“Fine. You’re on triple pay,” he said. “Plus a bonus.” We walked on in silence for a few moments.
“What do you think happened on the ship?” I asked.
He was silent, but in a very particular way. A way that said I don’t have an answer but I’m trying to figure it out. When I glanced back at him, he was chewing his lip. “What do you think?” he asked.
“I think you don’t just abandon ship and leave two people to drown,” I said. “I mean, maybe they’d forget me. I was a replacement. The rest of them all knew each other, but they weren’t used to me being there. So that sort of makes sense—”
Adam had his hand up. “Wait,” he said. “You thought they forgot about you? That’s what you think?”
I thought back to that moment on the bridge, when I realized the lifeboat was missing. That nightmare trip through the yacht, opening doors, thinking I was all alone. I nodded.
He blinked at me. “Angel,” he said softly. “Trust me on one thing. No one is forgetting you.”
I knew it was just meant to make me feel better, and I gave him a look, to let him know that I knew. But crazily, it sent a little flutter through my chest all the same.
“Anyway,” I said, “they wouldn’t forget you. You’re the VIP guest. So what happened? And the storm. When I went to bed, the engine was running—we were going to go around it. And yet we sailed straight into the middle of it.”
Adam glanced at the jungle floor, avoiding my eyes.
“What?” I asked.
He made a kind of half-shrug. “I dunno. It’s only a guess.”
“What?”
He sighed. “What if...what if we were boarded? Some time in the night? Pirates sometimes attack yachts, right? To kidnap and ransom people.”
I stopped, one foot up on a log, and turned to face him. “But then we’d be dead, or hostages.”
“But what if something went wrong? Up on deck, where we wouldn’t hear it? What if there was a fight, or something, and the pirates panicked and left, grabbing whoever they could?”
“A fight that went wrong?” I said. Then my voice rose in panic. “You mean...people got killed?” I thought of the crew, people I’d barely had a chance to get to know. God, even Simone. My stomach lurched.
Adam was suddenly beside me, slipping his arms around me, and for a second I wasn’t sure why. Was he trying to cop a feel again? Then I felt the heat in my eyes, the wetness just starting to spill down my cheeks. “Oh my God,” I whispered.
“Hannah—” His arms pulled me closer, but I couldn’t stop talking. I could see it all happening in my mind.
“They killed them all and threw them over the side—”
“We don’t know that—”
I was taking panic breaths, now. “And then they set a lifeboat adrift to make people think the crew got off okay—”
“Hannah, it’s just a…wotsit. A theory.”
“It’s a pretty good theory!” I was starting to panic breathe again. The jungle suddenly felt dark, too dark. “That’s how we wound up in the storm—the pirates probably set us on course for it, to get rid of the evidence. “The crew are all dead!” Then another thought occurred to me. “Adam, if that’s right…no one knows what happened. No one knows where we are!”
“Hannah, stop.”
His voice cut through the fog. I looked up at him.
“We don’t know what happened,” he said. Then his palms pressed against my cheeks, cradling my face. “Let’s both of us stop guessing and just find some water. One thing I do know—that boat was packed with high tech this and satellite that. A boat like that gets into trouble, the captain only has to press a button and half the world knows it’s in danger. So even if the worst happened, the coast guards know exactly where the yacht was. They’ll be looking for us. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said quietly. His hands on my cheeks felt comforting, but not just that. They felt good…too good. A part of me wanted something to happen, because it would push away the fear. Would that really be so bad, to just give myself up to it and feel warm and safe and loved for a while? I looked up into his eyes and they were locked on mine—
I had to end this. Right now. Before I did something I’d regret.
I took a deep breath and looked away from him, then pulled myself out of his arms and marched on, not looking back. A few seconds later, I heard him start to follow.
There were shafts of sunlight coming down through breaks in the trees—the jungle wasn’t really that dark at all, I realized, as my heart rate slowed. I’d just got scared, for a second, in the middle of my freak-out. I remembered the pitch-black ship and shuddered.
The ground started to slope up beneath our feet, rising towards the mountain. There were was still nothing that looked even remotely like a creek. And now it was worse, because I could feel his eyes on me as I walked. Was he checking out my ass? I thought back to my freak-out. I had a nasty feeling I’d called him Adam. That wasn’t good.
Or was he worrying about me, wondering if I was going to freak out again? That was the last thing I wanted. I didn’t need any man’s pity.
I needed to distract him.
“So did you have fun?” I stepped carefully over a tree root.
“What?”
“Did you have fun, yesterday, at your birthday? With the strippers?”
“Ow!”
“Careful.” I tried not to smirk. “There’s a tree root there.”
“They weren’t my type.” It was hard to tell, under the hangover pallor, but...was he blushing?
“Oh really? Blonde and busty isn’t your type?”
He stopped. “How did you know my one was blonde and busty? You were in your cabin.”
Oops.
“Simone told me.” A stab of guilt at that. For all I knew, Simone’s body was floating somewhere—don’t think about that.
We continued on, passing a few pools of mud, but no running water. “She...you know. Danced,” he said. “I only went through with it because Eddie arranged it.”
