Eden said it was shock. Eden said he had to drink something. Eden glared at him and growled, “You’re eating this if I have to stuff it in your mouth and move your jaw for you.”
Holden glared right back. “I’m fine.”
She looked like she’d do exactly what she’d threatened to do, those eyes blazing at him like blue fire. Finally, she just fell back against the rocks where they’d moved once she’d declared they’d have to stay the night.
At least.
He hadn’t missed those words.
He had a shareholder meeting in the morning that Dean had told him over and over about. Holden couldn’t miss it—and yet, he was going to miss it.
A few hours had passed, and he and Eden hadn’t spoken much. The drugs were starting to wear off, and his leg throbbed again, but he said nothing. He wasn’t going to take all of Eden’s medication, her food, and her water.
It had rained again, and she’d filled her bottle, her can, and a plastic container she claimed she’d brought food in. So they’d live. Holden may not know all the ins and outs of survival, but he knew enough. They had shelter and water, with a little bit of food.
“I’m sorry I didn’t come to your mother’s funeral,” she said, breaking the silence between them. And wow, she shattered it.
Holden turned toward him, true surprise tugging against his heart. “It’s okay.”
“No,” she said, almost before he finished speaking. “It’s not okay. I should’ve been there. I know it was a hard time for you, and you needed a friend.” She looked at him. “I—I just couldn’t.”
He reached over and slipped his hand into hers. “I didn’t even want to be there, so I get it.” He moved his hand back to his own leg. “Maybe we should turn out the light. Save it if we need it.”
“Good idea.” She leaned forward and clicked off the flashlight before stowing it in her pack.
True darkness enveloped them, and Holden stayed sitting up against the hard rocks. Eden adjusted her backpack right next to him and laid down beside him, the silver emergency blanket crinkling in the blackness.
“Pull it over you,” she said.
“It’s not that cold.”
“I’m cold,” she said. “Is this okay?” She snuggled right into his side, her head near his thigh.
“Fine,” he said, pulling the emergency blanket over his legs. He wasn’t cold, and with her beside him, he was sure he’d be plenty warm. Just the thought of her so close made his blood run hotter.
It was so much easier to talk to her in the dark, and he distracted himself from his growling stomach by saying, “Tell me about that can cooker.”
One of the best things about Eden was her ability to talk. She told him about the cooker, as well as several other inventions she’d created in the shed in the corner of her backyard. She’d always been inventive, a thinker, and he enjoyed the gentle cadence of her voice.
“What about you?” she asked. “You’re working for The Web Developer now, right?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“You’ve always loved computers.”
“I have,” he said. “It’s a good job. Keeps me away from the ranch.”
“Still no solution for that?” Eden shifted, her hand landing on his knee. Holden liked it there, where it made his leg tingle in a good way.
“Lincoln is…Lincoln,” he said. “And my father is my father. Without my mom, it’s just me. Well, I have friends.”
“Mm,” Eden said, and Holden had heard that noise before. Many moons ago, sure. But he’d heard it. She was nearly asleep.
“So I build custom websites now,” he said. “I like it, and it keeps me busy.” The pay was good, and Theo allowed him the flexibility he needed to run Explore Getaway Bay too. Of course, Theo didn’t know that was what Holden was doing. No one did, and he found himself wanting to share the secret with Eden.
He didn’t, and the silence between them was comfortable. “You’re still doing the tours?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said sleepily. “I work for Explore Getaway Bay. I rotate all over the island.”
He suddenly wished he’d been more hands-on with the outdoor tour aspect of his own company. “Which one is your favorite?”
“The underwater submarine,” she said.
“Why?”
“There’s a lot of families and kids that do it. They aren’t loud and obnoxious, like some of the whale watching expeditions. Even the hikes to the falls can have rowdy guys sometimes.”
Holden nodded, though there was no way for her to see him. “Hmm,” he added.
Several minutes passed, and he was sure she was asleep. He let his hand drift over her hair, but it was caked with mud and not exactly the romantic gesture he’d been hoping for.
Hoping for.
Don’t be a fool, he told himself. Just because Eden was talking to him and being nice didn’t mean she was willing to forgive him. She wouldn’t take him back. He knew her, and she felt things deeply. Loved deep.
Hurt deep.
He did too, which was why they’d gotten along so well in the beginning. It was also the reason he’d distanced himself from her as he went through his mother’s health decline and subsequent death. He didn’t need to hurt Eden too, and he didn’t even know how to deal with his own grief.
“I got help,” he whispered to the darkness, to the wilds of Hawaii. She’d left her bottle and can and container out on the ledge, just in case it rained in the night, and he wished he had a drink. But he didn’t dare move.
“I saw someone,” he said. “A grief counselor. And I got better. I go back sometimes.” He needed to go see Dr. Osthmus again. He could feel the darkness gathering way down deep in his soul, and if he rooted it out fast enough, it didn’t take over his life.
“And I have friends. Dean Black. Remember him?” Of course Eden would remember Dean. They’d spent time together the last time Holden and Eden had dated.
