Olympic diver Camille Wallace and her sister Willamina learn the ‘truth
about the love and devotion of the Hightower men’ only two nights before
Willamina’s wedding through their cloud account shared with Mina’s fiancé, and
328 images of a bachelor party featuring their doppelgangers ‘entertaining’
Kent and Kyle. Tragedy followed.
Fifteen years later, can Camille and Kyle clear the water between them
and start over, or is Ice Cold Coach Wally too stubborn to forgive? Did those
pictures justify the secret Camille kept and what it costed Kyle?
They say, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” but what if those words
were based on a lie told by a desperate brother beholding to a murderous
gangster? How can two people overcome heartache when the last decade and a half
of suffering were pointless?
Sneak Peek!
Chapter 1
Sometimes the happiest dreams lead to the most
heartbreaking moments.
Two years after the Summer Olympics...
Willamina
Wallace paced in her bathroom, it was 11:30 at night and she had woken up from
a wonderful dream, driven to an all-night pharmacy, and rushed home. Her sister’s
phone went to voicemail, so she dialed it again and again until Camille
answered.
“Somebody
better be dead, sis. I have a seven to seven at the call center tomorrow,”
Camille grumbled.
“I
had a dream... an amazing dream. I think I’m pregnant with twins, I can’t wait
to tell Kent!” Willamina burst out excitedly, then giggled as she heard her
sister fall out of bed.
“Wait,
what? Start over. Did you see a doctor about this? When did you find out you
were pregnant?” Camille scrambled up off the floor.
Mina
laughed. “Calm down, Hurricane Camille. I told you, silly, I had a dream, and I
saw twin divers competing. They looked just like us except they had Kent’s blue
eyes and dark hair. They were so pretty and so graceful. I was so happy
watching them dive.”
“Mina,
have you even taken a pregnancy test?” Camille demanded tiredly.
“I
am waiting on one now, Cami. Don’t be so grumpy. You need to accept when Kyle asks
you to marry him, so we can be sisters and sisters-in-law and have our babies
at the same time.”
“I
told you, Mina. It was a one-time thing; it won’t happen again.”
“Don’t
you mean two-time thing that won’t happen again and again?” Mina giggled because
she could practically hear her sister blushing as Cami stammered in denial
while she interrupted, “He really likes you. He asks Kent about you all the
time. Kent says Kyle hasn’t looked at a girl since Sophia, and honestly, Kent
and Kris were worried he had switched teams or decided to become a monk or something
and was afraid to tell them before Cancun.”
“He
hasn’t switched teams, trust me. But I just don’t know if I can trust him, I
mean what if he’s a player like Kris or worse, what if he… is like Ron,”
Camille almost whispered the last three words.
Mina
got quiet for a moment, “You gotta let it go, Cami, they all went to jail for
what they did to you and Violet. They won’t get out for a long time. It’s time
to take a chance on a guy who worships you. He’s...”
“I
am not having this conversation with you again,” Cami said in a dead voice.
“Well,
too bad! I have your wedding planned already. I got twenty more seconds and I
don’t want my sister to end up a spinster! If you could get married and
pregnant right away, then we could have our own synchronized swim team,” Mina
snickered, “And we could call them the blue
butterfly-ettes.”
“Have
you been drinking? Cause that’s bad for the baby,” Cami snarked.
“Babies!
I dreamed it was twins,” Mina reminded.
“Just
read the damn test,” Cami begged.
“Okay,
two lines but one is kinda fuzzy... Is that a yes or a no?” Mina was giggling
as she turned the test around trying to figure out if it was two lines.
“Oh
my gosh, send me a picture,” she insisted, almost screaming out her happiness
at the thought of being an aunt.
Cami
was grateful her job gave her a three-phone plan with unlimited sharing and
automatic cloud storage. A perk she shared with her sister and her sister’s
fiancé Kent, who, unlike his younger brother, was trying to make his way
through graduate architecture school without relying on the family money.
Cami
facepalmed as she heard the call drop. Her sister was the worst with
technology. If Mina was pregnant, Cami decided she was calling in tomorrow to
go baby shopping. She waited and waited, but the picture didn’t come. Groaning,
she got up and went to her laptop. If Mina took the picture before her phone
died, it would be on their cloud account. Her fingers flew over the keys. Leaving
it as her slow internet loaded, she made cocoa while she tried to call her
sister’s phone.
Finally,
Cami dialed the landline, “Your phone’s dead again, isn’t it? Willow tree, you
gotta plug it in every day.” A strange, muffled noise sounded like sobbing.
Cami had a momentary panic. “Sis, what’s wrong? Willamina, talk to me, are you
hurt? Do I need to call 9-1-1?”
