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July 24
The sun was shining brightly in the clear blue sky when Elizabeth Walker stepped off the plane, greeted happily by a picture perfect view of green palm trees and attendants placing leis over the heads of guests as they stepped off the plane.
“Aloha and welcome to Hawaii,” a young women dressed in a beautiful floral printed skirt and white top said softly to Liz as she draped a white orchid lei around Liz’s head.
Liz took in her surroundings from behind her sunglasses as she surveyed the land. It felt good to be on vacation after working her ass off to finally graduate from Boston University with honors. She was looking forward to some time to herself, to enjoy the area and the sunshine before getting ready to head off to medical school...wherever that was going to be.
“Oh my god! I can’t believe we’re in Hawaii!” a blonde girl behind Liz gushed.
Liz stopped dead in her tracks as she once again remembered why she hadn’t exactly been looking forward to the trip. Her parents had agreed to pay for the trip...that is, only if she came with her sister and her friends, as sort of a “parental guidance.”
She remembered her own summer trip right before college with fond memories. The only reason why her parents had allowed her to go alone with Katie to Canada was because, first, it was closer to Michigan than Hawaii was and second, she wasn’t known to be the partierher sisterRachel was.
“You guys want to head up to the hotel before hitting the beach?” Liz turned and asked the three girls, which also included Raleigh and Rebecca, Rachel’s two best friends.
“Sure...” Rachel answered slowly, receiving looks from Raleigh and Rebecca in the process. It wasn’t that the girls didn’t like Liz; in fact, she was almost like one of them. The only problem was that she wasn’t. They were looking for a vacation they wouldn’t forget and that usually consisted of late hours, clubbing, and random guys. Liz wasn’t known to be the girl who took a chance, the girl who did things just because it seemed like fun at the moment. Instead, she was the type who tended to think things out and assess for the possibility of risk in the future. She definitely wasn’t a stuck up prick who didn’t know how to have fun, but Raleigh, Rebecca, and Rachel knew their idea of fun wasn’t going to sit very well with Liz.
“I never said I was going to hang out with you guys,” Liz finished as she saw the look exchanged between the girls. “You make me feel old,” she called out over her shoulder as she started to walk towards the airport terminal, looking for the desk where she could find her rented car, leaving the three to lag a little farther behind.
To her luck, there was an open desk at the car rental and she hurried up to it, determined to get out of the airport and to the hotel as quickly as possible.
“Hi,” she began in a charming voice to the middle aged man behind the desk.
“How may I help you?”
“There was a reservation made under my name a week ago and I just came to pick up the car.”
“Okay. Can I have your name please?”
“Elizabeth Walker.”
“Miss Walker...if you sign here and here and present some form of ID, I can give you the keys to the convertible.” Liz looked up hurriedly from the papers she was signing and gave the man a confused looked.
“Convertible? I didn’t make a reservation for one.”
“Oh! Sorry Miss Walker, but there’s also a note here for you that says, ‘Enjoy the car sweetie and thanks for doing this, Dad’.”
Liz gave a small smile as she thought of the gesture. Father and daughter had always been close, sharing a type of relationship that stemmed from hours of just hanging out and shooting hoops.
She finished signing the papers and picked the keys up from the counter. She couldn’t wait to find the convertible and give it a test run, but first, she had to find the girls and make a trip to the bathroom. It seemed to be her day since Liz found them right outside the entrance to the ladies’ room.
“Hey, let me go to the bathroom really quick and then we can go,” Liz announced and without waiting for an answer, headed inside to one of the stalls. As she approached to sink to wash her hands later on, she gave her slender 5’10” frame a quick glance in the mirror. She had always considered herself tall. In fact, it wasn’t to anyone’s surprise that she played basketball extensively throughout high school whenever the subject came up. Her shoulder length straight brown hair was hazardously swept up into a messy bun and short wisps decorated her long oval face. Her appearance, complete with chocolate brown eyes, gave her a look she had always described as normal. She wasn’t hideous looking, but not pretty enough to be considered Miss America...at least in her mind.
The trip down to Waikiki, where the hotel was situated, was anything but eventful, yet there was still an air of happiness as the silver convertible jetted down the highway with the sun rays beaming down on the four girls and the breeze whipping through their hair.
