The storm was getting worse, the wind almost knocking us sideways as we stepped out onto the deck. It was so loud I couldn’t hear anything else. I could barely think. When I turned towards it, it crammed air down into my lungs like a fist down my throat. When I turned away, there was nothing to breathe. The rain wasn’t drops—it was constant, like being hit in the face by a hose, smashing its way into our eyes and nostrils, leaving us gasping and tearing and half-blind.
We staggered up against one of the remaining lifeboats and dropped the bags and Adam’s guitar in. I tried to remember the instructions, clutching at ropes and pulling levers with hands numb with cold and a brain frozen with fear. Between us, we managed to get the boat swung out on its davit. The boat was spinning and sliding on the waves and with each rotation the rocks loomed closer. We had to leave, now, but there was something I’d forgotten, someone else who must still be aboard….
“The cat!” I screamed over the wind.
“I’ll go!” And he pushed me towards the boat again and took a staggering step towards the stairs. And immediately fell flat on his face.
I helped him to his feet. God, he was so heavy! He must be solid muscle! “You can’t even walk!” I yelled. “I’ll go!”
He started to argue, but I was already turning towards the stairs.
The pitch-black stairs leading down into the pitch-black corridor.
It would be even worse, going back to the stateroom, because any glimmer of light would be behind me, not in front of me.
I searched the lifeboat and found a flashlight, but as the ship listed it slipped out of my hand and went rolling across the deck. I searched again and found a pack of chemical light sticks. Better than nothing.
I snapped one and shook it until it glowed—a weak, green glow that made everything look sickly and alien. But it was light.
The dress I’d thrown on wasn’t something I wore anymore—it was something that was plastered to me like a second skin by the rain and the wind. My whole body was going numb with cold. I grabbed the handrail with my free hand and descended the stairs. Worryingly, the water started a lot closer to the top of them, this time.
I climbed down the stairs, the water rising higher and higher up my body, praying that the next step would put me on the floor. When it finally did, the water was up to my chest and rising.
The light stick threw out a weak glow, reaching only a foot or so in all directions. But it was enough to hold the panic down in my chest and stop it consuming me completely.
Twenty steps to the stateroom. Thirty, tops. You wouldn’t even think about it if it was in the light.
I pushed forward through the water, trying not to think about how high it would be when I came back. The ship had stopped listing so much, now. The water it had taken on had given it some stability. But I knew that could change at any time. One big gust of wind and we could roll right over, I’d crack my head on the wall and then down, down, into the depths.
I tried to move faster.
When I finally reached the stateroom, the door refused to open. I had to heave against a chair that had floated free and jammed up against it. When I got inside, the room was a confusing sea of floating objects, a carpet of empty beer bottles on a rolling, inky-black surface, all lit by the ghostly green glow of the light stick.
“Ozzy?” I called, and I could hear the stress in my voice. No cat in the world would come towards that voice. “Ozzy?” I tried again, trying to make my voice comforting. “C’mon!”
The water was nearly up to my neck. I searched the high places in the room—on top of the wardrobe, the floating dresser, the shelves—
As the light stick passed by a shelf, Ozzy’s eyes glowed green from the darkness. He let out an ear-splitting yowl of fear and I jerked back.
The light stick slipped from my numb fingers and plunged beneath the surface.
Oh God. Oh God, please no. Not in here. This was a thousand times worse than the corridor. I was away from the walls, with nothing to hang onto, and the furniture was floating and moving, butting up against me, threatening to knock me over each time the water sloshed. My horrified eyes tracked the fading glow of the light stick as it sank. I squatted down in the water, putting my head under, and snatched for it once, twice, but missed. And then my fingers sent it spinning under the bed.
Everything went completely black.
Something thumped into me—the bed, I guessed—pushing me back against the wall. The wind was knocked out of me, and then my foot slipped and I went down deep. I knew I needed to get to the surface, but there was no surface. There was no light to head towards, no direction at all. I thought I might have slid under the bed, couldn’t tell if my hands were scrabbling frantically at the floor or the underside of the bed’s base. My lungs burned, and then felt like they were going to explode. I’m drowning, I realized. I’m drowning.
