Page 3 of Tides Of Your Love (Riviera Shores #3)

Rio

“YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO get birdseed for his girlfriend.”

“It’s not birdseed, Walter. It’s oatmeal, and we add it to your yogurt.” I was putting away the rest of the groceries in the kitchen cabinets.

On the open shelves, I kept a special place for the health products I brought from the shop.

I loved how the sage and lavender labels added color to the otherwise white kitchen.

I worked hard to keep this unpractical color immaculate.

I suspected Owen had never intended on actually living here when he’d bought the house.

But then his grandfather moved here when burst pipes in his old house rotted the wood and ruined the main electrical system.

And a few years later, I moved here, too.

“You think I’m frail like a bird,” Walter grumbled. “Should have seen me twenty years ago. All the pretty, young fifty and even forty-year-olds chasing me!” He was sulking over his low-fat, low-salt dinner at the kitchen table.

“You’re not frail and you’re still handsome, Walter. The ladies at the senior swimming class are always ogling you.” I turned and leaned against the counter. “So, you think he’s bringing a girlfriend?”

I encouraged Walter to be more talkative over the phone with his grandson, but he always pretended not to understand my cues.

“Why are you rolling your eyes?” he’d ask out loud.

“What does that mean?” he’d add when I’d make a hand gesture that encouraged him to roll the conversation.

“I don’t understand what she wants,” he’d mumble straight into the phone for Owen to hear.

I ended up texting Owen myself to let him know I’d still be here when he arrived, to which he responded, “ No problem .”

To whom?

“If he brings anyone, I hope it’s not the one from last time,” Walter now said.

“For a supermodel, she wasn’t even pretty.

” He pulled up his brown cardigan’s sleeves.

“Behaving like it was her house,” he muttered to himself.

“Sure, he owns it, but I live here, and he can’t bring overnight guests without asking me. I’m old and infirm.” He pouted.

I laughed. “You’re not infirm, Walter. You’re healthier than much younger men.”

Walter gave me his best I was an IRS auditor so don’t try to be cute scowl. He loved feeling sorry for himself, but to be honest, he had reasons. His only son remarried and moved to the other side of the country, and his only grandson lived on another continent.

“Maybe you should rest if you want to stay up late for your grandson,” I offered now.

Walter pushed his plate and got up. On his way out of the kitchen, he turned to me.

“If you can, Rio, make sure you have lots of kids and make your kids have lots of kids. That way, you’ll increase your odds that one of them will turn out less of an asshole.

” With that, he marched toward his ensuite on the ground floor.

“He’s not that bad. You’re being too hard on your relatives,” I called after him and watched the dismissive hand gesture he threw behind his back as he kept on walking.

At the pace my life was going, I’d be lucky to have any kid at all. I had just wasted five years on a guy who said he loved me but treated me like a compromise. Words were cheap for some people; they could mean nothing at all. I fought to utter mine, so I made sure they were meaningful.

I went up to my suite on the upper floor.

Beyond the large backyard, easy access to the beach, and the beautiful, calm coastal interior design and stucco exterior, the suites were the best feature of this house—three large ones on the top floor and one on the ground floor, all connected by an intercom.

I had my privacy, yet Walter could reach me.

So far, he only used the intercom for help with his crossword puzzles.

Wrapped in a towel, my hair still dripping, I stared at my open closet as if seeing its contents for the first time.

What do you wear for the first night of living with your brother’s best friend whom you once slept with but withstood falling in love with?

Despite the years I’d known him, despite his closeness to my brother, Owen was practically a stranger now. A stranger who had once been my friend. A stranger who had been the first to touch every inch of my body .

Our Owen , my mom used to call him when he stayed at our house a lot. But meeting him so rarely over the last decade, I grew accustomed to thinking of him as the distant superstar he had become. He didn’t feel like ‘Our Owen’ to me anymore.

I settled on a pair of jeans and a light pink camisole, pairing them with sneakers, hair up in a ponytail, and no makeup.

I hoped I’d look effortlessly at home, but the band of butterflies in my stomach—the same ones that had taken flight to my throat the first time I saw Owen—felt anything but casual.

At thirteen, I began taking interest in my brother’s friends.

Ruby and I had secret crushes on boys in our year but none of them noticed us, except Howard, who skipped a year and was at least a head shorter than me.

