Shipwrecked with Mr Wrong

by Nikki Logan

  Was the nightmare over?

  Soothing warmth seeped into Honor’s numb skin, not from the gentle hands rubbing her back but from the bare chest pressed tightly against hers. Intense heat radiated, soaking in, warming her frigid muscles. It should have taken just a split second for her to imagine how it would feel if his heart beat naked against hers, but the thought had to battle through the choked mire of her clouded mind. Shock still ruled and it lingered aggressively.

  Breathing deeply, she lifted her stinging eyelids and Rob slowly came into focus. He’d peeled his wetsuit half down at some point on their return to The Player‘s mooring and he enveloped her in his powerful arms and sea-salt smell. Safety had never felt—or smelt—so good.

  His lips were working; Honor was mesmerised by the movement, but the words were an incoherent thrum in her ears. His hands moved in reassuring circles over her back, under her cotton shirt, against her bikini, all warm and toasty against her frosted skin. The whooshing started to recede, to sound more like words, and then finally those words impacted on her brain. He was reciting Paterson.

  ‘… and upward, ever upward, the wild horses held their way, where mountain ash and Kurrajong grew wild …’

  ‘Wide.’ Was that pathetic croak her voice?

  He stopped and looked into her face. Deep blue relief flooded into his eyes. ‘Hey. Welcome back.’ He gently brushed her hair away from her damp face. ‘What’s wide?’

  ‘The Kurrajong grew wide, not wild. Common error … ‘

  His smile was entirely placating then. He wasn’t about to argue with the crazy lady. ‘How do you feel?’

  Embarrassed and shaky, but warm, with his arms back around her. ‘How long was I … away? ‘

  ‘The whole ride back around the island and two-thirds of The Man from Snowy River.’

  She shifted shakily away. Not because she wanted to—leaning into his safe arms was the most natural thing she’d done in years— but because the spectre of appropriateness suddenly floated up between them as conscience floated back with consciousness. She tried to make light of what had just happened and failed abysmally. ‘You know the whole thing?’

  He smiled, putting some space between them. She mourned the loss of closeness but appreciated the courtesy. ‘I can’t promise I didn’t make parts of it up … ‘ His quiet humour thawed her even more. ‘Can you get to shore, do you think?’

  She looked over to her familiar lagoon. She knew this water intimately and it held no fear. Immersing herself in the warm, familiar waters would give her the privacy and clarity she craved. And it would be off this damn boat. She nodded.

  She stepped shakily onto the reef when he pulled the boat around and then waited for him to secure it and join her. He shadowed her the whole way into camp.

  ‘You get dry,’ he ordered as soon as they were back on shore, and his voice still echoed a bit in her ears. ‘I’ll make some tea.’ Honor responded immediately to the authority he’d assumed. She was too drained to argue. She stumbled into the tent and sank down onto her swag, nausea threatening. Bad enough to have lost it so publicly out on the water; how much worse would it be having to face the inevitable pity in his face when she explained?

  And she knew she must. He’d been unexpectedly silent about last night—the whole chick thing—but there was no way he would ignore this one. Or could.

  Finally, she emerged. He thrust a hot cup of herbal tea into her shaking hands and gently pushed her into the camp chair.

  ‘I put sugar in, for the shock.’

  Honor didn’t even know she had sugar. Although she’d realised by now that she had shock. She accepted the chamomile tea and sipped it. The heat pooling outwards met the warmth soaking inwards from where he’d rubbed and finally she started to feel somewhat normal again. Her heart rate began to ease.

  He watched her without speaking. Those eyes were steady and patient. She wished he’d speak so that she didn’t have to, but his quiet witness only reminded her that it was her responsibility.

  ‘I’m sorry I ruined your dive.’ The truth was too hard, too confronting.

  His eyebrows raised and his eyes burned. ‘Don’t. Don’t apologise for something I did. I’m so sorry I pressured you into coming.’ He squatted next to her. ‘You tried to tell me you were frightened of boats. I was too wrapped up in my own needs. I just had to make the dive.’