And then suddenly there was light. Bright, white perfect light, shining from one side, and someone grabbed my leg and hauled me up.
I came out legs first, my body thrashing frantically in the air while my head was still under, and then he got a hand under my head and lifted me all the way out and oh God, AIR. I sucked it in and then coughed and spasmed, choking up water, and then sucked it in again, the air burning against my throat.
Adam was shining a flashlight around the room. The water was up to my neck and rising, and the boat was listing again, slowly but surely beginning to roll over. He pulled me fully to my feet, put his hands on my shoulders and said, “Can you walk?” His voice was still slurred, but a little clearer, now.
I nodded breathlessly.
He shone the flashlight towards the shelves and Ozzy yowled again. We waded over there, almost swimming, the water was so deep. When we were almost there, Ozzy jumped and landed on my shoulder, his paws scrambling for purchase. He secured himself by sinking his claws into my skin, and then bit my ear for good measure.
Adam put an arm around my waist and hauled me through the door and down the corridor.
Ozzy clung on even tighter, and hissed in my ear as if to tell me exactly what he’d do to me if I slipped and dumped him into the water. We forced our way through the water for the final time and, by the time we reached the steps, the water was almost up to my chin. I never would have made the climb up to the deck if Adam hadn’t been behind me, pushing me up.
On deck, we barely made it to the lifeboat before the deck started to tilt crazily. We tumbled over the side and into the bottom of the little craft, Ozzy immediately abandoning my shoulder and seeking shelter under a tarpaulin. The yacht was leaning so much that the lifeboat was almost in the water before we started to lower it. We cast off the rope and then suddenly we were floating free, a wave coming up between us and the yacht. We slid away from it, and when the next wave lifted us we were already fifty feet out. The rocks were very close, now, looming out of the darkness like dragon’s teeth. I knew we had to mount the oars and try to pull away from them, but I was utterly spent. Adam had collapsed into the bottom of the boat, whatever cocktail of drugs and booze he’d consumed having finally reclaimed him. With the lifeboat tossing and spinning on the waves, all I could do was lie down next to him. I pressed my body to his and clutched him tight, my head on his chest, and prayed for it to be over, one way or another. Sometime in the night, amidst the wind and the rain and the waves, the blackness took me.
Chapter 7
I awoke from a nightmare of freezing water and lashing rain into warmth and sunlight, and a warm body next to me. I was in my bed in San Francisco, waking up next to Nathan. Sunlight was streaming through the window—because even then, I used to keep the curtain open—and in a minute I’d get up and brew coffee and slice bagels for the toaster, but first, I wanted to cuddle up to Nathan for just a little while—
My fingers found Nathan’s chest, but not bare skin. They found a t-shirt, and it was wet. And the sun was too fierce on my cheek, and there was a draught…
I opened my eyes.
; I was half on top of Adam, who was still passed out in the bottom of the boat. I sat up slowly, my body aching from sleeping in the cold, and saw a smooth, flat horizon. The ocean was like a millpond, broken only by a cluster of rocks a half mile or so away.
It took me a while to realize that the boat wasn’t rocking on the waves. I turned around and gasped as I saw why.
We’d run aground on a soft, sandy beach—in fact, from the marks on the sand, we’d actually beached some time ago, and were now being gently pulled back out by the tide. I scrambled out of the lifeboat, landing ankle-deep in the surf, and tried to pull the boat up the beach, but it was impossible with Adam in the bottom. “Wake up!” I yelled. I threw a handful of water in his face. “Wake up!”
Adam blinked his way awake and looked suspiciously around. He lumbered out of the boat and helped me, his face growing first pale, and then green. As soon as the boat was clear of the tide, he sat down heavily on the sand. “I think,” he whispered, “my head is going to come off.”
I ignored him and, for the first time, took a proper look around.
From what I could see, the island seemed to be a few miles across. A soft white beach led up to palm trees and then thick jungle beyond. There was a mountain with an odd shape, like a chipped tooth.
