by Jill Myles
The sound of a fist hitting flesh and a male groan made me snap to attention. Eustace had gotten a good hit on Salvador, right in the eye, and he staggered backward.
I gasped despite myself, then clenched my hands into fists, fingernails digging into my palms as Salvador grabbed Eustace by the waist and bore him to the ground, knocking the air out of his opponent.
The girl turned her face away, unable to watch.
“Selfish oaf,” Eustace shouted at Salvador. “You have to take everything for yourself, don’t you? You can’t share, can you?” He swung wildly.
“Share?” I squeaked in outrage. What the hell was this ‘sharing’ crap?
Salvador dodged his punch easily, sliding over to one side and tensing, avoiding the next blow. “She is my woman, not yours. I found her.” The menace in his growl was fiercely possessive. “She is mine.”
“I don’t belong to anyone,” I protested, but nobody was listening.
“She’s the first woman on this island that we’ve seen,” Eustace shouted, his voice hoarse. “She should be mine by all rights. Take my sister, if you must have a woman.”
“Your sister is like my own sister,” Salvador said, ducking another one of Eustace’s wild swings and punching him in the gut. “Diana belongs to me.”
“Not if I win,” Eustace roared. “Then you can take my sister, if you must.”
I looked over at the sister in question, wondering how she liked this casual bartering of flesh. She hugged the old man, a pained frown on her face. I didn’t know if it was from the fight or from the conversation, but I felt instantly sorry for her. Her brother was an ass.
Another thought occurred to me as Eustace landed a solid right-hook and Salvador staggered backward. What if Salvador lost? What if I was handed over to the new guy? Eustace was a stranger to me, and it was obvious what his intentions were. The thought chilled me.
I liked the thought of kissing Salvador, maybe even sleeping with him. I was undeniably attracted to him. Eustace? Not so much.
Within moments, it was clear that my worry was for nothing. Salvador had the upper hand in the fight, clearly more skilled than his opponent. With every one of Eustace’s hits, Salvador returned it harder. For every gut punch that Eustace landed, Salvador knocked him to the ground. Within minutes, both men were bleeding and panting. Salvador looked merely cold with possessive rage, while Eustace looked exhausted, his face mottled red from anger and exertion. Time passed, and they began to slow and circle each other.
It looked like the ideal time to step in and stop this crap. I shoved in between the two men, arms outstretched. “This needs to stop right—“
I missed the fact that Eustace had been pulling his hand back to lunge at Salvador again, and Salvador’s bellow of anger came a second too late. Eustace’s fist connected with my chin.
My jaw exploded with pain. I staggered backward, stumbling to the ground and clutching my throbbing face.
That stopped the fight, all right. Eustace stood over me, chagrined. He moved aside as Salvador crouched next to me, feeling my jaw with gentle, possessive fingers. His gaze searched my face, as if needing to confirm for himself that I was all right.
I winced at the gentle touch of his fingers in the soft spot and turned my face away, not wanting to see either one of them. My head still rung and throbbed, stars danced at the edge of my vision.
Salvador’s angry roar made me wince. I squeezed my eyes shut, and missed what happened next. The angry slap of a fist on flesh made my eyes fly open, and I watched, dazed, as Salvador pummeled the weaker man.
I crawled over to his side, shoving at Salvador. “Stop it!” I yelled. “Stop it!” I wrapped both of my hands around his arm, trying to pull him back and fully expecting to get an elbow in the face for my efforts.
To my surprise, he stopped, jerking his body around, careful not to hit me. Salvador touched my cheek, all his concern focused on me again.
I stared down at Eustace’s bloody face, then at Salvador in disgust. “How could you do such a thing?”
Green eyes narrowed to slits. “He hurt you.”
“Only because you were fighting him. I don’t want you to kill anyone over me, you idiot!” I didn’t realize I was yelling until I saw the young girl wince off to the side. “What makes you think I want you? Either of you? Do you know what I want? Did you even ask?”
“What do you want, then?” Salvador’s voice was thick with anger.
