Shipwrecked with the Billionaire Rock Star

by Victoria Wessex

  Chapter 17

  The lean and the soaking floors made it tricky to keep my footing, but I managed to climb into the first cabin—the maid’s, at a guess, because there was female clothing strewn around. I grabbed anything I thought might fit me.

  The next two cabins belonged to men. I grabbed a few shoes in the hope of making a pair with the ones which had washed ashore. The next cabin was mine, but when I opened the door a rush of water pushed me back against the far wall. The hull had been cracked open by the rocks and anything that hadn’t been bolted down had been washed away. I did manage to find my wash bag in a drawer, though.

  In the galley, I grabbed anything that might come in useful: a saucepan, some spices, some canned food and a can opener. I stuffed everything into plastic trash bags and met Adam as he came out of the bridge. There was something in his eyes I didn’t like at all, but when I asked he just shook his head and said we should get off the yacht while our luck still held.

  The row back was silent. Clearly, something was very wrong. We had a huge haul and our life on the island was going to be much easier because of it, but he’d seen something on the bridge that had made all of that moot. What? Some evidence of a pirate attack? My stomach lurched. Blood?

  Back on shore, he sat me down in the sand and stared at me. I’d never seen him so conflicted.

  “Just tell me,” I said.

  He pressed his lips tight together. Then, “On the bridge...the distress beacon was all smashed up. Like someone took a hammer to it. The radio, too.”

  I frowned. “Pirates?”

  “Pirates wouldn’t have any reason to do that. They don’t care if people know the boat was attacked.”

  “So...what?” The look in his eyes was really scaring me, now. “What are you saying?”

  When he spoke, he spoke slowly. As if what he was thinking was so bad that he didn’t want to get to the next word. “That first morning on the island...you remember how I was hungover? Even though I hadn’t had that much?”

  “So you say—“

  “No. Be serious for a minute. I hadn’t.”

  There was no humor in his voice at all, and that terrified me.

  “Okay,” I said. “Go on.”

  “I don’t think it was a hangover,” he said. “I think I was drugged.”

  I sat there staring at him. I could feel my guts start to churn. Everything I thought I knew, every assumption I’d made since we woke up on the island started to crack and fragment.

  “I think someone drugged me,” he said. “And then they smashed the distress beacon, aimed the ship towards the storm and the rocks and got off in the other boat. They were trying to kill me, and make it look like an accident.”

  “Who? That’s nuts! Who would want to kill you? You’re a rock star. Who kills rock stars?!”

  He stared at the ground for a long time and I thought I’d convinced him.

  “Come on,” I said. “There’s got to be another explanation. No one’s going to try to kill Adam Sykes. There’s no motive. There’s no one who benefits.”

  And then he looked up at me and I realized I hadn’t convinced him at all. He already knew who did it. He was just having trouble saying it.

  “There’s one,” Adam said slowly. “Eddie.”

  “Eddie?! Eddie makes money when you do—”

  “No, Eddie makes money when the band does. I haven’t written a new song in a year. I’m holding them back. And Eddie can’t bring in someone new because it’s my band. But—”

  I was shaking my head. “No. That’s—He wouldn’t.”

  “Have you any idea what me dying would do to album sales?” He let out a bitter laugh. “Eddie insisted on the holiday. He booked the yacht and the crew. He organized the party. God, don’t you see it? It’s perfect! Billionaire rock god dies on a yacht in a storm. After a night of champagne and coke and strippers! He even had the rest of the band there—they can all tell the press about our final night together.”

  “But…but Eddie left. He left with the band and the strippers in the other boat!”

  “The whole crew was in on it, Hannah. They must have been. Paid by Eddie. They drug me; aim the boat at the storm, smash up radio and distress beacon and leave.” He shook his head. “Jesus, they’ll all be back in the States by now, telling everyone how the ship was tragically lost in the storm, and I was too drunk to get aboard a lifeboat. No one’s going to question it—not after they hear about the party from the band.”

