The Grump Who Stole Summer, page 1
Copyright © 2022 by Ella Fields
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, copied, resold or distributed in any form, or by any electronic or mechanical means, without permission in writing from the author, except for brief quotations within a review.
This book is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Editor: Jenny Sims, Editing4Indies
Formatting: Stacey Blake, Champagne Book Design
Cover design: Sarah Hansen, Okay Creations
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
EPILOGUE
ALSO BY ELLA FIELDS
For those who find safety in solitude
Alice
“Billion-dollar heiress unveils priceless assets.” My mother’s voice, smooth yet roughened by too many cigarettes, was apathetic at best.
She was pissed.
“Look,” I said, re-crossing my legs for what might have been the tenth time since she’d called me in here. Of course, that was after she’d kept me waiting in the hall for thirty minutes as though I were one of her many employees. “It’s totally not as bad as it sounds.” I released a forced laugh, then tried not to curse when it died beneath the suffocating tension in the overlarge study. “You know how these assholes like to twist things.”
Valencia Corvall lowered the magazine, revealing her new nose and poison-filled brown eyes. “Really,” she drawled, her eyes never leaving mine as she reached for the six others stacked beside her. I withheld a wince with every thwunk as, one by one, she slapped them all onto the center of her dining table–sized desk. “A set of bare tits on the front page of every gossip magazine in the country doesn’t lie.”
Though I was tempted to ask how she even had so many so soon, I didn’t. I shut my mouth and scrunched my nose upon catching a glimpse of the image. I’d been an idiot to believe that the night would conceal me. The dark was no match for modern technology and a little help from Photoshop.
An idiot and also drunk. Lost-a-whole-night type of trashed.
Her intentional pause ended. “Shall we tally how many places we can find them online?”
“They’re blurred,” I felt the need to point out.
A mistake. Her high cheekbones barely moved, but her eyes caught fire.
I made another by rambling, “They are, but even so, we can totally sue them.” Silence. My mouth opened again. “I mean, who hasn’t gone skinny-dipping at midnight with their friends at some point in their lives?” I rolled my eyes, flicked my freshly highlighted hair over my shoulder, and released another awkward laugh. “I think we’re lucky I decided to be a little adventurous now and not a few years ago.”
The scent of fresh lavender, something I typically loved, smothered me like a heated blanket in the middle of summer. The fireplace below the giant oriental vase remained empty. The ducted air flowed.
Still, I began to sweat.
I knew that look in her eyes—had seen her hand it to my father one too many times over dinner when she was about to hand him his ass on a shiny fucking platter. It was often accompanied by a knot of parsley to dress up Christopher Corvall’s serious lack of balls.
It was like watching a storm slowly roll in. The lack of emotion on her face and the growing venom in her eyes. The utter stillness of her entire body.
The storm arrived with one terrifyingly gentle word. “Adventurous.”
I swallowed, choosing silence out of fear and a late sense of self-preservation.
“So flashing your tits for the entire world to see is adventurous,” she said coolly, a long black-coated nail tapping at the mahogany of her desk. “I suppose you think a threesome with a strange boy and his girlfriend in the bed of his father’s farming truck is adventurous, too?”
Well, I wouldn’t exactly call that adventurous. Exhilarating and unexpected, sure. Again, trashed, but I held no regrets.
It was fun, and they’d lived out of town, so it wasn’t as though I had to see either of them around campus. It was just too bad the girlfriend had put the dashcam on. The quality was shit, and we weren’t always in view, but there was a little footage of me fucking her boyfriend while she sat on his face and kissed me.
I kept my mouth shut.
“What about last summer, hmm?” Her finger tapped faster. Shit.
Triple fucking shit.
No, I silently begged.
Her lips twitched as if she could hear my internal screaming. She’d promised to stop bringing it up. I’d lost my car for three months as punishment, and I’d volunteered at a homeless shelter. I’d done the time. I’d lived through the humiliation of being slandered online and smirked at on campus.
“The Dervents.”
My entire face burned. “You know I didn’t mean to do that.”
Her eyes lost a little fire, but I didn’t let that trick me into thinking this would end well. “While that may be so, it still happened, and it cost me a fucking fortune to fix that royal mess.”
“I didn’t know he was married to a politician.” And I’d actually been a little upset to discover the guy I’d gone on three whole dates with was married. I wasn’t a dater. I never even got the chance to screw him before we’d made the tabloids after being photographed at a restaurant.
A damn shame, even if I did feel guilty for the fooling around we’d done under the table on dates two and three. He’d had a darkness in his eyes and a confident set to his clean-shaven jaw that’d promised a good time.
He stopped contacting me a full month after the pictures were released. Up until that point, he’d sent me pleading texts daily before resorting to saying he was leaving his wife.
