Shipwrecked with Mr Wrong

by Nikki Logan

  Nate and, trailing by a split second, Justin.

  Images of her husband roared through her mind. The only man she’d ever been intimate with. The man that she should have felt this way with. But she hadn’t. Nothing like this. It was as if her body was working on a whole new set of rules.

  Tears prickled as she heaved in a deep, shaky breath. She’d not thought of them all afternoon. A sick feeling chased all the joy out of her body.

  What had she done?

  ‘Rob, I can’t breathe …’

  Everything in her screamed stay but the words coming out of her said move. The only sane part of her—her conscience—was giving the orders. He slid his weight off her and rolled onto the sand, one bronzed hand shading his eyes from the tropical sun, smooth bicep bulging. He looked at her silently, a question in his eyes. She dropped a curtain on her thoughts, forced herself to meet his gaze and smile.

  ‘So how was it?’ His words came from between heavy breaths. His chest rose and fell about as hard as hers.

  The conceit shocked her for a moment until she realised what he meant. The snorkelling. Or did he intend the double meaning? ‘Fantastic. I’m so pleased we did it. Thank you.’

  ‘Wanna do it again?’

  Oh, he knew. His smoky eyes told her well enough. She wanted to smile back so badly, to play along, flirt like the witty, beautiful women he was used to. But she wasn’t those women and she just didn’t think that fast on her feet—or back—after something as monumental as what they’d just shared. She went for honest instead, though it killed her to say it.

  ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’

  Her answer surprised him and his clenched abs pulled him into a sitting position as she rose. He looked at her like a curiosity the ocean had tossed up.

  Disloyalty choked her. What the heck was she doing sharing hot kisses with a demi-god on the edge of the same ocean her family died in? She should be thinking about them. Honouring them. Instead, she’d dishonoured their memory in a most fundamental way. Her hand strayed to her scars and curled around the damaged flesh.

  ‘Sometimes it’s better to leave something on a good experience than to push it,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to ruin it.’

  He narrowed his eyes and not because of the sun. ‘Are we still talking about snorkelling?’

  She didn’t answer. Suspicion blazed in his eyes, a moment of self-doubt quickly masked. It bothered her to have driven his confidence away. But her worry was wasted as she saw it return, two-fold. Perfect teeth gleamed between lips she knew so intimately now.

  ‘I’ll change your mind.’ He trailed the back of his hand over her hip to her thigh. Shivers of desire fluttered in its wake.

  Treacherous skin! She fought hard to remain still, to cloak the desire leaping in her own eyes. ‘You could. So easily. But please don’t.’

  He stared at her, hard. ‘Why?’

  She couldn’t help the flick of her eyes out to sea. But she didn’t speak. She just wasn’t that courageous.

  ‘Do you not get to live now, Honor?’ That brought hazel eyes back to his. ‘Isn’t it bad enough that two people died that day?’

  Fury rose quick and hard in her chest. Defensive. ‘You don’t know a thing about it. How it feels.’

  ‘No, I don’t. Thank God. It kills me that you’ve had to.’ He held her eyes. ‘But what if life is like snorkeling? Sure, we’d all stay down there if we could—where it’s quiet and beautiful and surreal. But humans aren’t designed to be there for ever. We need to breathe. To resurface.’

  Confusion roiled through her. ‘This is not resurfacing. This is just sex.’

  ‘Is it? Is that all?’

  Pain oozed out of her pores. It’s all I’ll let it be. ‘What else would it be?’

  Hurt radiated from his eyes. He took his time answering and his face slowly closed off to her. ‘Then what’s wrong with sex? If we both feel it.’

  ‘There’s a big difference between wanting and doing, Rob. For most people, anyway.’

  Why wouldn’t he take things to the natural next step? After the way she’d flirted with him in the water and kissed him last night. And just now. They were both well aware of the attraction zinging between them. Her gut churned.

  ‘My mistake, Honor. I thought today would be good for you. Would remind you of the joy in the world and take the pain away, just for one afternoon. I should have known better than to try and help someone who’s made herself perfectly at home in her misery.’

