A Time Apart: Book One of The Macauley Series Read online

  A TIME APART

  BOOK ONE OF THE MACAULEY SERIES

  Rebecca N. Caudilll

  DEDICATION

  To my husband, Alan, who loves and supports me even when I’m insufferable. I couldn’t do what I do if I didn’t have you at my side. You’re my everything.

  To my mom, Laura, who inadvertently set me on the path I’m on today and who first fueled and nurtured my love of the written word. As an eight year old I used to sneak your Danielle Steele and Nora Roberts paperbacks, and while I didn’t understand most of what I was reading at the time, I knew even then that I couldn’t imagine a world without romance.

  And finally, to my friend Amy Stearman, who helped me fall back in love with this book after having stepped away from it for so long. Without your insight and confidence in my abilities, I fear this book never would have seen the light of day.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  Sneak Peek – Blood of My Blood (Book Two of the Macauley Series)

  About the Author

  CHAPTER 1

  It had been nearly a year since the crash that had killed Olivia’s parents, Gerald and Marie Donnelly, and even though people often told her that sufficient time had passed, the emotional wounds she suffered at their loss were still incredibly fresh. Now, when boarding a plane – something she did quite frequently despite her growing fear – Olivia always wondered if it would be her last.

  To cope with a near-debilitating hysteria, Olivia had started studying those around her in the airport terminal, analyzing their faces, voices, and mannerisms, just in case they were the last people she encountered before plunging from the sky.

  She thought that that if she knew something about them, if the worst was to happen, she would feel a connection – albeit tenuous – to those around her. Know what motivated the young man in the seat across from her who was tied to his BlackBerry like a lifeline; to feel the happy joy of married love like those jetting off on their honeymoons; or maybe to experience the frustration of the single mother with three young children in tow as she tried to keep them from harassing other passengers.

  As a writer, Olivia had always looked to the people around her for inspiration, but ever since her parents’ plane crash the year before, she’d become obsessed with this pre-flight activity, imagining the potential reactions of her fellow passengers in the face of almost assured death.

  It wasn’t that she was afraid of being dead; rather, Olivia was terrified of the process of dying – the knowledge that would come just before it happened, the thoughts that would rush through her mind about all that could have been but never would, and then finally, just before her last breaths, an immense emotional and physical anguish that overriding all of her other senses.

  Because if Olivia knew anything at all, it was that her death would not be a quiet, dignified one. Somehow, ever since she had been a little girl she’d always known this.

  Olivia had been obsessed with death even before her parents had died. As a child, she’d often wake up screaming from nightmares that had featured all the horrifying and dreadful ways she thought that a child might die. Afterward, she’d lay awake obsessing over the particulars of each macabre scenario. Would it hurt? Would she know what was happening? How badly would she suffer? These were not questions normal kids would ask themselves, and yet Olivia couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t.

  Ever since the accident, however, she’d gone from those horrible nightly dreams to also experiencing ghastly waking nightmares, expanded to include the death of her parents. The authorities had told Olivia that they had died instantly – blunt force trauma from the plane striking the Atlantic – but she still drove herself insane speculating about what the last few minutes of their lives had been like.

  Olivia wondered what emotions her mom had experienced as she sat next to her adulterous husband as they plummeted from the sky. Had she forgiven him the years of infidelity and emotional abandonment, had she reached for his hand in a sign of solidarity in the finality of their experience? Or, Olivia feared, had they died together but alone, the way their marriage had been for years?

  And then she would wonder if her father had looked back over the life he’d built for himself – and as a byproduct of that, the lives of his wife and daughter – and think that he’d done well by them? Or had he finally realized that he had made all of them so unhappy for so many years with his slights and half-hearted attempts at family? Or had nothing of the sort crossed his mind at all? Had he instead thought about his latest mistress, hoping that she was pregnant with his child so that maybe he’d finally have a son to pass on his legacy?

  And that was the crux of the problem really. While Gerald could be rather cruel to her mother – and by extension, his daughter – he’d always doted on his mistresses, going so far as to change his will several times over the past fifteen years to take care of any potential offspring he may have produced.

  Olivia had been just a thirteen when she first found out about the cruel, taunting games he had played at her mother’s expense, and with each subsequent mistress Gerald had flaunted in front of his family, she had fervently hoped that no brother or sister would be forthcoming. Thankfully none had but that hadn’t stopped him from wondering aloud – frequently, inappropriately – what it would have been like to have a son … a boy like him. And so Olivia had known from a very young age that she wasn’t the child of her father’s heart, the son he had wanted but that her mother had failed to produce.

  When she was growing up, her parents’ friends had often said that she behaved more like an adult than a child, and Olivia knew it was true. She hadn’t ever really known how to be a child, and because of it, she had grown up with few friends. In fact, she would much rather have spent time with Marie and her friends than with their children. And whereas her peers had believed in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, fairy tale princes and princesses, Olivia had known that those blithe fairy tales were all a fabrication. She knew there was no such thing as happily ever after, much less love that was moderately happy from day to day. She could remember being just ten years old and thinking, “my parents hate each other.”