I’d then finally texted back with as much grace as possible, I’m twenty, you fucking asshole. Leave your wife for someone who actually wants more than sex.
Because that sure as shit wasn’t me.
Sure, I’d liked the guy—the Cheshire cat grin that made his dark eyes sparkle and the dry scratch to his deep voice—but I refused to allow myself to like someone so much that I might fall down the darkest of rabbit holes into certain doom ever again.
Love was for those who enjoyed pain. Not me. No, thank you. I liked to wake up without an instant ache in my chest that no amount of self-medicating could alleviate. I loved to breathe without feeling the burn of missing something vital.
I needed to live without feeling as though I was dying.
My mother sighed, some of the stiffness leaving her shoulders. “Alice, I think it’s time we look into therapy.”
“Therapy?” My mind began to whirl with images of me sitting on a couch, pricked by a thousand needle-like questions. I couldn’t do that. Not because I thought there was anything wrong with it, but because I just couldn’t. It would take me back. That was the whole point.
And I wouldn’t go back there. Not for my mother. Not for my meager friends. Not even for my inheritance.
Not for anything.
“Drug and alcohol rehabilitation.”
I gasped. “I haven’t touched coke since the last incident,” I declared far louder than necessary, and my mother blinked slowly—her version of a wince. “And it’s not the alcohol.” Okay, so it definitely didn’t help matters, but still. “Want me to stop drinking? Fine.” I threw my hands up. “Consider it done.” I sat back, stretched and crossed my legs again. “No problem.”
“No,” she said, sounding more resigned than pissed now. “It’s not the drugs or the alcohol. It’s you.”
She let that statement hang in the stifling air for a heavy moment. I could feel its weight pressing into my skin, the words threatening to seep into my pores and reopen wounds I’d spent a long time healing. Ignoring.
It was all the same, really.
She leaned over the desk, those dark eyes upon me as her head tilted. “I’ve asked you the same question nearly every visit since you left for college, but I will ask it one more time. Tell me what happened to you before you left.”
Rather than instantly clamming up and shutting down as I’d typically do, I decided to ask, “Why?” It wasn’t like my mom was a bad parent. Not at all. She worked a lot, and her interest in her two daughters had most certainly waned since we’d hit puberty and had caused her more trips to the hair salon, but she loved us.
In her own cold and unique ways, she adored us both. Especially my older sister, Tiana.
Out of the two of us, Tiana was the most like our mother in personality and with her dark brown bob of curls and matching eyes. Whereas I took after our chill father in both glowing blonde looks and attitude.
Until recent years.
Her lashes bobbed, eyebrows furrowing slightly before she checked herself. “So you admit that something did happen.”
I grinned. “Will it help me now if I do?”
Her expression, still so very bleak, iced more. So that would be a no, then.
Licking my lips, I eyed the gold velvet armchair to my right and the vintage fashion books on the coffee table between it and my chair. Shadows crawled over my skin, tempting me to dance with the dark I’d long left behind. Ever since, I’d searched for light, and if I couldn’t find it, then I created it. I’d do whatever it took.
Even at the cost of my reputation—of my entire family’s reputation.
“No,” I finally said. It was low, but she still heard me. I straightened, forcing those shadows to retreat.
Sometimes, they’d get the better of me, catching me unaware and forcing me to spill my innards onto paper. I was determined to avoid having another sometimes today or any time in the near future. For even though it purged something violent from inside me and relieved the pressure, the hangover was always worse than any I’d suffered through before.
He was pure venom, a dark need inside my veins that discolored the soul and shocked the heart, but only if I allowed myself to bleed.
So I seldom did. I knew the signs. I was becoming an expert at detecting his arrival. I would remain whole.
Happy.
Breathing.
Alive.
“You’ll be finishing school here in Eloise after the summer. Until then, you will report to your new job each day and be home by eleven.”
Every word was a slap to the cheek, over and over until my ears rang. Home. College. Job.
A weird noise left me. “Not funny, Mom. Like”—I swallowed—“at all.”
“I’m not laughing, Alice.”
Shit.
I’d never had a real job. That wasn’t what broke my spirit, though.
There was no private college here. Schools, yes, but no college. Unless she meant… no. “What do you mean, I’ll attend school here? I’m heading into my senior fucking year.”
“So you’ll fucking spend it here,” she retaliated without pause. “The Ivy League doesn’t care whose daughter you are. They no longer want to fuck with the likes of you.”
My mouth fell open. “They’ve expelled me?”
“Don’t be so dramatic.” Seeming nearly done with this conversation, she reached for her winged glasses and slipped them on, plucking her tablet closer. “They asked if you could find an… alternative.” She crinkled her nose a little. “Until you get yourself together. Which, of course, being that you’re one year away from becoming a real-life grown-up,” she infused sarcasm into every word, “I knew you would not appreciate.”
