Riptide (Sand Dollar Shoal Book 2) Read online

  RIPTIDE

  By

  Pandora Pine

  Riptide

  Copyright © Pandora Pine 2017

  All Rights Reserved

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, places, events, business establishments or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First Digital Edition: April 2017

  PROLOGUE

  December…

  The letter was buried in a pile of bills, a men’s health magazine and grocery circulars. Drake DeMelo didn’t look twice at the stack of mail before he tossed it onto the already overcrowded kitchen table.

  He never took the time to go through his mail when he got home. Instead, he shed his clothes on the way to the bedroom and hopped into the shower. Before he did anything else, he needed to wash the day off his body.

  After a childhood spent in several different foster homes in New York City with more reading tutors hoping to conquer his dyslexia than he could ever remember, Drake had headed out to California after he finally graduated from high school to live his dream of becoming an actor. The only thing he’d ever been good at in high school had been drama club.

  Just like every other budding star, Drake had spent his days trying to secure auditions and his nights waiting tables. He’d worked for a high end Italian restaurant where it wasn’t unusual to wait on famous movie stars and directors.

  His life had changed for the better the night he’d waited on Galen “The Mountain” Roberts. Galen was Drake’s favorite gay porn star. Nicknamed “The Mountain” because once his cock was finished with you, it felt like you’d climbed Everest.

  Not being one for gushing over celebrities, which he’d seen his fair share of while waiting tables, Drake had quietly mentioned being a fan as well as an actor himself. At that, Galen had stood up and had given Drake the once over. At 6’5” he was a few inches taller than the porn star and had broader shoulders.

  Galen ran a hand through Drake’s silky dark hair before reaching for his wallet. Leaning closer to Drake he whispered in his ear before handing him a business card.

  “I’d love to fuck that tight ass raw,” was what Galen had whispered. The card had been for Donovan Charles, Galen’s director of choice. Before they’d gotten together to make movies, they’d just been a guy with a monster dick and a guy with a camera. Together, they’d made porn history. It was estimated The Mountain had fucked hundreds of men in the course of his five year career.

  Sick of not being able secure more traditional auditions, Drake had called the number on the card the next morning and had found himself in Donovan Charles’ office later that afternoon showing off his “skills.” After two hours of sucking and being fucked by the director, he’d been offered a contract with his film company, Nasty Boys Productions.

  That meeting was six years ago and Drake had never looked back. Over those years he’d been fucked raw by Galen more times than he could count.

  As famous as Galen had been before he’d met Drake, or Damien Lovecock as he’d been named by Donovan Charles, his fame skyrocketed once the two of them started working together. No other man had been able to take all of Galen’s cock the way Drake could.

  He’d spent the day being fucked by Galen’s near foot-long cock. Drake knew he’d be feeling the effects of this long, hard day for the next week. Not to mention the sore throat and jaw he had from working Galen’s tool into his throat. Guys he met thought being a porn star was glamorous, but his ass and face could testify it was anything but.

  Leaning into the shower spray, all of the muscles in Drake’s back screamed in protest. For the majority of the day he’d been contorted into various positions that would best capture his ass taking every legendary inch of Galen’s cock.

  Aside from his cock, the other standout thing Galen had going for him was his stamina. Using a combination of cock rings and his own iron will, it had taken Galen three hours to come for the first time. The money shot had landed all over Drake’s chest and face. The scene ended with The Mountain feeding Drake every last drop of his release.

  He rested the palms of his hands against the tiled shower wall, letting the hot water sluice down his body. After the pounding he took today, the only thing he wanted now was a cup of earl grey and his bed.

  Drake snorted as he shut off the shower. He was the only porn star he knew of that relaxed between takes with a cup of hot tea. Other men he worked with had other preferences for how they spent their leisure time. Galen was fond of speed, saying it gave him that extra get-up-an-go. Drake certainly could attest to that being the case.

  Drugs were all over the porn scene, but Drake had been careful not to get caught up in them. Pills and powders were pervasive in the industry, but so long as they were out of sight, they were also out of mind. Until they weren’t. He’d seen a lot of promising careers end because guys got hooked and needed the stuff just to get out of bed in the morning.

  Quickly toweling off, Drake shrugged his broad shoulders into his black, silk dressing gown and headed for the kitchen. While he waited for the tea kettle to warm up, he grabbed the mail he’d carelessly thrown on the table. He set the fitness magazine aside to bring to bed with him and started flipping through the letters.

  The first was the cable bill which he hated paying. The cost was over two hundred dollars a month and he only watched five of the hundreds of channels he got. The second letter was his electric bill, while the third was from Nasty Boys Productions, Donovan Charles’ film company and Drake’s employer.

  He ripped the envelope and pulled out a single sheet of paper. Quickly scanning the letter, Drake felt his heart stop beating in his chest. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he whispered to his empty kitchen. The letter was sent to notify him that a performing member of the Nasty Boys had been diagnosed with HIV.

