The Trouble With Paradise

by Jill Shalvis

  “Hey.” She tried to sit up. “Don’t tell me I got another splinter, because—”

  “Whoa.” He held her down, then looked into each of her pupils. “Mildly concussed. You’re lucky you didn’t crack your skull open like an egg, you know that? Now just lay there a second, give your organs a chance to catch up. Took a good fall this time, did you?”

  “Yeah.” She closed her eyes again. “Because, you know, the last few weren’t good enough.” She went green to match Andy. “Oh boy.”

  He knew the signs. “Open your eyes,” he instructed. “Look at a focal point until the dizziness passes.”

  Those killer eyes opened and landed on him. “I’m okay.”

  “You are definitely okay,” he agreed. “Probably not ready for a mountain climb, but—”

  “A flight home would be great.”

  He gave her a grim smile and pulled her slowly upright to a sit. “Well, that answers that. You know where you are. Tell me who you are and what year it is, and we’ll be in business.”

  “I know who I am.” Her eyes met his, and in them was the knowledge of what they’d done last night. “I’d like to stand up. Because I think there might be ants crawling in places they have no business crawling.”

  He got her up, noting that Andy kept an arm around her, acting as her crutch. Not that Dorie seemed to mind. Nope, she leaned on him, even smiled a sweet thanks into his face.

  While Christian tried to remember why he’d ever wanted the two of them to find each other.

  “Actually,” Dorie said after a moment, looking shaky, “the ground was good. You guys go on ahead and finish your exploring, I’ll just take a little nap.”

  “No nap,” Christian said, catching her before she lay back down. “In fact, no sleeping for you, not with a concussion.”

  “You said mild.”

  “No sleeping,” he repeated firmly. “Not until I say so.”

  “She needs to get back to camp,” Denny said.

  Brandy slipped an arm around Dorie’s waist. “We’re done exploring today.”

  “So where the hell’s Ethan?” Denny turned in a slow circle, looking.

  Andy nodded down the way they’d been walking. “He kept going.”

  Denny shook his head. “Idiot. Let’s go back.”

  “And what, just leave Ethan out here?” Cadence asked, looking horrified.

  “Ethan’s a big boy,” Denny said. “He can take care of himself, trust me.”

  They all began the trek back, each of them taking turns helping Dorie so that Christian didn’t have to.

  Which should have worked for him.

  Except it didn’t.

  “I really thought I was cut out for this whole outdoor life adventure,” Andy muttered at the halfway point. “Turns out I’m not. I need a vacation from my vacation.”

  At the shakiness of his voice, Christian looked at him. “You starting to lose it?”

  “Yes. Yes, I believe I am.”

  “It’s going to be okay.”

  “Really? So you think there’s a Ritz on the other side of this island?”

  “We’ll be found,” Denny said. “You’ll get your Ritz.”

  “Yes, but when? A day? A week? We’ll all be dead before then.”

  “Nah,” Christian said. “We have plenty of fresh water, and it’d take a lot longer than a week to die of starvation.”

  “Good to know.” But Andy’s voice said it wasn’t good to know at all.

  When they finally staggered back to the beach, Denny handed out water, fresh fruits, and bread. The cheese and meats were gone, and though no one complained or said a word about it, Christian knew by tomorrow people would be panicking.

  He hoped like hell Ethan found people on the other side of the island. And a working radio. He watched Dorie very carefully, which was how he knew that though she pretended to, she didn’t drink and she didn’t eat. He waited until Cadence and Brandy went with Andy to the water to cool off and then he crouched at her side.

  “Are you going to ask me how I’m doing?” she asked without looking at him. “Because I’m not sure I could summon up a good lie right now.”

  “I want the truth.”

  “I want to take a nap.”

  “I know, but—”

  “No, I mean I can’t keep my eyes open, Christian.” She put her hand on his arm and looked into his face, her own imploring. “I’m not trying to be a whiner here, but my head hurts like hell and my eyes are closing, and if you need me to stay awake, then help me.”

