***
We fell asleep with him spooning me from behind, both of us stark naked. With the fire to warm us, it was warmer that way than putting our wet clothes back on. I woke only once, to see him throwing more wood on the fire, and then he was settling back down behind me, his strong arms wrapping around me, and I sank back into a comfortable slumber.
Chapter 14
I was dimly aware that it was morning, because it was light outside my eyelids. But Adam was still spooning me from behind, his body heat keeping me warm, and I could happily lie there all day. Maybe at noon, I thought. When we start to burn in the sun...that’s when I’ll move. And not before.
A tiny part of me was starting to ask questions, but I deliberately paid it so little attention, only catching odd words like “rock star” and “commitment.” The rest of me was so deliriously, joyously happy that it was easy to ignore.
Then fingers started touching my face. Stroking my cheek almost inquisitively, as if to see what I was made of. “Adam,” I giggled sleepily, “stop it.”
Fingers pinched my eyelashes and lifted one eyelid.
I looked straight into a big, leathery black face surrounded by brown fur.
“Ook?” asked the monkey.
“WAAAH!” I screamed, flailing. I tried to get up, which didn’t work because the monkey still had hold of my eyelid, so I wound up kneeling in front of it as if bowing to the monkey god, batting at it with my hands. I was still stark naked, which didn’t help.
I heard Adam climb sleepily to his feet behind me. To his credit, he didn’t laugh. He stepped around me and shooed the monkey away, and I could finally get to my feet and cover myself, one hand over my breasts and the other over my groin. I looked around for my dress.
“I’m pretty sure he’s seen it all before,” said Adam. He kissed my bare shoulder. “And I’ve seen it all.”
I elbowed him in the ribs and shifted uneasily. It felt different, in the daylight. By the fire, in the shadows, it had been okay; now, in the light of morning, it felt as if there was altogether too much naked skin on display. Too much me. And Adam was still equally naked, all powerful, rippling muscle and—I quickly glanced in the other direction. Something else had arisen early.
Adam glanced down at himself. “I can’t help it,” he said in a low growl. “You have that effect on me.”
“Be serious!”
“I can’t be serious. It’s a monkey.” He held out a finger to the monkey. The monkey grabbed it, sniffed it, then jumped onto Adam’s arm and scampered up to his shoulder. “Can I keep him?” asked Adam, grinning.
I glared at the monkey, who I swore was staring at my boobs. “You can try, but if he starts throwing poop, you’re on your own.”
Adam fed the monkey a banana while I found my panties, bra and dress. Neither of us could face catching and cooking fish so early in the morning, so once Adam had pulled his jeans on, we sat down in the sand and looked out at the ocean, the monkey exploring our shoulders. The sun was still coming up. “This is the first time I’ve been up this early in years,” said Adam. “I mean, I’ve seen plenty of sunrises…but only when I’ve been up all night.” At least it was a distraction from what we had to talk about. That jewel of a relationship conversation: About Last Night.
We both started to speak, and then both You first-ed.
“Why me?” I asked. And then I stared at him and wondered if he’d understand. Would he think I meant my body, like why not someone smaller? And I guess there was some of that, under the surface. I’d accepted my body—I wouldn’t go as far as to say that I loved it, but we had a sort of grim understanding. But no one’s ever that confident, right? No one ever thinks she’s perfect. So a part of me was wondering why me, and not Simone or any of the other hundreds of women he must meet.
A bigger part of me, though, wasn’t thinking about my body at all. It already knew why it had happened, and I just needed him to confirm it. Why me? Because we were stuck on a desert island together. Because he was the sort of guy who flirted with—and, if possible, fucked—every woman he met, like a compulsion. Either way, it wasn’t going to last and, I told myself, I was okay with that. The ice around my heart hadn’t been properly melted. It was thinner, maybe, than it had been—he’d definitely chipped away at it with his words and his looks, and the heat he’d raised in me had left it cracked and fragile. But so far, it was mostly lust…mostly. As long as I distanced myself now, there was still time for the ice to harden and thicken again. Another few days and it would be back to being the armor I needed. That’s what I told myself.
Except then, he had to go and ruin it all by denying it.
“Why you? ‘Cos I’ve never met anyone like you. You tell it like it is. God, have you any idea what it’s like to never have anyone go against you? You wind up doing more and more crazy things, just to get a reaction out of people.” A grin broke across his face. “But you,” he said, “you don’t let anyone push you around, or care what anyone thinks. You’re not worried about impressing me, you don’t try to suck up to me or shake your ass in front of me, trying to seduce me. You’re just...you.” He reached up and brushed his fingers across my cheek. “That’s a rare gift, Hannah.”
I bit my lip. This wasn’t how I’d expected it to go.
I took a deep breath. “Look,” I said. “I’m a grown up. I can handle it.” No I can’t. “It can just be a one night stand.” No it can’t. “Just tell me that,” Oh God please don’t. “I’ll be okay.” No I won’t.
He stared at me. “I like you,” he said slowly, and the word “like” was loaded like a tourist bus, crammed with so much stuff that there were suitcases strapped to the roof. “I like you a lot.”
