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

a denim jacket over a coral dress that was floating up with the breeze. Hud was in white shorts and a blue short-sleeved button-down, a pair of old Topsiders on his feet.

Each had been out drinking with friends when they found themselves passing each other just outside a tourist shop, selling tank tops with cheesy catchphrases and cheap sunglasses.

They stopped to say hi and told their friends they would catch up in a moment. But “a moment” seemed to get longer and longer until they realized they weren’t going to catch up with their friends at all.

They kept talking as they slowly started walking together down the boulevard, going into shops and bars. Hud tried on a straw cowboy hat and Ashley laughed. Ashley jokingly grabbed a Wonder Woman lasso and pretended to twirl it in the air. And Hud could tell, the way Ashley smiled at him, that the night was becoming something bigger than either of them intended.

Hours later, after a few too many drinks, they crammed themselves into one of the bathroom stalls of a bar called Mad Dogs. Ashley whispered into Hud’s ear, “I always wanted you. I always wanted you instead.” She’d always wanted him instead.

A second after she’d said it, Hud had kissed her and grabbed her legs, pulling her up around his waist and against the wall. She smelled like a flower he couldn’t name. Her hair felt fine and soft in his fingers. No one had ever felt as good against him as she did that night.

When it was over, they both felt exhilarated and satiated and light as air, until the anvil of guilt settled in their stomachs.

Hud liked thinking of himself as a good guy. And yet … sleeping with your brother’s girlfriend was exactly the sort of thing a good guy would never do.

Certainly not more than once.

But there was that night and then another. Then dinner in a restaurant four towns up the coast. And then a few discussions of how, exactly, Ashley should break up with Jay.

And then, she did it.

Five months ago, Ashley had shown up at Hud’s Airstream at eleven o’clock at night and said, “I broke up with him. And I think you should know that I love you.”

Hud had pulled her inside and taken her face in his hands and said, “I love you, too. I’ve loved you since … I don’t know. Well before I should have.”

And now they were just biding their time, trying to create the perfect moment in which to tell Jay the half-truth. A half-truth between half brothers, though Jay and Hud never thought of themselves as half brothers at all.

“Come to the party,” Hud said to Ashley. “I’m ready to tell everyone.”

“I don’t know,” Ashley said as she put on her white sunglasses and grabbed her keys. “We’ll see.”

8:00 A.M.

Nina was out in the surf, having a hard time finding the kind of long, slow right-handers she was looking for.

She wasn’t there to shred. And the waves weren’t right for it that morning anyway. All she wanted was to ride her longboard gracefully, cross-stepping up to the nose until the waves knocked her off.

The beach was quiet. This was the glory of a tiny, exclusive cove, protected on three sides by fifty-foot cliffs. While technically the beach was public, the only people who knew how to get to it were those who had access to private stairs or those willing to hike the jagged coastline and risk high tide.

That morning, Nina was sharing the cove with two teenage girls in neon swimsuits who were sunbathing and reading Jackie Collins and Stephen King.

Since Nina was the only one in the water, she hung out on her board just past the peak, unhurried. As she floated there, the wind chilling her wet skin, the sun crisping her bare shoulders, with her legs dangling in the water, Nina was already getting a small slice of the peace she’d come out here for.

An hour ago, she had been dreading the party. She’d even fantasized about canceling it. But she couldn’t do that to Jay, Hud, and Kit. They looked forward to this party every year, talked about it for months afterward.

The party had started out as a wild kegger years ago, a bunch of surfers and skateboarders from around town gathering at the Rivas’ house the last Saturday in August. But in the time since, Nina’s own fame had risen and she’d married Brandon, garnering even more attention.

With each passing year, the party seemed to attract more and more recognizable people. Actors, pop stars, models, writers, directors, even a few Olympians. Somehow, this once small get-together had become the party to be seen at. If only to be able to say you were there when.

When, in 1979, Warren Rhodes and Lisa Crowne got naked in the pool. When, in ’81, the supermodels Alma Amador and Georgina Corbyn made out with each other in front of their husbands. When, last year, Bridger Miller and Tuesday Hendricks met for the first time, sharing a joint in Nina’s backyard. They got engaged two weeks later and then Tuesday left him at the altar back in May. Now This ran a headline that said, WHY TUESDAY COULDN’T CROSS THAT BRIDGE WITH BRIDGER.

There was no end to the stories people would tell about what happened at the Riva party, some of which Nina wasn’t even sure were true.

Supposedly, Louie Davies discovered Alexandra Covington when she was swimming topless in Nina’s pool. He cast her as a prostitute in Let ’Em Down Easy and now, two years later, she had an Oscar.

Apparently, at the party back in 1980, Doug Tucker, the new head of Sunset Studios, got plastered and told everyone that he had proof Celia St. James was gay.

Did Nina’s neighbor Rob Lowe sing all of “Jack & Diane” with her other neighbor Emilio Estevez last year in her kitchen? People claimed