AGAINST THE TIDE Book #2

Prologue

Around Twenty Five Years ago...
Saint-Tropez, France.
Author's POV
Sometime in the late afternoon, when the sun is high above the sky striking the beach side with a lazy spell, two people refused to conform to simply busking without purpose.

In the little confinement of a yellow beetle, they went at it hard with the only intention being getting off. Rough breaths, deep groans and scattered moans echoed in their little space that proved to be hotter than the sun above them. Relentless for a release,they both keep on.

Just outside their little confinement of pleasure, life went about as would be expected on a hot lazy summer day by the beach.

She's aware that what she left behind is a marriage barely making it. He is aware that his wife has been calling for the last couple of days to apologize for how she treated him. To these two, it's retaliation; the kind where you drink poison and hope that the other person will drop dead.

Certainly for one of them, regret will follow and much sooner than he thinks.

They lay in each other's arms completely comfortable after the ten hottest minutes of their lives. The silver fox smiled and eventually chuckled to himself. "We are behaving like teenagers, aren't we?"

Vienna smiled at him. "I don't know about you but I am forever young."

"And ever so beautiful." He felt the soft strands of ginger strands that don't always appear as soft. She quickly noted his fading smile. She sat up promptly as the high she felt now feels like falling from the clouds.

"What's wrong?"

"I can't... I can't see you anymore."

"You can't see me anymore? Why not? Have I done something wrong?"

"No you haven't. But what we are doing is what is wrong. I have a wife-"

"So suddenly you think of her!" She pushed him aside. "I can't believe you!"

She hurriedly started getting dressed.

"Vienna-"

"Don't. Don't say anything else. We had a good thing going. Why are you ruining it?"

They have been to every beautiful city in France often in this yellow beetle. The so called 'personal time' and 'business trips' have come to an abrupt end. He knows why. He can't tell her because Vienna is the kind to sink ships. Her lips are as lose as her legs, always eager to part.

"I'm sorry." He got dressed too. "Let's not see each other again. Please don't contact me."

When he left her in the car, she couldn't believe it and even after he was long gone she still waited in the hope that he will return and say he has made a mistake.

Her wait wasn't just on the beach of Saint-Tropez that hot afternoon. It went on for days even when she was back to her home in Birmingham. The lack of progress in waiting for her lover to change his mind about their two year affair did not mean a lack of progress in the child growing inside her. With her husband's constant absence from home, the bored housewife had no more tricks and lies to convince him that the baby is possibly his.

As the child grew, the debate in her head was what to do with it. Abortion crossed her mind repeatedly but she knows better than to harm a life.

Her decision to carry the baby to term came with hefty consequences. Her husband issued her with a divorce and she had no choice but to take it. Suddenly, her little moments  in the yellow beetle didn't seem that woth it at all. She moved away hoping to give her daughter a better life.  A broken family later, on a rainy summer night in Naples, she gave birth to a girl.

Unfortunately for the little one who was eager to be held by the arms that held her, she was given away to an orphanage and her mother left with no intention of coming back for her.