. Friendly people. Glorious views.
Including Damon.
I was nineteen when I looked twice. He was twenty-two. I recall it vividly: a mighty wave pushing me under, the swirling pull of a vicious current, the sudden certainty I was going to drown. And then, a firm arm locking around my chest and heaving me back to the living.
My back hit the sand, I hauled in air, and he—a dark-haired Adonis—frowned down at me. Yes. Yes, you can do CPR on me, I’d thought.
That is, I thought I’d thought it. But these moments of surging adrenalin cleaved through my sanity. I was cupping that square jaw, staring into dazzling hazel eyes, and coughing all over him. You’re literally taking my breath away.
Which of course meant that when I regained my sanity, I spent the next two summers avoiding him. A hard task. He was everywhere. He’d taken over management of the tea rooms, hosted bingo evenings for the elderly, and spent the weekends volunteering as a life guard. He was everywhere, and then the next year, he was everywhere.
He came to the summer book club I’d set up. The first week, he smiled. The second week, he asked how intimately I knew the town. The third week, after a discussion on how best to organise so many books, he asked to see my holiday reads collection.
Five titles into my shelf and he’d smirked his way into my boxers. And there, on the single bed I’d slept in every summer since I was six, with a view onto the sand-swamped veranda and the ocean beyond, I lost my virginity. And how thoroughly I lost it. He moved inside me like soft waves against a calm dawn beach. He moved with a roar like surf, breaking into sweat. He moved like the waves against the cliffs of Kapiti Island. A pounding that erupted into the most overwhelming orgasm of my life.