Stranded with the Hidden Billionaire

by Elana Johnson

  Her freckles stood out on her pale face, and Holden traced his fingertips along her chin. Her eyes fluttered open, and he knew if she did that, he’d be looking into the blue-green depths of the ocean.

  “Eden, honey,” he said. “Can you wake up?” I need your help. Please don’t make me carry you out of here on a broken leg.

  She groaned again, and he kept talking. “Eden, you need to wake up. We’re stuck up on the cliffs, and I’m pretty sure if you don’t get us out of here, they’re going to have to call in rescue workers.”

  He almost smiled, but he absolutely could not allow that to happen. He didn’t need his face splashed all over the newspapers, and people asking questions, and everyone assuming that computer nerds couldn’t take care of themselves in the wilderness.

  “Holden?” Eden’s voice sounded like she’d gargled with rocks, but her eyes opened, and she focused on him.

  “Hey.” Maybe he said it a little too softly. Or maybe his leg hurt a lot, and he wasn’t thinking clearly. “You fell off a ledge.”

  She tried to sit up, but pain flashed across her face, and she laid back down.

  “Yeah, don’t move,” he said. “You literally fell off a ledge. I’m not sure how far up it was, but you passed out pretty dang quick, so I’m guessing you hit your head pretty hard.”

  She shifted, her eyebrows crinkling together. “Can you move my backpack? It’s killing me.”

  “Sure, yeah.” Holden quickly pushed the straps off her shoulders and pulled it out from under her. “What do you have in here? Anything good?” The darkness beyond the ledge didn’t settle him, and he wondered if they’d get off the mountain before dark. At this rate, he didn’t think so.

  Eden grabbed it away from him with surprising strength and speed. “I—nothing.” Their eyes met, and Holden felt the same attraction to her that had always existed between them. He thought about the first time they’d met, while she was a waitress at a place where everyone wears roller skates. She’d only been there for six months, just to pay off the last of one of her sister’s funeral bills from the death of her husband.

  She’d done it anonymously, and he wasn’t sure if she’d ever told Orchid what she’d done.

  He’d known her in high school, but she was a couple of years behind him, and he’d been quiet and kept to himself then too.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, a spasm of pain making his hands shake. He wiped his face, the spot of blood from the cut on his forehead dry now. It stung, but nothing hurt as much as his leg. “Got any painkiller in that pack?”

  “Yes,” Eden said in a hoity toity voice. “Of course.”

  “You should take some.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do, Holden,” she said, throwing him a nasty glare. So she wasn’t going to play nice, even in this precarious situation. Holden hadn’t realized how much he’d hurt her until that very moment.

  “I won’t,” he said.

  She shook the bottle of pills into her hand, the rattling noise making Holden’s nerves scream at him. She took out a bottle of water—Holden didn’t even have that—and swallowed them before looking at him again.

  Her eyes went to his forehead, and he watched the concern march across her face. “Here.” She handed him the bottle, and he shook four pills into his hand and swallowed them dry.

  “Thanks,” he said. “What else hurts? Anything broken?”

  She started to move her limbs, and they all seemed to work, though she did flinch in pain the tiniest bit. “I don’t think anything’s too bad. My right ankle hurts a lot.”

  “You probably landed on it when you came shooting over the ledge with the landslide.”

  “Is that what happened?”

  “Yeah.” Holden looked at her. “I’d ducked under here, but I thought I heard someone screaming, so I was stumbling out, and that’s when you appeared.” Like an angel, out of the storm and the mud.

  “Thank you for catching me before I fell,” she said softly.

  “Yeah, sure,” he said again. He wondered how many more times he’d say it, and he told himself not to utter it again.

  She shifted on the hard rock as the rain started to fall again, and Holden couldn’t help his sigh. He tried to move, but a white hot flash of pain sliced through him, and he sucked in a breath and said, “Oh.”

  He hoped he could just play it off on the rain, but Eden was smarter than that. She always had been. She had a real mind, one she used and one he admired.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” he said, but he didn’t even believe himself.

  “Holden.”

  He’d always loved it when she said his name, but not this time. Not when it was laced with danger and warning.

  “My leg is jacked up,” he said. “What about you?”

  “We already talked about me,” she said, her eyes sliding down to his legs. “Which one?”

  “Right.”

  She moved, and he drew in his breath through his teeth, making a hissing noise.

  “I don’t want you to touch it,” he said.

  “I have to touch it.”

  “It’s broken,” he said. “No one needs to touch it to know that.” Every muscle in his body screamed at him to make sure she didn’t touch his leg. But she kept inching that way, and Holden felt like he always did when he was with Eden—like he was trying to hold back the tide. And he hadn’t been able to hold on last time.

  He didn’t think he ever would.

  “Eden,” he said, but he clearly didn’t have the warning voice down the way she did, because she just looked at him with those teal eyes and focused back on his leg.

  “I’m going to move your pantleg,” she said.

  He tried to grip the rocks behind him, but they were slippery and smooth, and he still ground his teeth together as she pushed the fabric up to look at his leg. His skin was dirty, and a flash of embarrassment squirreled through him.

