Heart storms, p.1
Heart Storms, page 1
ALSO by
N. Christine Samuelson:
Eternal Seas
Echoes of Love
Praise for Eternal Seas:
…what a beautiful story. Eternal Seas is an emotional women’s fiction with lyrical narration set in Key West. … The mystery and romance added to the depth of the plot. … The spiritual element … kept me turning the pages. … The ending: WOW! … If you’re looking to be swept away on a journey from fear to love, … Eternal Seas … is a perfect summer read. – N.N.Light’s Book Heaven
Five Star Reviews for Eternal Seas & Echoes of Love Complete reviews are published on Amazon, Goodreads, BookBub, Barnes & Noble and other online retailers.
Highlights of Reviews:
Eternal Seas
… A perfect summer read … Dreams, the distant past of over a hundred years ago, and fate interweave in this compelling novel. … premonitions and flashbacks for Ella … Fate, History, and the
Eternal Seas. – Booksprout.com reviewers
Echoes of Love
… Beautifully written and delivered, the imagery is very vivid … An amazing book … chemistry between the characters is off the hook! The storyline is amazing! … I don’t think I have ever got so worked up about a book before. – Booksprout.com reviewers
…Author has written a stunningly vivid and captivating book, stories intertwined with past, present and future. - Amazon reviewer
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
HEART STORMS
COPYRIGHT © 2019 by N. Christine Samuelson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
Contact: christine@NChristineSamuelson.com
Visit author at: https://www.NChristineSamuelson.com
Print ISBN 978-1-54397-429-4
Digital ISBN 978-1-54397-430-0
Publisher: BookBaby; www.BookBaby.com
7905 N. Crescent Blvd., Pennsauken, NJ 08110
Published in the United States of America
To the Grandestparents:
Eva Eleesbet Röe & Harry Ellsworth Rose
Mary Mottola & James Cyro Ventola
You survived great storms in life but weathered them
together through all your adult lives. You gave the best
of your love, yourselves, and life to your families.
I forever give you thanks and love.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to first reader H. Eve S., and to beta readers and editors, especially Courtney Kelly for insightful, skilled critiques and advice helping to make this book the best it could be. Deep gratitude to all those who gave input on cover and copy, especially Salli G., Evie S., Lisa V.F., and Jeff and Christina V.
Huge thanks to family and friends for their patience, understanding and support for all the missed dates and family time due to my writing schedule and deadlines. Special thanks to great friend, Salli G. for support, input, and delectable treats to keep me going just when I needed it most.
Heart Storms
~
N. Christine Samuelson
“When three people’s lives collide
in a perfect storm of
heartbreak and ruin, betrayal and love,
will they be destroyed or transformed by their destiny?”
We Have the Same Heart
There is a place deep inside where our individual stories cling together to form a common knowledge of humanity.
In different lands with different enemies
within and outside ourselves,
no matter the color of our skin
or the place of our birth,
our religion or god or absence thereof;
no matter our homes or cities, our jobs, or money;
our size or sex or preferences,
nor education or health or sickness,
or strengths and weaknesses of body, mind, and spirit,
no matter our beliefs or politics or culture,
we fight the same battles,
we wage the same wars.
Our lives suffer kindred loss,
our hearts echo the same grief,
our teardrops fill with collective pain.
Deep in our souls, we know the truth of who we are.
Yet we rage, fear and hate in the quest for
peace, love, and happiness.
Our spirits struggle to find the grace already there,
our lives thrash maniacally on a quest for harmony,
our hearts seek love desperately,
searching for the birthright robbed by the acts of living.
No one knows for certain why we move through
pain and loss to find healing and life;
why we go through hell to find paradise.
But we do, each in our unique way.
Underneath all the different faces, places, actions, words,
love and hatred, and lives and deaths of every one of us–
our inner spaces are common, our language is the same,
we share the same song; we have the same heart.
— by N. Christine Samuelson
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Table of Contents:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 1
JADE ARMSTRONG
Jade married the wrong man. But it took five years and one morning to find out. As she gathered her things to leave for her job managing a hotel in Los Angeles, her husband said, “We need to talk… now.”
“I’m going out the door. Can’t it wait?”
“No.” He sat on a stool at the kitchen island. “And you might want to tell your boss you’ll be late. This might take a while.” He looked down at his hands, wringing them together.