Pulling up to the front of the Hilton Hawaiian Village, Liz looked around with an air of amazement and surprise.
“How exactly did you guys come up with the money to stay here for a week?” Liz inquired as she handed the keys to valet and watched the bellhop pushed their luggage into the lobby.
The hotel was situated right on Waikiki Beach and the front was decorated with flowers, palm trees and flowing water, giving the hotel a look of sophistication but also a natural feel, to place Hawaii back into a period of time when Honolulu wasn’t bustling with cars and skyscrapers.
“We have been saving for a long time you know,” Rachel answered as they stepped in the lobby behind the bellhop. The lobby was bathed in a soft mellow light, with desks lined up on both sides and the elevators located across the large expanse of floor. Along the walls and high ceilings were pictures and paintings painted against the wall to give an old Renaissance feel.
“Not to mention a few fundraisers here and there,” Rebecca added with a giggle. Liz rolled her eyes and didn’t comment. Trust her sister and friends to come up with ways to get money out of unsuspecting followers, just to benefit their own needs.
On her first visit back home from college four years ago, Liz had been more than surprised to see that her freshman sister had become the type of person she avoided like the plague in high school. Rachel became the cheerleader, the biggest flirt and the most sought after girl in high school, only to recognize the fact and flaunt it in other people’s faces.
Rachel wasn’t a bitch...well she wasn’t most of the time, and people could see it if they knew her well enough. Liz herself knew that Rachel had another side to her, one that really didn’t care about popularity or her looks. Rachel had aspiring dreams to become a successful lawyer and she was closer to her family than anyone could ever imagine. But there was always the shallowness at the surface of her personality.
After checking in, Liz grabbed her own room key and followed the giggling girls up the elevator to the eighth floor. When they came up to the hotel rooms, Liz entered hers and left the girls to explore their own. Her parents had been gracious enough to give her a view of the ocean, complete with a balcony while across the hall, the girls had to deal with a view of the city.
“I guess there are some perks to chaperoning,” Liz mused to herself as she took in her surroundings. There was a large king sized bed in the middle of the room, with a small television in front of it and the bathroom to the side, near the door entrance. It was a normal hotel room and Liz figured she could get use to it in her seven-day stay.
She took her time unpacking and sorting out her clothes and other junk, remembering to pull out a bathing suit and lay it on the bed. In the middle of placing her sweatshirt and long jogging pants in one of the drawers, there was a knock on the door.
Liz opened the door to see Rachel, Raleigh and Rebecca standing in her doorway with sunglasses on top of their blonde heads, a bikini top on and short denim shorts accentuating their long legs. The three almost looked identical except for a different patterned bikini top and different style sunglasses.
“We’re off to the beach,” Rachel announced as she hoisted the bag on her shoulder a little higher.
“Alright, just don’t go very far and come back before one in the morning, okay? I don’t want to tell your parents the first day of the trip that you three have gone missing.”
“Sure,” Raleigh called over her shoulder as a way to inform Liz they were listening though they didn’t particularly care what she thought. The three girls sauntered off laughing and whispering among themselves. Liz sighed and closed the door, walking over to finish unpacking once more.
Once she was sure there was nothing else to do around the room, Liz grabbed her black two-piece halter bathing suit off the bed and headed to the bathroom to change. She threw on a white tank over the top of the suit and a pair of Adidas shorts over the bottom. Picking up a tote bag, she put in a towel, sunscreen, her headphones and a novel to read. If she was going to spend her vacation in Hawaii all by herself, the most she could do was to do something productive.
Walking down the beach, Liz could see most of the people were centered down towards the clear, blue, sparkling water while a few people chose to distance themselves away from the crowd and sit near the edge of the beach. Liz spread her towel over a patch of sun away from the crowd, somewhere she knew she wasn’t going be disturbed. The only thing she could see were a few girls who looked to be Rachel’s age nearby, an old couple talking earnestly and a group of six guys playing volleyball with the nets set up a little distance away.
She sighed as she slathered on the sunscreen and settled down, pulling out the novel she had stuck in her tote bag and startingon page one.
“Oh come on, Brett. You know you can do better than that. I’ve seen Grandma hit harder,” Jeff Thomas, Brett’s stepbrother teased from the other side of the net. At thirty-two, he wasn’t anywhere near resembling the old man he proclaimed himself to be. He stood at a stocky 6’3” with an athletic build and wide shoulders.
