[Beachwood Bay 02.0] Unbroken Read online

  Unbroken

  A Beachwood Bay Love Story: Book Two

  Melody Grace

  Melody Grace Books

  Copyright © 2013 by Melody Grace

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover design copyright British Empire Designs.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Introduction

  Unbroken

  Also by Melody Grace

  Foreword

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  I. Unafraid

  Prologue

  1. Brit

  II. Sweetbriar Cove

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  About the Author

  Also by Melody Grace

  Thank you for reading!

  Over 3 million readers around the world have fallen in love with the Beachwood Bay series, and I’m so happy to welcome you to the family. It’s the kind of place where friendships and community endure, and sometimes your first love turns out to last forever…

  Each book is a stand-alone love story, but you’ll enjoy seeing familiar faces return for their own happily-ever-after. So pack your sunscreen, take a mini-vacation, and enjoy a taste of summer, wherever you are.

  xo Melody

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  Unbroken

  Welcome to Beachwood Bay: the small town where passion and romance are making waves…

  "Mom always told me there are two kinds of love in this world: the steady breeze and the hurricane. Emerson Ray was my hurricane..."

  Juliet McKenzie was an innocent eighteen-year old when she spent the summer in Beachwood Bay--and fell head over heels in love with Emerson. Complicated, intense Emerson, the local bad boy. His blue eyes hid dark secrets, and just one touch could set Juliet ablaze. Their love was demanding and all-consuming, but when summer ended, tragedy tore them apart. Juliet swore she'd never go back, and she's kept that promise... Until now.

  Four years later, Juliet's done her best to rebuild the wreckage of her shattered life. She's got a great boyfriend, and a steady job planned after she graduates. Returning to Beachwood to pack up her family's beach house to prepare it for sale, Juliet is determined that nothing will stand in the way of her future. But one look from Emerson, and all her old desire comes flooding back. He let her go once, but this time, he's not giving up without a fight. And Emerson fights dirty.

  A heartbreaking history. An unstoppable passion. Torn between her past and future, Juliet struggles to separate love from desire. But will they find a way to overcome their tragic secrets--together? And after so much damage has been done, can a love remain unbroken?

  Also By Melody Grace:

  The Sweetbriar Cove Series:

  1. Meant to Be

  2. All for You

  3. The Only One

  4. I’m Yours

  5. Holiday Kisses (A Christmas Story)

  6. No Ordinary Love

  7. Wildest Dreams

  8. This Kiss

  The Beachwood Bay Series:

  1.Untouched

  2.Unbroken

  3.Untamed Hearts

  4.Unafraid

  5.Unwrapped

  6.Unconditional

  7.Unrequited

  8.Uninhibited

  9.Unstoppable

  10.Unexpectedly Yours

  11.Unwritten

  12.Unmasked

  13.Unforgettable

  The Oak Harbor Series:

  1.Heartbeats

  2.Heartbreaker

  3.Reckless Hearts

  The Dirty Dancing Series

  The Promise

  Foreword

  Unbroken takes place four years after the events of Untouched. You don’t need to read the prequel novella to enjoy this book: both stories stand alone.

  Untouched is available now.

  Prologue

  My mom always said there are two kinds of love in this world: the steady breeze, and the hurricane.

  The steady breeze is slow and patient. It fills the sails of the boats in the harbor, and lifts laundry on the line. It cools you on a hot summer’s day, brings the leaves of fall, like clockwork every year. You can count on a breeze, steady and sure and true.

  But there’s nothing steady about a hurricane. It rips through town, reckless, sending the ocean foaming up the shore, felling trees and power lines and anyone dumb or fucked up enough to stand in its path. Sure, it’s a thrill like nothing you’ve ever known: your pulse kicks, your body calls to it, like a spirit possessed. It’s wild and breathless and all-consuming.

  But what comes next?

  “You see a hurricane coming, you run,” my mom told me the summer I turned eighteen. “You shut the doors, and you bar the windows. Because come morning, there’ll be nothing but the wreckage left behind.”

  Emerson Ray was my hurricane.

  Looking back, I wonder if Mom saw it in my eyes: the storm clouds gathering, the dry crackle of electricity in the air. But it was already too late. No warning sirens were going to save me. I guess you never really know the danger, not until you’re the one left, huddled on the ground, surrounded by the pieces of your broken heart.

  It’s been four years now since that summer. Since Emerson. It took everything I had to pull myself back together, to crawl out of the empty wreckage of my life and build something new in its place. This time, I made it storm-proof. Strong. I barred shutters over my heart, and found myself a steady breeze to love. I swore nothing would ever destroy me like that summer again.

  I was wrong.

  That’s the thing about hurricanes. Once the storm touches down, all you can do is pray.