“Oh, right. Because you’re a saint. Didn’t you once drop fifty thousand in a strip club in one night?”
“I’m not saying I’m a saint. I just didn’t feel like it, last night. Anyway, that story’s exaggerated. It was forty-eight thousand, and I paid off a couple of those girls’ student loans, so—”
I nodded. “You’re practically providing a service to women. I get it.”
He stopped again and, when I turned around, he was staring at me. “I’m having trouble getting a handle on you,” he said slowly, as if that wasn’t entirely a bad thing. He gave me another of those looks: annoyed and yet fascinated. What’s it going to take to push this guy away for good? And do I really want to?
We walked on. We were deep into the jungle, now, and it hit me that it wasn’t going to necessarily be straightforward to find our way back. The trees behind us looked a lot like the trees ahead of us, and if it wasn’t for the slight upward gradient, I wouldn’t have even been sure we were still heading in the right direction. A shudder went through me. I wouldn’t want to be lost in here, after dark.
Then again, if we didn’t find water, getting back to the beach wasn’t going to do us a lot of good anyway. What if we couldn’t? What if there wasn’t any fresh water on the whole island? Dying of thirst seemed like a pretty horrible way to go. I tried to only take tiny sips from my bottle, but they added up—already, nearly a third was gone.
The sounds of the jungle didn’t do anything to make me feel better. I could hear bird calls I didn’t recognize and the chattering of insects I couldn’t see. And there was nothing else. It’s amazing how used you get to the background hum of a city, or even a town. The island I lived on wasn’t exactly a sprawling metropolis, but it was deafening compared to this. I started to get antsy, and then downright scared. I’d never felt so...alone.
Luckily, Adam chose that moment to miss his footing on the slope and slid back down about twenty feet. When he finally came to a
stop, he looked as if he was going to throw up.
My frustration at him bubbled to the surface. We were in danger, and he was still getting over the night before! Some of the anger, I knew, was an attempt to escape my fear. If I let myself get good and angry, I couldn’t be scared. “How much did you drink?!” I yelled. “Look at you!”
He winced and climbed gingerly to his feet. “It’s okay. I’m fine, thank you. And I really didn’t have that much. I was barely drunk.”
“You probably didn’t notice how much you were drinking,” I said with something uncomfortably close to a sneer. “Hard to pay attention, when there’s a blonde grinding away on your lap.”
He looked up at me. “How did you know she gave me a lap dance?”
I flushed. “Isn’t that what they do?”
He walked towards me very slowly. “Were you...spying on me?”
“That’s completely ridiculous.”
A smile was spreading across his face. “You were spying on me. You were outside the door—”
“No—”
“Did you enjoy it?”
“No! I mean, I wasn’t—”
“Were you wishing it was you?”
My jaw dropped open. I was about a hundred years too late to call him incorrigible so I wound up to call him asshole instead.
Suddenly, his finger was on my lips. I was so surprised, I made a noise like “Mmmf!”
“Shh,” he told me. His finger lifted. “Close your eyes.”
Something completely alien stirred inside me. Not an unpleasant feeling, but a totally unfamiliar one. A sort of light, breezy fluttering, where previously there’d only been a leaden heaviness.
No, wait. Not totally unfamiliar. Just something I hadn’t felt in a very long time.
He’s going to kiss me.
There was a sort of thrumming in my ears. The air seemed to grow thick and liquid around us, as if time was slowing down. I closed my eyes and I found that my lips were pursing.
That’s ridiculous, I don’t want him to—
Yes you do.
“There,” he said. “Do you hear that?”
It only took me a fraction of a second to figure out that he hadn’t been planning to kiss me. But it still felt like it took a month to get my lips unpursed. Had he noticed? Oh, God, please don’t let him have noticed!
To cover myself, I forced myself to listen. But I couldn’t hear any—
Wait. There. Off to the left, a sound like a bubbling rush.
Water.
The excitement of it let me pretend that the previous few seconds hadn’t happened, which was exactly what I needed. I nodded quickly that I could hear it, and opened my eyes.
He was staring right at me. More precisely, he was staring at my lips. I gulped.
There was a long pause.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go find it.”
And we set off.
***
You big, bumbling idiot. Do you never learn?!
I strode towards what I hoped was the source of the sound, taking my anger out on the plants beneath my feet. The guy was a cocky, arrogant asshole. A heartbreaker. I’d known that. And yet all he’d had to do was make me think he was about to kiss me and I’d melted like a teenager at her prom. I didn’t even like him. I mean, I liked him physically, but I didn’t like him. I just had to make my body understand that.
And then I saw it. A twisting, fast-flowing creek winding through the trees and disappearing between the rocks and into the ground.
Adam squatted down beside the creek and scooped up some of the water. I tried not to look at the way his t-shirt stretched tight over his huge shoulders, or they way his legs bulged with firm muscle. I absolutely, categorically did not look at his ripe, toned ass.
He smelled the water, and then tasted it carefully. “Fresh. We should boil it, to be safe.”
I brightened. “So we’re okay, then? I mean, we can last days with just water, right? It’s not going to take that long for them to find us.”