  Even so, for all the ways this knowledge had messed her up as an adult, and for all the drama it had caused her over the years, it still pained her beyond belief to think that the two people who had given her life might have plummeted to a watery grave with hatred and coldness in their hearts.

  With those thoughts swirling fresh in her mind, Olivia attempted to clear her head for the 11-hour flight ahead. Olivia could only hope that when her time came she would die knowing that someone, somewhere, had loved her passionately and without reservation.

  * * * *

  “Good afternoon ladies and gentleman. This is the pre-boarding announcement for Flight 716 to Dublin. We are inviting our first class passengers to begin boarding at this time. Please have your boarding pass and identification ready. Regular boarding will begin in approximately fifteen minutes. Thank you for your cooperation.”

  Olivia took one last look around her and realized, quite mournfully, that if her plane crash
ed over the Atlantic there would be no one left to mourn her death, no one to wonder what she’d thought of in the seconds before the last breath left her body, no one to cry for nights on end because she was no longer there, no one to remember who she was or what she might have become had she lived just a little bit longer.

  With an unhappy sigh and a shake of her head to dislodge such thoughts, Olivia gathered her purse, laptop bag, and small leather carry-on and made her way down the gangway to the plane. She tried to think about things that weren’t gruesome and ghoulish, instead turning her mental energies toward the latest book she was set to begin writing.

  While Olivia normally worked out of her beach house in Hanalei, she had decided a few months prior that she was in desperate need of a change of scenery and so on a whim, had booked a one way ticket to Dublin. She was planning to hole up in Ireland – a land she thought of as being full of mysticism and mystery – in an effort to imbue her latest novel with a sense of atmosphere and intrigue that she felt had been missing from her most recent books.

  It wasn’t lost on her that Ireland was also far removed from her normal rituals and haunts; she hoped that in being there she would be forced out of the fog that she’d been operating in these many months.

  Decision made, Olivia had metaphorically traded in her bikini for a new wool coat, and her sun tan lotion for an ungodly expensive face cream to protect her highly sensitive alabaster skin from wind, rain, and other hostile elements Irish winters brought with them. She found herself shopping for clothes she’d long admired but had never had reason to buy having spent the majority of her life in relatively temperate San Francisco. Now her carry-on luggage was filled with a scarf, hat, and gloves instead of a bathing suit and sarong.

  Olivia noticed that her fellow first class passengers were mostly single travelers huddled over various mobile devices. A few businessmen had their laptops open in order to get in a few more minutes of precious work time, while only a select few had already settled in comfortably for the long flight ahead. The woman seated next to her was in fact the only person in the cabin that seemed completely relaxed already, having set up a nice space for herself with bottled water, blanket, slippers, eye mask, and a new murder mystery she’d just purchased at the airport bookstore.

  As Olivia settled in herself, she took out her iPhone, eye mask, a bottle of water, and the one thing she needed more than anything else to get through a flight – Valium. She wasn’t proud of her dependency on narcotics, but given the circumstances she felt that she was not without excuse. She opened her bottle and popped two pills, hoping that soon enough she’d be incoherent and on her way to never, never land.

  Before the pills could take effect, however, she caught her neighbor staring fixedly at her, and it was obvious to Olivia that she didn’t like what she saw. Having witnessed the pill popping, her pursed lips and squinted eyes self-righteously indicated that she knew Olivia had exceeded the normal dosage. The woman looked at her, Olivia thought, as if she was an addict. Looking Olivia up and down, zeroing in on her Louis Vuitton purse and Prada glasses, it was written plain as day on the woman’s face that she thought Olivia was some sort of rich, designer drug junkie. Before Judgy McJudgerson could say anything to her about her predilection for prescription narcotics, Olivia steeled her nerves, put on her best “woe is me” face, and looked Judgy squarely in the eyes, ready for a standoff at the Aer Lingus Corral.

  “My parents died in a plane crash last year and I really shouldn’t be flying but I have to for work.”

  Not really a lie, all things considered, Olivia thought, continuing to make direct eye contact with the woman, making sure that she saw the hurt and anguish that she carried every day of her life.

  Judgy’s eyes softened and her mouth relaxed. Despite what Olivia’s seemingly sophisticated exterior was telling the woman, she could now see that Olivia was far removed from the world of socialite druggies. Instead, Olivia’s hangdog face told her that the pre-flight cocktail was what she needed in order to make it through the long, transatlantic flight – and on a doctor’s orders no less.

  “Oh sweetie,” McJudgerson said, as she reached over to pat Olivia’s arm. “I’m sorry. Of course you need them.”

  Pat, pat, pat.

  Olivia shook her head a little, laying it on thick, as her big green eyes welled up with tears. That’ll certainly give the woman something to think about for being so nosy, Olivia thought as she patted the woman’s arm back reassuringly.

