It Happens in the Hamptons Read online

  Dedication

  To Stick-em-Up, Bedford, Toddler, Java, Ass-man, J-Po, Hawaii Joe, Shane, Wingnut, Joey Wakesurf, Fardaddy, Chef Henri, Fetus, and Sunshine for teaching me to love the salt water

  Epigraph

  “Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.”

  –Oscar Wilde

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One: One Small Step onto Planet Hamptons

  Chapter Two: Try to Hang on for the Ride Known as Summertime

  Chapter Three: Shoreline Sideshow

  Chapter Four: Preposterous Posing

  Chapter Five: An Innocent Stroll

  Chapter Six: Close Encounters with Another Kind

  Chapter Seven: The Binary Beachfront

  Chapter Eight: Goliath v. Goliath

  Chapter Nine: That Memorial Day Monday Thing

  Interlude: August Sneak Peek

  Chapter Ten: Downtime in Town

  Chapter Eleven: Surf Shop Shenanigans

  Interlude: Memorial Day

  Chapter Twelve: And Pop Goes George

  Chapter Thirteen: Helipad Heaven

  Chapter Fourteen: Conscious Coupling

  Chapter Fifteen: Happy Campers

  Chapter Sixteen: Yes, Her Real Name Is Poppy

  Chapter Seventeen: Bond Girls or Girls Bonding?

  Chapter Eighteen: Wacky Workout

  Chapter Nineteen: Time for Romance

  Chapter Twenty: Ridiculously Extravagant and Incredibly Cheap

  Chapter Twenty-One: Meanwhile Back at the WASP Fortress . . .

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Clash of the Ages

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Views in a Vise Grip

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Everything Good Happens in Summer

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Rocking the Boat

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Blushing in the Bay

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Inconvenient Intrusions

  Interlude

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Misunderstandings and Miscommunications

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Drop-off Drama

  Chapter Thirty: Violet Underground

  Chapter Thirty-One: Patio Party Gauntlet

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Home Is What You Make It

  Chapter Thirty-Three: Blue Video

  Chapter Thirty-Four: Midweek Mojo

  Chapter Thirty-Five: First Date . . . or Is It?

  Chapter Thirty-Six: Playing with Fire

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: Take Back the Night

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: Steps of Doom

  Chapter Thirty-Nine: Push the Pause Button, Please

  Chapter Forty: Talk Therapy

  Chapter Forty-One: George Is Baaaack

  Chapter Forty-Two: Everything Isn’t Quite as Shipshape as It Seems

  Chapter Forty-Three: They Don’t Make ’Em like This Anymore

  Chapter Forty-Four: Trouble Leads to More Trouble

  Chapter Forty-Five: The Dog Days of Summer

  Chapter Forty-Six: The Plutocrat Has a Plan

  Chapter Forty-Seven: Nail Him

  Chapter Forty-Eight: The Socialite Scene

  Chapter Forty-Nine: Demands on the Docks

  Chapter Fifty: Planning Perfection

  Chapter Fifty-One: Anxiety Alert

  Chapter Fifty-Two: A Reckoning to Remember

  Chapter Fifty-Three: A Mad Mother

  Chapter Fifty-Four: Day of Discovery

  Chapter Fifty-Five: Resolution Time

  Chapter Fifty-Six: Breakfast Table Breakthrough

  Chapter Fifty-Seven: Forgive and Forget

  Chapter Fifty-Eight: Lifting Fog

  Chapter Fifty-Nine: Police Palooza

  Chapter Sixty: Station Stop

  Epilogue

  Reading Group Guide

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Holly Peterson

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  One Small Step onto Planet Hamptons

  Memorial Day weekend, Saturday morning, May 27

  “Sorry, lady,” the taxi driver said to the woman in the backseat. “I don’t see number thirty-seven marked on a porch or mailbox. Sometimes they nail the numbers on trees, but I can’t find the house.”

  The woody station wagon taxi rounded a corner and slowed alongside one stretch of Willow Lane, then turned around and back again. The midmorning sunlight burst through the tree canopy and heated the wet street, burning the fog so it swirled off the pavement.