  The industry required all actors to be HIV tested every fourteen days, but it was a well known fact that it could take as long as four months for an infected person to test positive for the virus. In the last two weeks, Drake would guess he’d had about twenty partners. None of them had used condoms.

  He looked around at his condo, done in Italian marble with its high-end stainless-steel appliances. He thought about all of the money piled up in his bank accounts. None of it would be worth a god damn if he were infected too. He looked down at the crumpled letter in his hand.

  It wasn’t a letter. It was a death sentence.

  1

  May…

  Presley Forrester couldn’t remember ever being this happy in his entire life, unless he counted his time at Phillips Andover with his three best friends, Noble Killington, Gregor Allen and Griffin Fox.

  He lovingly rubbed the palm of his hand over the finish of the hotel door before locking it up for the night. He had the crazy urge to press his lips against the wood. After all, this building had saved his sanity, if not his life.

  It had been Griff’s idea to buy the derelict Cape Cod hotel and restore Sand Dollar Shoal to her former glory. Noble had spent the last four months doing just that. Pres had to admit the old girl looked like a million bucks. Now it was his job to make sure everyone knew it and reserved rooms.

  Presley’s parents, both huge Elvis fans, ran their own business called Hound Dog Hooch in Memphis, Tennessee. They had guilt-tripped Pres into work for them once he graduated with his MBA from Harvard. He’d hated every soul-sucking second of working for his parents. Being the bosses’ son didn’t bring him or his ideas respect, only criticism.

  When Gri
ff had brought up the subject of buying the hotel as a way of getting out from under his father’s thumb, Pres had initially scoffed at the idea. Griff’s father, hotel mogul Astor Fox, had been putting pressure on him to run the Central American division of his business and Griff wanted out.

  Presley and Griff had roomed together all through Phillips and then again through their five years at Harvard. No one knew better than Pres how much pressure Griffin’s father was putting on him. This hotel was an opportunity for both men to spread their wings and fly on their own.

  It had been hard telling his parents he wanted out of the family business, but thanks to some advice from Noble, he’d been grooming his successor for months to make the transition easier.

  Stepping out of the hotel, Presley noticed there was no moon or stars, meaning that the storm clouds the weatherman predicted were here. The forecast for the night had been for severe thunderstorms that would be compounded by an astronomically high tide. Presley prayed the ocean stayed where it belonged and didn’t surge into the hotel.

  The beach was only fifty feet or so from the back doors of Sand Dollar Shoal. Running along the right-hand side of the hotel’s access road were six two-bedroom cottages that Noble had also worked to restore. The first tiny house was only set back another twenty feet or so from the ocean. If the local meteorologist was right, Noble and his boyfriend, author Landon Fairchild, were in for a rough and possibly wet night.

  At present, the plan was for Sand Dollar Shoal to be open from Memorial Day in May through Columbus Day weekend in October. Knowing that their “Band of Brothers,” as Gregor had christened them after taking Shakespeare class back at Andover, would want to live as close to each other as possible, Noble had installed central heat and fireplaces, making the cabins livable in any weather New England threw at them.

  Presley and his friends would live in the cottages for the time being. Griff reasoned that if demand were high enough, those cottages could also be made available for hotel guests. He couldn’t deny that he loved living so close to his friends again.

  The band had broken up after their four years at Andover with Pres and Griff driving twenty-nine miles south to Cambridge, Massachusetts to attend Harvard. Gregor had joined the Navy after September 11, and Noble had taken over the running of his father’s construction business while Nick Killington had recovered from a heart attack.

  Over the years they’d gotten together for various events, the last of which had been an intervention the friends staged for Noble back in September. He’d started drinking after a devastating car accident killed his husband, Vincent.

  Not that an intervention for an ailing friend was the best reason to get together, but Pres had known in that moment that he’d never wanted to be so far away from his friends again. It was twenty minutes later that Griffin announced the plan to buy Sand Dollar Shoal and make them business partners.

  As Presley walked by the first cabin, he could see Landon sitting in the back window of the cottage at his desk. Landon had shown up at Sand Dollar Shoal back in January hoping the grand views of the ocean would help break his months-long bout with writer’s block. What Landon hadn’t known was that the hotel had been closed for the last two years.

  Not only had Sand Dollar Shoal saved Landon’s writing career, he and Noble had fallen in love in the process. Presley knew the light being on in the kitchen meant Noble was making dinner for the two of them.

  Sighing heavily, Presley kept walking. He desperately wanted what Noble and Landon had, but with as many hours as he was working to get the hotel ready for its grand reopening in a few short weeks, he barely had time for a shower and rushed spank session, never mind finding the man of his dreams and starting a relationship.

  The love of Noble’s life had just shown up at the hotel out of the blue. What were the chances something like that could happen a second time? Slim to none would be Presley’s guess.

  Walking past Griffin’s cottage, he could smell grilling meat and heard Queen’s Crazy Little Thing Called Love, which meant Gregor was with him. Gregor listened to Queen almost constantly which was a good thing. When Gregor started playing Metallica, it meant there was trouble.

