The Rivals - Dylan Allen Page 0,309

before - taking off without a word. But never for this long. My kids love him more than just about anyone else. He’s more present in their lives than their father and his extended absence has been felt keenly by them. Especially by Eva.

“Where’s your grandmother and does she know you’re using her phone??”

“She’s in the bath. Eva stressed her out, so she needed to relax.” He affects my mother’s voice and I chuckle. He’s an excellent mimic. I normally chastise him for his impersonations - I don’t want him poking fun at people. But he’s so spot on and it’s more of an homage than a mimic and his answering giggle feels like a perfect place to say goodbye. “Alright, honey, I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”

“Wait, can you help me turn on Paw Patrol, first? Evie’s locked in her room and she’s got that keep out sign on her door.”

My ten-year-old is on the cusp of tweenhood and her patience for her twin brothers’ antics is virtually non-existent, and the last thing I want is to be refereeing fights over the phone. “Of course, darling, but let me go somewhere quiet and I’ll call you back.” With a sigh of longing and one last look across the pool, I head inside.

Chapter 12

Chasing Venus

Stone

The view of the horizon from my poolside table is breathtaking. That kiss of sea and sky is a siren song extolling the vast and limitless adventures I’ve yet to take. Proximity to water is the thing I miss most living in Pamplona. It’s a stunning town set deep in the valley of a mountain range in Eastern Colombia called Valle del Espiritu Santo. It’s a humble, charming community that settled in the 16th century. It bustles with commerce by day and vibrates with revelry by night.

But the excellent food, the welcoming people, and the endless promise of adventure that can be found within a day’s drive of the city, can’t compare to the crash of waves and the cool, constant breeze that wafts over me like a Sea of Cortez’s sigh of contentment. This water is always where I find equilibrium. I could stay here forever.

A loud shriek pulls my eyes to the other side of the pool just in time to see a woman fly through the air and land in the water with a splash so big that several cries of complaint rise up around us.

When I turn back toward the horizon, I scan the dining area and see Regan Wilde sitting across the pool in all her windswept, golden brown glory.

She leans back in her chair and I get a view of her upper body that makes my mouth water.

Her white romper opens from her neck to her navel, exposing just a hint of the rounded full breasts beneath. A gold chain glints against her exposed chest and snakes a trail down her flat, toned stomach and disappears into the waistband of her shorts.

Beautiful is too tame a word to describe her. Even when I was just a boy who didn’t know my ass from my dick, I knew she was something rare and special.

I take a swig of my beer to wash down the nostalgia that’s clouding my judgement. All of that was a whole lifetime ago; In this lifetime, Tyson Wilde, her younger brother, is one of my best friends and one of the few people in the entire world that I trust.

I met him when I tried out for the track team at U of H. He brought a box of Shipley’s glazed donuts to practice and offered them around. Everyone reacted like they were nuns being asked to suck a dick.

Except me. We paired up for team workouts and discovered that a weakness for glazed donuts was just one of the things we had in common.

When the team workout was done, everyone else was laid out, legs turned to jelly, lungs ragged with exertion. I headed outside for a run. Tyson, who’s competitive streak asked if he could join me. I humored him and said yes but warned that I was setting a six-minute mile pace.”

“Why? You tired?” he asked before he took off. At the end of a fast, hard, flat out run that left us both gasping for breath he extended his hand, a grin of respect on his face and said, “I’m the Tyson Wilde, not to be confused with my less handsome, much older brother Remington.”

My heart was already racing from the exertion of the