Malibu Rising: A Novel, Taylor Reid [best fantasy books to read TXT] 📗

and smoothed his hand over the side of her T-shirt, grazing her ribs and hips.

“Sorry,” he whispered, with a confident smile. “Just wanted to ‘see for myself that it’s soft to the touch.’”

It was the third time a man had tried this line since her ad for SoftSun Tees launched last month.

Nina had posed for it at the top of the year. It had been her biggest payday to date. In the ad, she stood, in red bikini bottoms and a white T-shirt, her hair wet, her hips jutted out to the left, her right arm up against a doorframe. The T-shirt was threadbare. You couldn’t see her nipples but if you stared enough, you might be able to convince yourself you could.

The photo was suggestive. And she knew that. She knew that’s why they wanted her in the first place. Everyone wanted the surfer girl to take her clothes off—she’d made her peace with that.

But then they had added that tagline without telling her. See for yourself, it’s soft to the touch. And they’d placed it right under her breasts.

It had invited a level of intimacy that Nina didn’t care for.

She grinned insincerely at the boy’s father and moved away from him. “If you’ll excuse me …” she said as she waved to the rest of the customers and went back into the kitchen, closing the door behind her.

Nina understood that the more often she posed—most likely for even more high-profile campaigns—the more people would show up at the restaurant. The more often they would want her photo, her signature, her smile, her attention, her body. She had not quite figured out how best to handle the sense of ownership that people felt over her. She wondered how her father had tolerated it. But she also knew they didn’t touch him the way they touched her.

“You don’t have to go out there and shake all their hands,” Ramon said when he saw her.

“I don’t know … I wish that were true,” Nina said. “Do you have time to go over the books?”

Ramon nodded, wiped his hands on a towel, and followed her into the office.

“The restaurant’s doing OK,” he said to her as they walked. “You know that, right?”

Nina shook her head from side to side, a yes and a no. “It’s the keeping it doing OK that I worry about,” she said, as they both sat down and began to go over the numbers. It was a complicated endeavor.

The building was old, the kitchen had needed to be brought up to code recently, business ebbed and flowed with the seasons.

Fortunately, it had been a good summer. But the off-season was approaching and last winter had been brutal. She’d had to keep the place afloat with an influx of her own cash back in January, just as she’d done a few times before.

“We’ve pulled it out of the red from the top of the year,” Nina said, turning the book toward Ramon for him to see. “So that’s good. I’m just a little worried we’ll fall back in once the tourists dry up.”

It occurred to her at times that she was using modeling to subsidize a restaurant in which people came to take her photo and often didn’t even buy a soda.

But she loved the staff, and some of the regulars. And Ramon.

“Regardless, we will figure it out. We always do,” she said.

She wasn’t going to be the one, three generations in, to let Riva’s Seafood go to shit. She just wasn’t.

“Can we stop at home before we head to the restaurant? I want to take a shower,” Kit said, over the sound of the road.

“Totally,” Jay said as he put on his blinker to turn down the street they’d grown up on.

Jay and Kit were the only two Rivas still living in their childhood home. Nina was in the mansion at Point Dume and often traveling for photo shoots. Hud liked living in his Airstream. But Jay and Kit stayed in the beach cottage they had grown up in, the one their father had bought their mother twenty-five years ago.

Jay had taken over the master bedroom. But he traveled a lot, too. He was often at surf competitions all over the world, with Hud by his side.

Soon, the two of them were supposed to leave for the North Shore of Oahu. Jay was scheduled to compete in the Duke Classic, the World Cup, and Pipe Masters. Then they’d be off to the Gold Coast of Australia and Jeffreys Bay in South Africa. O’Neill would foot a lot of the bill and have their name plastered across Jay at every turn. Hud would be snapping photos of him all the while.

The two of them were due for another cover, were planning on selling off the rights for posters and calendars. But to do so, they had to roam the earth. The life of a professional surfer and his entourage required a light foot, a sense of spontaneity. Jay’s and Hud’s passion, their livelihood, their lives, depended on chasing the ever-changing, unpredictable combination of wind and water.

And so, as much as Jay considered California his home, lately he didn’t think of himself as necessarily living anywhere.

Kit, meanwhile, was still sleeping in her childhood bed, looking at a junior year at Santa Monica College, spending her nights and weekends behind the register at the restaurant. The only bright spot she could see would be when she could ditch to take trips with her friends up to the breaks in Santa Cruz. The waves were big up there, some double overhead. But that was about as far as Kit’s life was taking her right now, just a few hours up the coast.

Her siblings were out there seeing the world while Kit was still slinging crab cakes.

She wanted some of the glory, too. Some of the glamour of Nina’s life, some of the thrill of Jay’s and Hud’s. She had spent so