Contents
Just a Bit Wrecked
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Part II
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Epilogue
From the Author
About the Series
Just a Bit Wrecked
Straight Guys Book 11
Alessandra Hazard
The Straight Guys series:
Xavier and Sage: Straight Boy: A Short Story (Book #0.5)
Derek and Shawn: Just a Bit Twisted (Book #1)
Alexander and Christian: Just a Bit Obsessed (Book #2)
Jared and Gabriel: Just a Bit Unhealthy (Book #3)
Zach and Tristan: Just a Bit Wrong (Book #4)
Ryan and James: Just a Bit Confusing (Book #5)
Roman and Luke: Just a Bit Ruthless (Book #6)
Vlad and Sebastian: Just a Bit Wicked (Book #7)
Dominic and Sam: Just a Bit Shameless (Book #8)
Nick and Tyler: Just a Bit Gay (Book #9)
Ian and Miles: Just a Bit Dirty (Book #10)
Copyright © 2020 Alessandra Hazard
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and events are the product of the author’s imagination.
This book contains explicit sex and graphic language.
Part I
Chapter 1
“Stop staring at them, honey. You’re being terribly rude.”
Andrew Reyes tore his gaze from the gay couple and looked at his wife. Vivian was frowning at him, disapproval plain on her kind face.
Andrew scowled. “What’s rude is that they’re practically groping each other in front of us,” he hissed. “It’s a public place. It’s bad enough that we have to sit next to those people for hours, but we don’t need to look at that—that indecency.”
Vivian chuckled, patting him on his arm. “Indecency? You sound like a Victorian lady from some BBC period drama. It’s the twenty-first century, Drew. Let them be.”
Andrew glared at his wife, annoyed that she didn’t share his annoyance. His gaze returned to the couple they were sharing the first-class cabin with, and he scowled again.
The older man, the one with dark hair and chocolate-brown eyes, was leaned back in his seat, his posture lazy and indulgent. The top two buttons of his blue shirt were unbuttoned, revealing a hint of his muscular chest.
The other guy, a redhead, was practically in his lap, kissing the man’s tan neck. Andrew couldn’t see his left hand, but he was pretty sure it was under the dark-haired man’s shirt. It was absolutely disgusting.
“Stop gawking at them, Andrew,” Vivian whispered exasperatedly.
Andrew barely heard her. His gaze followed the redhead’s right hand as it trailed down the other man’s muscular torso, over his abs, to his belt—
“Gross,” Andrew said, snapping his gaze upward.
Brown eyes locked with his. Their owner raised his eyebrows, staring him down.
Andrew glared at him, his face warm. He felt embarrassed, as if it were him who had been caught behaving shamelessly in a public place.
“Tom, move to your own seat,” the man said, pushing the redhead away gently. “We wouldn’t want to offend anyone’s sensibilities.”
The redhead—Tom, apparently—whined. “Come on, Logan, just ignore the bigot,” he grumbled, kissing him on the jaw. “He’s been gawking at us since the airport.”
Logan glanced at Andrew. “I know.”
Flushing, Andrew looked away and glowered at the clouds outside the window.
Vivian cleared her throat. “I apologize for my husband,” she said. “Andrew didn’t mean any offense.”
“I’m sure he didn’t,” Logan said, his voice very dry.
“No, really,” Vivian said. “He’s not bigoted. My brother is gay, too, and Andrew gets along with him just fine.”
Andrew smiled a little, feeling a rush of fondness. Vivian was ever the peacemaker, but that was an exaggeration even by her standards. He did get along with his brother-in-law, Derek Rutledge—if by “getting along” one meant that they tolerated each other for the good of the company and for the sake of Vivian. They barely spoke to each other if it didn’t concern Rutledge Enterprises, and Andrew talked to Derek’s husband even less. He couldn’t stand them, and it had nothing to do with him being bigoted. They had simply stolen everything he had worked for since he was twenty.
Sighing, Andrew reclined his seat back, closed his eyes, and tried to fall asleep. Sleep would help him pass the long flight from Tahiti back to the US, and it had the added benefit of preventing him from having to look at those people for hours. It had been a relaxing week, just the two of them in the beachside cabin they were staying in, but he felt so annoyed and tense now that he doubted he’d be able to fall asleep.
He must have managed to do it, because the next thing he knew, he was startled awake by a violent jolt.
For a moment, Andrew was disoriented, unsure where he was and what was happening.
Right. The plane.
The plane shuddered, again and again. They seemed to be caught in a thunderstorm, the clouds outside the window very dark, with lightning striking around them with alarming frequency.
The intercom chimed, followed by a tight female voice requesting all passengers to put their seats in the upright position and buckle down.
Doing as he was told, Andrew looked at Vivian in the seat next to him. She was very pale, her fingers gripping the armrest hard.