  “I know that’s the right number,” Katie Doyle said. “I’m positive. My friend said it was a little hidden.”

  “You’ve been there before?”

  “We’re from Oregon. I’ve never even been to the East Coast.”

  “Um-hum,” answered the driver, knowing this out-of-towner was in for a few shock waves this summer.

  “Let me get out of the car and investigate,” said Katie. “Maybe the number is blocked.”

  Katie longed to breathe in the curative salty breeze instead of the stale, fruity air freshener in the car. Her eight-year-old son, Huck, was asleep next to her, his white-blond hair mashed against the clumpy pillow he’d fashioned out of his knapsack and jacket. She would let Huck nap in the house before exploring the new town, though he’d slept well on the six-hour red-eye flight from Portland, two and a half hours jolting on the Long Island Railroad to Southampton, and then fifteen more minutes encased in the stench of this taxi.

  She yelled back to the driver, “This is it for sure!”

  Katie never found a number, but she did spot a metal pail on the crumbling porch that looked like it was last painted around the era her taxi came off the production line. She walked up to the old steps and found the pail bore a welcome offering: summery bing cherries inside—the same type she and George Porter had picked with her son at a Hood River farm back home.

  Looking down at the cherries, she thought back to that early May afternoon. Huck had sat in the grass under the shade of a tree making a pyramid of cherry pits, his lips turning a darker crimson as his pile grew. On a blanket warmed by the sun, Katie laid her head back on George’s outstretched arm. He traced his finger down her profile and neck to the top button of her blouse. She took a deep breath to disperse the arousal from his touch, and wondered if they’d fall into bed again before his flight back home that night.

  He blurted out from the calm silence between them, “Come east to Long Island for the summer.”

  “Yeah, sure.” Katie smiled softly, keeping her eyes closed.

  “Be sure.”

  She pushed her chin out resolutely toward the sun. “No problem. Huck and I will just pick up and move to the opposite coast, just like that.” She elbowed George to quit it with the silly talk, and placed her finger on her mouth to get him to be quieter so Huck didn’t hear.

  He kissed her forehead gently and then whispered in her ear. “I want you. I want us together all summer.”

  “Huck and I are staying put. You can come visit anytime.” She jutted her jaw to the side to suppress a smile.

  “No strings. Just come. The family cottage is yours. I never stay there. I’ve got my own a few miles away.”

  Katie turned to him and propped on her elbow, looking back to make sure Huck was consumed with his cherry pit project. “Are you serious?”

  “Very. And you’d love it.”

  “It’s already May,” she answered, squinting her eyes at him to gauge his resolve.

  “It is, thank God,” George said, upping the challenge. “And your teaching seminars are completed and you’ve got the summer off. Perfect timing. In the Hamptons, you
’d find plenty of students to tutor and time to write your studies. Hood River may be the windsurfing capital of the country, but you haven’t tried the prevailing winds off the Atlantic. Ever.”

  Katie wrapped strings of grass around her fingers, tighter now that she felt he meant this. “Using wind and water to entice me is pretty clever. But, are you serious?”

  “Very.”

  “Aren’t the Hamptons just a rich playground where a bunch of people spend too much money?” Katie asked. “We’ve discussed this, that’s not my thing, all the snobby . . .”

  “I’m not going to lie and say some of the summer people aren’t a little over the top, but you make the Hamptons what you want. There are perfectly normal families that have lived out there full-time for generations. You can hold the August tomatoes and bite into them like an apple, the shellfish is amazing, and the Atlantic is so much warmer than the Pacific.”

  “You mean it.”

  “I do. I really do.” He kissed her neck softly, sexually in that way he did in the dark.

  A moment passed. “Well, then I’ll let it settle a little. I promise. A change is not a crazy idea at this point,” she let out in the most noncommittal tone she could. She faced the sun again, wondering if this man was falling for her more than she had understood. Since Huck’s father had skipped town before the kid could even sit up, Katie’s trajectory was her own design. She could say yes and own a new life plan right this minute if she wanted.

