Paradise Wild Read Online Free PDF

came around his desk to shake hands. “I’ll get the name of a lawyer to you in a few days. Where can I reach you?”
    “I checked into the Plaza this morning as Jared Burk.”
     
    The ride back to the hotel was pleasant. Jared had the driver take a short tour of the city first. The weather was a brisk sixty-five degrees on this early June day, warm for Bostonians, but chilly compared to Hawaii. Jared hoped he would not have to stay here too long, especially into the colder months.
    The carriage entered the Back Bay area. When Jared saw the Beacon Street sign, his whole body went stiff. Which one of these tall townhouses belonged to Samuel Barrows? Whichever one it was, Jared would be invited to that house soon. He would make Samuel Barrows’ acquaintance. And then somehow, in some way, he would break the man, ruin him. Killing was too quick. Jared wanted him to live a broken man, to know what had happened, and why.
    Jared remembered the first time he had heard the name Samuel Barrows spoken from his mother’s lips. He had been seven years old. Life was good. He lived in the country with his mother, while his father tended business in Honolulu many miles away, making frequent visits to his family.
    Jared and Leonaka were just beginning to learn responsibility, being allowed to help plant sugar cane. But they were quick to slip away to the beach and meet Dayna. The beach was their playground, surfboards their toys. One day when Jared stole away to the beach by himself he found his mother there, walking hand in hand with a tall man he had never seen before. That night he asked his mother who the strange haole was, and she told him. Samuel Barrows, an old friend from Boston, where his mother came from.
    A week later his father came home and for the first time in his life Jared heard his parents fighting. They were in the enclosed patio at the back of the house andwere unaware that Jared was in the back yard, only a few feet away.
    “Who in damnation is this man John Pierce saw you embracing?” Rodney Burkett had begun.
    “John?”
    “Yes, our neighbor! He came all the way to Honolulu just to tell me what he saw—you and another man behaving in an unseemly manner on the beach!”
    “There is no reason for you to be upset,” Ranelle answered in a quiet voice. “It was just Samuel Barrows, and we embraced only to say good-bye.”
    “Barrows? The man you were supposed to marry? The man who married an heiress instead, because his family needed money?”
    “Yes, I told you about him.”
    “What in God’s name was he doing here?”
    There was a long pause. “He—he came for me. He said he still loved me.”
    Something shattered against a wall, a glass or a vase. “He still loves you! What about his rich wife? Did she conveniently die?”
    “Rodney, I told you there is no reason to get upset.” Ranelle started crying. “He’s gone now, gone back to Boston.”
    “You didn’t answer my question, Ranelle. Is he a free man now?”
    “No, he’s still married. But he would have left her if I were free, regardless of the disgrace. There are no children in that marriage, and his family is solvent again. But he didn’t know that I had married, that I have a son.”
    Quietly, in a torn voice, Rodney asked, “Did he ask you to leave me?”
    “Rodney, stop it!” Ranelle pleaded. “There’s no point in it. Samuel’s gone—he won’t ever come again.”
    “Did he?”
    “Yes, he wanted me to go with him. He said he would take Jared, too. But you can see I’m still here. I told him no!” Ranelle began screaming hysterically. “He is eight years too late! Too late!”
    Jared ran down to the beach then, to get away from the sound of his mother crying. He had never heard her cry before, never heard his father’s voice raised so angrily or with such pain.
    Ranelle Burkett was never the same after that. She had always been a gentle and loving mother, devoting her life to her son and husband. Now she was distant,