“Hey, it’s normal,” he said with a reassuring smile. “Turbulence. Every flight experiences some. Lightning can’t hurt the plane.” He tried not to think about the exceptions to the rule—the few cases when planes had crashed or been ripped apart due to bad storms. Those cases were a statistical anomaly.
Vivian smiled back faintly and nodded.
A man raced past them in a hurry, some crew following him a few seconds later. Another bump in the air rattled the plane again, the trembles becoming more alarming. Someone in economy screamed.
Vivian reached out and grabbed his hand.
“We aren’t crashing, don’t be silly,” Andrew said, squeezing it.
She didn’t say anything, just looked at him with wide eyes full of terror.
Swallowing, Andrew took a deep breath. He knew he must remain calm for her sake—even if he was nervous, too.
“It’s all right, honey,” he said. “It will be all right—”
The plane convulsed harder and then dropped, and shrieks of terror filled the plane. They were now descending at an unforgiving speed. Vivian’s hand clenched his so hard it was painful.
Biting the inside of his cheek, Andrew looked around the cabin, trying to distract himself from the fear on his wife’s face.
His gaze locked with Logan’s. The other man’s eyes were grim, but his expression was calm and resolute. He didn’t look afraid. Unlike him, his redheaded lover was crying in his seat, gripping his seatbelt and muttering something under his
breath.
Oxygen masks fell from their compartments, and Andrew numbly helped Vivian to put it on before grabbing his.
He breathed and held his wife’s hand, trying to remain calm.
For the first time in years, Andrew prayed.
Chapter 2
Logan groaned, hauling himself upright. His vision faded in and out, his body aching all over. He forced himself to focus.
The first thing he saw was Tom’s body.
Logan didn’t need to check Tom’s pulse to know that he was dead. There was a gaping wound in Tom’s head. Tom’s blue eyes were lifeless, still wide with fear.
Bile rose in his throat. He had known Tom for just a few days, but it was still incredibly unsettling to see the guy he’d been kissing a few hours ago dead. Christ, Tom hadn’t even been twenty-five yet.
Tearing his gaze away, Logan looked around. They were not losing altitude; that much was obvious. They’d landed, then. Crashed. It was light enough to see by, which meant that it was still day, wherever they’d landed. He tried to calculate just where they’d come down, based on the flight time, but came up blank. Okay; not important.
His gaze finally fell on the guy across the aisle. The guy—Andrew, if Logan remembered correctly—was crying, shaking his wife and begging her to wake up.
Logan stared at him, vaguely amazed by the transformation. Gone was the haughty, picture-perfect man sneering at him in contempt. This guy barely resembled him, his curly brown hair the only thing they had in common.
Shaking himself out of his stupor—had he hit his head?—Logan forced himself to move. He unbuckled his seatbelt and got to his feet, ignoring the dull pain in his ribs.
The plane was quiet. Too quiet. He had expected that there would be panic and people’s screams, but there was nothing. When Logan parted the partition that separated the first-class cabin from economy class, he found out why: part of the plane was gone.
Logan glanced at the cloudy sky and then at the beach nearby. It seemed the plane—what was left of it—had crashed into the shallow waters of some island, far enough from the storm the plane had been caught in. Or perhaps it had been hours. How long had he been unconscious?
No locals. No houses anywhere to be seen. No sign that there was anyone but them on the island. Probably uninhabited, then. Wherever the other half of the plane was, he couldn’t see it. It was possible it had already been swallowed by the ocean. Speaking of the ocean, it looked like the tide was coming in soon.
He returned inside and went to the cockpit. He didn’t have much hope that anyone inside it was alive, and his expectations turned out to be correct when he found the bodies of the pilot and co-pilot.
Sighing, Logan carried them out of the plane, one by one, then carried out Tom’s body. At last, there was only the bigot left. Him and his dead wife.
“Come on, carry her out,” Logan said gruffly. “We can’t leave the bodies here. The plane is going to flood when the tide comes.”
The guy lifted his head and blinked at him dazedly. His wide eyes were very green. Strange. Logan had thought they were blue.
He frowned and waved a hand in front of the guy’s face. “Did you hit your head? Do you understand what I’m saying? Come on, the tide is starting to come in. There’s no time to lose. Carry the body out.”
“The body,” the man repeated, looking lost. “She’s—she isn’t dead. She’s just unconscious.”
Logan looked away, his jaw clenching. He didn’t want to feel sorry for that bigoted dick, but it was impossible not to. “She’s dead,” he said, a little softer, glancing at the unnatural angle of her neck. He pressed his fingers to her throat, just to be sure, and wasn’t surprised not to find the pulse. “I’m sorry for your loss, but we have to move. You can’t stay here. Carry her out.”
He didn’t wait for the guy to follow his instructions. There was no time to babysit him: judging by the height of the waves, they had very little time left. So Logan busied himself with getting the carry-on bags out of the plane, and then all the food and water he could find. He had no idea when rescue would come, so it was better to be prepared than not.
At some point, the other man must have moved, because he wasn’t in the plane when Logan returned after putting the bags on a higher point of the beach.