  “We’ve only known each other for a month,” she reminded George.

  And he replied, “Four perfect weekends, why not try a dozen more?”

  Chapter Two

  Try to Hang on for the Ride Known as Summertime

  Anyone could have predicted that the summer’s turmoil would start the moment Kona’s rusty Jeep blasted through the wooden white entry gates that Saturday night. The car skidded around a rare Japanese tree and screeched to a stop. He marveled at the deep tire marks he’d made in the cinnamon pebbles raked like frosting.

  Luke stepped out from the passenger side first. He swiped his hands down his black pants and stiffened the collar on his white shirt, his handiwork with the iron now ruined by the ride in Kona’s damp Jeep. His soft, dark eyes itched from a day in the salt water, and a trace of white zinc remained in a small patch of stubble on his handsome jaw. He patted down his shaggy mahogany hair, particularly on that stubborn part on the top. No matter how hard he’d worked, nothing felt right.

  The guys were trying their best, but that didn’t extinguish the “fish out of water” neon signs blinking on their foreheads as they entered the fray of the .001 percenters at the Chase estate. The mansion, which they’d only seen from the beach shoreline, bulged with impossible weight over the fragile oceanfront dune. The party above was filled with warlocks who controlled every lever of Manhattan’s industries—from Wall Street and media to advertising, fashion, and the arts.

  “You think we’re dressed right?” Luke asked. “Hamptons Festive might mean those pink ties and blazers.”

  “Nah. Black and white. Always the safe bet. All good,” answered Kona. Years battling waves and climbing up Hawaiian palm trees to pick coconuts had sculpted his burly frame, now sheathed in a wrinkled white button-down he’d found in the depths of his dresser. Kona had inherited his Nordic father’s bushy blond eyebrows and blue eyes and his Hawaiian mother’s high cheekbones and caramel skin. “When you’re tan and good-looking and not a fat banker, it doesn’t matter what clothes you got on. Fuck these people: we look good. And forget Simone for a night. C’mon. Let’s find you a higher grade woman.”

  Luke fist-bumped the young valet parking attendant he recognized from town. “Thanks, man,” he said, as Kona threw the kid his keys in a large arc over the exposed roll bar of his Jeep. “We teach the Chase kids to water-ski and surf; I’m sure little Richie made them invite us.”

  Luke didn’t like gaining entry to the Chases’ exclusive party when the twenty-three-year-old parking valet couldn’t get in, and he promised himself he’d sneak him a beer on the way out. He remembered this same kid had dented the shiny right bumper of the owner’s new four-seater Porsche Panamera “family car” when the automatic driveway gates had opened on their own last summer. Jake Chase, the forty-seven-year-old, corpulent owner of the otherwise pristine vehicle, didn’t much mind. He knew he’d simply have someone tell someone to tell someone to repair it.

  At the scene of the fender bender, Jake, amazed by his uncanny ability to keep everything so well in perspective, had assured the young man: “It happens, kid. Don’t sweat it. Hell, why should a fifty-thousand-dollar gate function properly when you push a button?”

  The legendary Jake Chase was like that, always trying to prove he was on even par with the local guys because he started out driving a laundry truck to get by in college. By the time he was thirty-five, that stint behind the wheel led Jake to create the country’s largest Laundromat chain. Developing entire malls followed, and the cash rolled in with the same certainty as those pounding waves in front of his summer home.

  Jake would punch the guys too hard in the upper arm to make sure they were alert when he recounted tales of his career. He’d then throw his balding head back in laughter, hoping deep down in his short, stubby build that they got his inane jokes. Cool is a gift bestowed. Luke and Kona knew one couldn’t buy, rent, borrow, or steal it.

  But at this moment, Luke was feeling anything but an arbiter of cool, even among posers. It was an accepted fact of life on this rarefied outer tip of Long Island that many of the local families’ incomes were reliant on wealthy Manhattanites with their clan-like customs and infantile impatience. Every summer, these invaders crashed into town on Memorial Day weekend and vanished at the stroke of 6:00 p.m. on Labor Day.