  He pushed himself to his feet and glared down at her, the contours of his muscles defined even more with tension. His hard body all the more glorious. ‘I’ll leave you in peace to wallow.’

  He turned and ploughed his strong legs into the water, dived in and swam to retrieve the diving gear where it had sunk earlier.

  Honor’s legs shook as she ran up the beach, her soul flapping out behind her.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ORDINARILY, Rob didn’t mind the quiet.

  He could work for hours in the wet-lab, painstakingly conserving a maritime artefact, not speaking to another being for the entire day. At sea it was often quiet, even when he was working in a team. Such a contrast to the endless, social yak he endured outside of work.

  But the new silence on this tiny island was intolerable.

  For the second time in as many days, Honor was avoiding him. At first, he considered that he was avoiding her. He was still angry and just wanted to punish her by keeping his distance—ironic how it felt so much like punishing himself. But now she was unquestionably avoiding him.

  A day without her and he was getting bored with his own company. He had no idea how she managed months on end out here. That took a certain level of comfort with your own thoughts. Something he didn’t have. He hadn’t realised how very occupied Honor kept him. Talking to her, listening to her, thinking about her. Imagining. Even when she did crazy things, like stalking off into the trees.

  He fisted and unfisted his hands absently, hearing the echo of the harsh words that had spewed from his lips. Lips that had been so delightfully engaged with hers only moments earlier. Nothing he didn’t think was true, and nothing he wouldn’t have said if asked, but words he’d rather have said more kindly. At the right moment. She was only respecting and honouring her family. He had to admire that.

  To a point.

  He leaned back on his bunk in The Player’s rocking cabin and looked at his watch. Not even nine o’clock. Way too early to be considering hitting the sack. There was no way his body was going to let him rest here. As if he wasn’t already worked up enough, the threat of sinking to Davy Jones’s locker preyed on him. Earlier in the day, Honor had offered to split the tent, back when she was still feeling warm and fuzzy towards him. Him at night while she was out surveying turtles, and her during the day while he made himself scarce.

  But that was before he’d pawed her on the sand. Her sense of charity would have dried up for sure now.

  Rob shook his head. He’d occupied himself all afternoon with rigging up one of his diving sensors down in the hull so that it would send an alert if water started filling The Player‘s hull. Enough time to scramble out. But he wasn’t sleeping. And not just because he was anxious about possibly waking up to find himself bobbing on a cabin-full of cold water.

  The echo of his angry words clattered around in his mind like a lottery wheel.

  He needed to see Honor. Speak to her. Try to set things to rights. When there were only two of you on an island, you couldn’t afford to hurt someone and leave them that way. Particularly when one of them was a woman like Honor …

  Such a bundle of contradictions. Exactly like one of the artefacts his team would spend a year of painstaking, gentle handling to release from its crusted tomb. Caked in rock-hard deposits, just waiting for someone to chip it all away and restore it to its former beauty.

  I don’t think that’s a good idea, she’d said, so coolly. As though she was unaffected by what they’d just shared. He k
new that couldn’t be true—her flushed skin and heaving chest had given her away and it wasn’t from the snorkelling. Her body might have been affected but, apparently, her mind remained perfectly inviolate. So too her heart.

  Rob ground his teeth. Hearts—hers or his— had nothing to do with it. It wasn’t her heart he was imagining the taste of, the texture of— although he remembered the feel of it clearly, beating half out of her chest as she struggled to break from their kiss.

  He had to make this right.

  Five minutes later, he loped into an empty camp, dripping wet from his swim in from the boat. Technically, she hadn’t recanted the offer—she’d have to speak to him for that to happen—and so, in theory, the tent was his. If he got lucky, she’d pop back from the turtles for something. Otherwise, he’d see her in the morning at the changeover. Before she could disappear on him.

  He peeled off his shirt and laid it over the tent top to dry overnight. His saturated board shorts followed. His naked skin dried almost immediately in the warm night air.