“I...
I logged into the cloud to email you the picture and... And Kent is...” More
sobbing made the rest of her words unintelligible.
Cami
rushed back to her computer and choked on her own heart as it broke. Falling
and shattering her arm poolside had been painful, but not as painful as what
she was seeing on her laptop. Cami instantly regretted letting herself fall in
love with Kyle Hightower when she knew his youngest brother Kris’s reputation
for being a player on campus. Her sister was sobbing about Kent wouldn’t do
this to her, but the images were of the Hightower brothers, the men they loved,
at a topless club, being ‘attended to’ by several women, two of whom looked
remarkably like the sisters. The shock wore off as it was replaced by an icy
cold rage, a blizzard formed in Camille’s heart.
“That
son of a... I... how could he? Oh, I’ll kill him! Both of them! I’ll cut them
into bait. I’ll drop them in the Gulf for the blue crabs,” Cami ranted, biting
off the urge to spew profanities because her aunt had raised her with the strict
manners that ladies didn’t cuss.
Another
set of images populated, and Mina choked out, “Oh Gawd, I think... I... I’m
going to be sick.”
The
anguished voice of her sister’s misery dragged Camille back from the high of
her rage. “Mina, log off. Log off now. It’s not good for the baby for you to be
so stressed. I want you to go to the Ridgeline and stay with Beau and Gramma
and Grandpa. I’ll handle the wedding cancel.” Nothing happened so Cami snapped
at her, “Willamina Grace Wallace, I said log off! I can still see your icon.
Look, sis, we’ve seen enough, we know the truth. You need to think about the
baby.”
Camille
watched her sister’s icon go offline, while she listened to Mina sob about how
Kent wasn’t like Kris; he had never once gone to a place like that. Kent and
his older brother, Kyle, had promised them both it was just going to be cards
and cigars and a few shows for the bachelor party, not strippers.
“Right...
shows,” Cami thought bitterly.
More
images appeared every few minutes. Cami felt sick as she noticed the girl who
looked remarkably like Mina giving Kent a lap dance. He was staring at her with
glazed adoring eyes as his hands roamed all over her. Over his shoulder, she
could see Kyle with a woman who had a blue butterfly painted on her abdomen
between her breast and her navel and knew the woman was supposed to be her doppelganger
as Cami unconsciously crossed her arms over the tattoo that rested between her
breasts.
In
her memories, Kyle seemed so sincere in his attention and Cami believed in his
affection and honesty. Believed it enough that he was the first man she had
willingly given herself to. They texted and called for two months. At the
rehearsal dinner, she longed for the practice wedding to be over, so she could
be in his arms. She wore a stretch velvet dress that showed off her curves and
her cleavage, but most of all, her butterfly tattoo. Neither slept that night,
and he kissed her tenderly before taking a cab back to his hotel. It was the
last time she saw him before he flew out with his brothers for Kent’s bachelor
party. Cami shook herself, loathing that she had ever let him touch her tattoo.
Seeing they hired strippers to pretend to be her and her sister for the
bachelor party made her want to vomit. Enraged, she sent Kyle a text message.
‘We can see you boys.’
Two
images later, she watched him looking at his phone. In the next image, he was
back cupping the breast of the stripper who looked like her. She forced herself
to focus on her crying, emotional sister.
“Mina
honey, you need to go to sleep. You’re pregnant and the baby will need for you
to be rested.”
“Cami,
what am I going to do?” her sister’s voice wavered pitifully.
“You
are not going to worry; I have over half a million in sponsor money put back. I’ve
never touched it. We don’t need the Hightowers or their money. We don’t need
anything from them, you and me, just like it has been since mom and dad died,”
Camille tried to sound calm and strong, but inside she was shattering as an
image of Kyle with his face buried in the stripper’s cleavage popped up.
“You
and me and baby makes three?” Mina asked timidly, quoting a nursery rhyme.
“That’s
right, willow tree, only now we’re gonna have to find you a new nickname; you
won’t be stick-thin anymore,” Cam tried to make light as her soul hemorrhaged.
“What
are they doing now?” Mina whispered in a tiny voice.
Cami
couldn’t lie to her sister. She never lied to anyone. She didn’t have that
particular ability because her eyes or face gave her away. She couldn’t lie
over the phone to her sister because her voice would give her away. “They are
still getting lap dances and booby facials.”
Mina
choked on a sob, “I’m going to take a shower and go to bed. Don’t watch anymore,
Cami. Just... It’s better... better that it’s before the wedding.”
