Waves of Passion (Wild Women Trilogy Book #1) (4 page)

That first night we spent together was one of the most amazing nights of my life and it was the first of many. We were together for nearly four years when I lost my darling Amber, only one year after I had proposed and she had accepted. We were waiting for her to finish college, but we never made it to the altar. Her death was a horrific and sudden one and I have never gotten over it.

I will never forget the night her father came to tell me. He stood at our front door in the middle of the night; no expression, no color in his face and his eyes with no soul, I knew something was terribly wrong-- he was the picture of a broken man.

He held onto the doorframe as if it was the only thing in the world that could hold him upright, “Seth … there's been an accident … Amber's been…” he faltered in his delivery, “She's been killed.”

I heard someone shouting and then realized it was me. “Noooo!” I cried as my mother held me. The room started to spin and my breath was labored, I ached to wake up from the horrendous nightmare that had suddenly become my life.

Amber's father looked down at the floor. “It was an accident, a drunk driver ran her off the road.”

The driver was Trey Haughton and that night I wanted nothing more than the opportunity to wrap my hands around his throat. He was still paying for his crime, although whatever amount of time he spent in prison would never compensate for my Amber's life.
 

She had gone to town that night for her weekly yoga class which she always rode to and from on her bike, for extra exercise. I'd been so over protective of her on this, ensuring that her bike was road worthy and contained all the relevant lights and safety equipment but it hadn't been enough to save her from Trey.

I was furious in that first instant when I found out. “It was hardly a fucking accident if he was drunk?” I accused her father as if placing the blame on him would make it hurt any less.

My mother was visibly shocked by my choice of language, it came from nowhere if truth be told but I was in shock, I think my mother sensed that as she didn't berate me for my poor language.

“I know son but it's irrelevant to what the outcome is.” Her father's lip began to tremble and I knew I shouldn't take my anguish out on him. He was a broken man and I could relate to that, I had to put my feelings of anger aside and allow his grief to manifest naturally.

I cannot begin to explain what a void that night left me with, my beautiful Amber; I would never see her again. Nevertheless, I did see her again, every night in my dreams. I played our first night together over and over in my mind, trying earnestly not to forget her face. Like a painful break up there were songs that reminded me of her when they played soulfully on the radio, I wanted to reach out and turn them off but I couldn't. In a sick way, I wanted to forget her but I felt a rise of panic in my throat to think I could ever truly forget my darling Amber.

In the years that passed after that night, there was never a single day that I didn't think about her, I sometimes became overcome with hysteria that I was losing sight of her memory. I would have to get the photo albums out of my mother's dresser to remind me of Amber's beauty but then I would realize it was forever etched in my mind. I talked to her often and if there was ever a decision that had to be made I pretended to ask her for advice. I was deeply depressed but I held it together at least on the outside. On the inside, I was in a thousand pieces, each one of them looking for itself on the floor to piece back into a sensible jigsaw.

I spent a lot of time with her parents, I think we were all trying to hold onto her for as long as we could but then we slowly started to drift apart. It happened naturally and no-one suffered as a result. Everyone remembers their first love; for me, she was my only love. It was years before I even attempted to date another woman, but I never entered a serious relationship after Amber.

Life went on but I seemed to be living mine under a raincloud. I wasn't a negative person, quite the opposite, but it felt like the sunshine wasn't quite reaching me, I had to wait a long time before that cloud passed.

Two months after Amber's sudden death, we lost my father. Like Amber's it was sudden, but my Father had known he was ill for some time, it seemed he had spared us the pain of his terminal cancer, opting for a 'normal' last few months as the doctors had diagnosed. It was an extremely difficult time for both my mother and me, so having the boat's restoration to occupy my mind was a Godsend, I was so thankful for the distraction and if it hadn't been for that I may have lost sight of the future. My mother was also suffering in silence and this worried me. She wouldn't open up, preferring to bottle up her feelings and deal with her grief alone. We didn't do a very good job of managing our grief, but we supported each other. My mother is a strong woman and after pulling herself out of the black hole of her grief, she was able to throw in a rope to help haul me back out as well, we did it together and I'm very proud of us.