  He crawled into Honor’s vacant tent, unzipped her single sleeping bag into a blanket and climbed under it. It was soft and silky and smelled just like her. He lay back in the darkened tent, soaking up her smell and feeling pretty chuffed with himself. His digital watch beeped the hour.

  In bed by nine o’clock.

  Bloody hell. Honor stood at the edge of camp in the dying hours of the night and flashed her torch warily at her humble tent. There was a large male T-shirt draped where her sunflower should be. And a pair of shorts. Her stomach flipped over and her logbook fumbled from her fingers. She retrieved it from the sand.

  What the heck was he doing in her tent? Excitement warred with common sense. She should have rescinded her offer. He should have realised it was void! Either he was extremely obtuse or extremely thick-skinned. She knew he wasn’t dumb—far from it, daily proof of his sharp mind had made her regret her assessment of him as an empty, pretty vessel.

  So being in the tent wasn’t accidental. She’d wondered vaguely where he had been sleeping before tonight. Not on his boat since that first night, and who could blame him with water slowly trickling into the hull? Hanging out in there when you were conscious was one thing … She had a sneaking suspicion he’d been dossing down on a beach somewhere, which wasn’t ideal either. While there were no creepy-crawlies on Pulu Keeling—having risen out of the ocean, its only native life was marine or bird—the beach would still harbour a million things a man might not want sneaking up on him in the dark, like football-sized robber crabs. They usually preferred the leaves and fronds that littered the island’s floor but if a perfectly tasty, perfectly unconscious snack presented itself on a beach.

  It made sense he’d prefer to use her tent. And since she wasn’t in it.

  She sank onto one hip. She could wait him out. He couldn’t stay in there for ever, although he was just about stubborn enough. She packed away a few of her work things and poured a drink of fresh water from her stash. Ate the last of her muesli bars. If he wasn’t here, she would probably hang around in camp until the sun was well and truly up and then slide in with her complimentary airline eye-mask on until she fell asleep. But, since his arrival, she’d taken to crawling into bed almost as soon as she’d finished her shift. Just to minimise the chances of running into him. Not because she didn’t like him …

  On the contrary …

  She moved to the tent’s entrance, stepping quietly in the fine sand of the clearing. His shirt blew pennant-like in the pre-dawn breeze. Not accidental. Deep down, she knew that was his way of pre-warning her, of giving her an escape clause.

  Her heart lurched. It didn’t help her resolve when he did kind things like that. Maybe he’d come to camp last night to talk. Maybe that was why she’d hit the turtle nests so early yesterday evening. Knowing he was braver than her.

  Honor gently peeled back the flap of the tent’s entrance and peeked inside. Rob lay sprawled out on his front, her sleeping bag askew but still covering the bits that counted. One arm stretched out in front of him—where she would have lain, had she been with him, a sneaky voice pointed out—the other tucked under him. She ran her eyes from his fingertips, along his sculpted bicep, over a bulging, tanned shoulder, to his well defined back. Visions of Michelangelo’s David came to mind even in his relaxed, sleeping form.

  Her heart thumped as she remembered how it felt to run her hands over those muscles. She’d never, in her life, put her hands on firmer, healthier—manlier—flesh.

  Guilt tore at her. Get a grip, Brier. Just hours ago, she’d called a halt to any further physical interaction with him and here she was, already contemplating what it might be like to call a halt to the halt!

  There would be no more kissing.

  She let the flysheet drop with an angry hiss.

  Where was she going to sleep now? She had no idea what time he’d gone to bed, he could be there for hours yet. She was exhausted. After the emotional upheaval of the dive yesterday and the sensory roller coaster of what came after—though she forbade herself to think about that in any detail—she’d practically fallen asleep while monitoring the nests. Only a hatching just as her eyes slid closed had kept her attention—that and the threat of having to dig out the abandoned nest to count the shell remnants.