Brett could see the competitive edge in Jeff’s deep brown chocolate eyes from the other side of the net and without even looking in the mirror he could tell that in his own blue-gray eyes, a competitive glint matched that of Jeff’s. Ever since they were little, the two had been close, but that wasn’t to say the relationship wasn’t chocked full of problems as each always tried to outdo the other.
Brett didn’t answer as he turned around to nod at his cousin Rich who threw up the ball and served it over the net. The guys concentrated as the ball furiously flew over both sides of the net, finally landing on the sand on Jeff’s side of the court as it flew by Brett’s other cousin, Dave’s, hands.
A loud chorus of groans could be heard from Jeff, Dave, and the third member of the team, Mike, a close friend of the family, while on the other side, Brett, Rich and Mike’s brother Kevin exchanged high fives.
The six guys worked for the same insurance company, National Union Insurance, each the respective head of a different branch within the United States. The insurance company was the product of Brett and Jeff’s father, their uncle and Mike and Kevin’s father’s relationship in their younger days. The company bloomed under their watch and these days, it was considered a multi-million dollar corporation.
But just by looking at the guys, it was hard to tell they weren’t just a bunch of surfers, looking for jobs to get by with in Hawaii. Brett himself was a muscular guy, standing at 6’2” with blonde hair and darker roots. He had inherited his father’s long face and strong jaw line, making him look more like a causal surfer than the president of the San Francisco branch office.
Soon the game was tied at fourteen with the group agreeing to play until fifteen when Brett stood up at the base of the court, ready to serve out the game. He surveyed the scene in front of him quickly, noting the positions of Jeff, Dave and Mike and even the beach a little further along. He saw a group of teenage girls, intently watching the game, trying to be discreet but failing miserably. He shook his head and smiled to himself. If he was a five or ten years younger than his current twenty eight year old age, he might have flirted back a little, but as of now, he wasn’t looking to place a lawsuit on his hands, never mind the fact that he really wasn’t interested in teenage girls.
Beyond the girls was an older couple seemingly getting to know each other, Brett could tell with their animated hand gestures and laughing faces. A little further beyond them, he could make out a lone figure, lying on the beach by herself absorbed in a novel. Even from his distance, he could make out the fact that she was gorgeous, with long shapely legs and a slender body. Her brown hair was pulled up in a messy bun and she was fully concentrated on her book.
“You going to serve or what?” Mike called out, tearing Brett’s eyes away from the brunette.
“Yeah, just making sure you guys are ready to lose,” Brett joked back. He earned a few chuckles from the guys while Jeff called out,
“Sure man, whatever you say. I saw you checking out those teenage girls over there.” Jeff didn’t expect an answer because he knew what was coming up next. Brett served the ball long and hard towards the back of the court, only to be set up by Jeff for Dave to spike. Rich blocked the spike and the game went back and forth once again as all the guys played to win.
Liz sneaked a quick glance at her watch and reasoned with herself that she could take a shower and get a few hours of sleep before she went down to the beachside again to attend a luau the hotel was putting on that night. She gathered up her stuff and headed back to the hotel, only turning one more time to see the guys still furiously pounding the ball over the net.
“Sorry, buddy,” Jeff said as he jogged over to the other side of the net and draped his arm over Brett and Rich’s shoulders, obviously not that sorry.
“Yeah whatever,” Brett answered as he shrugged the comment away. He was disappointed they hadn’t won but he wasn’t going to pout over it like he would have when he was younger. There had been plenty of times where Jeff beat him at something and the younger brother had stalked away sulking.
“We’ll get you tomorrow,” Rich replied to Jeff’s comment.
“Tomorrow? We’re heading up to Sunset Beach to surf. How are you suppose to get us tomorrow?” Mike asked, still gloating over their victory.
“We’ll come up with something,” Kevin answered as he picked up the volleyball. The guys started to walk back to their hotel when Brett turned around to look down the beach one more time.
The brunette had disappeared as well as the old couple. Now, all that was left were the teenage giggling girls. He turned around and joined in the conversation as they made fun of Jeff, forgetting all about the brunette that had been on the beach.
A/N: New story! The day that I finish posting Unlikely I put up a new huh? I hope you guys like this one. Review and let me know, okay? Thanks.