My father's boat became my savior. As I stood back and admired the final laboring effort that had gone into her makeover, it only seemed right that when I took the brush my father used to scribe my mother's name onto its hull I chose to change it. Her new name became 'Amber Rose.' Tears of sadness, pride and grief poured from my heart as I painted each letter, but as I finished the very last one, I was slightly comforted that Amber would always be with me, wherever I traveled.

Amber's parents were of course delighted and touched that I'd decided on that particular name, they were still in mourning and I suppose whenever a parent loses a child the pain never stops but they seemed comforted that their daughter's much too brief life had been filled with love and admiration.

CHAPTER TWO – AN EMPTY VESSEL

After our first year together, when Amber and I were busy planning the life we already knew we would spend together, we dreamed of starting our own chartering business; but we realized one of us would need to provide a steady income while we grew our business so we wouldn't have to touch the trust fund my father provided. That was for our future family. We decided I would go to the local community college to pursue a two-year degree in business management and because the primary industry in the area was fishing, I was able to gear my education toward the type of business I wanted to build with my future wife. While I was in school, Amber began her four-year degree at the university over a hundred miles away. She refused to move closer to school, so she commuted three days a week, staying overnight with a friend while she pursued her degree in early childhood education. She wanted to be a teacher because she loved children, but also because she wanted her summers free to spend with me out on the sea, running our chartering business during the peak of the season when she knew I would need her help. It was a perfect plan that never came to fruition in the way I had hoped, but I decided not long after her death that I would continue to pursue our dream for us. 

The 'Amber Rose' became the vessel that would house my business, the hub of my dream that had once been Amber's dream too. We spent many long nights making our plans and ultimately decided on the name, 'The Anglers Rest' for our company we hoped to start some day in the distant future. The plan was for me to work a few years as a deck hand for another company until we had saved enough to purchase a small vessel. 

I dreaded the thought of so many years working for someone else, but I was happy to do it as long as I could do what I loved. I was so grateful that I wasn't stuck in some dead-end civil service job like most of my friends had ended up with after college. With the plans Amber and I had so carefully made together and with the help of my mother, I was able to launch our business venture far sooner than I anticipated. I never expected to become a millionaire just running charters, but I did expect job satisfaction, and that is exactly what I got. Nothing filled me with more fear than the thought of waking up to an alarm clock only to dread the day in front of me. Thanks to my father generosity in leaving 'Clarissa's Kiss' to me, I never knew what it was like to work for someone other than myself. 

Both my mother and I knew that my father would have approved, he would have wished it could have been him helping me grow my business, but he would have encouraged it all the same.

There were some particularly hard days when I wished that my father was on board with me, the same way I felt cheated that Amber wasn't joining me on my sea voyages, she would have made the perfect deck hand, there was no other girl I knew who could work a boat as well as she could. Her parents still lived on their boat on the other side of the marina but we often climbed aboard each other’s vessels for a time of reminiscing.

In the first months of my fledgling career, when I finally found my first client, Amber's parents presented me with a present I was overwhelmed with. It was a picture of Amber and I standing on the deck of their boat drinking champagne as we celebrated our engagement and the picture spoke a thousand words. We were very much in love and so looking forward to our lives together. In a bitter way, that was true. In the dozen years since she'd been gone, I was still very much in love with her.

After my first few successful trips with local clients, I began the arduous task of creating a website and figuring out how to reach clients from all across the world. My mother was a huge help with the details, but I was beginning to feel that life was moving on and my memories of Amber and my father were being left behind. I was still depressed and wallowing in my grief and I wanted nothing more than solitude. I felt a slight pang of guilt when I told my mother I wanted to leave her home and live on the boat, but she took it better than I expected. I suspected she was grateful for some solitude herself. And it wasn't like I was leaving her like Amber and my father had, I was literally just across the harbor and we made a conscious effort to see each other every day for dinner. She knew I needed space and the opportunity to move on with the next stage of my life. More importantly, we both needed to learn how to live with our grief before we would ever be whole again.