  The beach was safer during the day but hot and impossible to sleep on without the semi-darkness afforded by her little tent. Her eyes turned in the direction of the lagoon. Rob’s boat would be no safer for her than for him. Although at that moment Honor might have taken her chances out at sea rather than risk being alone with him for two minutes.

  She sighed and looked back towards the tent. Her tent. Currently being illegally used by an oaf with a nipple piercing. Bad enough that he’d invaded her island. Her peace. Her dreams.

  Why shouldn’t she have a good night’s sleep? After how she’d spoken to him on the beach, he was hardly likely to try anything on with her. A painful lump formed low in her throat.

  She refused to admit to herself just how much she had needed the contact on the beach. Not the kissing necessarily, but the intimacy, the shared goal. Breathing in someone else’s air. A man’s touch. It had been too, too long since she’d experienced that. More than four years.

  Not just any man. Rob’s touch. That was what made it so unacceptable.

  If it were just a physical connection she craved, everything would be so much simpler. The scientist in her knew that attraction was explainable in chemical terms. She twisted her head to line her eye up with the split in the now slack tent entry flap to spy the long length of strong brown leg he’d exposed by flipping over. With material like that, it was no wonder she was attracted. He was, without question, the best-looking man she had ever met. And the best built.

  Acknowledging his physical superiority didn’t feel disloyal to her husband. It was a bit like eyeing off a red Porsche in the showroom window and then driving home in your sturdy sedan. But harbouring those other feelings certainly did. She had no business being attracted to Rob’s personality, his lust for life or his smile. Or feeling the way she did when he looked at her sideways, when he thought she wouldn’t see. Or wondering about his childhood and what made him tick. What made him so sad.

  Those sorts of thoughts had no place in her neatly ordered new existence.

  Fortunately, she was half made of will, as experience had proven. If Honor Brier told herself that she wasn’t attracted to someone, well, that was just how it would be. It was how she’d survived the past four years.

  But she’d also done it by not prioritising anyone ahead of herself. Letting him sleep in meant she’d go tired. And that meant she’d be sleepy tonight. She surveyed the darkened little bubble and made her choice.

  She made no effort to be silent as she whipped the entry zip open and threw it back to let her torchlight stream in. She nudged him with her foot, not particularly gently. ‘Rise and shine, Goldilocks. My turn to sleep.’

  It was such a stir
ling impersonation of him she stifled a giggle. Rob rolled half on his side and flung one muscular arm up to shield his eyes as though his vampire half would implode with light’s touch. Her giggle amplified.

  ‘Am I entertaining you?’ he murmured up at her, thick and gritty. Morning voice. God, how long had it been since she’d heard one of those?

  ‘You’re in my bed. Time to get up.’

  He squinted at his chunky watch, pressing its side to throw extra light on the numbers in the dark. ‘It’s four-thirty in the morning.’

  ‘I’m aware of that. I’ve been up all night while you’ve been in here getting your beauty sleep.’

  He blinked up at her in disbelief. She fought hard not to find it irresistible. ‘Four-thirty, Honor.’

  ‘This is my bed.’

  His massive body scooted over and turned on its side away from her before wriggling back down under the sleeping bag. ‘There’s plenty of room. Squeeze right in.’

  ‘I am not sleeping with you, Rob Dalton.’

  He looked back at her over a smooth, rounded shoulder. ‘Yeah, I got that back on the beach.’

  ‘In here,’ she insisted. ‘I’m not sleeping with you in here.’

  ‘Fine. Boat’s not locked.’

  Silent seconds ticked by. ‘Rob. Get out.’ He didn’t answer but he couldn’t possibly have fallen back to sleep that fast. Even at four-thirty in the morning. ‘Rob?’

  He groaned and rolled back over. ‘Climb in, Honor. Your virtue is assured and I’m whacked. I’ll sleep on top of the covers if it helps.’ He started to fling the sleeping bag back and she got a flash of long, muscular, naked thigh.

  She tore her eyes away but dived at the sleeping bag to hold it in place. The last thing she needed was more mental pictures in her already crowded and confused mind. ‘No. You stay covered. I’ll go on top.’