  “C’mon, man,” yelled Kona, shaking his stringy blond hair that graced the lower part of his shoulders—a perfect length to attract the lady folk, while still thrusting a middle finger at any semblance of a desk job. “Julia Chase is waiting for me upstairs; I just feel it.” Julia Chase, the buxom hostess of tonight’s Memorial Day weekend cocktail affair, had pushed the guys hard to show, insisting her glamorous friends wanted to meet real surfers.

  Luke, thirty-one, and Kona, thirty-four, had both grown up in the same Southampton school district. Their local friends and relatives were electricians, land surveyors, restaurateurs, AV technicians, shop owners—normal American folks who actually lived in one residence all year round. Though Kona had spent many school years in Hawaii on an Air Force base with his parents, both men had grown closer than brothers. They knew middle-class childhoods, nothing more—and a lot less when times were tough.

  The gray slate steps were illuminated with a subtle line of lights flooding the stairs as if they were leading to the entrance of a royal Egyptian tomb. Kona didn’t appreciate that the entry was conveniently lit for his bare toes in black rubber flip-flops, nor did he know that a few steps cost more than he and Luke made all summer.

  As he strode up to the event, Kona couldn’t decide if Julia Chase’s supersized wealth and married status were an inconvenient reality, or one of those thrilling challenges that tended to smack him in the face.

  “The beach was empty, my towel was like a goddamn postage stamp in the sand,” Kona declared, with boorish confidence. “And Julia chooses to do a down-dog yoga move like five feet in front of me? She’s dying for it.”

  “She may have not even noticed you were there,” counseled Luke. “She’d just dropped her kid off at camp and maybe wanted to stretch a little. Don’t get us in hot water with Jake Chase. The season is just starting and that kook is sharper than he looks.”

  Entering her territory and this grandiose house, Kona began to question everything he’d felt on his territory: the water sports camp on his beach. Whether he could properly evaluate Julia’s stretching needs or not, he resorted to his fail-safe stance and walked up those illuminated steps like he owned the entire forty-million-dollar beachfront pr
operty.

  The guests inside reveled on this Memorial Day Saturday, drunk with the sweet aphrodisiac of summer’s arrival. Kona reminded himself that life was all about making moves—on bored, horny housewives, on job connections with the city people, on any opportunity that befell him. He rubbed the stubborn sand out of his eyebrows and shook his head a bit to cast off these rare schoolboy inhibitions.

  Chapter Three

  Shoreline Sideshow

  Near the twelve-foot-high privet to the side of the estate, a young woman escaped the party and raced behind the pool shed, her heart beating violently. She tried to create moisture in her dry mouth by sucking on the insides of her cheeks. Pulling her glorious, curly mane off her bare back, she knotted it up into a bun so as to better perform the business she had in mind.

  Waiting for her, he lay like a starfish in the dark, tangled brush. His blazer flapped open against the sandy earth beneath him, exposing the Lilly Pulitzer pink-and-yellow gardenia lining he found so festive and reassuring all at once. He passed the time deciphering the sparkling constellations above, his eyes eventually settling on the hunter, Orion.

  The shoulder straps of her orange silk romper got caught in the branches as she dashed along. An undulating field of high sea grass shielded the spot they’d agreed on. She knew sneaking here was not the best idea, but it was funny that he’d suggested that they should do it now. An Instagram of the spot would be awesome. No one would ever recognize the patch of grassy sand where he waited, but she would make clear what transpired there. And she would never tell anyone with whom.

  He checked his vintage Rolex Daytona. Indeed, she was eighteen minutes late. Off in the distance, the waves of the Atlantic pounded the shoreline, making the ground beneath him reverberate with a gentle rumbling. He had all night to mingle, and he knew all the arrivistes sipping their colorful cocktails on the other side of the hedge wouldn’t discover them. His reasoning, honed on the debate team at Exeter, usually did not fail him. But tonight, with his mind consumed in the sparkling sky and his loins captivated by her sheer roundness, his thinking was not sound. After all, ensuring a young woman’s discretion was far more difficult than pinpointing the archer’s bow above.