Impulsive Ever After SAMPLE (Book 4 of The Conquest Series)

1. Mostly Mattie

Just a few quick words before you start.

This will be a short book, only 20 chapters long. It is a wrap-up novella for The Conquest Series which includes the books (in order) Impulse, Redemption, and Provocation.

This book is already completed on my p*****n account and can be read in full there @ www.patreon.comkknightlybooks

Mathilde hurried off the plane like her ass was on fire and the only way to quench it was to get to the ocean or resort they’d book lodgings at. It was a beautiful view even coming into the airport, but she’d been cramped up for hours in what amounted to fifth class seats.

This was the first and last time she let Harry allow her to book the flights for one of their frequent holidays. She was useless at it and had forgotten to book in business or first class.

Never. Again.

She shook out her hair as soon as she was on the walkway leading to the gates. Already she could feel the mugginess affecting her usually straight locks and curling them up the ends. She tried hard to keep her cute little bob on point, and already she was looking at a two-week life of constant dates with her hair straightener and pulling her hair back from her sweating face.

Hawaii was beautiful, she had to admit. Hot. Humid. But picturesque. It seemed like the perfect place to renew her vows with Harry, her husband of almost thirty years.

At least at first it did. She could already feel her armpits dampening and the sweat trickling down between her breasts in rivulets of nastiness.

So gross.

“Love, wait up!”

Harry was scrambling behind her to catch up, both their carry-ons being wheeled behind him as she attempted her escape to the cool air-conditioned insides of the airports.

“Hurry up then, Harry. It’s hot as the devil out here.”

Maybe that was a slight exaggeration on her part, but for Mathilde is was just that—slight. Hawaii was wonderful in the abstract. This humidity was going to kill her, though.

Harry eventually caught up and they both strode toward the baggage claim. Unfortunately for Harry, Mathilde had packed everything but the bidet from their en suite and the kitchen sink. He could only be grateful she hadn’t brought her laptop and would suffice with her iPad and cell phone as her only nods to technology.

Unlike Harry, she wasn’t all that interested in scouring the web and rarely used her personal laptop even when at home. She preferred her electronic magazine subscriptions and the occasional how-to video on YouTube. She thought it made her seem ‘hip’, though to Harry it was just another adorable quirk she owned.

Like a boss, as the kids said these days.

Much like her penchant for sticking her nose into other people’s love lives and being completely clueless when it came to attaching a baby seat into the back of her SUV. With four grandkids now, it was amazing that any of them survived a ride with ‘Mimi’, as she liked to be called. Mathilde didn’t see herself as the typical grandmother to Mason and Dora—Violet and Carl’s children—or Cadence and Parker—Nate’s little ones. She was right, though, and all of their tight-knit crew had to admit they never knew a grandmother like her before. It was what made her a unique addition to their ensemble. She even considered RJ and Little Lizzie her honorary grandchildren.

Over three years had passed since the birth of Nate’s first child, Cadence, and they’d added onto the family a couple years later with Parker who had just turned one year old. Although she was on vacation, she couldn’t wait to see them playing in the sand and wading in the ocean.

Safely and supervised, of course.

After all, their trip wasn’t just going to be the two of them. Harry and Mathilde had invited the whole gang and their children to witness what Mathilde was calling their ‘second marriage’. The first had obviously been abroad thirty years ago when the two had barely known each other. They’d come a long way since then, and Mathilde had seen the spike of vow renewal ceremonies as something fun and exciting. Every few years it was proclaimed as the ‘in’ thing to do, and since her 30th anniversary was coming up, she’d bullied Harry into making it a family vacation as well.

Their luggage came out shortly, and Harry was able to breathe again after being winded trying to keep up with his wife. Even though Mathilde had insisted on wearing heels on the plane, she walked like a marathon runner in them still. He was sure he’d have fallen face first onto the tiles had he been wearing 5-inch pumps.

“Who did you rent the car from, love?” Harry asked as the first piece of luggage rolled past them on the conveyor belt.

“Hertz, I think. I have to check.”

With a few swipes of her finger it was confirmed, and the first of her luggage was being rolled slowly toward her. She picked it up and added it to the other wheeled bags before Harry’s one lonely—yet still large—bag was pushed onto the belt.

Harry claimed one of those rolling luggage racks near the doors and piled their belongings onto it before they left the claim area and forced themselves out into the thick, soupy air.

“Christ,” Mathilde mumbled, trying to fix her hair as she waited for a car to pass by so she could walk across the road to the car rentals. Hertz was the first rental agency she could see, so at least it wouldn’t be a far walk to get back into the cool, recycled atmosphere of civilization.

She hoped the ocean breeze off the Pacific would make all the difference. She couldn’t imagine doing things like taking a jungle trek like Carl and Vi had mentioned. It sounded like a vile way to spend your time when there were sunny beaches and spas everywhere on the big island of Hawaii. A beachside wedding at sunset had sounded heavenly, and she’d made plans with a Hawaii-based wedding planner way ahead of time. Her only regret was that because she was so far away, she hadn’t been able to be as active in the planning. Everything was done by Skype or Zoom, and something got lost in translation over the grainy video quality.

Once Mathilde got to the counter at Hertz, she handed over her driver’s license and a credit card and gave them her name. She’d also been the one to put down the deposit on the rental car they’d be using for the two weeks of their vacation.

Harry was added as a secondary driver, and they were both taken to the car lot where their ride for the next two weeks was parked. When they got there, Harry glowered at the vehicle. He hadn’t been expecting a Mercedes Benz really, but he hadn’t expected this joke of a car as well.