  ‘Not just any dive.’ Her voice was small. ‘No, not just any dive. But not worth that either.’

  They fell to silence. His vehemence told her exactly how badly she’d lost it. She watched his jaw tightening, saw the colour flushing at his neck. He was taking too much on. She knew then she’d have to explain; she just didn’t know where to begin. A deep breath steadied her.

  ‘It’s not your fault. I used to love sailing and spent hours at sea with my husband.’

  Surprise showed in his face and his glance dropped to her left hand. She flexed her fingers under his gaze. ‘I don’t wear it … any more.’

  She stalled by sipping her soothing tea. ‘Our son inherited his father’s passion for the ocean.’

  Rob’s eyebrows lifted. His hand slipped over Honor’s as sudden tears filled her eyes. ‘Justin was a regular little water-baby. We’d just bought a new yacht, a forty-two-footer. Nate loved a maiden voyage. Justin loved any voyage. Especially on the new boat.’

  She took several swallows of tea, not knowing how to proceed. Rob read her hesitation and slid his other hand under hers. It seemed to disappear inside his large ones. ‘What happened?’

  She stared into empty space. ‘It was our third day out in the.’ She still couldn’t bring herself to call the yacht by its name. ‘We sailed up to Exmouth and then struck a course for Christmas Island. The current was high one morning but the wind was low so we’d switched over to motor. It was perfect dolphin weather. Justin saw the pod and he …’ Her eyes stung. ‘He knew not to but … he just … jumped.’

  In her mind, she saw his little sneakers tipping off the back of the cursed boat, a thousand kilometres from shore. His excited squeal. The awful flash of bright orange as his life vest hit the water.

  ‘I leaped in right off the back after him.’ Blue eyes shifted to her scars. ‘He missed the propeller, but I didn’t. The stabiliser guard sliced through my shoulder.’

  Rob closed his eyes as her voice failed.

  ‘I held onto him for as long as I could with only one arm.’ Her voice rose with the agony of retelling, begged him to understand. Tears caught in her throat. ‘He drifted away. I clung to the ladder with my good arm and Nate jumped in and swam out to him. He tied his life vest to Justin’s and tried to swim them both back towards the boat, but the swell was so strong …’ The tears flowed freely now. The pain, the terror of that awful day clawed in her gut.

  Rob’s nostrils flared and he wrapped both his hands around one of hers. ‘Don’t. I don’t need to know, Honor. Don’t relive it for me.’

  She had to keep going. She didn’t understand why, after all this time, she needed him to know, but she did. Her voice cracked as she continued. ‘There was blood everywhere and I was terrified of attracting sharks, not for me but for Justin in the water. I don’t remember doing it but somehow I crawled back into the boat and activated the emergency beacon.’

  Rob swallowed hard twice.

  ‘I could see them, the orange of their life vests, as they clung together in the water further and further away. I tried to stand, to motor the boat to them, but then I slipped in my own blood … I fell onto my bad arm and passed out.’

  Her voice was faint. She could hear the silence of that day, broken only by the sound of the sea and her own agonised moans as she lay on deck, rocking with the swell. She made the same sound now. Rob’s eyes glittered as he stared at her.

  Her voice now was hollow, exhausted. ‘They sent a chopper from the military base in Exmouth. I lost a third of my blood before they found me. I came to a week later in Darwin hospital and I hated the doctors for saving my l
ife. They wouldn’t tell me, but I knew.’

  She dragged her eyes up to his. ‘Justin and Nate were gone.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  ROB swallowed hard and squinted. Tears wouldn’t help her now, while she sat there bleeding from her very soul.

  He remembered the story in the newspapers. An Indonesian trawler found the bodies still lashed together a hundred miles from where they’d gone overboard. There was no imagining the physical and emotional agony Honor must have suffered in the weeks—months— after the accident.

  He kneeled and tipped her wordlessly forward into his arms. What did you say to a woman who had lost everything and survived to relive it daily? She didn’t resist this time. She clung to him and sobbed dry tears. The horrible, agonised wheeze broke his heart.