  She paused and rummaged through her backpack, pulling out a package of wet wipes. “I’ll be gentle, but I can’t tell if the skin is broken.”

  “My bone isn’t poking out,” he said, almost rolling his eyes. Eden was always so careful, and this examination could take an hour.

  So what? he asked himself. He had nowhere to go, as the rain continued to fall beyond the ledge. At least no more of the mountain was coming down.

  The pressure on his leg made him yell out, and she immediately pulled back. “Sorry.”

  “I really don’t think this is necessary,” he growled.

  “We could be up here for a while,” she said. “Especially if you can’t walk.”

  “I can walk,” he said, not really knowing if that were true.

  “Holden.”

  “Eden,” he said in the same reprimanding tone.

  She sighed like he was being difficult on purpose. “Just lay back.”

  “Fine, but can you hurry?”

  “I’ll try.” She wasn’t a great liar, and she didn’t hurry. She cleaned his leg despite all his hissing, and she probed around with a couple of chilly fingers, finally saying, “I don’t think it’s broken. I think it’s really badly bruised.”

  “You think so?”

  “Got hit by a rock, right?”

  “How did you know?”

  “You have a massive lump on your leg, and it’s really red.” She pulled his pantleg back down and leaned over him. “Are you—?”

  Holden looked up at her, wishing they were lying on the beach, the sun shining gloriously overhead, and she was about to kiss him.

  “Am I what?” he asked, but she still didn’t answer.

  Chapter Three

  Eden’s mind had blanked when she’d looked into Holden’s dark eyes. He wasn’t glaring, so they weren’t black, and he wasn’t about to kiss her, so they weren’t the storm cloud gray she enjoyed so much.

  It was entirely unfair that he could be so handsome while covered in dirt and mud and blood. She cleared her throat and took out
another wet wipe to clean up his forehead. As she did, the wound started to bleed a little bit. “This is going to need stitches,” she said, bottling up her emotions.

  This was Holden Holstein. She knew exactly who he was, and what kind of power he held over her heart. He had the ability to shatter it into a thousand pieces, and she was still trying to find all of the shards from last time, thank you very much.

  “Do you have any supplies?” she asked, peering at him.

  “No,” he admitted. “I was just coming for a couple of hours.”

  “That’s what everyone says,” she said, wishing she’d packed more food. But she was just coming for the afternoon too. She’d happened to pack lunch, and her backpack always had high-protein and calorie dense snacks in it.

  “How long do you think we’ll be out here?” he asked.

  “I thought it would just rain for a few minutes,” she said.

  “It did,” he said. “It quit for a while, and then started up again.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to rain today,” she said. “I checked the weather.” She waited for him to make some crack about how of course she had. But he didn’t. She realized that he only did that when they were together, when he was teasing her, when he could kiss her afterward.

  Her face grew hot, and she didn’t dare look at him. He’d always had a way of being able to see what she was thinking, and he’d told her she wore everything on her face. She’d tried to hide things the way he did, but she simply didn’t know how.

  The rain tapered off and stopped again, and Eden started to stand. Her back cried at her to go slower! She did, and she managed to stand all the way up and stretch the aches and pains from her legs and back and neck. “I’m going to go see what we’re dealing with.”

  “Be careful,” he said, an urgency in his voice and on his face. So maybe he wasn’t as great at hiding things as he used to be. Or maybe he didn’t want to be all alone with no supplies. No matter what, Eden took precious seconds to put her backpack on so if she fell again, she’d at least have her phone, her snacks, and all the other stuff she’d brought with her.

  She felt bad for Holden, but there was no way he was walking out of here. She’d either shoulder most of his weight down, or rescue hikers would be coming in to get him. That much was clear.

  No, his leg wasn’t broken, but he was in a great deal of pain and couldn’t put any weight on his leg.

  Outside of the ledge, the air held so much water it almost choked her when she breathed. It wasn’t raining, but the humidity was off the charts. The small space outside the half-cave was full of debris, and she couldn’t go more than a step or two without meeting mud.

  She didn’t want that on her shoes or back in the cave, so she stalled. To her left was open air, something dripping from the path above—where she’d come from. She looked up and judged the distance to be maybe fifteen feet or so.

  Shivers racked her body, and she looked away. Her situation could be so much worse, and she was glad she couldn’t look over the edge to see how much further she could’ve fallen. And what were the chances of finding another person and a cave in the span of ten seconds?

  And not just any person.

  “Holden Holstein,” she whispered. The very man who’d plagued her for years. She sighed, half-relieved she wasn’t stuck out here alone and half-annoyed she’d have to share her supplies with him.

  To her right, another ten feet of ledge remained, and she carefully stepped that way, testing each section of rock to make sure it would hold her weight before committing to it. “The path is gone.” Even through the dim light, she could see the path Holden had come up, on the other side of a twenty-foot gap.

  Even with two good legs, neither of them could make that jump. She didn’t have the right equipment to rock climb, though she was experienced in it. Holden had been too, at some point. After his mother’s death, he’d finished his computer science degree and gotten a job with The Web Developer, one of Theodore Fleming’s tech companies that had come to the island a few years ago.

