Love is a Beach: a romantic comedy Read online

  LOVE IS A BEACH

  A BAYSIDE NOVEL

  LILLIANA ANDERSON

  Ebook & Print Edition

  Copyright © 2019 by Lilliana Anderson

  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 by Ember Designs

  Editing by Making Manuscripts

  Created with Vellum

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  1. Darcy

  2. Darcy

  3. Darcy

  4. Darcy

  5. Darcy

  6. Leo

  7. Darcy

  8. Darcy

  9. Leo

  10. Darcy

  11. Darcy

  12. Darcy

  13. Leo

  14. Darcy

  15. Darcy

  16. Leo

  17. Darcy

  18. Darcy

  19. Leo

  20. Darcy

  21. Darcy

  22. Darcy

  23. Leo

  24. Leo

  25. Darcy

  26. Darcy

  27. Darcy

  28. Leo

  29. Darcy

  30. Darcy

  31. Leo

  32. Darcy

  33. Darcy

  34. Leo

  35. Darcy

  36. Leo

  37. Leo

  38. Darcy

  39. Darcy

  40. Leo

  41. Darcy

  42. Leo

  43. Darcy

  44. Darcy

  45. Darcy

  46. Leo

  47. Darcy

  48. Darcy

  49. Darcy

  50. Darcy

  51. Leo

  52. Darcy

  53. Darcy

  54. Darcy

  55. Leo

  56. Darcy

  57. Darcy

  58. Leo

  59. Darcy

  Epilogue

  Also by Lilliana Anderson

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  To Lochie, my real life Archer.

  FOREWORD

  Love is a Beach started from a tiny idea I had many years ago where a newly single mother met her new man via her son tackling him to the ground. That tiny sliver of information stayed in my ideas folder until it grew into something more tangible thanks to the many stories my mother-in-law would tell me about her beachside lifestyle and the characters she met along the way.

  Nana was born out of those stories, just as Archer was born from my own eight-year-old son (I actually recorded our conversations to get Archer’s voice right.) So there’s a lot of reality in these pages. I think there’s a slice of my reality in every book I write. I tend to mix it all in with the crazy, fun, emotional fiction that you’re coming to expect from me. And I hope this one is funnier than most.

  I laughed a lot in this book.

  It also took me longer to write because it’s almost twice as long as my regular books are. But it doesn’t feel like a long book. It’s an easy read that will have you reflecting on your own life, or that of someone you know, with the knowledge that everything gets better, and there’s joy everywhere you look. You just have to choose to see it.

  Anyway, I’ll quit rambling there and let you read. I hope you finish this book with a massive smile on your face and happy tears in your eyes. And then I hope you force everyone you know to read it as well, because we all need a Nana, and a Leo in our lives.

  ONE

  DARCY

  “It’s great news for the Field family, Kevin. You’re in remission.” The doctor smiles brightly as Kevin’s mouth falls open.

  My hand flies to my mouth as I gasp, my entire body flooding with relief-filled endorphins. “Thank God!”

  “Wow.” Kevin shakes his head, shock evident on his pale face. Remission is the word we’ve been hoping for during the months of radiation therapy. Now it’s here. The fight was worth it, and my husband will live. He’ll live, and our children get to grow up with their dad healthy and alive. Thank. God.

  Eight months we’ve fought this, with Kevin undergoing treatment for testicular cancer while I tried to hold everything together on the home front, maintaining normalcy as much as I could. We haven’t told a soul about his diagnosis—not even our kids—preferring to fight this quietly for the sake of everyone’s sanity. Kevin hadn’t wanted anyone treating him differently, and we’d both agreed that worrying the kids was unnecessary. The knowledge would have sent our teenage daughter into a hormonal woe-filled tailspin, and our eight-year-old would have wanted to film the entire process for his YouTube channel as a ‘Try Not to Cry’ video. Let’s not go into the drama either of our parents would have caused. No. It was best we kept this to ourselves, especially since Kevin is cured now and everything will be OK.

  We’re going to be OK.

  This may be the understatement of the year, but I don’t think I realised what toll this process has taken on me personally. I’ve been so busy making sure Kevin was comfortable and the kids were looked after that I haven’t stopped and thought about myself—how frayed my nerves have become, how tired and tense my body is. Suddenly, I can breathe again, the weight I’ve carried on my shoulders is finally gone. I have my husband back. I’m not fighting alone anymore.

  Tears fill my eyes as I reach across the ruler width of space between our chairs and touch Kevin’s arm. “Remission,” I whisper, smiling so hard it hurts my cheeks.

  Kevin blinks. “Wow.”

