Chapter 1
The plane back to New York had just taken off, and as I looked out the window I thought about how much my life had changed in the last five days. If you had told me at the beginning of our trip that I would be leaving so much happier, in such a short time, than when I arrived, I would have said you were nuts. When we planned the trip, it was for me to get away and nurse my broken heart. Lying on the beach and reading, that was all I had planned to do. The day after we got there, everything changed. As the plane climbed higher into the sky, I thought about the day we left.
“Abby, hurry up we’re going to miss our flight!”
“I’m coming Claire, I just have to grab my e-reader!” A pile of clothes spilled out of my chair and each piece landed on the floor as I hurriedly searched for my tablet. I had to find it because all I wanted to do on vacation was lie on the beach and get lost in someone else’s life. I couldn’t get Scott out of my mind and I had to figure out a way to move on.
“Are you planning to just read the entire time we’re there?” My twin sister almost sounded like she was whining.
“No, of course not, just most of the time we’re there!”
“Abby! You have to come out with me while we’re there, I’m not going to go out by myself!”
Yep, she was definitely whining. Claire and I were identical twins and we were as different as night and day. I mean, okay, we did have a few things in common, but our personalities, our taste in clothes, our taste in music and our taste in guys was completely opposite. We were strikingly pretty girls and we both had dark hair, mine was really long, down my back, and Claire’s hair brushed her shoulders. We had perfectly toned bodies from years of dancing, but that was where the similarities stopped.
When we were younger we were really competitive, each of us trying so hard to have our own identity, and as we got older that competitiveness turned into unfailing support for each other. We were both professional ballerinas but Claire was always the star of the troupe. I kept telling myself that one day I would be the star, so I was okay with taking a back seat to my sister, for a little while. We had just finished our first tour, with me as Claire’s understudy, and this vacation was exactly what we needed.
I was almost working up a sweat rushing around my room looking for the tablet and then I saw the corner of it peeking out at me underneath my chair.
“Found it!” I grabbed it, grabbed my suitcase and rushed into the hall where Claire was waiting for me by the door.
“Finally! Come on, the jet has probably been waiting for us at the airport for a half hour.”
We hurried downstairs to the town car and off we went to the airport. Claire and I had just graduated from college and we hadn’t taken a vacation yet. She was my best friend and we were inseparable. I couldn’t wait to feel the cool sand between my toes and the warm sun wrapping its rays around me. I wanted to put hundreds of miles between me and Scott Dawson and I wanted to forget I had ever known him.
Scott and I met during our junior year of college and had dated for two years. He made me believe that we would get married after we graduated and I was so in love, or at least I thought I was. A week before Claire and I left for our trip, I went over to Scott’s place to surprise him with his favorite pudding. He’d had a really bad day at work and he told me that he was just going to crawl into bed and shut out the world when he got home that night. Ever since he tried my pudding the first time, he told me that it was so delicious it could make any bad day better. Wanting to be a sweet girlfriend, I made him some pudding that day and went over to his place around 8:00 that night.
I had a key to his place so I quietly went inside not wanting to wake him if he was sleeping. I tiptoed to the kitchen to put the pudding in the fridge and as soon as I closed the door I could have sworn I heard a female giggle. I froze in my tracks when I heard it again followed by a soft moan.
What the hell?
Nerves kicked in as I quietly made my way to Scott’s bedroom and as I opened the door I saw what no girlfriend ever wants to see. Some big-boobed redhead had her legs in the air and Scott’s face was buried between them. I thought I was going to throw up. I slammed the door against the wall and they both turned to look in my direction, completely startled. Scott quickly grabbed his shorts from the floor and was blabbering something about being sorry and it didn’t mean anything.
I was so angry I was numb and I didn’t say a word as I glared and Scott and then turned to leave. He reached out and grabbed me, begging me to hear him out and I quickly snatched my arm from his grip. With eyes that were steely and cold I looked at him and it took everything in me not to slap him across his face.