  A dozen image fragments tumbled through his mind. Her scars, the razor-sharp propeller of a marine motor, Honor bleeding to death on the deck of a yacht while her son and husband drifted away.

  Then he saw himself, joking about whether she was going to send him back out to drown; telling her she would make a good mother; criticising the turtles for not protecting their young. And Honor refusing to leave the dying booby chick.

  So it wouldn’t be alone.

  How had she not gone mad?

  Rob thought about his own life—the challenges of his parents and their expectations and the revolving door of empty relationships— and realised it wasn’t even close to what this tortured woman had lived through.

  And he’d judged her for being brittle.

  ‘Shh …’ He could do nothing but stroke her and rock her while she cried. It was completely inadequate. He wasn’t equipped for this, figuratively or literally. Back in his own world, he would have given her a couple of Valium, a few kind words and tucked her into bed as he’d done so often with his mother. Here there were no drugs and absolutely no words.

  But there was a bed.

  He swung her into his arms and moved towards the tent. He lay her on her side and let her curl into the foetal position. She looked so fragile, lying there, her sobs turning into exhausted hiccups and eventually to sleepy breaths. He imagined her story in his head, imagined it was his family out there, him

  waking in the hospital to find his life destroyed. Honor and his child gone.

  He frowned. Not Honor. A wife, any wife.

  It was simply unimaginable.

  He lay down and curled around her, tucking her back into his chest. He wanted to tighten his hold but didn’t want her to stir. If she slept, hopefully dreamless, she wouldn’t hurt. He could do that much for her, at least.

  He draped a heavy arm across her cold body and rocked and rocked and rocked.

  Day turned to evening before they spoke again. Honor had fallen into an exhausted sleep and Rob stayed, tucked close to her, stroking her hair from time to time and murmuring senseless words into her fevered ear.

  She finally stirred in his arms and stiffened, resisting him even before she fully woke. He rolled away and gave her some space.

  ‘I wanted to make sure you were warm,’ he said, before she gave him a serve for being in her bed.

  She sat up shakily. ‘What time is it?’ Not the first words he’d expected. ‘Ten to six.’

  Her head whipped around. ‘In the morning?’

  ‘In the evening. Same day as the dive.’ She sagged. ‘Oh. Good. I thought I’d missed the first night of the hatch.’ Her voice was hollow but otherwise normal. His heart sank. Back to business. Was she really going to say nothing?

  She shuffled to the entrance of the tent and climbed out into the golden light of evening, avoiding eye contact. He followed her. She rustled in the store box for some flavoured noodles and set a small pot of water to boil on her camp stove. He watched her the entire time; she ignored him just as determinedly.

  ‘Honor …’ He had to try.

  She spun brightly towards him. ‘I’m looking forward to the hatch tonight. Technically still too early, but you never know!’

  ‘Honor … could we—’

  ‘Would you like some noodles?’ There was a frantic tinge to her over-bright gaze, as though she was only just holding it together.

  He sighed, wondering how she could possibly repress all her emotion now her world had imploded. ‘Yes, sure, if you have enough.’

  Honor busied herself making two-minute noodles. She specialised in avoidance. She’d perfected the art over the past four years. Back then, it was the only way she could manage the overwhelming feelings. These days it was pure habit.

  She over-stirred the cheap noodles cooking in her little camp pot. It was something to do. Anything was better than thinking … than feeling. Busy work while she got her broiling emotions under control. She just wasn’t up to looking at Rob—not yet. Large parts of the afternoon were blank but she knew she’d lost her bundle on the reef and he’d had to clean up the mess back here in camp. There’d been tears and way too much information and he’d had no choice but to deal with what she’d lumped on him.

  Mortification stiffened her movements, kept her back rigid. Poor guy. He’d looked uncomfortable, as though she expected him to ask her about it, that she needed him to. The truth was she needed no one; she could cope on her own. Just because he was the only other human being on the island didn’t mean he was obliged to help her. The sooner she made this clear the better.

  ‘Honor—’

  ‘Almost done.’