  AS WE LEAVE THE HOSPITAL, excitement bubbles out of my chest in the form of words, detailing the ways we should celebrate.

  “Champagne,” I say, looping my arm through his. “And not the sparkling wine kind, real champagne from France. And dinner. Actually, anything you want, just name it. We’ll get Mum to keep the kids and make a night of it because, remission, Kev. Can you believe it?”

  “I want a divorce, Darcy.”

  “What?” The words hit me like Miley Cyrus swinging in on her wrecking ball. Boom, right in the chest. We stop walking and face each other.

  “I…” He looks at the concrete floor in the parking garage like the words he needs are written down there. I look too. Nothing but our feet and years’ worth of dirt and scuff marks. He meets my eyes again. His faded blue ones look pained, his dark unruly brows arching down. “Dar.” He takes my hand. “You had to know this was coming.”

  I snatch my hand back. “No.” I say it so loud that it echoes. “I didn’t know that at all.” I can’t breathe. “Why?”

  “Because I almost died. Now I want to live.”

  “What the hell have we been doing these last twenty years? Spinning in circles?”

  “Dar.” He looks at me in that horrible pitiful way that only those knowingly breaking your heart can accomplish. “We got married so young—”

  “So what? We have children, Kevin. A life!” Hysteria coats my words. I’m not sure if I’m going to laugh, scream or cry, but something is coming. I can’t stand here and be understanding when my husband—the man I’ve spent twenty years of my life with, the man I just nursed through eight months of cancer treatment—tells me that he doesn’t want me anymore.

  “I know this sounds selfish. But I feel like I’ve been waiting all this time for my life to start. It’s always, ‘wait until the house is paid off,’ ‘wait until the kids have grown up,’ ‘wait until you get that next promotion,’ or ‘until you retire.’”

  “I can’t believe this,”
I mutter, my eyes wide.

  “I don’t want to wait until I’m retired. I want to live now, experience a different life now.”

  “So, let’s experience the world together. You know, we could pull the kids from school and travel anywhere in the world if that’s what you want. Sell everything and just go. We could do that. You don’t have to leave us to change your life.”

  He gets that pitying look on his face again.

  My stomach recoils. Oh…oh dear… “Unless…” I take a step back, choosing my words carefully. “It’s not the world you want to experience, is it?”

  He shakes his head.

  “I see. It’s other women?”

  “Dar.” He reaches for me but I dodge him.

  “No. Don’t ‘Dar’ me. We have a life, Kevin. A good life. And you’re throwing it all away because cancer made you realise you didn’t fuck enough in your youth?” I rake my hands through my hair then start to laugh. It’s a mad laugh, one of those laughs that doesn’t belong in the situation. But it’s all so ridiculous. Too ridiculous. Is this even real?

  Just to make sure, I pinch myself on the arm. “Ow.”

  “Did you just pinch yourself?”

  I’m not laughing anymore. Tears fill my eyes as I stand across from my husband and realise I don’t actually know him anymore. Twenty years, two children, a home, friends. Does he really not want what we built together? Or is it…just me he doesn’t want? Surely he’d never walk away from his kids. How long has he felt this way?

  “Well,” I say, blowing out my breath, trying to calm down so I’m not a public crying mess. I want to argue with him, to fight for us, because I have no idea where this came from. No inkling he wanted to leave. If he’d said something sooner, we could have worked through this…this…whatever it is. But if there is one thing I’ve learnt from the twenty years I’ve spent by this man’s side, it’s that there’s no changing his mind. Once he’s decided something, that’s it for him. Standing before me, he’s chosen to leave. He’s chosen to leave our marriage, our home. Forever. “I guess we need to apply for this…divorce of yours then.”

  He presses his brow together, ever so slightly. “I still love you, Dar. I just…we want different things.”

  Pressing my lips together, I give him the fakest, bravest smile I have in my arsenal. “Yeah, I’m getting that.” I wipe my hands over my face and swallow my raging emotions so deep I’ll probably get an ulcer. “Let’s just…go home, I guess. We need to figure out what—how—to tell the kids.”

  He scrapes his teeth over his bottom lip as he stuffs his hands in his pockets. “About that…”

  TWO

  DARCY

  “Breathe.”

  The paper bag is so loud, I can barely hear my sister’s encouraging words. Well, encouraging is probably the wrong word to use. Instructional might be better, because she’s basically making sure I don’t die from lack of oxygen.

  Kevin did not return from the hospital with me. He didn’t come home to pack his things or say goodbye to his children. Seems he’s been planning his escape from what I’ve always considered a happy marriage for quite some time. He didn’t want anything from his ‘old life’, said he wanted to ‘start fresh’ with someone new. That was the precise moment I started screeching out a string of expletives that probably sounded like a train whistle. He shrugged, said he really was sorry and walked away, leaving me to deal with the fallout of his…his…monumentally cowardly escape from reality. That’s the best way I can think to describe what just went down.