“I
am sending you a ticket to Colorado, just print it out, and take a taxi to the
airport. I’ll have Beau pick you up. He is supposed to be flying out tomorrow
afternoon with Gramma and Grandpa anyway. I’ll… I’ll take care of them and the
wedding cancel… I love you, Willamina.”
“I
love you, Camille. Don’t do anything too crazy with your hurricane temper. Don’t
hurt them,” Mina begged. Their grandfather always said Camille’s temper was as
bad as the hurricane she was named after.
“Fine,
I won’t harm a hair on their heads, I promise,” Cami vowed, “I’ll just show
them that a picture is worth a thousand words, and I am really good with words.”
After
her sister hung up, Cami stayed online to make sure Mina didn’t log back in as
she blamed herself for her sister’s entanglement with the middle Hightower
brother.
A
slip poolside during training less than a year after her bronze medals left her
with a broken arm, concussion, and unable to dive for months so she got a job
at a cellphone carrier call center to pay her bills. When she finally got
through rehab, she had missed the Nationals and the Olympic tryouts. It was a
crushing blow to her spirit and dreams. It would be another semester before she
could try to get her spot back, so she was studying oceanography, biology, and
teaching swimming and water exercise classes at the Houston YMCA. The three
days a week she didn’t have classes, she worked at the call center. It was a
job she hated but it gave her extra cash while she was in school. Her sister
started dating Kent while Cami was in the hospital and soon it was love. Kent
was a nice guy but driven to succeed, and so good for her sister; he was the
rushing river to her calm willow tree. They were the only perfect couple
Camille had ever seen besides their grandparents in Colorado. Fairytales didn’t
happen anymore, but Mina and Kent seemed like the one-in-a-million and in two
days, they were supposed to be having a grand wedding suitable for their love
story, but that fairytale was over now. Cami had hundreds of pictures of the
truth of the love and devotion Kent promised to give only her sister; the same happily
ever after Kyle had promised Cami just two nights ago.
Watching
the pictures appearing, she saw that Kent’s bachelor party went way beyond a
few lap dances and by 4 AM Central Time in Texas, everything Cami had felt for
Kyle was as cold as the water in Antarctica. She called their cousin to leave a
voice mail about the change of plans.
It
was 3 AM Mountain Time, but Beau answered on the third ring, “Cami? Are you
okay?”
“I’m
sorry I woke you. The wedding is off. Kent cheated on Mina, log onto the family
cloud account, but don’t show Grandpa or Gramma.”
In
moments, she got the response she was expecting. Beau was more like a big
brother than a cousin. They spent a year together on their grandfather’s ranch
in Colorado after both sets of their parents died in a small plane crash. Then
Mina and Cami went to Texas to live with their mother’s much older sister so
they could continue diving.
“I
will kill him! I will feed him to the bears!” Beau raged. He had always been
overprotective of the quieter, gentler Willamina. It sounded like his fist was
pounding on the bedside table.
“Easy
Beau, Mina is flying out to Durango tomorrow; I emailed you a copy of her
itinerary. I am putting her on a plane outta here while I deal with this mess.
The Hightowers screwed over the wrong set of sisters,” Camille declared coldly.
“I’ll
be there, tell her I’ll be there.”
“There’s
one more thing, scroll back to midnight to the last thing Mina uploaded.” Cami
held the phone away from her ear and waited for him to see the pregnancy test.
“I
will feed him alive! To! The! Coyotes!” Beau roared, then ranted, “Oh Kent is
so dead! I liked him but now... Wait, is that Kyle too? Those… those…”
“I
know, Beau, but please let me handle this. Sis needs you to be strong for her
till I can get there. I love you, big bear.”
“I
love you too, cliff jumper. But I swear, if they set foot on our ranch, gawd in
heaven won’t be able to find their bodies,” Beau vowed vehemently.
“I
know and I’ll help you bury them, but right now, we gotta focus on Mina and the
baby.” Cami swallowed hard, remembering Mina’s broken sobs.
“Be
as vicious as you can, you make them pay, Cami, humiliate them and I’ll keep
sis safe.” He hung up without saying goodbye. Beau was funny that way, he never
said goodbye.
She
texted Mina that Beau would get her on the other end of her flight. An
immediate ’thanks’ had
Cami worrying about her sister getting enough rest. Somehow, she knew Mina
spent the night lying awake and crying, just like she had. It was a sister
thing, a twin thing, even though they weren’t twins in the traditional way.
Camille and Willamina were Irish twins; sisters who were born only eleven months
apart. Cami knew what her sister was thinking as the sun lightened the horizon
and texted her.
‘He’s not worth it. Get some rest
before you call the taxi.’
Mina
didn’t respond.