  It was Theo’s dating app that Eden had tried and failed with. As far as she knew, Holden didn’t use the app, but she couldn’t know for sure. Anyone could choose any screenname, and she could’ve communicated with him in the brief time she’d used the app.

  But somehow, she didn’t think so. Holden was a man of few words, and he didn’t seem like the type to chat through an app with strangers.

  Eden wished she didn’t taste bitterness on the back of her tongue when she thought about Theo. Yes, she knew him. She’d pitched him her line of survival gear a few months ago, and he’d started shaking his head before she’d even finished the first sentence.

  “I’m in technology,” he’d said. “This is physical products.”

  “Maybe I could start selling with an app,” she said.

  He’d smiled and said, “Our apps are very expensive.”

  And that had been that. Eden had left his office feeling like a fool, and she’d vowed never to approach another billionaire looking for money. Then she’d gone and done it again.

  Well, she’d learned some lessons, hadn’t she?

  Don’t repeat the same mistakes.

  She turned back to the cave, where Holden waited for a report on their situation. He was definitely a mistake she was not going to make again.

  But she didn’t want him to die in that cave, either. She moved back inside, glad that the interior of the cave felt so much more secure than the ground outside. “We’re not getting out of here without help,” she said. “There’s nothing to the left—the landslide wiped everything out in that direction. And there’s a huge gap in the path going back down. There’s this, oh, I don’t know.”

  She blew her breath out, trying to make mental calculations. “We’ve got about twenty feet across, and eight outside of the cave, most of it covered with mud and shrubs and rocks. We might be able to clear it, but I don’t know why we would.”

  Depression lanced through her, but she might as well finish. “And this cave, which is what? Fifteen feet back? So twenty feet by twenty feet.” Four hundred square feet. Her bedroom was bigger, and she didn’t have to share it with her ex-boyfriend.

  “Not only that,” she continued when Holden said nothing. “But we have half a bottle of water between us, and….” She yanked open the zipper on her backpack and pulled out the plastic zipper bag where she kept the snacks. “And maybe one meal each.”

  She met his eyes, but it was too hard to look at him for long. Too many memories. Too many things left unsaid.

  Glancing away, she stuffed the protein bars and single-serving bags of nuts back in her pack. “If it rains again, I’ll set the bottle out to collect the water. I have a can as well. We can survive for several days without food, but not without water.”

  “Several days?” Holden asked, the first words he’d spoken since she’d returned.

  “Holden, there is no direct path to where we are. We’re on the side of a cliff, and no one knows where we are.”

  “I’ll call Dean.”

  “I already texted my sisters,” she said. “Let me call them and see if they can get someone to come help right away.”

  Holden put his phone to his ear too, but Eden wasn’t going to let him be the only one to call. She’d told her sisters if she didn’t call within the hour to send help, and they needed more information.

  “My phone’s dead anyway,” he said. “Maybe I can use yours after you call Iris.”

  “How did you know I was going to call Iris?” She paused in her tapping, now wanting to call Orchid instead. But Orchid was probably already crying, and Eden didn’t want to deal with that right now.

  She saw she had twenty-seven new texts, but she ignored them and tapped Iris’s number while Holden said, “You always call Iris,” in a voice barely loud enough to hear.

  “Eden,” Iris said, heavy relief in her voice. “Ivy, it’s Eden. Where are you? Do you need help?”

  “Yes,”
Eden said. “We need help.”

  “We?” Iris said—another reason Eden called her. She picked up on little details.

  “Yes,” Eden said, working very hard not to clear her voice. “I’m here with Holden Holstein, and he can’t walk.”

  “I can walk,” Holden said at the same time Iris squealed and said, “Holden Holstein?” in the loudest voice possible. Leave it to her flirty little sister to focus on who Eden was stranded with instead of the fact that she was stranded on a mountain with the man who’d broken her heart.

  “We have very little food and water,” Eden said. “I brought several of my inventions, but they won’t make food out of mud and rock.”

  “Where are you?” Iris asked.

  “I parked just past mile marker forty-six,” she said. “There’s a path across the highway that leads up to the Bald Mountain Cliffs. I went up about an hour or so. We’re in a little cave just below that path.” She twisted toward Holden. “I’m not sure how Holden got here.”

  “I parked at the entrance to Cowboy’s Beach,” he said.

  Eden knew the place. “His truck—” She looked at him, and he nodded. “Is at Cowboy Beach. He must’ve taken the trail that goes north from there. It comes up this way. But Iris, it’s out. There’s a huge gap in the path near where we are. I’ve got flags in my backpack, and I’ll set them out in the morning.”

  “The morning? You’re going to stay there overnight?”

  As much as Eden didn’t want to, she knew there was no way they were getting down tonight. “Yes,” she said, meeting Holden’s eye and holding it this time. “We’ll have to stay here overnight.”

  Chapter Four

  Holden’s mood worsened with every passing hour. When Eden offered him a protein bar for the fifth time, he declined it—for the fifth time.

  Eden leaned into his personal space, her eyes sparking in the darkness. Semi-darkness, as she had a flashlight in her pack. And an emergency blanket. Though the rain had cleared, Holden still felt a chill running through his bones.