While Jade grabbed the phone to text her boss, her stomach sickened and her nerves tingled. Something awful was about to happen. Scenarios whirled through her mind—Did he lose his job, is he sick, did someone die, is he in trouble? Whatever it is, we’ll deal with it, we’ll survive and go on. She stood across the island from him.
Still not looking at her, he spewed out statements so fast she heard only certain words, only the most impossible, devastating words: “leaving for good… have to… the end… sorry.”
His sentences were drowned out by the shattering white noise of her denial and heartbreak. This wasn’t happening. No, no, no, this wasn’t her husband speaking even though it was his face and voice. This was no ‘talk;’ it was a bomb dropped in the middle of her life with the words no woman ever wants to hear.
Inside her head, Jade’s reaction was, ‘This is not my life, not the one I agreed to, not the one I planned on and saved for, the one I envisioned since I was a girl.’ While outside of herself, her husband’s words burst like firecrackers in her head, “… other women… you and I hardly ever together… drank too much… drugs… gambling… I love someone else, didn’t mean to, sorry… addicted, need help.”
In the same way a deep scratch on a CD causes the music to halt and skip until silenced by pressing the stop button, Jade’s brain skipped at the deep cuts of his revelations. With shock magnifying at hearing each confession, Jade’s desperate thoughts skipped to: If he cleans up, he’ll come to his senses; SKIP: He’ll revert to the man I married. Another SKIP: We’ll have a second chance. SKIP again: “I’ll help you,” she pleaded, “we’ll do this together.” But there was no magic button to stop his words.
His uncaring expression froze into a grimace while he slung words like darts, her heart being the target. “No. Nothing will change how I feel. I don’t need your help. I don’t want it.”
Through sobs she asked, “But why? I love you. We’re partners.”
He finally looked into her eyes. “Because I love her. She’ll be my partner as soon as our divorce is final.”
Jade’s knees buckled and the room spun around. When they’d married, her mother, Maggie, had given her a fairytale wedding because she’d never seen her daughter so happy as with this man who lit up her world. Now Prince Charming was leaving, taking his light and love, making her world go black as she crumpled to the floor. She became conscious a minute later and found herself in his arms, her head still spinning. “Please tell me this isn’t real; it’s some kind of nightmare.”
He leaned Jade against a kitchen cabinet and told her she wasn’t dreaming. He sat on the floor beside her gazing straight ahead to avoid seeing the agony in her eyes.
Jade’s breath turned shallow; her mind swam in a fog of disbelief. When he spoke, his voice showed no emotion. “I don’t mean to be cruel, but this is real and you need to deal with it.”
Stunned and grasping at anything to fix this, she placed her head on his shoulder and her hand on his arm hoping he’d feel her love and respond in kind. “Why are you doing this? Now? So fast? You don’t have to do this.” With no response, she said, “Please tell me why. You owe me the truth.”
He wiped perspiration from his forehead through his hair, and muttered, “There’s no easy way to say it. I have to do this. She’s pregnant. I’m going to marry her.”
Jade yanked her head and arm away as if he were a leper and shrieked, “A child? You bastard. Why would any woman want a cheating, drug-addicted man for a husband and father to her child?”
“I wasn’t addicted when I met her. My affair with her differed from the others…”
“Others?!” Jade screamed so loud he jerked his head back. Her voice was part sobbing, part gasping for air like being punched in the gut and stabbed at the same time. “You had other women?!”
With his head hung low, he uttered a barely audible, “Yes.”
Jade’s mind paralyzed like he’d slammed her head with a bat. Incapable of speech and struggling to accept this new reality, she asked herself, ‘Why?’ Her heart split in half as she wondered how and why her husband did this to her; how did she not see it coming? Her rational mind said, ‘He was never home long enough. He hid his true self and actions.’ Then her conscience argued, ‘You didn’t see it because you didn’t want to. You wanted the fairytale; you lived it and trusted him.’ Jade closed her eyes and clutched her head to hold it together. She delved deep into her memory where she’d tucked suspicions of him away but never let them out, never confronted him, and barely whispered, “Why?”
He shrugged. “I guess because I could. We rarely had time together and you know I can’t be alone or bored or serious. I did what made me happy.”