  Chapter One

  I’m doing eighty on the highway with all the windows down, my dirty blonde hair whipping like crazy in the wind. I’ve got my Ray-Ban sunglasses on, and the radio playing country classics as loud as my beat-up old Camaro will go, trying to drown out the whispers of memory that started the minute I took the freeway exit onto the familiar coastal road.

  45 miles to Beachwood Bay.

  45 miles to Emerson.

  I shake it off. We were coming here for years before I met him, I remind myself sternly. Every summer when I was a kid. Months filled with playing in the surf and reading out on our shady back porch. I should have other, better memories of this place without him.

  But you haven’t been back here since.

  I block out the treacherous voice in my mind, yelling along with the radio instead.

  “Gone like a freight train, gone like yesterday…”

  The song is right, I decide. It’s gone. That summer is so far behind me, I couldn’t see it in my rearview mirror if I tried. I’m a different person from the screwed up, headstrong girl I was the last time I drove down this sandy road. I’m twenty-two now, just a month away from graduating college and starting out a whole new life. I’ve got a perfect boyfriend b
ack in the city, and a great career all lined up. Despite everything that happened here that summer, I made it out—made myself into the person I wanted to be—and even though coming here to Beachwood Bay makes me feel sick and dizzy, like I’m about to jump out of a plane in total free fall, this weekend won’t change any of that.

  It can’t.

  Besides, I tell myself, trying to calm the shiver of nerves in my stomach, I don’t even know if he’s still here. I don’t know anything about Emerson anymore. My idle midnight searches online always come up blank. He could be halfway around the world by now, trekking in the African jungle, or knocking back beers on some beach in Australia with a tall, stacked bikini model at his side.

  Tucked under his arm, the place I used to be…

  I crank the radio even louder, the country twang ringing so hard I don’t even hear my cellphone, I just see the screen light up from where I tucked it in the cupholder on my dashboard. Lacey. My best friend. I answer, struggling to turn the volume down and keep a hand on the steering wheel. I know I shouldn’t talk and drive, but way out of the city out here, I won’t see a cop for miles.

  “Hey Lacey, what’s up?”

  “Are you there yet?” she demands.

  “Close.” I check the clock again. “About a half-hour away.”

  “I still can’t believe Danny boy didn’t go with you.” There’s a muffled noise as she gets comfy, and when she speaks again, I can just picture her, curled up in our student apartment in Charlotte, looking out the window over the bustle of downtown. “Isn’t this the kind of thing future fiancés are legally obligated to do?” she asks. “Packing up the summer house you haven’t stepped foot in since…well, you know.” She trails off.

  The silence sits in the air between us, heavy with grief. Emerson isn’t the only ghost lurking in this town. The pain he caused me was only half my broken heart.

  I gulp a lungful of fresh, salty air and force the demons out of my mind. “First of all, we don’t know he’s planning to propose.” I shift the phone to a more comfortable position under my ear.

  “Please,” Lacey snorts. “His parents love you, you’re moving in together after graduation, and he’s been dropping not-so-subtle hints about your taste in jewelry for months now.”

  “You didn’t tell me that!” My stomach kicks, but this time, it’s with a whole different kind of nerves.

  “It’s been kind of hilarious,” Lacey adds. “So, do you think Juliet prefers modern or art deco styles?” she mimics Daniel’s careful East Coast voice.

  “What did you say?” I ask, curious. Even though Lacey is right—I’ve figured this was coming for a while now—it still feels strange to talk about it like this. Marriage. The future. Forever.

  With someone who isn’t Emerson.

  Lacey continues, oblivious to my thoughts. “Princess-cut, classic setting, nothing under two carats. Duh.”

  “Lacey!” I flush.

  “What? You said you wanted to build a life with him,” Lacey reminds me. “That you could picture growing old and gray together.”

  “I did. I mean, I do,” I correct myself quickly. “Daniel is great. He’s kind, and sweet, and smart—”

  “—and perfect, I get it!” Lacey cuts me off. “So I don’t get why he’s not going with you. Not just for all the heavy lifting and packing, I mean. If my girlfriend was going back to see her ex—”

  “I’m not here to see Emerson!” My protest comes way too loud, and I flinch, swerving wildly on the road.

  Lacey whistles. “Easy there. I’m just saying, Danny boy must be super-secure in your relationship if he’s not even curious about the first guy you ever loved.”

  I catch my breath, trying to calm myself. The last thing I need is to wind up dead, crashed in a ditch before I even reach the county line. I slow my speed and focus on the road ahead. “Daniel isn’t coming because I told him not to. I said I need the space to study in peace. And…he doesn’t know about Emerson.” I admit in a rush.

  “What?” Lacey’s screech makes me swerve all over again. “You said you told him ages ago!”

