Wren is a hardworking archaeologist on his first vacation in years. While he’s tempted to look for ancient artifacts, this is Maui and he needs to focus on taking it easy. So it’s off to the beach to relax. There Wren dives into trouble, literally. Luckily, the backward roll and breathing techniques he learned studying Ninjutsu saves his life, because the shore break called Satan’s Washing Machine grinds him up and spits him out, temporarily blinded and badly battered. A karate dojo owner named Steven takes him to a doctor, a pharmacy, and then back to the beach, only to find Wren’s car and all his belongings have been stolen. So Steven invites him home instead. Will their mutual love of martial arts lead to other a deeper relationship? Or will their shared desire for humbleness and respect for others keep them from falling in love?

Beyond Black Belt

“It doesn’t seem like real history, being only a couple of hundred years old, does it? And yet it hasn’t been used in decades. Except for art, of course. And hiding.”


I looked around. The ground inside the walls was littered with wreckage. I hated to say trash, but therewas an old mattress, an over-turned grocery cart, rags, and broken things that may have been anywhere from two days to two hundred years old. Not all man-made, either, and certainly not all recently man-made. If I’d been educated enough to date something from just a small broken sliver, I might have started collecting things, but I wasn’t, so I didn’t.


Besides, archaeologists don’t just pick stuff up and walk away with it. Pictures often had to be enough. The Hawaiian Islands were not the Middle East. I didn’t expect to find thousand-year-old civilizations, lost cities, or dinosaur bones. They could all be here, but I knew nothing about it. Perhaps even those who had been born and raised here didn’t, either.


Chapter 8