Rubbing his aching ribs, Logan looked around the rapidly flooding plane, searching for anything that might be remotely useful. He grabbed a handful of blankets, pillows, and some tools, and glanced at the cockpit. The plane’s communication system didn’t seem to work. He could only hope the plane had sent a distress signal before crashing and that rescue would be coming soon.
The water had already reached his waist, so Logan left the plane, figuring he’d done all he could.
He deposited everything next to the bags and pulled out his phone. No signal, as expected. That would have been too easy.
Running a hand over his face, Logan sighed and turned toward the bodies. He hesitated. If they were rescued soon, burying the bodies would be pointless, but he didn’t like the idea of leaving them unburied in such heat. So he went to work.
Digging three graves with rudimentary, limited tools proved to be long, exhausting work, and by the time he was done, Logan was sweating profusely, his bruised ribs aching. He pulled off his drenched shirt, washed it in the ocean, and left it to dry on a rock.
Then he grabbed a bottle of water and went in search of the other guy. As much as he didn’t like that dick, he didn’t want him to die of dehydration.
He found him around the bend of the island, by a tall palm tree. Andrew was kneeling in front of a shallow mound of sand. A grave. He was covered in sand, his hands dirty and bloodied.
Logan frowned. Had he dug the grave with his hands?
“Hey,” he said. “You should get some water into you.”
The guy didn’t move, still hunched over the grave. He was breathing raggedly, his breath coming out in harsh gasps. Or sobs.
“Are you hurt?” Logan said, eyeing him with mixed feelings. As much as he hated the thought of being stranded on some godforsaken island with a bigot, the guy had just lost his wife. A nice, lovely woman who had spent the flight trying to defend her homophobic husband. If Logan remembered correctly, she had mentioned that they’d been married for nine years. Nine years with one person was a long time. Logan couldn’t hope to understand the enormity of losing one’s spouse of nine years. Although he did feel sad about Tom, they’d barely known each other. Tom was—had been—another tourist Logan had hooked up with on Bora Bora; it could hardly compare to losing one’s wife.
There was no reaction.
Logan’s lips thinned. He’d never exactly been known for his patience, and unfortunately for Andrew, he was too exhausted and stressed to make an effort now.
He dropped the bottle at Andrew’s feet and strode away. The guy was a grown man. He wasn’t going to babysit him.
If he wanted to die of dehydration, it was his own choice.
***
Logan spent the next few days exploring the island.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to explore. They were stranded on a tiny piece of land barely one square mile big. The island probably didn’t even have a name. It probably wasn’t on any maps, just one of thousands of small isles in the Pacific Ocean.
The only piece of good news was that there was fresh water: a tiny creek. The water tasted a little metallic but was good enough to drink. At least he hadn’t been poisoned after drinking it.
There was no animal life, and no sign of humans ever being there.
In light of this, and considering that rescue still failed to appear, Logan spent a day making a fishing net from the clothes he’d found in Vivian’s carry-on bag. He felt a little bad for destroying a dead woman’s belongings, but he figured she wouldn’t mind her clothes being used to feed her widower. It was only practical: out of all the clothes, hers weren’t something they could wear—unless they got really desperate, but Logan tried not to think
about that option. If they got desperate enough to need to wear Vivian’s clothes, that would mean they would have been stranded on this island for a very, very long time.
He actually sort of wanted Andrew to get angry over his wife’s clothes. The silence was starting to get on Logan’s nerves. The guy walked around the island like some kind of ghost, his gaze listless and lost. He barely touched the water and food Logan left for him several times a day. He didn’t speak at all. It was a stark contrast to the confrontational guy who had been glaring at him and Tom with disgust only a few days ago.
Something had to give; it couldn’t go on like this.
Chapter 3
Andrew wanted to get drunk.
There was a bottle of vodka among the things Logan had salvaged from the plane. Andrew grabbed it when the other man wasn’t looking, went to his wife’s grave, and got smashingly drunk. It was a good feeling.
Logan found him a few hours later and was, quite predictably, furious. But then again, he seemed to have only two moods, as far as Andrew was concerned: disgusted and furious.
“Go away,” Andrew slurred, looking up at him from the ground. “You’re killing the mood here.”
His voice sounded strange even to his own ears. Hoarse and croaky. How long had he not used it? Since…
Andrew took another swig from the bottle, relishing the burn.
He was pretty sure Logan’s face would have turned red with rage had it not been already so sun-bronzed.
“I told you: you aren’t allowed to take anything without my approval first,” Logan gritted out, a muscle ticking at his temple.
Andrew snorted, kicking Logan’s shin. It was a pity he was barefoot. It probably didn’t even hurt that asshole. “You’re the biggest control freak I’ve ever met.” His lips twisted into a smile. “And I’ve known quite a few control freaks, so that actually says a lot. Are you sure you didn’t attend Joseph Rutledge’s school for the most controlling dicks on the planet?”
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