“So send me to another Ivy League school.” Her bland look nearly made me scream. “Please, Mom.” I wasn’t above begging. I couldn’t fall from grace in such a public way. I wouldn’t survive it.
I wouldn’t survive five minutes at an ordinary school with ordinary people who probably thought I was nothing but a rich, entitled airhead. Not to mention, I couldn’t move home. I hardly returned for a week in the summertime.
I fucking hated it here.
Another sigh. “Alice, this is final, so do not push me. You of all people know it could be far worse.”
“I’m failing to see how uprooting my entire life and setting it on fire could be topped at this point,” I spewed before I could think better of it.
Ice coated every gentle word. “Care for me to try?”
There was no need for her to spell out what came next. I’d lose my trust fund. My car. My phone. The morbid list would undoubtedly go on.
I sank back into the seat. “So I’ll be working for you.”
She snorted. “No, you’ll be volunteering for some other poor soul.”
“Volunteering?” Fine. I’d done that before, and I’d escaped unscathed, but then my stomach clouded and clenched as I remembered, “But my apartment…”
“It’s being packed up as we speak.” Checking her watch, she hummed, as if pleased. “They’re probably done by now.”
“You what?” I was spoiled, and I knew that—privileged beyond reason—but I needed my apartment. My notebooks. I needed my own space in order to breathe. She didn’t understand, and her empty patience warned me to dare try to make her.
I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. Not only because I was inwardly fuming, rage pressing at every blood vessel and my fucking bones, but because I couldn’t go back into the dark.
I cleared my throat and told myself it would be okay. Told myself to breathe. My things would be fine. I’d get another place and probably soon, being that my parents were now used to having a mostly empty nest. “What about my major?”
“How fortunate for you that you’ve picked such a common mistake to waste our money on.”
Creative writing was not a mistake. If anyone understood passion, it was my mother with her beauty empire. Yet she never let me forget that she was one of the rarities. That she wouldn’t wish the scrutiny, the pressure, and the sleepless nights of her first decade of business on anyone.
“You need to stop saying that.”
“Then you need to stop giving me reasons to,” she shot back, then gave her attention to her tablet. “I’m late for a call. You need to go.”
That was it. Dismissed.
The call was already connecting, but I still asked at the door. “You were just kidding about the job, though, right?”
“Dearest darling, no. But don’t worry.” She laughed. I shivered. “This time, I’ve set you up with something I think you’re going to love.”
Smith
Coughing, I stumbled down the last few steps into the shop with a head-throbbing clang.
Peering at the weight in my hand, I realized why and dumped the bottle of whiskey I’d been clutching before a farm animal picture book. Guilt got the better of me when I neared the front counter, and I groaned, backtracking to move it to the self-help section.
Much better.
“Hello?”
“Fuck.” I spun with a growl. “Warn a guy before you just appear out of thin air.”
The man standing at the end of the aisle with a book in his hand blinked at me. “You work here, don’t you?”
“No, I just hide out here because I have no place better to be.” Not exactly a lie. I stalked past him, being sure that no part of me, not even my jacket, touched his rotund form, and headed to the counter.
It was a mess, as per usual. Shoving papers aside, I found what I was looking for and unscrewed the bottle of pills, dumping three into my palm. Regret arrived. I shouldn’t have ditched the whiskey. Cursing, I reached for the flask I kept under the register. Only a sip remained, but it was enough to wash them down.
The man still hadn’t taken it upon himself to leave. “We open at nine,” I grumbled when he neared the counter. “The sign still says closed.”
“It’s after ten,” he stated, and I avoided the eyes that dipped over me—assessing, judging, cataloging. “And the sign says you’re open.” He paused. “And also something else that’s, uh… a little crude. Are you drunk?”
If only. “Are you finished yet?”
He dumped the book on the counter, and I barked, “Twenty dollars,” without checking the price.
He huffed but slapped the bill down and collected his book. “No receipt?”
Finally meeting his scrunched eyes, I glared, and they widened before he wisely took off, muttering to himself on the way out.
Morning glowed through the crinkled glass of the door, and I made a mental note to have someone come and fix a new set of shutters for it. The last lot had perished after falling to the ground. Likely from the door being slammed one too many times by some ass-hat who worked here.
Me. I was the only one who worked here.
The powers that be had apparently decided there would be no reprieve this morning. The door opened once more, bringing with it enough sunlight to make me hiss.
“Good god, Charles. It reeks of mothballs and whiskey in here.”
Jesus fuck. I was tempted to crawl back upstairs and have this week see itself out without me. “What do you want?”
Dear old Dad paused on the threshold, taking in the raggedy, dust layered display of a bestselling memoir from two years ago with a frown. If you asked me, most books don’t get enough decent shelf time. I was doing this old-bird a favor. “Just paying a visit to one of the places I own.”