He finally fell asleep too, something he’d thought impossible. He woke to the sound of dripping water, and he opened his eyes to try to locate the source of it. His throat hurt, and his back ached, and someone had positively stuffed a live coal in his leg.
The darkness felt like a living, breathing thing, and he couldn’t even see his hand in front of his face. There was no pressure against his leg. No warmth. “Eden?” he whispered.
The dripping continued, and he realized it was rain. But the water was hitting something…unnatural. Through the sound of it, he heard a soft snore, and he knew Eden was still here.
More relief than he should’ve felt filled him, and he pushed away from the rocks with a groan. If it was raining, he could drink and set the bottle to refill. What he couldn’t do was stumble out onto that ledge in the pitch blackness.
He’d turned off his phone when it was close to dying, but he powered it up now just to get a little light. Get the layout of where he was. See if Eden was still asleep on her pack. If not, he’d take her flashlight and get a drink.
His phone made a horrible chiming sound as it turned on, the high-pitched dinging and singing filling the cave and echoing around for a long time. Still Eden didn’t stir.
With the six percent of battery life he had left, he shone his screen around until it landed on Eden, several feet to his left. The pack was beside her head, and Holden strained to reach for it.
A couple of fumbled attempts later, he had the bag in his hands as he searched for the flashlight. His need to drink felt almost insatiable, and his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. With the light ready now, all he had to do was stand up and walk.
He’d told her countless times that he could walk. He would absolutely not allow himself to be carried down this mountain by her or anyone else.
He’d already been in the Getaway Bay gossip mill enough over the years.
He aimed the flashlight out into the darkness, easily finding the glinting plastic in the beam. The can sat next to it, but the container was nowhere to be found. A click
later, and darkness enveloped him again. He put his left hand against the wall and pushed himself onto his knees.
His right leg cried out in pain, and he stilled, panting through the agony. It subsided slightly, and he bent his left leg and leaned against the wall, using it for security as he got to his feet.
Or rather, his foot.
Balancing all his weight on his left leg, his right simply throbbed a warning at him. If he could lean into something, he could probably walk, but there was no wall leading out to the water.
“Come on,” he told himself, thinking of those hot summer days when his dad would make him go out into the fields to move the pipes around. He’d worked through pain before. He could do it again.
Balancing a tiny bit of weight on his right toe, he managed to shuffle forward a few inches. He clicked on the flashlight and studied the ground to make sure he wasn’t going to twist an ankle or shuffle into a rough part of the floor.
Foot by foot, minute by minute, he got closer to the water. He was walking, and he half-wished Eden were awake to see it.
A whistling sound alerted him to the fact that the wind had arrived, and he hesitated before taking another step. Probably two more, and he could crouch down and reach out and get the bottle.
It wobbled in the wind as he took another toe-step. Panicked that it would blow over and be lost forever, he stepped again quickly.
A cry tore through his throat as his leg buckled underneath him. He went down hard on his knees at the same time the bottle tipped. The same time the flashlight skittered out into the rain.
He reached for the bottle, desperate to be ninja-like in this moment. “Holden?” Eden asked from behind him, and everything happened so fast.
The bottle fell over, dumping it’s contents on the already soaked rock. The flashlight went out. Behind him, the crackling, crinkling sound of the blanket meant Eden had gotten up.
“Holden,” she said now, panic in her voice.
“I’m trying to get a drink,” he said, his hand scrambling around where the bottle had been. He had to get it. They’d already lost one container. “The plastic container was gone. I was just so thirsty, and now the bottle’s tipped.”
A glow filled the cave, and Eden used her cell phone to approach him. “Why didn’t you wake me up?” She switched on her phone flashlight and swept the ledge.
The bottle was gone.
Holden groaned as she reached out and collected the can. “Here, drink.” She stepped back into the rain and collected the flashlight while Holden did as she said.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “The wind blew it away.”
“Whatever, Holden,” she said as if she didn’t believe him. “It doesn’t matter now.”
Chapter Five
Eden watched Holden gulp the rainwater, and she probably should’ve stopped him. She was thirsty too. But she didn’t. When he finished, he stuck his hand out in the rain and set the can back out to collect more. The steady sound of water hitting metal was loud enough to hear out here, and Eden really hated that.
“I’ve learned everything I could my whole life to survive in the wilderness,” she said. “But in my head, I always had more supplies.”
Holden gave a dark chuckle. “At least you have supplies at all.”
“You need to eat.”
“I’ll eat when we get back.”
“I have six packages of nuts. You can have one. Or two. It’ll be fine.” She couldn’t know that, but she knew what Holden was like when he got hungry. He did stupid things, like try to walk to get a drink when he should’ve just woken her. She’d take an empty belly over a hangry Holden Holstein.
He lay on the rocks, his chest heaving and his eyes closed. Eden shone the flashlight, which flickered in an unsettling way, into the backpack and pulled out the bottle of pills.
“Holden,” she said, trying to soften her voice. Orchid had mentioned that maybe the reason Eden couldn’t get a second date was because she came on too strong. She was too loud. Laughed too much. Knew everyone on the island—sometimes even tourists.
She crouched next to him and held out four pills. “I need you to take these.”
“I’m okay,” he said.
