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Prologue
In the beginning…
Connie
The first timeI saw him I was eighteen. I was sitting on my family’s private beach humming along to Hozier as it played through the iPod that I carried with me everywhere I went. My toes were dipped in a shallow rockpool, the seawater warmed by the midday sun. I remember so clearly the tiny see-through fish swimming about my bare ankles. I remember the swathe of emerald seaweed gently moving in the current made by my wiggling toes and the smell of briny sea air.
It had been a peaceful summer’s day. Idyllic.
The sun had been high and hot, the August rays warming my tanned skin, drawing out a rash of freckles across my cheeks and shoulders, and colouring streaks of blonde in my coffee-brown hair. I’d been wearing a dark blue swimsuit with a pair of cut-off denim shorts that showed far too much skin according to Grandma Silva.
“Save something for the imagination, child. Real beauty is a gift that doesn’t need to be flaunted,”she’d often said to me.
But I was my mother’s daughter.
I was free-spirited, headstrong, and far more womanly than I had any right to be at such an age. With a fresh face, cupid bow lips, long dark tresses and eyes as deep blue as the sea I adored so much, I knew I was pretty, and I liked that because people never look too deeply when all they see is a pretty face. My soul, however, belonged to someone who’d lived far longer than my eighteen years, and I never let anyone else get close enough to see into the depths of me. Maybe that had to do with the fact tragedy had struck my life so young, or maybe I was always born to be that way. Either way, I felt older than I was, even back then.
Perhaps that was why I’d remained behind whilst my friends had visited the mainland in search of fun, wanting nothing more than the hustle and bustle of a busy town or city. My best friends were bored with living on our little island nestled off the coast of Kent, cut off from the world and as backward as a third world country when it came to mod-cons. The only way in or out of the island was by boat and if a bad storm hit no one was going anywhere.
But despite my friends’ desire to leave, I’d been happy and content to spend time in my own company writing lyrics and listening to my favourite kind of music, the kind that can move a person, can change them just like the gentle waves that moved against an ever-changing shore.
In my hand I’d clutched my notepad, my pencil scratching against the cream paper, my round cursive filling the pages with lyrics that I’d kept hidden inside my heart. I’d been so engrossed in the words flowing from the pumping organ within my chest that I hadn’t noticed the schooner dropping anchor a mile out to sea. I hadn’t noticed a lone figure dive into the water, until strong shoulders and powerful strokes came into my peripheral vision and I’d looked up from beneath the shade of my straw hat.
I’d been immediately entranced, so caught off guard by this sudden intrusion into my most sacred place that I’d dropped my notepad into the pool of water at my feet. I hadn’t even bothered to try and rescue the waterlogged paper, too intent on trying to get a better view of the mysterious stranger swimming towards my family’s private beach, Broken Shores.
The small cove had been named by my great-grandmother who’d lost her heart and soul the day her beloved had lost his life to the waves many, many years ago. According to my grandma, the women of our family are cursed when it comes to love. We might be destined to find our soulmate, but we’re never allowed to keep them. My grandma believes that where true love is concerned for the women of our family, tragedy always strikes, ripping hearts in two and shredding souls apart.
“Never fall in love, Connie. Keep your heart guarded. Save it from the pain, child.”
Like my great-grandmother, Grandma Silva also hated this cove just as much. Grandpa John had died on this beach, a massive heart attack taking him from her at the age of forty-five. So I understood why she’d refused to visit, why she’d hated Broken Shores so much, but I could never hate such crushing beauty. How could I, when it had brought mehim?
Malakai Azaiah Dunbar.
A bronzed god with rippling muscles and black swirling tattoos that covered his skin in designs that had made my heart ache and my core clench with strange new feelings, awakening something forbidden, something…dangerous.
That day he stole my heart without even realising it, but that didn’t matter to me because I had given it freely despite my grandma’s warning, maybe even because of it. When he’d looked up at me, his eyes narrowing on mine, salty seawater running in rivulets over his taut golden skin, the sun glittering on the ocean behind him, I’d known at once that he was my soulmate. I’d known it deep down in the very marrow of my bones even when he’d refused to believe it. Even when he sailed away from it, from me, I still believed.
Istilldo.
I was eighteen that day he walked onto my beach. He was thirty-six.
The expanse of eighteen years kept us apart back then.
But like the terns that nested in the cliff face of Broken Shores, he returned the following summer. He returned the year after that too, and with every day that passed, the gap shrank until the only expanse that kept us apart was his schooner sailing beyond the horizon and his refusal to believe in us. Perhaps I should’ve heeded my grandma’s warning. Perhaps I should’ve guarded my heart against him. Only I didn’t.
I still refuse to do that. What you’re about to read is our love story, or perhaps our very own tragedy. I guess that still depends on how it ends…