When Simon had his friends over, Ruby suggested we’d put on our cutest outfits, glamour up with pink lip gloss and blue eyeshadow, and pretend we were in the kitchen to make grilled cheese sandwiches.

“Dating a high schooler,” she had whispered dreamily while skating a finger over her braced teeth to remove pink gloss remnants as we gawked at Simon’s friends from the staircase.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING here?” Simon’s hiss was loud.

“We just came down for food,” I whispered to my brother. Whispering served two purposes—I didn’t stutter in whispers, and I hoped no one would notice us, though two of his fifteen-year-old friends turned their heads toward us.

Unfortunately, one of them was the gorgeous new guy I had spotted from the stairs. Two girls stood next to him and clung to his every word.

“Do the accent,” one of them said.

“Not now, Brittany,” he said with a smile and a perfect British accent as the girls giggled.

“Mom said we could be in the kitchen,” I whispered in Ruby’s and my defense.

Ruby, meanwhile, was openly scanning the room and spreading full-braces smiles at everyone while I tried to be more covert.

“Here, take that upstairs,” Simon hissed again, pushing a bowl of Cheetos against my chest.

“Okay, we’re going. Relax,” I muttered louder, the O and the G lingering in my throat now that I wasn’t whispering.

“Hey, Si, you’re scaring the kids. Get over here,” New Gorgeous Guy said, glancing our way.

Ouch. He was defending us ... but also calling us kids.

Simon was busy grabbing a Mountain Dew bottle from the fridge and making Ruby take it, anticipating our next excuse to come down.

New Guy turned his attention back to his friends, having lost interest in Simon chiding his little sister.

But then the girl next to him spoke. “She’s not scared, she always stutters,” she said loud enough for everyone to hear. Bless her, she probably thought she was being helpful.

My cheeks flamed, and the once-sweet taste of my strawberry gloss cloyed on my tongue .

New Guy froze, his eyes locked on me.

The whole room seemed to freeze too, which was strange because I was now sweating.

My gaze was stuck on New Guy. Despite my brain’s commanding, “Stop looking at him!” my eyes wouldn’t budge, like the rest of me.

New Guy’s eyes seemed to refuse the same command; he was staring at me as if no one else was there. Didn’t he know it was impolite to stare at someone with an impediment?

Then, his face broke into a soft smile. A barely-there smile that was more in his eyes than his lips, so only the person it was directed at could perceive. Even my thirteen-year-old brain knew that it was him viscerally and actively sharing in my feelings.

“You chew your hair, Tiffany, and Simon bosses people around. Guess we all have our thing,” he said, briefly looking away.

“There, food and drink. Now take your friend and get out.” Simon’s whisper and his added poke rocked me from my spot, cracked the frost, and broke my eye contact with New Guy.

Simon was usually nice, but in a kitchen full of his friends, he wanted me out of sight.

He was the middle ground between Dad, who thought he protected me by speaking over me, and our sunshine Mom, who had named us after her favorite song and the band’s lead singer.

To her, lecturing my class was a great idea: “Stuttering isn’t the same for everyone.

For some, it’s the plosive consonants like P, B, M.

For others, like our Rio, it’s words that begin with velar plosives and laryngeal sounds that originate in the throat—like K, C, G, and even A, O, E.

Some stutterers repeat syllables, but for our Rio, it just takes longer to utter them. ” They both meant well.

“Who’s that new guy?” Ruby asked Simon, unfazed even while he was pretty much shoving us across the kitchen like unwanted pests.

“His name is None. None of your business,” Simon replied.

The new guy looked at us again when we passed by him. “Owen,” he said with a smile, his head towering above his friends.

I flashed an embarrassed smile at him and went upstairs with Ruby.

Halfway to my room, I realized: Owen started with a velar sound.

I LATER SAW THAT SMILE directed at me countless times—when I spoke in school assemblies, in my tenth-grade homecoming dance, in little in-between moments.

I searched for it in PR photos, in paper snapshots of him visiting sick kids in hospitals with his team.

Surely, he’d offer that same smile to children who needed it most.

But it was never the same one.

I came to think of it as his secret smile—one that belonged only to me.

Now on the doorstep stood a much older Owen.

One with tattoos, sharp angles, stubble, and dark circles around his blue eyes; one with broad shoulders under his white shirt and muscular footballer legs showing under his khaki calf-length pants.

The perfect mixture of laid-back and stylish. Right out of British Vogue.

But there was no smile on his face. Secret or otherwise.