He really was the stubbornest man on the planet. “Holden,” she said again, getting even closer to his face. He smelled like earth and rain, with a hint of that musky cologne somewhere in his skin.
“Sweetheart,” she said, and his eyes flew open and locked onto hers. “I’m really worried about you. Please take these pills.” She inched her hand closer to him, hoping she could hold his gaze for as long as it took.
She was worried about him. Maybe she shouldn’t have called him sweetheart, but it had gotten his attention.
“And your stomach will hurt if you don’t eat just a little something with the meds. Please.” Apparently, she wasn’t above begging. She couldn’t live with his pain—or his death—on her conscience.
“Okay,” he said, groaning as he moved into a sitting position, both legs out in front of him.
“And I want to look at the leg again.”
“There’s nothing you can do,” he said.
“If it’s infected, I can drain it,” she said.
“You will do no such thing.”
“I have a knife,” she said, slipping her hand into her pocket to pull her tool out. She reached for the can, which had begun filling with rainwater, and handed it to him. “Take the pills, please.”
He did, and Eden counted it as a major win. She got out a bag of nuts and handed them to him. “Eat as many as you can stomach. You’re probably dehydrated, and you might be sick with how much you just drank.”
Holden’s eyes shone like liquid ink, black and deep and mysterious. She’d seen those eyes when they were half-closed, filled with desire, about to kiss her. She’d seen them when they held nothing but anguish. Heartache. Loss.
She’d seen them crinkle when he laughed, and as she edged toward his leg, she wanted to see the range of his emotions in those gorgeous eyes again.
Her heart skipped a beat, a clear warning to her that if she let Holden Holstein back into her life, she’d be asking for trouble.
She sliced a slit in his pantleg before he could protest, and then she didn’t have to move his leg to see it. “Okay,” she said. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“Hmm,” he said, but he was eating the nuts, and Eden prayed for a third miracle that night. No infection. Or if there was one, that she could drain it and make sure he didn’t lose his leg on Bald Mountain Cliffs.
She shined the flashlight on his leg and sucked in a breath at the angry, red skin. “Holden,” she said, her voice reverent and scared. She gently touched the bump, which was about the size of a dinner plate at this point.
His skin was on fire.
“This is definitely infected.”
“Eden,” he said, his leg twitching, and he probably didn’t even know it. “There’s nothing you can do. Help will be here in the morning. I’m fine.”
He was not fine, and Eden pulled her backpack over to her and started rummaging around inside it. She had a little case full of items. Safety pins. Bandaids. Ointment. Flossers. Quarters, back when there were pay phones. Aspirin.
And she was sure she had some antibiotics. “I had these pills once,” she muttered. “They were yellow.” She flipped through the plastic baggies, her nerves almost choking her. “Here they are.”
She almost ripped the bag out of the plastic sleeve as she shook a couple of yellow antibiotic pills into her hand. “You need to take these, and I need to examine this leg.”
He didn’t look happy, but he swallowed the pills. At least she hoped he did. He could be holding them under his tongue for all she knew.
“Come on,” she said, standing up and moving to the back wall again. She zipped up her pack and piled the emergency blanket on it. “You’re sitting back here while I look at that leg. I’m going to do whatever I need to do to save it.”
�
�Save it?” His voice pitched up a little.
“That got your attention, didn’t it?” She squatted and looped her arm under his and around his shoulders. Wow, he was strong and broad, and the only way she got them both standing was because he did most of the work with his left leg.
With a grunt, she turned and helped him to the makeshift soft spot in the cave, where he almost collapsed again. Out of breath now, she tried not to think that they’d only moved ten feet. If it came to her having to help him down the trail? She could never do that.
Pushing the thoughts away, she turned her attention back to his leg. “I haven’t been in nursing school for a long time,” she said. “But I think I remember a few things.”
“I didn’t realize you never finished,” he said.
She looked at him, but it was hard to see his eyes with the flashlight so close to her face. “It got to be too much.” That was all she could say. Orchid’s husband had died, and Eden didn’t want to keep working all day and going to school at night. Her sister needed her help, and she’d given up her education in favor of a second job at night.
In fact, that was how she’d met Holden in the first place. She’d always told him she was going to go back, and she did for one semester. In the end, though, she’d decided she didn’t want to be a nurse.
Couldn’t stand to see people in pain and not be able to do anything about it.
Exactly like Holden on this mountain.
She drew in a deep breath. “I went back a couple of weeks before we broke up.” She touched the outer rim of the red area, and she could feel a distinct difference between his uninfected skin and the injured area. “It wasn’t the same. A lot of work, and it’s not like I didn’t want to work. I’m fine with working.”
“You’re a hard worker,” Holden agreed.
She tapped on his skin, probably a little too hard, but she wanted to see how squishy the area was. He hissed and said, “Ouch, Eden, ow, ow, ow.” He sucked in a breath and pressed it out between tight lips once, and then again.
“Sorry,” she murmured. The skin looked angry and bright red, and she didn’t see any white areas that indicated pus. She couldn’t just cut into his leg. Could she? She glanced at him, wondering if he’d even know.
Stranded with the Hidden Billionaire Page 3
