Skin (23 page)
The couple walked
down the path, sliding in and out of view. He’d hidden in the trees thinking to see where Brian was taking Karina. And hoping his instinctive guess was wrong.
But no; there she was. Ian thought he’d missed her leaving. But no, she’d left with Brian. Why?
Why Brian?
Brian was nothing. And he had a girlfriend. Or he’d had a girlfriend. According to the gossip, he’d just been dumped.
How could Karina do such a thing? It’s not like Brian was in any shape to enter another relationship right now. Had she no respect. For him? Or for herself?
He stood in the shadows of the trees that darkened the path and watched them make their way to Brian’s dorm. Anger simmered inside.
Brian had many girls fawning all over him. He didn’t need Karina. He’d only cast her off later.
Karina deserved better. If she weren’t so blinded by Brian’s flashy looks, she’d realize it. She’d be sorry later.
Damn Brian to hell.
*
Satisfaction thrummed through
Karina’s body as she collapsed beside Brian in the wee hours of the morning. Her skin was damp and her body buzzed from their heated lovemaking. “Who’d have thought?” she whispered into the darkness.
A deep rumble rolled out from his chest as he attempted to speak but couldn’t. She grinned. She’d brought him to this. She’d been the one he’d turned to tonight. Not Wendy, but her – Karina. Maybe she shouldn’t have jumped at the opportunity…but she’d needed the chance to show him how good they could be together. How perfect.
And given that exams were over and all students going their separate ways, it had been now or never.
It seemed she’d loved him for so long. Always an acquaintance, never quite a friend and always superficial, kept on the outside…the last place she wanted to be.
She could no more stop blurting the words than she could stop the tidal wave of love that swept through her, giving the words their freedom.
“I love you,” she whispered and dropped a kiss on his bare chest, before nestling her head on his shoulder and falling asleep.
*
Morning dawned bright
and clear. Karina woke slowly, her body still warm and achy from the night’s activities. She bolted upright as memories flooded back.
Brian.
She’d had the most wonderful night of her life. She grinned and bounded out of bed.
Wrapping herself in the sheet, she walked out to the communal room, grateful that Brian’s roomies had already left.
Empty.
She stood in the middle of the room, dread forming a sinking ball of steel in her stomach. An engine started outside.
She raced over to the glass doors, stepping out onto the small verandah in time to see Brian’s car disappearing down the drive at a good clip.
He was coming back, wasn’t he?
She stood there, waiting, for a long time after his car disappeared from view. As her heart broke into a dozen tiny pieces, hope faded away. The small sedan was gone.
And he hadn’t once looked back.
TO BE CONTINUED…
This ends the preview of Second Chances. Part 1 of the book is Free. Part 2 is also available.
Second Chances – complete book (Parts 1 & 2)
Adult RS/thriller
Death had touched anthropologist Jade Hansen in Haiti once before, costing her an unborn child and perhaps her very sanity.
A year later, determined to face her own issues, she returns to Haiti with a mortuary team to recover the bodies of an American family from a mass grave. Visiting his brother after the quake, independent contractor Dane Carter puts his life on hold to help the sleepy town of Jacmel rebuild. But he finds it hard to like his brother’s pregnant wife or her family. He wants to go home, until he meets Jade – and realizes what’s missing in his own life. When the mortuary team begins work, it’s as if malevolence has been released from the earth. Instead of laying her ghosts to rest, Jade finds herself confronting death and terror again.
And the man who unexpectedly awakens her heart – is right in the middle of it all.
This book is FREE. Sample chapter is next…
I
n perfect symphony
the clouds swayed in the sky, wrapping the moon in protective cotton wool as the ground shook and trembled beneath the sleepy town of Jacmel in the south of Haiti.
Mother Earth growled and raged over and over again as if she knew the secrets long kept hidden in the hills behind the small town. As if she knew about the injustices done. As if she knew this had to stop. She gave one last mighty shove and the earth cracked open.
Trees toppled, their roots ripped from the ground in hapless destruction. Large rocks tumbled as their foundations were wiped out from below. Everything fell to the force of Mother Nature – at long last exposing old secrets to the light.
When she was finally satisfied, the clouds slipped back from their protective stance, letting the moon glare upon the result of Mother Earth’s game of fifty-two pickup with the Devil. The rays shone on bones long picked clean – now newly exposed to the sky.
The ground undulated one last time. The surrounding hillside shuddered, sending a light dusting of earth and rock to rebury the gruesome evidence. As if the sins of man were too much for even the moon to see.