After the first six months, Anglers Rest took off well locally as well as further afield and I soon built up a flourishing business, an active website, and a blog I wrote myself. There were times I even had to create a waiting list to service all our potential clients. From time to time, I hired a second crew to take on the smaller charters and I thought about purchasing a second boat and hiring another crew and captain, but I really wanted to keep my business small and easily manageable.

I took on a variety of clients, from those who wanted to learn to sail and fish to much more experience clients. For the less experienced, I would take them out as far as the North Shore, but it was too risky to take them any further as they had little or no knowledge of sailing. My favorite trips always consisted of my more experienced clients. With more knowledgeable passengers, we were able to sail further, on much longer voyages, without having to worry too much that certain guests were out of their element. Of course, there were always safety precautions in place before we set sail but it was easier for me to relax and enjoy the trip if I knew I didn't have to keep an eye on everyone. I always tried to offer my guests the kind of trip they wouldn't get anywhere else. I always made sure I provided the best routes with the best scenery and the best fishing, while tailoring each trip to suit the eclectic mixture of needs of my passengers. It was difficult when I first started out, but I eventually developed a reputation as one of the best and over the years, the business blossomed; keeping me busy enough to earn an honest living.

Running a business left me with very little time to socialize and is probably one of the reasons I never found the time for love. Since Amber, there had been no-one. I'm sure some people, my mother being one of them, found this a little strange. I wasn't suspending Amber in an obsessive shrine, quite the opposite, I feel like I was able to let her go and it no longer hurt the way it had in the beginning, but it was like our love had been so fulfilling I couldn't possibly hope to find that with another, and I didn't feel the need to try. The pain of losing Amber and then my father was so unbearable, I knew I could never survive that kind of loss again and as long as I was content with my bachelor life, I didn't think I needed to complicate things. 

Despite not having someone special in my life, I wasn't unhappy. I had always been a person who enjoyed simple solitude. If anything, sometimes I felt a little claustrophobic when people shared my living space. The boat wasn't tiny by any means, it was an eight berth, but at the times when were booked, and everyone was together in the saloon, I found it stifling. I preferred it when it was myself, a few passengers and the occasional hired hand. The boat felt palatial with the right amount on board.

After my fifth successful year, my mother encouraged me to hire a regular deckhand to help out on the weekends and holidays when my charters were booked full for the shorter voyages. There was a young neighborhood boy she thought I should hire. His name was William and he was only about ten years old at the time, but he was constantly in trouble and reminded me a lot of myself at that age. Will haunted the docks, desperate to learn anything he could from the local fishermen who paid him no mind. His mother was Kelly, a single mom and a girl I had known only in passing back in high school. She had married an old friend of mine just out of high school, but Jason had died from a terrible illness when Will was just a baby. I admired Kelly for raising Will on her own at such a young age while she struggled through college and medical school. I know my mother expected Kelly and I to bond over our shared tragedies or at the very least over our love for her son; but Kelly and I have never been anything more than good friends. The best of friends really, I can still count on Kelly for anything, and I love Will like he was my own son and I can't thank her enough for giving me the opportunity to be the surrogate father he so desperately needed.

In the last seven years, I have been quite happy with my surrogate family of survivors. Kelly and I are close but there has never been the slightest attraction between us, but we have raised William together. He is nearly sixteen now, and I couldn't be more proud of him if he were my own flesh and blood. Kelly and my mother are very close, like mother and daughter, but they also share the tragic loss of the husbands they loved to the cancer that killed them far too soon.

I was always happy to see Will making a beeline for The Amber Rose as soon as school let out. And at the end of a long afternoon of hard work, caring for the boat and managing the days catch, Kelly and my mother would join us for dinner. I am the world’s worst cook and am no longer allowed in the kitchen, but Kelly and my mother are culinary geniuses…otherwise I would have starved a long time ago.