I turned and looked around, and that’s when I got really scared.
There was nothing else on the horizon. No coastlines, no other islands, no ships. Just the jagged black rocks a little farther out to sea.
“I don’t know where we are,” I said slowly.
Adam was trying to shield his eyes from the rising sun. “Yeah,” he said. “Me neither.”
I glared at him. “I know you don’t know where we are. You’re a tourist. I’ve been here for two years now. I know these waters, I know all the islands...but I don’t know this one.” I looked again at the unfamiliar peak. “I’ve never seen that before. Whereabouts were we, when we went down?”
Adam rubbed his head. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?! It was your vacation!”
“Could you please…speak…quieter?” Adam begged, pressing fingers to his temples. He sighed. “I just let the captain go wherever he wanted. Bloody hell, this trip wasn’t even my idea, it was Eddie’s.”
I turned in another slow circle. We’d been out past the normal tourist islands…way past. And then we’d kept going for most of a day. When I’d gone to sleep, the captain had just started the engine again, so we could have still been moving for hours—
“We’re lost!” I yelled. I could feel the panic starting, deep in my chest, spreading outward and draining my energy, muscle by muscle. “We’re somewhere way way out in the Pacific.” I stared at Adam, eyes wide. “No one comes out here!”
Adam tried to jump to his feet, but staggered and went down on his knees. I was just winding up yelling again when he put his hands out towards me in a calming motion. “Angel!”
It was so unexpected that it worked. I stood there open-mouthed, panting, and halfway to yelling.
“Shh!” Adam said desperately.
I closed my jaw.
“Look,” he said slowly. “Who do you see?”
I looked at him. He looked patently ridiculous, standing there on the beach in his black leather jacket, black t-shirt and jeans.
“A—Adam,” I croaked.
“Adam who?”
“Adam…Sykes.”
“Adam Sykes what?”
I swallowed. “Adam Sykes…rock star?” I said in a small voice.
“I was going for rock god, but alright. Yes, luv. Adam Sykes: rock star. Now do you think, do you think for one second that someone like me can disappear and they won’t look?”
I stared at him. The panic was still there, but a tiny thread of hope had appeared.
“Right now,” Adam said, “the rest of the crew are already back on shore. A massive search is underway. Army! Navy! Air Force! Coast Guard! Journos will be flying in from all over the world, interviewing Eddie and the rest of the band. It’ll have hit the internet. Twitter will be exploding. We’ll probably break Twitter, do you understand that?”
I nodded slowly. The thread was gradually growing thicker, the panic receding.
“Look around you, luv. Island paradise. Six foot two of gorgeous man meat. What more could you ask for?”
I felt myself flush…but it did push the panic back more.
He finally managed to get to his feet. Shakily, but he was standing. “All we have to do,” he said. “Is to stay calm. Yeah?”
I slowly nodded. “Yeah.”
“Yeah?” he asked, moving closer.
“Yeah,” I said, nodding. And then he was pulling me into a hug, and the feel of him there, so strong and warm and solid, when everything else seemed to have slipped away, was so good that I could have stayed there forever.
Wait. What was he—?
I pulled away from him.
“What?” he asked in an aggrieved voice.
“Your hand!”
“I was comforting you.”
“My ass doesn’t need to be comforted!”
He did the calming hands thing again, wincing.
“You’re not even calming me down for me!” I yelled. “You just want me to stop yelling!”
He clutched his head. “Yes! Guilty! Got me, bang to rights. Sorry. Now please stop yelling!”
I stood there glowering at him, but I’d run out of things to yell about, so I kicked the sand instead. “Idiot,” I said under my breath. I wasn’t sure if I was talking about him, or about me, for slipping into his arms so easily.
“God, I’d give my left nut for a drink of water. Maybe we can find a stream and then boil it and—”
“I brought some,” I told him, and strode over to the boat. The two bottles of mineral water I’d thrown into the trash sack suddenly seemed pathetically small.