*
Five days later,
a tractor, hastily called into service, with a bucket on the front, groaned as it carried yet another load of the town’s dead to a large grave. Herman, the tractor driver, was beyond pain and grief and death. He focused on the gritty details of plain survival. Five days of heat and exposure hadn’t been kind to the dead – or to the living. Survival had become a grim business and rotting bodies needed to be buried or disease would crush them further. So many dead. No money. No time. No help.
No choice.
His neighbor, John, lifted the last small corpse from the dump truck load on the ground to the loader’s bucket. He pulled off one work glove, straightened the bandana tied around his mouth and nose and shouted, “Good to go!”
Herman popped the gear shift forward, swore and prayed that Bertha would survive the job given her. He trundled forward. “Come on girl.” He patted the stick shift in his hand. “I need you to get it done. If you quit on me, I ain’t gonna make it through this.” And that was no joke. He knew for damn sure that he wouldn’t if ol’ Bertha didn’t.
Bad business this
. He had respect for the dead. Every one of his family and friends had received a proper send off, a decent burial – as was fitting. Until this earthquake.
Pain clutched his heart and squeezed. So many dead.
He’d lost his wife, one son and two grandkids this last week. Sex and age hadn’t mattered here. Mother Nature hadn’t cared. She’d wiped them all out.
John, the only other person who’d stepped up to help, had been lucky. His young wife and her family had survived the devastation. Living out of town had helped. That also contributed to his motivation to help out. This grave butted against his wife’s family’s land so it made sense for John to make sure this grave was closed over right and proper. There could be many people trekking to the grave on All Soul’s Day, as families came to honor their dead. Then again, complete families had been buried together. There might not be anyone left to mourn.
He would come and visit. There were too many people here to forget.
Herman tugged at the old t-shirt tied around his nose and mouth, his black skin blending with the poor light. Nothing kept the smell out. He’d already gone through a half dozen pairs of gloves. But without the makeshift bandana the breath caught in his chest, making him gag. His clothes would have to be burned after this. There would be no way to clean them.
Bertha struggled forward. Darkness hid the evidence of what they were doing. What he’d done. He only hoped he wouldn’t have too many more loads to haul.
In the aftermath of the earthquake, everyone had been numb, in shock or frozen with grief. No one had been able to make decisions. There’d been no army to take care of the problem. The government buildings and staff had been as decimated as the rest of the population.
Herman hadn’t been able to leave his people lying exposed like that. Determined to do what he could he’d taken command and had done something. Something so awful, he couldn’t close his eyes without seeing the stares of the dead – blaming him.
So far, close to sixty people had gone into this pit. The natural depression, a ready-made burial spot, was a godsend to the desperate survivors, a fast answer to the bloated dead rotting on the sidewalks. He didn’t know how many more were to come, maybe hundreds. Later, much later, if someone cared, they could open this mass grave and do the right thing. But not now. Now they had to get on with the business of survival.
Mother Nature was a bitch.
One year later…
J
ade Hansen twisted
in the cool sheets. Her sweaty panicked body searched for a way out of the endless nightmare of bloated bodies, desperate people and cries for help – pleas that would never get answered. She turned in the fog as one more person, caught among the fallen rocks, cried out to her. She came face to face with a woman – blood congealed in her hair and streaked down the side of her face, a chunk of concrete crushing her legs. She begged for Jade to find her son.
Screaming, Jade took off to the safety of the tent, the tent filled with the dead…and the living that searched for their families.
She couldn’t help them all.
She couldn’t help any of them.
She couldn’t even help herself.
With tears streaming down her face, Jade woke in a panic as if the demons of her nightmare had followed her into the present.
Shuddering, she recognized the hanging lamp overhead as the one in her apartment. The Aztec print couch she’d fallen asleep on was hers, a gift from her brother. And she finally understood that the evening’s in-depth television coverage of a small earthquake in Haiti had been the trigger for her nightmare.
Jade curled into a ball, pulling her throw higher up on her neck. She winced at the images still flashing on the news. Another earthquake in Haiti. Only a little one this time. Not that the size mattered. The memories of her one and only humanitarian trip to that area, after the major earthquake almost a year ago, had etched themselves permanently into her brain. A horrible time, a-praying-on-your-knees-for-help kind of horrible time. In Haiti, nightmares had destroyed her sleep. The shortage of food for those suffering had destroyed her appetite.
She’d lost weight over there, but nothing compared to the pounds that had slipped off after her return home. Sure, that had been almost a year ago. It didn’t matter. With the nightmare fresh in her mind it felt like only two days.
So much pain and suffering.
So much torment.
She couldn’t stop it. She couldn’t even begin to make it right. There’d been nothing she could do to help – or so little relative to the scope of the problem, it might as well have been nothing. If she’d been offered a ride out of that hell on any given day, she’d have jumped over her colleagues to grab it.