That brittle, cracked ice around my heart shifted and moved, hairline fractures spreading and joining. I took another deep breath and put my hands out between us, as if to call a stop. “We’re stuck here,” I said. “And things...happened. Maybe we should just accept that and say, ‘okay, it wasn’t horrible, but let’s put it behind us.’ Before one of us gets hurt.”
He blinked. “It wasn’t horrible?”
I flushed. “You know what I mean.”
“It wasn’t horrible?!”
I swallowed, remembering. “It was…very good.”
“Very, very good, as I remember it. Wasn’t it very, very good twice, for you?”
I reddened even more. “Yes, okay, it was very very good twice. But I just—I don’t want to start something.”
“I think we already started something. Didn’t we?”
I just looked at him, biting my lip again.
He stared at me for a long time. Then, “Why are you so scared of this? Why are you so sure it’s not going to work out?” He paused. “Did something happen to you?”
I could feel it slipping away from me. The first good thing I’d had in two years, the first chance at recovering from Nathan and taking my life out of neutral. But it needed me to make a leap, and I just couldn’t. I shook my head and looked away, down the beach.
And then suddenly, I was jumping to my feet. “Look!”
“Oh come on,” he said. “Really? That’s so transparent. Don’t change the subject.”
“Really! Look!”
He followed my pointing finger and looked. And then we were both up and running.
***
The first thing we found was a man’s shirt. Not one we recognized, and it was too small to fit Adam. But then I saw a deck shoe that I was sure I’d seen Simone wearing. And a plastic measuring cup I recognized from the galley.
“It’s from the yacht,” I said in wonder, staring at the debris-strewn stretch of beach.
“The stuff that floats, at least,” said Adam, grabbing a plastic dish. “It must have been washed up in the night. Hurry! Before the tide takes it back out!” And he was off and running. He seemed a lot steadier on his feet than when he’d first arrived.
He was right about the tide. The water was already lapping hungrily at the items
lower down the beach, tempting them back into the surf where it could pull them away. I ran after him and we started work, barely looking at the things we were grabbing, just trying to save whatever we could.
The flotsam and jetsam covered a long stretch. We wound up going further along the beach than we’d explored, right down to the headland. It was exhausting, and it didn’t help that we only had Adam’s black holdall to carry things in. The one thing that didn’t wash ashore was another bag.
After an hour, we staggered to a stop. We’d rescued everything that was in immediate danger and made a pile of junk by the tree line. It looked as if a welfare store had left its stock out in the rain.
“Why now?” I panted. “We’ve been here for days!”
“Must have been caught in a different current to us,” said Adam. He rubbed his chin, and I remembered how his stubble had felt against me when he’d kissed me. “We should keep at it. Get everything we can off the beach.”
And so, after a break for water, we went back to it. This time, we had time to be more methodical, making piles of clothes, shoes, kitchen stuff...there were even hundreds of pages from random, broken books. The monkey joined us and helped—and by “helped,” I mean he picked up objects at random, carried them around for a bit and put them down. Other than the paper, which he tried to eat.
It gave me a chance to think. To tell myself that of course I’m doing the right thing not opening up to him. The last time I’d let a man into my life, I’d had to drop out of the world for two years. He seemed different to Nathan; he seemed nice. But I wasn’t kidding myself. However unusual or special I seemed to him, ultimately it was about the sex. It was lust, not anything deeper. If we’d stayed aboard the yacht, we’d have never gotten together. We’d been thrown together by chance. As soon as we left the island, the fling would be over. I couldn’t afford to let my final defenses down. Sex was one thing, but if it became more and then he left…
By noon, we’d cleared the beach. Which was a good thing, because the sun was too strong to work, unless we mudded up again. We retreated under the trees to go through our haul.
There were random items of clothing from everyone on board...except us. None of the men’s clothing fitted Adam, but I found a few shirts that would act as cover from the sun. Then there were dresses and blouses that must have belonged to Simone or the maid, because they didn’t even come close to fitting me.
I’d been wearing the same pair of sandals since we left the yacht and I fell upon the pile of shoes with eager enthusiasm. It didn’t last.
“Not one?” I asked mournfully. “Seventeen shoes and not one pair? How is that even possible?!”
“Wait,” said Adam. “That’s a pair.”
It was a pair of men’s shoes. One had been bleached by the sun and the salt and was now a different color to the other, but they were a pair!
They were too small for either of us. “That’s just plain cruel,” I said.
On the plus side, we had some kitchen gear. The saucepans must have sunk straight to the bottom, but several plastic cups had washed up, and a few bowls. No more lip-splinters from bamboo cups. And we had something to read: five pages from a fishing magazine, a chunk of a romance novel and the final three pages of a murder mystery (his wife did it).
All of it took us straight back to thinking about the yacht, and what might have happened to the crew. And to the fact that this was our third day on the island with no sign of rescue. I scanned the huge, empty sky. “Adam?”
“Mm-hmm?”
“Tell me someone’s going to come.”
He grinned one of his wide, easy grins. “Of course they’re going to come.”
But for the first time, I could really see the tension in his eyes.