Jade was afraid to say or do anything because she wanted to kill him, to get him out of her face and off the planet except she wasn’t capable of murder. Her dreams were the only things dying now as she realized she’d expected the fairytale—so much so it blocked the truth of him out. Jade vowed to never trust the too-good-to-be-true guy again, or the storybook life and the happy ending. There were no such things.
With Jade’s silence, her husband assumed she waited for further explanation. “Her family owns one of the largest vineyards in Napa, it’s how we met. I drank a lot, still do. I hid the drugs from her as I did you and gambled away a small fortune. So, when this wealthy woman wanted me, it solved the problems of my miserable life. She’s paying for my rehab because she wants a clean and sober husband. The pregnancy was an accident, changing birth control methods, or so she said. In any case…”
Jade stood and cut him off. “In any case, whether she tricked you or not, you’re marrying her for her money, right?”
He stood, too, hands jammed into his pockets, head down. “Yeah, partly; but she’s got the whole package I need to turn my life around—prestigious family, a career at her vineyard, social connections, great homes, cars, travel. A kid cements the deal.” He stared at Jade. “It’s what you wanted to hear, isn’t it, the whole truth? Now you can officially hate me forever.”
His words shredded her insides. Jade’s spirit twisted and snapped, leaving her jagged and raw. Her usual compassionate, loving soul gave rise to a shadow that morning, a dark side had to express itself or eat her alive. “I hated you when you said you loved someone else. Now I detest you. And I’m taking everything since you’ll be ‘Mr. Rich Bastard’ now. I’ll need the house and car and bank accounts to start over. You’ll have to deal with that.”
He opened the liquor cabinet, grabbed the vodka, poured himself a full glass and drank half of it in three gulps. “About our assets. There’s something you need to know.”
Jade’s body raged like fire inside anticipating his next words. She wrapped her arms around her waist and ran to the sink, about to be sick. “You didn’t. No, please, don’t say it.”
“I have to, better you hear it now. There’s nothing left. The drugs and gambling took all the savings. I mortgaged the house and now we can’t sell it for enough to pay both mortgages. In fact, I stopped paying them months ago. I hid the bank notices from you using a P.O. Box. Everything was in my name and phone, so only I got the creditor calls. I paid utilities and cell phones so you wouldn’t suspect anything.” While gulping down the vodka his cheeks and nose flushed cherry red, and he shot Jade an accusatory look. “Maybe if your damn job wasn’t more important than me, if we’d seen each other and enjoyed life, this wouldn’t have happened.”
Angry flames rose from her gut to her head so fast her body felt boiled and her head wanted to explode. “We agreed to this situation!” She recalled how their plans for the future resulted in the marriage working like a revolving door where they passed each other coming and going, their schedules allowing for only a couple days together each week. Her management job in the hospitality field meant working most nights and some weekends. He traveled five days a week as a wine sales executive up and down the coast. But by mutual agreement, they accepted that way of life because it was the price of admission to their grand future. They intended to devote most of their time to careers and making money. They’d planned to sell their house for a huge profit in a couple years, then buy a bed-and-breakfast inn. After becoming financially successful and stable, they’d start a family.
He said nothing, his eyes downcast.
He’s coming up with a rebuttal. Jade’s arms tingled with rage because he had always seemed happy. She’d been happy, too, but she’d believed his lies and excuses. The indications of something amiss had been there and grown slowly over time like a hidden cancer. She’d been in denial until now, until this stage four with death closing in.
While Jade had worked hard, sacrificed and kept their dream alive, he’d been conducting a life separate from hers. Her gut churned, violently releasing bile and anger into the sink. He moved beside her and rubbed her back. Still bent over, she yelled, “Get away from me!” and jabbed him hard in the ribs with her elbow. He groaned and rubbed his chest, looking at her as if she were a lunatic.
“You’re damn right, I’m crazy. I’ve always loved you and been loyal. But I hate you now. I trusted you with everything—our house, our money, my money, and this is what I get? I worked hard and thought you did, too, for our future, not to indulge in every bodily compulsion to keep you entertained when we were apart. And you have the audacity to throw it back on me? To blame me? You got a real brass set and if you don’t get out of my sight now, one good kick will take care of those, too.”
He put his hands up, like a thief caught. “Okay, enough. I admit it, I’m a shit. I am.”