  He considered calling Andy back to get on babysitting duty, but that thought only pissed him off, so he rose to his feet and gently pulled her to hers. “Come on.”

  “Oh no,” she said when he walked her back to the edge of the rain forest.

  “Trust me.”

  She didn’t say a word to that, so he assumed she did trust him, which he didn’t want to think about. He remained silent, keeping an arm around her waist, guiding her, until they stood before the natural waterfall, where they’d had the most erotic, sensual, hottest sex of his life only the night before.

  He pulled her into the cool water up to her calves, and immediately saw a change in her eyes. More alert, more aware.

  Good.

  Why he then pulled her against him, gently cupped her head, taking care not to touch her injury, before leaning in and kissing her, he’d never know. But he immediately sank into the kiss, into the feel of her doing the same with that sweet, soft sigh, and when she slid her hands up his back as if she couldn’t help but touch as much of him as she could, he thought his legs were going to buckle.

  Then she pulled back just a little and stared at his mouth in surprise.

  He was just as surprised.

  “What was that?” she asked.

  With a shake of his head—which didn’t help clear it—he stepped back. “Not a clue.”

  “I thought we weren’t going to do that anymore.”

  “Like I said, not a clue.”

  She was still looking into his eyes, her own curious. “You said that it was just adrenaline. But that didn’t feel like just adrenaline.”

  “I know.”

  Again, she looked at him for a long beat. “I’m going to make this easy for you, Christian.” She staggered back a step, then held up a hand when he would have reached for her. “If you don’t know how or why that just happened, then you need to keep your hands off me. And your mouth.” She pointed at him. “Especially your mouth.” With that, she turned and very carefully and very slowly began to leave.

  He followed, and when she glanced at him, he raised his hands. “You want to go back. Fine. But not alone.”

  “I’m feeling better.”

  “Great, even if you’re lying. But there’s still the little problem of whoever made Bobby bleed all over his bathroom, remember?” He could see by her face that she did. “Don’t ask me to let you go back alone.”

  She stared at him, then slowly turned and began walking again, allowing him to follow. Because apparently, he could do little else.

  TWENTY

  Night Two on deserted island

  without modern conveniences,

  which sounds much more romantic

  than it really is.

  For some time now, Dorie had had this recurring dream. It changed a little each time, but it came in some variation of finding herself seventy-something years old, complete with gray hair and white orthopedic shoes, moving up and down the aisles of Shop-Mart, still shelving for an even older, meaner Mr. Stryowski.

  This time she was in the geriatric aisle trying to reach the Depends, and Mr. Stryowski was coming after her waving his cane.

  When she awoke with a start, she was covered in sweat. “I am not going to be shelving adult diapers when I’m seventy,” she said out loud, then shut up because her head hurt like hell.

  “Well, that’s good.”

  She gulped in air but kept her eyes closed. His voice was low, already unbearabl
y familiar, and just the sound of it, French as ever, was so comforting she felt the burn of tears behind her eyes.

  “Dorie? Look at me.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Dorie.”

  Fine. She’d look at him, even if doing so always, always, did something to her belly, and it wasn’t completely pleasant. She opened her eyes. Pitch-dark under their shelter, and pitch-dark outside except for the glow of the ever-burning campfire.

  Turning her head, she focused on Christian crouched at her side. Behind him, she could hear Brandy breathing deeply and evenly. Cadence was behind her, most likely asleep as well, though she wasn’t making a sound. Andy, she knew, was closer to the beach, but was still in plain sight, or had been when they’d all gone to sleep.

  She knew Denny had settled near Andy, with Ethan as well, who’d returned with no news. She could only assume that Christian had slept with the guys.

  When he wasn’t waking her up, that is.

  He’d been waking her up every few hours. She had no idea what time it was, but guessed dawn was still a long way off.

  “How many of me do you see?” he asked.

  “Same as the last time you asked me that question, and the time before.”

  “Dorie.”

