Micah's Island
Authors: Shari Copell
MICAH’S ISLAND
By
Shari Copell
Micah’s
Island
Copyright ©
2013 by Shari Copell All Rights Reserved.
First Edition: January
30, 2013
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.
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Shari Copell generally keeps a low profile, but you can
email her at [email protected]
Sometimes I dream about killing him.
I wake up in the middle of the night
drenched in sweat, my heart pounding, remembering how he very nearly succeeded
in destroying me. I think about the pain he caused me with his stupidity and
greed. Thinking about him makes me want to stick a knife in his heart and twist
it as he goes to his knees in the sand.
Then, as the waves of terror recede, I remember
where I am. I hear the deep breathing of my love asleep beside me, and I know I
don’t want him to die. It’s too easy, too quick.
I want his failures to torture him. I
want him to know that he
hasn’t
beaten me, he
hasn’t
hurt me;
that I am, in fact, still alive and insanely happy, and there’s nothing
he
can
do about it now. I am safely beyond his reach.
He
is my uncle. Calvin Gamble. My mother’s brother.
My adventure (if you can call it that)
really began four days before I turned 21. Up to that point, I’d had a fairly
normal life. Calvin still owned me for those four days, but I’d soon be free.
Well, he didn’t really own
me,
he owned my island and my resort.
My name is Gianna Deveraux. Pronounced
Gee-AH-na
.
Hard G. My parents owned the resort island of Tiago. I know you’ve never
heard of it. It’s under the jurisdiction of Florida, though it sits just inside
the northernmost point of the Bermuda Triangle. It’s the secret playground of
the rich and famous. They like Tiago because they can be themselves without
the paparazzi hunting them.
I’m amazed that they’ve managed to keep
it a secret from the outside world for this long. I thought for sure that
drunken bimbo whose first name begins with B was going to spill the beans a
couple of years ago. I beat the crap out of her when she was here, and her
people whisked her away. They posted pictures of her in the gossip rags with a
black eye and everything. Said she wrecked her car while DUI. My ass.
Most of the people who vacationed on
Tiago were assholes. They wanted to drink, eat, and get laid, not necessarily
in that order. Being rich and famous seemed to give them the notion that they didn’t
have to play by the same rules as the rest of us. I didn’t care. I just wanted
them to spend a lot of money.
My parents were killed in a plane crash
three years ago, and of course, the whispers started immediately. Had they
been sucked into a vortex in the Bermuda Triangle? Nah. Stupid fucking pilot
didn’t fill it with enough fuel to make it all the way from Miami to Tiago.
That’s what happens when you put your life in the hands of a drunk. We had
wreckage, bodies, and everything. They didn’t disappear into some mystical
vortex.
I wish I could have. I had lots of
experience running the resort. I’ve been doing it all my life. But my parents,
for reasons that I still can’t understand, delivered me and Tiago into the
hands of another drunk not a whole lot older than me. My uncle Calvin.
Thanks, Mom. Thanks, Dad.
I’m an only child. I guess they thought
I couldn’t handle it. Like Calvin was a big help. All he did was drink, spend money,
and screw women. And I’m not entirely sure he didn’t screw an occasional man. He
sat in the house all day long on his fat ass while I was out busting my own ass
bartending, fixing things, solving problems.
He practically salivated when he heard
that mom and dad were dead, and he was now my guardian. It was disgusting. I
didn’t know him well, but it didn’t take long for me to learn to hate him. He
always looked at me as though I were an insect he wanted to flick away with a
snap of his fingers. I think it royally pissed him off that he needed me. He
didn’t know the first thing about managing the resort.
He sure knew how to spend money. When
he got here, he immediately took over the master bedroom and spent a fortune
remodeling it to his taste. He moved me from the room I’ve been in since I was
a little girl to another, smaller room down the hall so I wouldn’t see the
endless parade of women coming and going. It’s not like it was a big secret.
I picked a fight about it, but Calvin
choked me to the point that I almost passed out. I decided it wasn’t worth
dying for, but it still pisses me off.
After some knockdown, drag out fights
(and make no mistake, I lost them all when they turned physical), we settled
into a routine. He fucked, drank, and spent my money while I worked to keep
the resort running. Sounds fair, right?
He didn’t talk to me, and I didn’t talk
to him. That’s why it surprised the hell out of me when he sent Rico down to
the tiki bar on the beach with a message that he wanted to see me at the house.
~***~
In hindsight, I should’ve known
something was up. As I walked the smooth path through the jungle back to the
house, I noticed there was a huge yacht docked at the marina.
We get some big yachts here, but not
like this one. Massive, like a floating hotel. It was big and white, with
golden hardware gleaming in the sun. It took up a whole side of one of the
marina docks. It must’ve been at least six stories, if you compared it to a
building.