“You have to be f*****g kidding me!”

“Isn’t it so très adorable?” Mathilde’s hands clasped together in delight as Harry nailed her with the scowl that was creeping across her face slowly.

“It’s a f*****g clown car, Mattie.”

It certainly looked like one. Yellow with two stripes stretching across the top, it looked hardly large enough for one person, much less Harry, who was no small man himself. He may not have been as tall as Carl or as beefy as Ramon, but he’d have to fold himself in half to sit inside the Mini Cooper Mathilde had thought was très adorable and he thought of as a sick joke.

“Where we will we put all your damned luggage?” he asked, following it up with an internal and me. “I won’t be able to drive that thing unless you want us wrapped around a pole and hanging off a cliff.” He looked over at the employee with a desperate look on his face. Help me, it said. You can see this is madness, can’t you? “Do you have any other vehicles available? Money is no obstacle, I assure you.”

The man who’d shown them the vehicle shrugged apologetically. “Sorry, but this is the last car or SUV we have until next week. It’s the busy season, sir.”

Harry groaned deep in his throat where his irritation with his wife rattled around until it broke free in a short expletive. “f**k me.”

Mathilde turned around and gave him a beaming smile. “You ready to go to the resort?”

His eyes clenched shut as he gave in to his wife’s eccentric whim to have him toted around the big island of Hawaii in what amounted to a shoe box.

“Just get in the car, Mathilde. I’ll try to wrestle these damn bags into the back seat and trunk.”

If I can, he added in his head.

He sighed as Mathilde took the keys from Jake, their Hertz employee according to his badge, and hopped into the driver’s seat while Harry took out his frustrations as he mumbled curse after curse while trying not to mishandle the bags to the point they broke.

It was difficult not to just toss them aside and say ‘f**k it’ to the five bags of luggage Mattie had brought with her.

***

“For f**k’s sake, love! Hawaii is still in the states! Stay on the right side of the road!” Harry looked panicked, and he was tempted to jerk the wheel from her as her gaze wandered off to the ocean on her left.

“But I thought I saw a shark. Or dolphins.” She couldn’t tell the difference from this far away, but it had excited her all the same.

And distracted her. She’d almost run a motorist with a surfboard on his hood off the damn road.

Harry knew he should have insisted on checking with the other car rental places to see if they had something he could actually drive instead. Right now, he was so cramped that his nuts were aching and squashed, and his calves and thighs had cramped up.

All that talk about massages Mathilde had mentioned were starting to sound damned good to him. He’d need someone to knead the charley horses and ache out of his body pronto.

If he could have, he’d have told Mathilde to pull over onto the side of the road so he could switch places, but not only was there no ample room to do so, he knew he wouldn’t be able to drive any better than she could, even with the seat pushed back as far as it could go.

He felt like a pretzel in a Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts.

Thankfully, the epic view of the ocean was cut off at one point and Mattie decided that the jungle surrounding them was too boring to inspect, so she was a half-way decent driver after the first spine-chilling ten minutes of their drive through heaven.

Or hell—he wasn’t quite sure. He certainly didn’t want to be minced meat anytime soon with the way Mattie was navigating the roads on the coast towards the resort.

Hotel Fairmont Orchid was one of the resorts with its own private beach, and it was pricier than usual because of it. If the rooms fit the descriptions on their website, then both of them thought it would be well worth the trip. They’d bypassed the traditional lei-giving services at the airport, but they’d never been ones to hold to such cliched movie-going baloney. The cinema would have you believing that the airports on the Hawaiian Islands passed out leis like candy to kids on Halloween, but it was actually a paid service that neither felt the need to take part of. Kitschy and cute, but Harry and Mathilde didn’t want to walk around with a loudly-colored flower that might clash with their already loud apparel.

Especially Mathilde, who was already wearing pretty much every color on the planet on her long maxi dress.

As they pulled into the parking lot of the resort, Harry nearly wept with relief when he was able to stretch his legs. He thought he’d temporarily lost the feeling in his toes and he was glad to find that he could still wiggle them in his penny loafers quite easily.

He shook his legs out like a wet dog and walked gingerly for a while until he felt they could hold him upright as they sauntered up to the hotel’s check-in counter. No one accosted them with leis, and no one seemed to even realize they were there until the Asian lady looked up at him and plastered on a bright, practiced smile.

All pleasantries aside, they were given electronic room keys after Harry asked if they had mini-bars in the suites. They might not carry his favorite scotch, but he also wasn’t going to be too picky in regards to the alcohol they offered either. He needed a drink too damn badly for that.

After his first sip of scotch, the first layer of his travel-weariness seemed to slough off his shoulders and he collapsed onto the couch in the living area of the suite. He was just finishing off his first drink when Mathilde swept out of the bathroom with a scarf wrapped around her head.

“I’m going to put my clothing away,” she said, smiling as she wandered off in the bedroom.

“That’ll take half the holiday as it is,” he muttered sarcastically under his breath.

Earlier he’d texted Violet and found she was already ensconced in her suite with Carl and their two children, having come in on an earlier flight. Ramon and Mariana would be getting in later on in the evening, although Aiden, Constance, Nate and Leila were already set up in the rooms.

“I’m going to see what Vi and Carl are up to,” he called out to Mattie, who murmured her assent just loud enough to be heard. He slipped another couple of cubes of ice and added more alcohol to his glass, thinking he’d probably make a trip to the liquor store sometime that evening after dinner.

He had a feeling he was going to need it.