  She couldn’t look at him and concentrated on stirring in the noodle seasoning packet. Her growling stomach reminded her she hadn’t eaten since the small muesli bar at noon. She scooped half the noodles into her bowl and handed the still-hot pot to him. It was the best she could do on an island where there was only one set of everything.

  She sat on a stump, as far away as possible from him, and pushed her noodles around in the bowl. Despite her hunger, her appetite deserted her.

  The silence grew palpable.

  ‘I’m sorry I asked you to come out with me,’ he murmured finally.

  I bet you are.

  She stirred her noodles, hating the tightness in his voice and knowing she was the reason for it. She hadn’t ever thought she’d come to miss his cocky self-assuredness.

  She sighed. ‘It wasn’t your fault. It was my choice to help you.’ It was the perfect out, an opportunity to back away and put things between them back onto a light, harmless level.

  He didn’t take it.

  ‘What happened out there?’

  He flicked his head towards The Player, concern live in his eyes. It almost undid her all over again. She studied her bowl. There may well have been ten feet between them but his energy reached out to tangle with hers. Suddenly, she found herself possessed with the desire to talk. Share. Open up. It was the strangest sensation.

  She swallowed slowly. ‘I haven’t been on a boat, alone, since …’ She cleared her throat. ‘It was so silent out there. Just the slap of the water on the side of the boat, the birds overhead. I thought I could do it …’

  He put his uneaten noodles aside and moved to sit on the ground in front of her as her heart lurched. His closeness had comforted her before; now it rang alarm bells.

  She rushed on. ‘I wanted to swim ashore. I would have risked it, even with the swell on the reef, but I knew I couldn’t leave you down there.’ Her voice was tiny now. ‘It was such a long time. I just … the flashbacks …’

  It happened again now—a momentary flash of staring up at the azure sky, the sickening silence, the stickiness of her own blood congealing around her, the stink of terror.

  Her two mouthfuls of noodles threatened to come back up.

  Rob dropped his head and studied his feet. Uncomfortable at her show of emotion? She shifted on the log. When he lifted his gaze, it burned into her soul like acid. Or ice.

  ‘It’s my fault you were out there. I couldn’t wait. I wanted it now.’ Colour was high in his cheeks.

  Honor stared at him and knew—without needing to know anythin
g more about him— that this was the first time he’d ever admitted anything of the kind. She studied his face and realised that his pained expression was not embarrassment or awkwardness. It was something else. She felt her reserve slip more than a little, and another piece of armour fell away.

  ‘You’re in pain today because of me,’ he said. He looked up at her with naked, raw shame.

  Her breath caught.

  There was the man she’d been wondering about.

  Avoiding Rob on an island scarcely more than one square kilometre took some doing but she’d pulled it off for a whole twenty-four hours. It was no accident she’d spent last night watching for hatchlings and most of today sleeping, lingering in the tent longer than she needed to until she was sure he wasn’t around.

  What had possessed her to reveal her most intimate secret to someone she hardly knew? She’d said things she’d never even told her counsellors. She couldn’t have picked a less suitable person to open up to. The last sort of someone to trust with a chunk of her soul.

  She had a good handle on Rob Dalton after their few days of forced cohabitation. He was a player. Charming, undoubtedly talented, probably spoiled. Things came easy to men like him and he had the look of someone who hadn’t had to fight for much in his life.

  She was attracted to him, no question. Flashes of his strong body in the surf, in the wetsuit, against her skin kept coming back at inappropriate times. His casual confidence was appealing to someone who lacked the kind of social grace that he was gifted with. And that lazy smile …

  Honor rinsed the toothpaste out of her mouth and spat into the earth, then covered it with loose sand. More roughly than she’d meant.

  There had been the occasional intriguing glimpse beneath the very pretty façade, but otherwise she found him safely one-dimensional. All good looks and superficial charm. And that was the way she’d like to keep him.

  Until yesterday. His raw shame drew her to him. She’d been intrigued by the imperfection. Something she suspected they might both have discovered at the same time.

  She’d panicked and dashed off into the trees without thanking him for getting her safely back to camp, without acknowledging his apology. Not that he had apologised, technically, but he was trying to. Maybe that was new to him, too?