It would probably surprise you to know
that despite living on an island resort, I don’t know a whole lot about boats.
That’s because it scares the shit out of me to go out in one on open water. I
don’t do it unless I absolutely have to. Being out on the ocean with no land
in sight stirs some primal fear in me. I lock up and can’t breathe. Makes me a
little crazy. I’ll keep my feet planted on solid terra firma, thank you very
much. There’s nothing out there that I need to see bad enough that I would ever
willingly get on a boat.
Our mansion sits on ten acres of lush
tropical vegetation surrounded by a very high, white iron fence topped with
barbed wire. Calling it a fence will give you the wrong impression. The house
is protected like a military base, with armed guards carrying AR-15s and
everything.
One of our guests tried to scale the
enclosure once. He was almost to the house when they caught him. He had all
kinds of nasty things on him: rope, duct tape, and some kind of drug that
knocks you senseless. He was after my mom, who was positively,
absofuckinglutely gorgeous. Dad sort of went white when they told him. The
barbed wire went up the next day. The armed guards were in place the day
after.
I punched in the code, and the gate swung
open. It was about a half-mile of macadam walkway to the house. Under other
circumstances, I would’ve taken my time for a face-to-face with Calvin. It was
so unlike him to ask to see me though, that I hurried. Wish I would’ve known
then what I know now.
I won’t bore you with the details of the
mansion, though I know they want you to include description so you can picture
it in your mind. Let’s just say the house was larger than life, from the huge
wrap-around porch with its fluted white marble pillars to the double, mahogany
doors with gold hardware in the front. The house was a cream color, with dark
brown hurricane shutters and lots of what they call ‘gingerbread’. I loved our
house.
Calvin was sitting in my dad’s study
with his feet up on the massive dark red mahogany desk. My father would’ve
punched him in the face if he’d seen him do that.
I’m going to stop here, and give you a
little description of what I had on that day. I
hate
when they do that
in books, because it’s not really relevant to the story (most of the time), and
it sort of stops the flow of things. I’m going to do it because I think it’s
important that you understand that I didn’t leave Tiago with much on in the way
of clothing. And I wish I had.
I also want to tell you because my brain
can’t seem to lose any of the minute details of those moments leading up to the
start of my ‘little problem’, and it makes me feel better to comb over them.
They were the last normal moments I had for a long, long time.
I’m told that I look like my mother. Tall,
thin, dirty blond hair, blue eyes. Nice boobs, long tanned legs. I know I’m
pretty in a head-turning way, but I don’t let it get into my brain and make me
all arrogant and egotistical. I’ve seen more than my share of beautiful people
who were very ugly once you got to know them. What a turn-off.
I love the tank tops with the built- in
bras. I had
drawers
full of them. The climate of Tiago is hot and
tropical. We didn’t wear much, even when it was winter elsewhere. Cutoff jean
shorts rounded out the uniform—the shorter the better.
So...on this day, I was wearing a black
racer-back tank top with built-in shelf bra and a very short pair of cutoffs.
I was barefoot.
And Calvin, the son-of-a-bitch, had his
feet up on my dad’s desk.
He’d also poured me a tall glass of iced
tea, complete with a sprig of spearmint. That should’ve been Clue Number Two
that I was fucked.
~***~
“You turn 21 years old in four days,
Gianna. You know what that means,” Calvin said to me. His elbows rested on
the arms of the office chair, fingertips pressed together in front of him. He
kept tapping his index fingers together, a nervous tick that speaks volumes to
me now.
I should’ve known that the look in his
eyes, his overall demeanor, was predatory. I should’ve known that after
becoming accustomed to life here on the island, he wasn’t going to give it up
to his 21-year-old, snotty, uncooperative niece without a fight.
I didn’t know any of those things. I went
like a lamb to slaughter.
He was also drinking from a tall glass
of iced tea, complete with mint sprig. Same as mine. It was a hot day, and
after walking to the house, I drained about a third of it in a couple of gulps.
I had no reason to be suspicious.
Now I know the unholy light that shone
from his eyes as he watched me drink meant that he knew he had me. Like a cat
that smacks a mouse into the corner. And it still pisses me off to no end that
he did it with a glass of iced tea.
“Yes, I do, Calvin. And I want you to be
off this island the same day,” I snapped. There was no point in pretending. I
wanted him gone.
We glared at each other for what felt
like hours. After three years of walking on egg shells, never knowing when this
fat bastard was going to take a swing at me, I was not going to be the first
one to look away.
“And I
will
be off of this island
just as soon as I can be. But first, there is some paperwork for you to sign.
I’ve had the lawyers draw these up. No need to wade through all the legalese.
They sever my guardianship and transfer legal ownership of Tiago to you.”