  “I did,” I protest weakly. “I said there was a guy I dated, before college. But I didn’t say he was here. Or how serious it was.”

  “Serious?” Lacey’s voice is dripping with sarcasm. “Try, like a fucking anvil.”

  “What was I supposed to say, Lace?” I sigh, feeling that familiar wash of guilt that always settles over me whenever I think about the half-truths I’ve told my boyfriend. “That I had my heart broken so entirely, it took everything I had not to slash open my wrists just to make the pain stop?”

  My voice is light now, but the words are true. For the longest time, it felt like I was teetering on a precipice, like one wrong step could send me tumbling into the darkness. The worst part was, there were moments I wanted to take that leap, to just end the pain for good.

  “Oh, babe…” Lacey’s voice softens. She knows what it was like for me: as my freshman roommate, she had a front-row seat to the damage that summer left behind. The days when all I did was curl in a ball, weeping, the weeks I barely ate or left my room at all, except for classes. She was the one who finally sat me down and staged a one-girl intervention: dragging me out to parties and coffee-breaks and the campus therapist, who prescribed me a whole list of anti-depressants and anti-anxiety meds.

  The pills helped—too much, I think sometimes—but Lacey was my real lifesaver, forcing me to fake at being OK long enough that I finally began to believe it for myself. I didn’t meet Daniel until my junior year, and by then, I could almost believe that those dark days were behind me for good. The only visible scar I had left was the tiny blue jay tattoo on my right shoulder blade. I’ve thought about getting it removed, wiping the slate clean completely, but something makes me leave it there to glimpse in the mirror every time I step out of the shower. A lasting reminder of all my dumb, fucked up choices, and the road I swore I’d never take again.

  Until now.

  “It’ll be fine,” I say firmly, as if that old fake-it-’til-you-make-it strategy will work now, all over again. “I’ll pack up the house for the realtor and be back by Monday. I picked up groceries in the city, so I won’t even need to go into town.”

  “If you say so.” Lacey’s voice is doubtful, but she doesn’t press. “Call me later, babe.”

  “Love you.”

  I hang up, and grip the steering wheel determinedly. It’ll be simple: I’ve got a plan, just like I said to Lacey. I’ll get the beach house packed up, hand the keys over to the realtor, and leave town for good this time—no mess, no fuss, and damn well no moping over old memories.

  I head around the next bend, and all of a sudden, the familiar sign comes into view.

  Welcome to Beachwood Bay. Population 5,654.

  Despite all my good intentions to leave the past in its dark, deep grave, I can’t help it. One look at that peeling wooden board is all it takes for my mind to go racing back, four years ago, to the last time I drove down this road.

  The day when I met him.

  4 Years Ago…

  “…And we can make s’mores in the fire pit, and cycle into town for ice cream like we always used to. Jules? Juliet?”

  My mom’s voice slips through my daydreams. I’m staring out the window at the haze of gray and moss green blurring past, fiercely wishing with everything I have that I was anywhere but here.

  I turn. My mom is looking over from the driver’s seat. “What?” I snap, not even trying to keep the irritation from my tone.

  “I was just planning all the fun things we can do this summer.” Mom glances out of the windshield at the rain drizzling against the glass. “When the weather clears up, at least.”

  “We could have stayed in the city another week,” I remind her with a stab of bitterness. “I barely had time to say goodbye to everyone. I’m missing the big graduation party. And Carina gets to stay…”

  “Your sister has classes,” Mom reminds me. “She’ll d
rive down with your father next week.”

  I sigh. My older sister is twenty-two, finishing up college at UNC. She’s majoring in publicity and marketing, and from what I can tell, that just means she spends most of her time strutting around the bars of Raleigh on the lookout for an eligible bachelor. And by eligible, she means a future lawyer or investment banker from the right kind of family, earning six figures with another seven in a trust somewhere. I don’t want to call her a shallow bitch, but she earns it.

  “We could have waited for them,” I murmur. “I mean, isn’t the whole point of this summer—to be one big happy family?” My voice is full of sarcasm.

  I see my mom flinch out of the corner of my eye, but she doesn’t rise to my bait. “Another few days would have turned into another week or more,” she says briskly, instead. “And then summer would be half-way done before we even arrived.”

  I don’t reply. One week is nothing when I’m staring down three months of my fucked up family pretending like everything’s OK.

  I turn back to the rain-soaked view outside the window, lifting my beloved camera to peer through the viewfinder lens. It’s a manual Pentax SLR, a bulky old antique that my grandpa gave to me, years ago, back before he died. Everyone uses their cellphones now, snapping digital pictures to post online and pass around, but I like the weight of the old camera in my hand, and the hours I have to spend in the darkroom, gently coaxing each photograph into life.