  “Thanks, I knew you’d understand.”

  Turning away, Olivia snuggled down into her soft, wool sweater and began to relax as the drugs did their job. As she was starting to drift off, the flight attendant began her welcome announcement, interrupting Olivia’s muddled haze of consciousness.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard Flight 716 with service from San Francisco to Dublin. We ask that you please fasten your seat belts and secure all baggage beneath the seat in front of you or in the overhead compartments. At this time, please turn all personal electronic devices to airplane mode so that they cannot transmit a signal. As you know, smoking is prohibited for the duration of our journey to Dublin, and that includes in the lavatories. Thank you for choosing Aer Lingus. Enjoy your flight.”

  It was usually at this point in any flight where Olivia’s real panic kicked in. Shortly – terrifyingly – the plane would be airborne with nothing but land and sea below. While she knew statistically that airplanes were safer than cars, she’d never known anyone – let alone two anyones – who had been killed, their bodies never recovered, from a freak accident on the freeway. Not to say that it didn’t happen everyday; she just didn’t know anyone that it had happened to.

  To distract her mind, she listened to the crew outline the plane’s safety procedures and then the Captain’s welcome, including the weather forecast for Dublin – rainy and brisk, how shocking. Sipping the champagne the flight attendant had offered her when she boarded, Olivia felt the combination of the Valium and the alcohol take over her body, but not quite enough that she gave up the death grip she had on the arm rests. As she felt the tell tale tingle of the Valium working its magic, she thought – not for the first time – that maybe someday a plane crash wouldn’t be the worst thing to happen to her. Maybe someday she’d just never wake up from the self-induced drug and alcohol fueled nothingness she needed just to fly.

  Who am I kidding?

  Sadly, more and more frequently it wasn’t just plane rides that had her mixing booze and pills. Most days she wrapped herself in a hazy blur of alcohol like a security blanket, protecting her in a cocoon of mental fuzziness.

  Olivia felt her pulse beginning to race and her breathing accelerate, and she made a conscious effort not to panic, not to look over at Judgy lest the woman start advocating for professional psychiatric help. It wouldn’t have been the first time some well-meaning motherly type had tried to get Olivia into therapy. She stole a quick glance in Judgy’s direction only to find that she was already engrossed in her novel, Olivia’s neurosis and emotional paralysis the least of her concerns.

  Not too long after she had fought back the near panic attack, the whirring of the engines lulled Olivia into a stupor that soon resulted in a fitful sleep. For the next ten hours she didn’t exactly fall into a deep slumber, but she wasn’t fully awake either. Her mind seemed to float between a dreaming and wakeful state, and she felt strangely separated from her body. She’d see snippets of things in her head but wasn’t sure if the images were of events or instances that she was remembering, things she was imagining, or scenarios she was concocting to be used in her novel.

  And then Olivia saw, quite clearly, the face of a man she had never met and yet she felt like she had known him all of her life – blue eyes, sharp and unnaturally piercing as if he could see deep into her soul. She saw a field of green that stretched far and wide, rolling hills dotted with sheep and lined with stacked stone walls. She saw herself as a child chasing a puppy larger than she was down
by a river while laughing that high-pitched squeal that only a child can make as the dog raced back toward her covered in mud and dripping with water. And then that image changed as quickly as it came and she saw her mother as a young woman, happy and carefree, in love with a man who was not Gerald Donnelly.

  And as she always did when in one of her fitful states of sleep, Olivia saw all the ways she could die – car accident; mugging gone horribly wrong after having put up a brave fight; her house on fire, the flames licking at her feet as she tried to run; her body weak and broken as it was ravished by cancer; or her heart slowly stopping as she lay in her bed, blind from old age and hunched with the rigors of time.

  And in these dreams she was ready for it – any of it – almost welcoming the vast blackness that would follow whatever her death would be.

  And then she saw that face again – the man she didn’t know but felt so deeply that she should. He whispered her name, longingly, “Olivia.”

  * * * *

  With a start Olivia woke, trembling and wishing that she’d caught just a bit more of the images that had danced in her head, grasping at a thread she found infinitely better than her lonely, bitter, real-world existence.

  To calm her mind, she practiced the breathing exercises a friend had taught her – a coping mechanism, really, during times of great stress. Olivia opened her eyes and saw that the flight attendant had been watching her. She hoped – but knew otherwise from past experience – that she hadn’t called out in her jumbled sleep.

  The stewardess glanced away then, sadness and pity mingled in her expression, but she did not move on. She hovered, Olivia thought, as if she had wanted to say something to her. Olivia abhorred it when she caught those pitying glances, hating that anyone should feel sorry for her. She didn’t want to be pitied any more than she wanted to be condescended to. Olivia stared back at the flight attendant, defying her to say something. Olivia imagined the woman had seen many different types of reactions to the stresses of travel throughout her career, and that she, Olivia, was just another messed up soul to pass through her world. What really would anyone be able to say that hadn’t already been said before?