  She sighed. “I see one of you. Do you have an evil ex-wife?”

  “What? No.”

  “Just checking, because you’re always looking at me like you’re waiting for me to bite you or something.”

  “I’ve never been married, and I’m definitely not afraid of a bite. What’s my name?”

  “Grumpy Doctor. Which reminds me to ask you, why are you a doctor anyway, if you grew up hating being dragged around the world with your father?”

  “I never said I hated it, and what happened to the gorgeous part?”

  “Huh?”

  “I thought the nickname was Gorgeous Grumpy Doctor.”

  She rolled her eyes. Big mistake, because that hurt like hell. “Okay, why do you look like you hate being a doctor?”

  His gaze cut to hers. “What I hate, if anything, is—was—being on a sailboat and healing paper cuts and sprained ankles.”

  “And splinters.”

  A very small smile curved his lips. “Actually, that was a nice perk.”

  “That’s my butt you’re talking about.”

  “Like I said, a perk.”

  “Well, thank you. I think.” She studied him a moment, and he let her. In reverse, she’d be squirming, but he wasn’t much of a squirmer. He was extremely comfortable in his own skin, an appealing trait, she had to admit. “Why aren’t you working at a hospital then, healing much more serious problems?”

  He looked away.

  Interesting. He’d never hidden a thing from her, not his annoyance, his arousal, nothing.

  “Christian?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  She understood complicated. She lived complicated. “Like working at Shop-Mart instead of designing clothes because you’re afraid kind of complicated?”

  “I’m not afraid. Of anything.”

  Somehow, she believed that. “Then what?”

  He drew in a deep breath as if reaching for patience, and it occurred to her, he was trying to scare her off. Except after being shipwrecked and concussed, she’d learned something about herself.

  She didn’t scare off easily. “Spit it out.”

  He shot her a half-amused/half-incredulous look. “Spit it out?”

  “American saying for ‘get to it, buster’.”

  “Ah.” He looked into her eyes, checked her pupils. Then slid his talented hands through her hair to feel the goose egg on her head. “Are you in pain?”

  “No. You’ve fixed all my sprains and splinters and aches, thank you very much.” A big, fat lie. Her head hurt so bad she could hardly breathe. “Good thing you’re not billing me—I couldn’t afford you.”

  “Your head still hurts.”

  “Okay, yes, it hurts like hell. Now get back to the subject. The subject of you.”

  “Isn’t there anything else we could talk about?”

  “Humor the patient, Doctor.”

  He sighed. “Fine. I’m here because I’m indebted to Denny for another year. After that, I’ll go back to France, or wherever I end up, and practice where I’ve always wanted to, in an ER.”

  “Indebted? What do you mean, indebted?”

  His fingers were at her temples now, and began some sort of massaging motion that felt so incredibly soothing and pain-relieving, she actually moaned. “Oh my God.” His hands were the most amazing, talented hands that had ever been on her. And it didn’t matter that he wasn’t touching her sexually, she felt that happy little switch inside her click on. Basically, he turned her on by just looking at her.

  How embarrassing was that?

  She squeezed her thighs tight and tried to come up with ways to distract herself. She thought of her unpaid bills at home, for instance. And then the fact that she was hungry but if she tried to eat, she’d probably toss her cookies. “Tell me about the indebted.”

  “One-track mind.”

  “I’ve been told. Are you paying off school debts?”

  “Not really. My father’s mission in life was to help impoverished villages by making doctors available. He went wherever he felt the calling the most, using connections for donations.”

  “Connections?”

  “He was a master at getting what he wanted. With one hand he worked with the villagers, while with the other he cultivated friends in high places.”

  “That’s quite a fence to straddle.”

  “Yes, it is. Especially when not all those so-called friends were on the up and up. He ran into financial trouble a few years back and a friend had to bail him out.”

  “Denny,” she guessed. “Oh my God, your father sold you to Denny to cover his debts?”