I jabbed my thumb into my own chest. “I...want...to go home.” I said, then burst into tears at the realization. “I want to leave this goddamn place and never think about it again. Understand?”
“You can’t go home. There is no way home.”
Salvador’s quiet words cut through me like a knife. I reached out and slapped him across the face. When his mouth tightened and he said nothing else, I burst into fresh tears and ran out of the room, heading for the privacy of his small cave where I could burrow under the blankets and have a good cry.
*** *** ***
I expected Salvador to come back to his room at some point, to comfort me. I expected him to kiss away my tears, and say something to make me feel beautiful or wanted. At worst, I expected him to come in and demand his rights as my new ‘owner’.
He did none of these things; in fact, he didn’t show up at all, and that made me feel even worse. As I cried, I counted the hash-marks on the wall. 489 of them. The number meant nothing to me, but I wondered if it was how many days Salvador had been marooned here on this weird dinosaur island.
That was more than a year.
The thought of spending more than a year on this horrible island made me feel even sorrier for myself. I cried myself to sleep in the mess of furs.
I awoke sometime later, with the lantern blown out and my face feeling like a piece of raw meat. I lay in the darkness, wondering if I should stay in Salvador’s small cave until someone came to talk to me – aka, hide from the world – or if I should find out what I could about the others.
My bladder decided it for me. I had to pee something awful, and I hadn’t seen anything that resembled a toilet in his small cave, so I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and got to my feet, and emerged from Salvador’s room.
Sunlight filtered in through the thick palm leaves at the front entrance, and I squinted at the light. At some point, someone had rolled back the palm ‘roof’ to let the light stream into the cave area, and it felt very bright and warm. A fire was blazing in the center of the cave, and I saw three other leather hangings dotted around the corners of the large entrance room, which must have been where the others slept. It reminded me a bit of the Anasazi cliff dwellings that I’d seen in a National Geographic once.
The young girl was tending something over the fire. She looked over at me, her eyes red. “Good morning.”
She hadn’t made itsound like it was a good morning. Her voice was clearly resentful. “Hi,” I said, edging closer to the fire and noticing there was a slight damp chill in the air. “Morning, you say?”
She nodded, then went back to stirring the misshapen pot over the fire. “You’ve slept for quite a while.”
“Oh,” I said. No one else was around except her. “Is there a bathroom somewhere?”
She glanced over at me. “Bathroom?”
Oops. Did the British not use the word ‘bathroom’? “Um. Washroom? Lavatory? I have to, you know...” I made a gesture at my pelvis, not quite sure how else to communicate it. How embarrassing.
“Oh,” she said, then colored pink. “There’s a bucket behind the screen. Near the ledge.” She gestured at a leafy area of the cave-wall, near the front. “Once you’re done with it, toss the waste into the pit below.”
Bucket? Screen? How un-private. I wrinkled my nose and hurried over. Sure enough, there was a very crude bucket, and a stack of clean leaves for obvious purposes. I used it as quickly as I could and dumped it over the side, wishing for a real bathroom. Something with more than just a screen, at the very leas
t.
My business done, I returned to the campfire and sat on one of the stools parked nearby. The girl made no attempt to talk to me, so I studied her as she stirred the crude cook-pot. She was young. Ten? Twelve? Her clothes were tattered and faded to the point that I couldn’t tell what sort of make they were, and she wore a fairly long skirt for such a warm climate. Her hair was pulled tightly back into a bun, and a few wisps escaped to frame her face, curling around her ears.
“I’m Diana,” I said when she noticed me staring.
“My name is Lady Olivia Smythe,” she said, her voice stiff.
Lady? I didn’t want to insult her by stating the question aloud, but it seemed an odd way to introduce herself. Maybe her brain was a little whacked out from being shipwrecked. Not that I blamed her.
She didn’t seem inclined to carry the conversation, so I tried another tactic. “Eustace is your brother?”
Olivia gave the pot a quick stir with a long handled wooden spoon. “He is Lord Eustace Smythe, Marquess of Langdon.” She blinked repeatedly, and I winced inwardly. I hoped I wasn’t going to make her cry.