“You brought water?” He looked in astonishment at the bottle I held out to him. “Oh, you angel.” He took it reverently and drank. “You are a goddess amongst women. You get a raise, and a promotion…you can be head chef.” He looked at the lifeboat. “I mean, we’re going to need a new yacht, but as soon as we get one, you’re head chef. You won’t even cook anymore; you can just snap at people and threaten them with knives.”
The banter was almost a relief. When we weren’t talking, the island was eerily quiet. “I don’t…I never threatened you—”
“There was the thing with the sausage, but that’s fine. It’s forgotten. It’s in the past.”
I gave him a look and then nodded at the holdall sitting in the bottom of the lifeboat. “What did you bring from the yacht?”
He looked towards the boat almost guiltily. “Oh, you know. Stuff.”
“Clothes?” I looked down at the dress I was wearing. I didn’t even normally wear dresses, but it had been the first thing to hand when I’d woken up in the night. It would keep the sun off me, a little, but it wouldn’t protect my arms. I picked up Adam’s holdall.
“Ah,” he said. “No. Wait—”
I was already unzipping it. “Do you maybe have a shirt I could—?”
I stopped and stared.
The holdall was full of money. Stacks of bills as thick as your palm, and lots of them. “This is….”
“...about three hundred thousand,” said Adam.
“You brought money?!” I screamed. “We were abandoning ship and you brought money?!”
Adam clutched at his head again. “Sweetie! Relax! This isn’t going to be Robinson Crusoe. We’ll be picked up within an hour or two.”
“You have billions of dollars! Why did you—”
“Cash isn’t covered by the insurance. If that had gone to the bottom it would have been gone. I couldn’t just throw it away.”
“Well fantastic! This is great! We can just buy whatever we need!” I was about to hurl the bag at him when I felt something heavy roll across the bottom of it. I groaned as I pulled out a bottle of bourbon. “Money
and booze. You brought money and booze?!”
Adam put up a hand in defense. “Now wait. That has sentimental value. Eddie gave me that for my birthday. It’s vintage. Thirty years old.”
I wanted to scream. I threw the bottle at him. He flailed to catch it, missing twice, and grabbed it just before it hit a rock.
“Come on,” I grated between my teeth. “Let’s try to find some water. Two bottles isn’t going to last long.” I went back to the lifeboat to grab the second bottle.
Down in the bottom of the boat was the tarpaulin that had kept the rain out of it when it had been on deck. Now, the fabric twitched and moved. A ginger head poked tentatively out and then a furry, ginger body.
We both gave Ozzy an affectionate stroke as he jumped up onto the lifeboat’s gunwale, looked suspiciously at the beach and then jumped down and started to explore.
“You think he’ll be okay?” I asked.
“Are you kidding? Look around.” Adam indicated the beach. “He’s in the world’s biggest sandbox.”
Ozzy pricked up his ears as he heard the call of some far-off jungle bird. Before I could grab him, he’d raced into the trees.
“Okay, then,” I muttered. “Water.” And I set off, Adam trailing behind me.
Chapter 8
As soon as we got out of the sun and into the cool of the trees, Adam gave a sigh of relief. Looking back at him, I could see he really wasn’t in a good way. His skin was clammy and pale and there were heavy, dark circles under his eyes. But I was short on sympathy. “How much did you drink?” I asked, shaking my head in dismay. “Were they pouring champagne straight down your throat?”
The jungle wasn’t all that thick, but the light was dim and you had to concentrate on where you were stepping. It took him a second to respond. “Who?”
I ducked under a creeper. “The strippers.”
He gaped at me. “How did you know about the strippers?”
“We all knew about the strippers, Mr. Sykes.”
“Really? It’s ‘Mr. Sykes’ even now?”
“I saved your life and now I’ve given you water. I’m pretty sure that counts as still working for you.” The real reason was to keep some boundaries in place. The thought that we’re all alone together kept slipping into my brain, and it carried along with it all sorts of ideas that I didn’t want to think about.
Shipwrecked with the Billionaire Rock Star Page 5