  “It’s the twenty-first century, not the Middle Ages,” he said dryly. “And it wasn’t Denny, but the owner of the Sun Song, Denny’s partner.”

  “So you’re working to pay off your father’s debt?”

  His silence was her answer. She couldn’t help it—the thought bowled her over. Her own parents were a little bit clueless when it came to her—okay, a lot clueless—but she couldn’t imagine them ever expecting her to step in and help them fulfill a debt they’d incurred. Unless . . . “They were going to rip off his kneecaps, right? That’s why you had to step in and work on the Sun Song?”

  “Shh.” He dug his fingers in, deepening the massage, and it felt so good she nearly passed out. She wanted to concentrate on him, on what he’d just told her, and how it completely changed the way she saw him. He’d given up two years of his life to help his father, had put everything on hold to honor a debt that wasn’t his. But he kept at the massage, and it was putting her brain cells into a pleasure coma. “You’re doing this on purpose, luring me into a state of ecstasy.” Her words were actually slurred because of the bliss coursing through her.

  “Stop squirming and relax.”

  “Are you kidding? I can’t relax when your hands are on me.”

  His fingers went still for one telling beat. “What did I tell you about saying things like that?”

  “That you could take advantage.”

  “That’s right.”

  The thought of him doing just that made the tingling worse. Not that he was amoral, or dangerous, at least not to her physical being. But he was a man who could push her to the edge of her comfort zone without even trying, and though he’d stop if she asked him, the bigger concern here was . . . would she ask him to? The answer to that was a big, fat, humiliating no. “I’m not the one who decided that this thing between us was . . . what did you call it? Oh, yes. Asinine.”

  He sighed, then rose to his feet. “I’ll be back to check on you later.”

  “Yeah. Okay, great.” She lay there listening to him walk away until Brandy rolled over and slid her sleep mask up to her forehead.

  “
You should have gone for it again, hon. I wouldn’t have watched. Okay, I might have peeked, but that’s all.”

  Dorie let out a huffing laugh. “Oh my God.”

  “Hey, I’m not here to judge.”

  Dorie turned over, and found Cadence gone from her pad.

  “Uh, Brandy?”

  Brandy came up on her elbow. “Huh. Looks like someone else is going for it.”

  “So much for the penis embargo.”

  “Honey, sometimes a woman just can’t help herself.”

  Unfortunately, Dorie could identify with that.

  It didn’t feel like she slept, but the next time she came awake, she sensed it was much closer to dawn, though the sky was still dark.

  Only a week ago, her nighttime fantasies had run along the lines of, say, Matthew McConaughey, but now as she lay on the long, golden stretch of beach, staring past their shelter to the star-riddled night sky, she fantasized about chocolate chip cookies.

  Make that double chocolate chip cookies.

  Sorry, Matthew, but priorities were priorities. Stuck on a deserted South Pacific island without cookies? Serious suffering going on.

  All around her came the sounds that people tended to buy those nature CDs for: the waves gently hitting the shore, crickets chirping, an exotic bird squawking . . .

  Her stomach growling.

  She put her hand on her belly, thinking she’d give her right arm for an entire bag of cookies all to herself. Maybe even her left as well.

  “How’s the patient?”

  Ah, there he was, the bane of her existence. She knew this because just his voice made her nipples go all happy.

  Damn nipples.

  She felt him sit in the sand at her side but she didn’t look at him. Nope, looking at him was a really bad idea because then her brain would begin that painful tug-of-war.

  Want him.

  Hate him.

  Want him.

  Hate him.

  She sighed. “Go away.”

  “Ah. You’re feeling better.” He lay next to her so that his arm brushed hers, the one she would definitely sell for that bag of chocolate chip cookies.

  “Question,” she said.

  “Hit me.”

  “Do you ever think about chocolate?”

  He turned his head and looked at her. He was all hard, lean, sinewy lines to her soft, curvy ones. She imagined if she pointed out how different they were, he’d say he liked those differences very much. “I think about other things,” he said.