Six Months Earlier
There are too many people. They are everywhere, crowding the sidewalks, the streets, adding to the already unbearable heat of Miami.
Millions of eyes, all staring at me with disgust.
The rage boils up inside me, but what am I to do? And how can I blame them? No matter the injury done to me, no matter how much I rail at the injustice that people can no longer see past my hideous face… it doesn’t change my circumstances.
I am the same person inside that I always was, for the most part. Though I admit, storms of anger now taint my every thought, every feeling with red, because of what I’ve become on the outside. A monster.
It doesn’t matter. Soon I will be alone. Finally, blessedly and completely alone.
As I stalk down the crowded sidewalk to the office of the seaplane charter company, I try to push away the memory of how I came to be like this—once a rich, successful man on top of the world, now a mangled beast. Though I know I can’t focus on it if I want to survive, still the darkness dogs my every step.
Celeste. A beautiful icy blonde who loved the same things that I did: money, celebrity, and games of dominance and submission. But she loved one thing that I did not—her childhood sweetheart, a grifter more ruthless than I had ever been. I’d been so in love—at least, I’d thought I was—that I’d never seen the trap they’d set coming, the trap that left me bloody, scarred and very nearly broken. It also left me without a considerable chunk of my bank account, though not nearly as much as they’d imagined. I wish I could find more satisfaction in the fact that I’d withheld the enormity of my fortune from her.
The money? I can let it go.
The scars, both inside and out? They changed my life irrevocably. The prodigal son made a fool by love.
Never again. Where I’m going, it won’t get the chance.
A year ago I purchased the small island in the warm waters of the Bermuda triangle sight unseen, with thoughts of opening an exclusive resort of some sort. A fanciful dream made more tempting by my accountant’s promise of lower taxes.
Maybe the fingers of fate prodded me towards that particular purchase, because though the accident has halted those plans abruptly, I have plenty of use for the island.
I need to heal. And a tiny, deserted chunk of land that doesn’t even have a name sounds like heaven at the moment. A place where there will be no one to see me. No one to stare.
No one to make me feel like less of a man.
The plane charter office is much as I expected it to be—a rundown interior housed inside a tiny bungalow by the edge of the water. The door is propped open, to let the sunlight in and, I imagine, the stuffy interior out. Only a handful of people are inside.
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Master of the Island- Invitation to Eden (FREE prequel!) Prologue
RomanceWhen his life takes a dark turn, billionaire Theodosius Vardalos purchases a deserted island in the Bermuda triangle. It’s accessible only by plane- the better, he thinks, to hide his scars from the rest of the world. What Theo doesn’t know is that...