It was wonderful to see Kelly and my mother in the kitchen together. They brought some life and laughter into my home and they always made a sumptuous meal from the days catch. My favorite was fish pie, quick and apparently easy to cook, but the flavors they managed to infuse were unbelievable. There was nothing better than a home-cooked meal with good friends and family to enjoy it with. This was something all my guests commented on without fail. Prior to every journey, my mother and Kelly would stock my freezer with dozens of prepared meals that my passengers devoured with zeal after long days of fishing and sailing. My mother always did her best to give the boat a good once over when she visited before my journeys at sea. I didn't have the time or inclination to clean so it was nice to have a woman's touch now and again, I drew the line however at letting Kelly and my mother make it too frilly. I was a single man after all and I'd never gone in much for all of that fancy stuff. I liked minimalistic, the inside of the boat reflected my personality; 'like a shipwreck' Kelley would joke.

When Will was still a young boy, he tried desperately to get his mother and I to fall in love in the hopes that we would become a real family. Kelly and I sat him down and carefully explained how we were already a real family and neither of us would ever leave him, but we wouldn't be getting married. It wasn't long after that I started calling him son and I asked Kelly if she minded if Will called me dad. A sad smile touched her lips and she heaved a trembling sigh of regret. She admitted it wouldn't be fair to deny him the father he wanted when he'd never known the real father who loved him as an infant. We made it official a few months later when Kelly asked if I wanted to adopt Will. I'd never been so happy in my life as I was the day when I asked Will if I could adopt him. He was about thirteen years old and had been so determined to act like a man, but when I asked him if I could be his legal father, he flung himself into my arms and sobbed. It has only been a few years since that day, but I can't imagine my life without my son.

When my mother finally realized that Kelly and I would never be more than friends, she took up her matchmaking again…this time for both of us. Kelly was better at dodging her ploys that I was, but I'd learned how to switch off from her unrelenting pleas about meeting a woman. Only when I turned the tables on her and asked her where the man in her life was, did she withdraw. We all three understood how hard it was to move on after the tragedies that took our loved ones. It felt like a betrayal to Amber and my father and Jason, although I'm certain all our loved ones would have wanted us to be happy. We were happy in our own way and I knew if I ever found someone to love it would be because it happened naturally and not because I'd been hunting for someone to fill a void that couldn't be filled.

Kelly was always eager to help my mother with cooking and occasionally cleaning, but she had her own career as a doctor at the local clinic and I didn't want to take too much of her time by asking her to help with Anglers Rest. My mother was my business partner and we spent a great deal of time together in that capacity. She took on the responsibility of keeping the paperwork organized and managed the finances, but we worked together to develop our plans for each trip. We spent many a night pouring over client applications. We always had a good giggle at some of the more ridiculous requests we received from people who didn't have the first clue about sailing or fishing.

My mother thought she was sneaky, but I knew she was systematically vetting the female applicants in the vain hope I would fall in love while at sea with a beautiful woman. Whenever she made a tactical move, moving a certain applicant to the top of the pile, I would privately roll my eyes and agree with her, then I would do my own thing. Her attempts never resulted in anything beyond friendship with clients I enjoyed spending time with.

One of the applicants that moved to the top of my mother's list was a beautiful young girl named Terry who had shown an interest in learning to sail. Her form was duly filled in and her photo was clipped to the front page, she was admittedly a very lovely girl, and as my mother pointed out, she seemed intelligent and her conversation would reflect that. I however spotted at the bottom of the form that she had asked whether there would be electrical outlets on board the boat so she could plug in her hair straightener. I found the question a telling one– it wasn't an intelligent remark at all and anyone who wanted to straighten her hair on board a boat in the middle of the ocean was not someone I wanted on my boat. Mother was appalled that her application form went in the bin accusing
me
of being shallow.