“Oh,” I said, feeling awkward. “I don’t have a title, I’m afraid.”
“You’re common, then?” Her eyes raised to meet mine. “You sound as if you’re from the colonies.”
“I’m American, yeah.” Whatever she was cooking smelled wonderful, and my stomach growled. “That smells great, whatever it is.”
She flushed a little, clearly pleased at my appreciation. “Stewed lizard and some lemongrass. It’s quite good once you get used to it.”
“It smells wonderful.” I didn’t want to think about the lizard part too much, but if she was going to eat it, well, so was I.
She warmed to me a little at that, and I saw the hard edges leave her mouth, and she even smiled. “Would you like a bowl?”
I nodded eagerly and she left the fire briefly, heading over to the far wall and plucking something metal and shiny off of a natural shelf in the stone. She flipped it in her hands and brought it to the fire, swaddling the base of it in ragged fabric. “It will be hot, so be careful that you do not burn yourself.”
When the odd bowl was filled, she handed it to me and produced another, smaller wooden spoon for me to eat with. I poked at the soup cautiously for a moment, examining it. Bits of pale meat floated in the thin broth, some greens mixed in. The bowl was hot even through the fabric, and I was careful not to let the wide metal lip touch my bare legs.
The first bite was pure heaven. I took another larger bite, nearly burning the roof off my mouth in the process, but I felt like I couldn’t get enough into my stomach fast enough. “It’s wonderful,” I said to her between bites.
She beamed with pleasure, then got herself a bowl and sat across from me on another stool, eating.
As we ate, I counted the stools – four in all. So there were only four castaways here in the cave, five if you counted me. But all of the men were missing, and it was just myself and Olivia at the fire. I finished my food, scraped the bowl with my spoon, and wondered at the odd seam that went down the middle of the metal bowl, cutting across the diameter. It seemed an odd place to put a seam, and I unwrapped it and examined it.
A helmet. A conquistador helmet. I blinked in surprise. “Where did you get this?”
She shrugged. “Salvador.”
“Speaking of, where are all the men this morning?” I tried to make my question sound as innocent as possible.
Her small face closed up on me again at that. “Harold is sleeping late, because he is old and unwell. Salvador went hunting. Eustace...he left.”
I couldn’t ignore the sourness in her voice. “Left?”
She gave a watery sniff and bent her head over her soup-bowl-helmet. “He’s gone.” Olivia rubbed a hand across her face in a childlike motion. “He said he’d be back later when he’s had time to...think about things. He’s never left me alone here before.”
“I’m sorry.” What did I say to the kid after she’d just been abandoned by her brother and left stuck with me? “I, uh, really didn’t want them to fight over me.”
“Well, what did you expect?” She said tearfully. “They’ve been stranded here for so long with no women, and then here you come sauntering in with no clothing on your body, and talking filthy, and you’re so pretty, of course they’re going to fight over you.”
My back stiffened and I frowned at her. This was going a little far. “No clothes? Talking filthy?” Well, I did call Salvador a bastard a few times, but jeez. Olivia was really damn sheltered if she thought I was a potty mouth. Of course, she was only twelve or so, and she’d been stranded on this island for some time. Still, I stuck with my guns. “I’m wearing a bikini.”
“A what?”
Now I was starting to get annoyed with her. My bikini was actually pretty modest as far as swim-wear went. It was a two-piece sport bikini, nothing sleazy, so I was starting to get offended by the fact that she thought I was some huge skank. “You’ll have to forgive me if I lost the rest of my clothing when the dinosaurs tried to eat me.”
She gave a watery sniff. “The terrible lizards? They attacked you?”
“Yeah, the T-Rex nearly ate me at one point. I had to hide in the plane for a long time. That’s how Salvador found me. He saved me from the cavemen.”
Olivia shuddered. “They’re rather vile, aren’t they? I’ve only seen them a few times – both Salvador and Eustace try to keep me sheltered here in the cave.”
I could guess why. If the cavemen were hot to trot for a big amazon like me, I had no doubt that Bgha and his crew would find Olivia’s petite – although young – form a nice treat. “It’s nice of them to take care of you,” I ventured.