  “I…don’t…know…what…to…doooo,” I whine between my gasping pants. The words are muffled inside the bag, but somehow, Jo hears me and lifts the hand she’s using to rub my back to push my blonde hair out of my eyes.

  “Fuck him,” she says as she secures it behind my ear. “Let him go. If he can’t see what an amazing woman you are, what an amazing wife and mother you’ve been all these years, then he can go and get fucked by a donkey.” Jo is tougher than me. When we were kids, and the neighbourhood kids teased us over our father’s drunken singing (he was terrible and hiccupped half the words) I’d get upset and burst into tears, but she’d give them an earful before threatening to knock their teeth down their throat. It didn’t take long before they learned that you didn’t mess with a Sullivan and get away with it.

  “A donkey?” I sniffle, lowering the paper bag.

  “Yeah, ’cause then he’ll really be a donkey’s arse.”

  I can’t help but laugh at that one. My sister is always excellent in a crisis.

  “You, Darcy, are better than anything Kevin has ever offered you. You know that, right?” She’s also never really liked my husband. Possibly because she’s always been my first call whenever things go wrong between us. Every big fight, every frustrated moment was heard by my sister’s understanding ear. She’s always felt that Kevin wasn’t good enough for me, called him lazy, selfish and controlling on more than one occasion. She absolutely hated that Kevin never let me work, even after Archer went to school. He said that the kids needed me home. While he always made sure I had enough of an allowance to pay for the things I needed and was fine with me running an Etsy store for ‘pocket money’, Jo still felt I needed physical and financial freedom of my own. But that’s just the tip of her iceberg of problems with Kevin. To her credit, she’s always been candid in her advice despite her feelings. We don’t have a lot of secrets, Jo and I. Which of course means she’s also the only person I’ve told about Kevin’s illness—I know, I know, I wasn’t supposed to have told anyone. But she’s my sister and I tell her everything. I needed someone to vent to, and I knew the information would never go any further.

  Jo peers into my eyes with her identical blues, her mouth set in a straight line. “You are going to be fine, Darcy Sullivan. Do you hear me?”

  “It’s still Field. I’m not divorced yet.”

  She shrugs. “You’ll always be a Sullivan to me.”

  As I calm slightly, I catch the time changing to two o’clock on the microwave clock. “Oh God, what am I going to say to the kids?” They’re still at school and I need to get my story straight before three o’clock rolls around.

  “Just tell them the truth.”

  “The truth?” I have to close my eyes and force myself to swallow the lump in my throat. “It will break them.”

  “It won’t. They’re tougher than you think.”

  The truth. I can do that.

  “A HOLIDAY?” Archer’s eyes go wide as he spoons Coco Pops into his mouth.

  “Yes. I thought we might go to the beach, visit your great-grandmother. She has a lovely place right across from the water in Bayside.” I think when Jo said ‘truth’ my mind heard ‘deflect’. It’s my tried and true way of dealing. Run away and pretend nothing is happening. It’s like the cancer diagnosis all over again: if I just keep acting normal, maybe nobody will notice that everything has changed…

  “The beach.” Somehow his bright blue eyes get even bigger. “First it’s breakfast for dinner and now we get to go to the beach.” In the eyes of an eight-year-old, it’s like a second Christmas. “Hell yes.”

  “Language, young man,” I admonish, although I’m smiling too. His enthusiasm is infectious, and I feel a stab in my heart as I wonder how Kevin could leave this without so much as a goodbye. Archer is such a funny, happy-go-lucky kid. All he needs is love and a little attention and he’s golden. I can’t recall the amount of times I’ve spotted him trying to learn about paintball and computers just so he’d have something to talk to his father about. He was so good. And I can’t wrap my head around the desire to walk away from that. “We can pack our bags and leave right away if you like.”

  “Yes,” he yells, shoving his chair backwards and rushing for his bedroom. “I’m only packing bathers.”

  “And underwear. You need underwear.” I smile and place a single Cornflake on my tongue, crunching the slightly sweet morsel as I meet Abigail’s assessing eyes. Abigail. I feel that
Kevin’s leaving is going to hurt her the most. At fourteen, she’s old enough to have noticed that something has been going on of late. She’s her father’s daughter, the child he got along with the most. I’ve often found them sitting at the table, long after dinner chatting about her friends at school. To her, learning he’s gone is going to be the moment she loses her trust in men. As that stabbing sensation fills my heart once more, I know I want to delay that moment as long as possible.