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

At just that moment, Mick looked up to see that Nina had woken and found them there.

“Hi, honey,” he said to her.

From the bedroom, Jay and Hud started crying at the same time. June scooped up Nina and went to tend to her babies. Mick peeked over her shoulder, looking at the newborn son he was meeting for the first time.

June was unable to bear it, witnessing Mick’s connection to this child. She swatted him away and he backed off.

When she was done with the children, she went to the bedroom and saw that Mick had lain down on the far edge of the bed, as if the left side of it was still his.

“Junie, I love you,” he said.

She said nothing in return.

But as June looked at him, she felt fatigue take her down. He was not going to make it easy on her. He wasn’t going to leave of his own will. He was going to make her scream it and shout it and force him to go. She was going to have to rage against him and even then, she might not win.

Anger extracts such a toll and suddenly, June was so tired. She sighed, giving her body over to her breath. She could not fight him now because she could not fight him now and win.

And so, she lay down next to him, saving her indignation for daylight, when she could think straight. All of this would still be there to fight in the morning.

But in the morning, her anger had lost its edges. It had morphed into sorrow. She was now overtaken by the dull ache of grief, expansive and tender like a whole-body bruise. She had lost the life she had believed she’d been granted. She was in mourning.

So when Mick turned over and put his arm around her, she could not summon the energy to shrug it off.

“I promise you all of that is over,” Mick whispered, tears forming in his eyes. “I will never do anything to hurt you again. I love you, Junie. With all of my heart. I’m so sorry.”

And because June had not shrugged off his arm, Mick felt confident enough to kiss her neck. And because she had not shrugged off the small request, she did not know how to shrug off the larger one. And on and on it went. Small boundaries broken, snapped like tiny twigs, so many that June barely noticed he was coming for the whole tree.

With every move Mick made, as he held her, as he kissed her, June lost sight of the exact moment to speak up and then resigned herself to the pain of having never spoken up at all.

And soon, on the horizon appeared a resolution—one that even June started to welcome if for no other reason than needing the return of normalcy, even if it was a lie.

At midnight the following night, Mick whispered sweet nothings into June’s ear. June, despite herself, relished the feeling of his breath on her neck. And the two of them talked it through, in the hurried and hushed tones reserved for secrets.

Mick would be forever faithful and they would raise Hud as one of theirs. They would intimate that Jay and Hud were twins. No one would dare question it. After all, they were about to enter another social stratum with Mick’s second album. They would have new friends, new peers. They would be, now, a family of five.

June felt, that night, as if she and Mick were mending their own broken bones together. Laying the cast perfectly in the hope that one day she would not even remember she had been broken.

• • •

And the crazy thing was that it worked.

June loved her children, loved her older girl and her twin boys. She loved her house on the water and watching her kids play on the shore. She loved people stopping her at the market, two infants and a toddler in the cart, saying, “Aren’t you Mick Riva’s wife?”

She liked the money and the Cadillac and the minks. She liked leaving the kids with her mother and putting on one of her smartest cocktail dresses and standing backstage for some of Mick’s shows.

She liked hearing “Warm June” on the radio and having Mick’s attention when he was home. He always did make her feel like the only woman in the world, even when she knew—knew for certain now—that she wasn’t.

So, despite the ulcer she was growing, June had to admit, she could stomach it all more easily than she thought. Vodka helped.

Unfortunately, Mick simply couldn’t stop himself.

There was Ruby, whom he met on the Sunset lot. And then there was Joy, a friend of Ruby’s. They meant nothing to him and so he saw no real betrayal.

But then, Veronica. And oh my God, Veronica.

Black hair, olive skin, green eyes, a body that set the standard for hourglasses. He’d fallen again, despite every attempt to keep his heart out of it. He fell for her crimson smile and the way she liked to make love in the open air. He fell for her slinky dresses and her sharp wit, for the way she refused to be intimidated by him, the way she made fun of him. He fell for just how famous she was getting, maybe more famous than him, when she starred in a hit domestic thriller called The Porch Swing. Her name was above the marquee in big bold letters and yet still, in the quiet of the night, it was his name she called out.

He could not get enough of Veronica Lowe.

And June knew exactly what was happening.

When Mick didn’t come home until four in the morning, when Mick had a tiny trace of lipstick behind his ear, when Mick stopped kissing her good morning.

Mick started having dinner with Veronica in public places. Sometimes, he stopped coming home altogether.

June had her hair done. She lost weight. She humbled herself to the level of asking