Her face hardened. “They treat me like I’m a child.” She stood and extended one hand for my empty bowl. “We’ll clean up here, get Harold settled, and then we’ll find some proper clothing for you.”
I handed her my bowl and watched as she bustled around the small cave, rinsing out the bowls, giving the remainder of the stew a good stir, and then heading over to one of the nooks and waking the elderly Harold. Watching her, one could easily see how she would resent being thought of as a child, when she was clearly the one running the house here.
Harold stumbled over to the fire with Olivia’s help, his arms shaking with frailty, and I felt immediately sorry for him. He needed a doctor – his face was drawn and thin, and covered with myriad wrinkles under the white puff of beard. I wondered how old he was, and how long he’d been here. “Did you all come from the same wreck?” I asked. “The same plane?”
Harold shook his head at me and smiled, showing a few crooked, yellow teeth. “A shipwreck for me, mistress. All three of us came from ships.” His voice rattled in his throat so much that I was afraid he’d gasp his last breath at the end of every sentence.
“Oh,” I said, and watched as Olivia fed Harold.
“We’re going to find some clothing for Diana,” she said, patting the old man on his shoulder and fussing over him like a daughter. “We’ll be back shortly. Stay here and tend the fire for us?”
At Harold’s nod, Olivia rose in an elegant gesture, and inclined her head. “If you’ll follow me, please?”
I smiled at the queenly motion, feeling the absurd urge to curtsy.
Olivia led me to a small storage nook in the back of the cave, and to my surprise, there was a treasure-trove of things stuffed in there. “Most of the things we’ve found washed up on the beach from wrecks such as your own,” she explained, digging through a series of crates and pulling items out. “Some of it we can’t use, but don’t have the heart to throw away. Some of it we can’t make out. So we keep it all.” She glanced back at me. “We have an agreement with the cavemen – because they used to fight us over what washed up – that everything on the north beach is ours, and the south beach is theirs. That is why they were so upset that Salvador took you – he took you from their territory.”
“But I’m a pe
rson,” I protested. “You can’t own someone.”
“Of course you can,” she said easily. “On this island, people are possessions just as surely as anything else, and women are a valuable commodity. If you can’t protect yourself, you’re better off under someone else’s protection.” She turned back to give me a wistful look, her arms full of faded fabric. “You’re lucky that Salvador wants you. He’s the strongest man on the island.”
I eyed the trunks as she shoved past me with the armful of fabric. “I don’t suppose there’s a radio shoved away somewhere in here?” I wanted to stay and look at things. I picked up a small compass and frowned down at it as the needle spun in circles on its own. Well, that wouldn’t do me much good. I walked past a massive sword, still in its scabbard, and peeked at another pile of discarded things. There had to be something useful in the storage room. “Maybe a transistor of sorts?”
“A what?” she called back mildly to me. “Come out here to the light and pick out something.”
“Never mind,” I said under my breath, making a mental note to go and dig through everything later. Another day wouldn’t hurt anything.
Olivia began to spread the clothing out near the front of the cave – where the sunlight was brightest – and I watched as she picked through them with gentle hands. “I would only pick out one or two things,” she said. “We can use those until they wear out, and then once they’re completely done-for, we can go back for something else.” She glanced over at me. “It’s stingy, I know, but we have to make things last.”
“That’s fine,” I said, not wanting to bother her about it. I didn’t care as long as it was clean.
She gestured to a pretty, lacy dress with a high collar and long, tight sleeves. “Something like this would be acceptable, perhaps.”
I eyed it with distaste. “Won’t that be hot?”
Olivia shrugged. “A lady must be modest or she incites men to think bad things about her.” She gave me a pointed look.
Geez, that wasn’t obvious of her at all. I ignored her little comment and dug through the clothing a bit longer. I found a coral-colored blouse of sorts that had one sleeve ripped off – I ripped the other off to make it match, despite Olivia’s horrified look. It went nearly perfect with a long, flowing skirt of white. “This’ll do for me for starters.”