Chapter 15
Lunch was more fish, and the fact that all we could really do with it was to steam it meant the novelty was starting to wear thin. “Dessert,” I announced, “will be chocolate banana surprise.”
“What’s the surprise?” he asked.
“There’s no chocolate.”
When we’d eaten, Adam told me he’d had an idea. “We should follow the creek back to wherever it starts,” he said. “If there are animals, they’ll go there to drink. Maybe we can set traps or something.”
“Animals? Like what? Like lions?”
“I was thinking more like a squirrel.”
“Don’t you need...snares and wires and things? Do you know how to do any of that?”
He lifted a little plastic roll of dental floss from the pile of junk. “I have this,” he said. “And how hard can it be?”
***
After a solid hour following the creek, we didn’t find anything resembling an animal trail, for which I was secretly glad. I was getting sick of fish and I’m not squeamish about preparing meat, but carving up a chicken isn’t the same as trapping something warm and furry and then killing it.
What we did find was a waterfall.
There was a sheer cliff rising up out of the ground and the creek cascaded down from the very top of it, falling fifty feet into a pool. A break in the trees meant that sunlight could blaze down and warm the water, as well as bake the rocks around it. When we stepped up onto the rim of the pool, the stone was pleasantly warm to the touch and the moss even made it soft. Add in the crash of the water and the calls of the jungle birds, and it was idyllic.
We both sat there on the edge for a while, just staring. I wondered how something so beautiful, something that would have been a tourist attraction anywhere else in the world, could just happen by accident, on an island where no one would ever see it. We might be the first people in years to even be there—maybe even the first people ever. And if something happened to us, if we got ill or ran out of food and died on the island...no one might ever see it again.
It was a place that made you want to not have regrets. It made me think about Nathan, and the last two years. I’d thought that I didn’t want to ever get involved again, that I never wanted to expose myself again like that. But now...two years seemed a long time to be hurt and resentful...and angry.
“You’re thinking about him, aren’t you?” Adam asked.
“Who?”
“You know who. The idiot who hurt you.”
Whenever the subject of Nathan came up—which until now had only been on an infrequent Skype call home—there was a part of me that always wanted to defend him. As if I’d be less of a pity case if people could see why I fell for him. “He’s not an idiot,” I said. “He’s actually a very smart guy.”
Adam did something then that I hadn’t know he was capable of. He just sat there and waited, and listened.
I took a deep breath of sweet jungle air, wondering why I was going to tell him. It wouldn’t make any difference. I didn’t need someone else to tell me that I was hurt and damaged. I knew that already.
But as I looked into those cool blue eyes, I knew I owed it to him. He’d shared something of himself with me. I knew there was more to come, but he’d been a hell of a lot more open than I had. And more than that...I wanted to tell him. I didn’t want the past poisoning us.
And so, with my eyes fixed on the crashing water, I told him. I told him about meeting Nathan and the whirlwind romance. I told him about the engagement and the big, sparkly ring. I told him about the dress and the flowers and, when I couldn’t put it off any longer, I told him about how I’d felt, on the day, when he hadn’t shown up.
“I felt as if someone stamped on me,” I told him. Then I put my hand to my chest. “Right here. And then, over time, it sort of...iced over.” I pressed my lips hard together, trying to hold back the tears. “But that’s not the same as being fixed. I’m not sure that part of me still works properly. I’m not sure it ever will.”
When I finally turned to look at Adam, he was gripping the edges of the rock we were sitting on, his knuckles so white that I thought he was going to tear a chunk right out of the stone. I’d never seen him looking so murderously angry. He no
dded at me to continue.
I told him about the islands, and hiding away. About a life lived in neutral: sailing around on other people’s yachts. Living in a shared house that felt like it didn’t belong to any of us. Nothing in my life was permanent: I could fit everything I owned into a suitcase and take it with me, and I’d liked it that way. Until a few days ago.
I finally ran out of steam and it was only then, as my head tilted down to gaze into the water, that I saw the outward ripples caused by my falling tears, and realized I was crying.
“Hannah?” Adam said, his voice thick with emotion.
I slowly turned to look at him.
“I’m not good at this stuff,” he said. “I don’t know the right things to say. But I know that Nathan was...is…an arsehole. And that’s a guy’s opinion. You can take that to the bank.”
I sniffed. “That’s the independent opinion?” I tried to smile, to turn it into a joke, but I couldn’t.
“No,” he said. “No, not independent.” His eyes were locked on mine. “I can’t claim that.”
We just stared at each other for a few seconds. I could feel the tears still rolling down my cheeks and I couldn’t stop them.
“I don’t think I can go through that again,” I whispered. “I don’t think I could stand it.”
He leaned closer to me. “Is that what you think is going to happen? You think I’m going to—sleep with you and dump you?”
“Use me and throw me away,” I croaked, my voice breaking. “Don’t deny it. That’s what you’re famous for, right?” I could see him start to speak, and my voice suddenly became vicious. “Or do you form lasting, meaningful relationships with every one of those hundreds of women a year?”
Shipwrecked with the Billionaire Rock Star Page 10