He nodded slowly. “Might get a bit cold at night. We should get a fire going. But…yeah. We’re gonna be fine. Just like I told you.”
I wanted to hug him. Which was stupid, so I started looking for something to carry the water in, instead.
Chapter 9
Back on the beach, the sun was high in the sky. Luckily, there was some cloud cover or we both would have been fried without sunblock. We decided to divide forces.
We needed a fire to boil the water and to be ready to signal a plane or ship if we saw one. Adam claimed he knew how to start a fire by rubbing sticks together, so I let him get started. Meanwhile, I took the plastic trash bag—which was the biggest container we had—back to the creek and filled it with water.
If you’ve ever carried a bulging trash bag, praying it doesn’t tear or burst, you’ll know how delicate they are. Well, imagine carrying one full of heavy, sloshing water, while navigating a jungle where every branch seems to end in five thousand thorns, knowing that this bag is the only one you have. By the time I got back to the beach and nestled the full bag into a hole in the sand, my nerves were shredded.
I looked across at Adam. He was making what looked like a bow and arrow out of a stick and a shoelace. “Going hunting?” I asked.
“It’s a fire bow,” he told me solemnly. “Observe!” And he hooked a stick in the string and pulled the bow back and forth like a deranged violinist. The stick twizzled around, its end scraping against another piece of wood. “Friction,” he said. “It’ll get hot. Then: fire!”
He kept bowing. We both stared at the stick. Smoke and flames failed to happen.
“It probably takes a while,” he said defensively.
I left him to it and got back to the water. Next problem: I needed something to boil the water in. I couldn’t put a plastic trash bag over the flames...assuming there were eventually flames.
Then I remembered something I’d seen not far from the creek. I trekked back there and returned with a piece of bamboo as long and thick as my arm.
“How’s it going?” I asked Adam. An hour must have gone by, but he was still bowing back and forth as if trying to play The Flight of the Bumblebee. He’d taken off his t-shirt and I tried not to notice just how good he looked, the solid slabs of his pecs flexing, his abs rippling—I quickly looked away.
“Fine,” said Adam between his teeth. “It’ll work. Men have been doing this for millions of years.”
I broke out my knife set and started hacking away at the inside of the bamboo, breaking down the walls that divided it into sections. After another hour, I had a very deep, very narrow cooking pot.
“Bloody hell!” yelled Adam.
I looked up in time to see him throw down the fire bow and cradle his hands to his chest. “It’s not possible. Maybe cavemen’s hands were different. All leathery.”
Something was tickling at my brain¸ right at the back of my consciousness. Something I should have remembered earlier.
“I didn’t know you could get calluses this fast,” Adam said, shaking his throbbing hands. “I feel like I just played a guitar solo for nine hours straight.” He sighed. “It’s gonna get cold tonight. And we need to boil the water….” He eyed the fire bow. “Maybe if I made it bigger….”
The memory finally came back to me. “Oh! I brought a gas lighter!” I said happily.
Adam looked at me. “What?”
“I brought a gas lighter?” My voice was still cheery, but my smile was flickering like a bulb with a loose wire.
“What?!”
My smile flickered out completely. “I...probably should have thought of that sooner.”
“You brought...a gas lighter?”
“Yes. Over there in the boat. Look.” And I jumped up and fetched it. And then I went to touch the plastic end of it to his little pile of kindling. “Oh. Sorry.” I made to hand the gadget to him. “Would you prefer to…?”
“Oh no,” he said, his voice hollow. “You go ahead.”
I clicked the button and an orange flame shot out. The kindling went wumf and a merry little flame sprung up.
There was silence for a few seconds.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But, on the plus side: fire!”
He glared at me with barely-contained rage. “You are,” he said through gritted teeth, “without a doubt, the most—”
I glared right back at him, waiting to see what he’d say. And then his eyes changed. The heat of anger turned into a different sort of heat.
“…unique woman I’ve ever met,” he said at last.
I looked quickly away. We had enough problems. I wasn’t going to add some sort of crazy fling to the list. Those parts of me that Nathan had damaged were still cracked and fragile, ready to shatter at the slightest impact. No way was I going down that path again. Safer to keep myself locked down and closed off, even if it meant I couldn’t feel anything at all.
“Help me fix something up to hold the bamboo,” I said. “And let’s get boiling.”
***
An hour later, sitting in the shade of the trees, we passed the bamboo between us. It’s not easy, drinking out of something that’s as long as your arm, especially when the mouth end is roughly cut and the drink is almost-boiling water. But when you’re thirsty, you can make it work.
“It’s practically like coffee,” said Adam. “If you ignore the taste, and imagine you’re being charged five dollars, we could be in a coffee shop.” He was starting to look better, the hangover easing.
I stared at the empty horizon. “Why don’t they come?” I asked quietly.
He reached out and took my hand. It was so unexpected that I nearly jerked it away, but a few seconds later I was glad I hadn’t. His touch there felt good. “They’ll come,” he said. “Hell, Eddie will be having a complete meltdown. I bet you a hundred bucks he’s out there in a boat right now, searching for us, yelling at the coast guard to go faster.”
Shipwrecked with the Billionaire Rock Star Page 6