  He knew if he popped around back, he’d be welcomed to join Griff and Gregor’s barbeque. Hell, he’d be welcomed to join Landon and Noble for dinner too, if he’d knocked on their door. Tonight, he just wanted to take a hot shower and settle in with a frozen pizza and marathon Fuller House.

  The first fat drops of rain splattered against his face as he put the key in the lock. It looked like the weatherman was right this time. A bolt of lightning lit up the April night. He stepped inside the cottage just as the thunder rolled and rain started pouring out of the sky. Presley crossed his fingers that the weather wouldn’t knock out the WiFi and ruin his plans for the night.

  XX

  It had turned into the day from hell. Drake had been determined today would be his last day on the road after having spent the last two weeks driving cross-country from California. He’d checked out of his New York hotel room before the sun had risen.

  It should have been about a five hour ride from Kingston, New York, where he’d stopped for the night, to Hyannis, Massachusetts, but fourteen hours later, Drake was still on the road.

  He’d gotten stuck behind tourists who were doing ten miles an hour on Route 2 in Western Massachusetts. It was impossible to pass on that windy mountain road. When he’d finally ditched the tourists and stopped for lunch, the waitress lost his order ticket and then he’d been stuck in traffic for hours after two eighteen-wheelers had collided on the Mass Pike approaching Boston.

  Drake finally made it across the Sagamore Bridge and onto Cape Cod at 9:00pm. After all the time he’d spent researching the Cape, he was bummed that it was already dark and he couldn’t see the Cape Cod Canal or the town of Sandwich on the other side of the bridge, but now that he was going to live here, he supposed he could drive across this bridge anytime he wanted.

  All Drake wanted was a hot meal and a warm bed for the night. The only problem was that he had no idea where to stay. Cell phone service had been spotty at best driving through Western Massachusetts and when he finally got a signal in a town called Templeton, which made him think of the rat in Charlotte’s Web, voice control stopped working on his phone. He was so frustrated he wanted to scream.

  His ultimate goal was Hyannis Massachusetts. Until the day the dart hit that spot on the map, Drake had never heard of the Cape Cod town before. Growing up in foster care didn’t afford him an opportunity to head to the Cape for a vacation. Drake never went on vacation until he started earning his own money.

  If Drake stopped to put things in perspective, today was not the day from hell, not by a long shot. He’d had a lot of actual days from hell in the last six months, starting with the day he opened that letter from Nasty Boys Productions.

  Other days from hell had followed with him getting blood test after blood test to see if he had a disease that would ravage his body before it killed him. Then there were the days he spent pacing around his condo waiting for the results to come back.

  The day after the letter came Drake had called Donovan Charles to break his contract and quit his job. His boss had tried to talk him out of leaving by offering him more money and top billing, but Drake wasn’t having any of it. He was officially retired from the porn business regardless of his test results.

  Drake had spent the last six months hunkered down in his condo eating bad take-out and marathoning television shows he’d been too busy to watch. His plan had been simple. He was going to get tested every two weeks, as if he was still working in the industry, for six months. He’d decide what was next for him after the results of the last test came back.

  He hadn’t had many people in his life he would consider actual role models, with the exception of one of his foster mothers back in New York. Cindy Marchand had been a kind-hearted woman who’d taken in over eighty foster kids by the time Drake had come to live with her.
She lived the power of positive thinking as a lifestyle. Drake had always thought that was hokey. Until his death sentence came in the mail.

  The morning of his first HIV test, he’d decided it couldn’t hurt to put that power to work for him. All through the blood draw, he kept telling himself everything was going to be all right, that the test would turn out negative.

  Two weeks later when he went back for his results and to take the next blood test, he repeated the positive words in his head and it turned out the test was negative. Not wanting to break his routine, Drake repeated his positive self-talk at every other appointment.

  He’d hung his negative test result on the fridge like a proud parent would do with a child’s artwork. This was another trend he kept going as the weeks went on until there were twelve negative HIV tests taped to the stainless-steel fridge.

  It was after the last negative test that he’d bought the map. He had no idea what to do next with his life, so he figured the first step in the process of reinventing himself would be to pick a new place to live.

  Getting out of California was his top priority. There was no way he could start a new life in this place, so close to his friends and former colleagues. He was afraid that in a weak moment, he’d end up going back to the only career he knew.

  Drake put his condo on the market for a ridiculously low price, telling the real estate agent to take any offer that came in on it, no matter how low. In the meantime, he’d taped the map to his bare living room wall. He’d spent hours tracing his finger along the major highways of the United States.

  The rules of the dart throw were simple. He’d move to wherever the dart struck, with the exception of California. If he happened to hit the Golden State, he’d try again. The first dart had missed, sticking into the wall, but the second one had stuck into Hyannis, Massachusetts.

  After the dart struck the map, the rest was history. Drake sold his condo, donating most of the profit to AIDS charities and packed only the essentials. He traded in his sleek red Corvette for a more practical Chevy Sedan and hit the road. He couldn’t believe he was finally here.