  I thought about how all the crew seemed to know each other, apart from me. They’d all had name tags. They’d all worked together before. “I was the replacement,” I said, horrified. “It was all worked out, and then their chef got sick and they had to bring me in.” God, no wonder Simone had hated me from the start.

  “But what about me?” I asked desperately. “I woke you up. I got you out. Why would they leave me behind? It doesn’t make sense.”

  He nodded slowly, thinking. I felt a glimmer of hope. Maybe we’re wrong about this whole thing. Maybe we’re just being paranoid. There had to be another explanation, something innocent—

  “Unless…did they try to drug you, too?” he asked. “Like, try to give you a drink or something?”

  And that’s when I remembered the glass of champagne Simone brought me. The one I’d tipped down the sink. I put my hand to my mouth in shock, and I second later I was glad I did because I felt as if I was going to be sick.

  “You were meant to go down with the yacht as well,” said Adam wretchedly. “Collateral damage. Jesus.”

  We sat there staring at the rocks for a moment, neither of us speaking.

  “Hannah, I am so, so sorry,” said Adam. “This is all my fault. It was me they were after.”

  I shook my head. “It’s not you,” I said bitterly. “I don’t blame you. It’s them.”

  Adam suddenly stood up, grabbed a rock and hurled it across the beach. “For God’s sake, I had a billion in the bank and the best job in the world and I’m moping around saying I can’t write a fucking tune! I should have just quit, or gone solo or….” He sighed. “This would never have happened.”

  I sprang up and hugged him from behind, feeling the tension in his body, his heart thumping in his chest. “This is not your fault.” I told him. “Look. Even when they get home and tell their story, there’ll still be a search for us. They’ll still send planes and ships, just in case we’re alive.”

  Adam turned and stared at me sadly.

  “What?” I asked, terrified. “What?”

  “Without the beacon, the search aircraft won’t be able to pinpoint the ship. They can lie about where it went down,” said Adam. “Say it was hundreds of miles from here. There’s probably already been a search, and we never saw it because it never came anywhere near us.” He closed his eyes in pain. “Hannah...no one’s coming to rescue us.”

  ***

  Clouds were rolling in and the temperature was dropping, so we lit a fire and huddled by it and stayed there for the entire afternoon, watching the wreck slowly slip away from the rocks, then stop as some part of the hull became snagged. It clung there, like a person clinging to a cliff by their fingernails, as the waves battered it again and again. It might survive another day, but its fate as inevitable.

  ***

  As the sun set, I said, “You know what I regret most?”

  We were almost lying in the sand, our shoulders propped up on a mound of sand. Adam had his guitar on his knees and was occasionally strumming chords. He shook his head at my question.

  “All this time—the whole two years since the day of the wedding—I never spoke to him. Not even once. I never yelled at him or screamed at him or even sent him an email. Because if I did that, it would be making it all real. It would be admitting that it really happened. I didn’t think I was strong enough to take that.”

  He rolled over on his side to look at me. “You are,” he said.

  “Doesn’t matter now,” I said bitterly. “Maybe that was
my problem. Maybe I never really accepted it. That’s why I never went home. That’s why I stayed out on the islands, in limbo, because it wasn’t real until I went back to my normal life.”

  Adam leaned close and rested one warm hand on my cheek. “You deserve a better life,” he said. “You deserve to make a new start and have that big white wedding and a good guy and a life in San Francisco. And tell that arsehole what you think of him.”

  “But I’m never going to,” I whispered. I could hear my voice starting to crack. “I didn’t want to move on, and now I do and it’s too late.” I closed my eyes, but I could feel the tears start to leak out. “I just wanted to put things on hold for a while. And now they’re stopped forever.”

  He gathered me up in his arms and snuggled me to his chest, my wet cheek against his neck. It helped, but it didn’t change anything.

  We were trapped. And we were going to die there.

  ***

  Late in the night, when I was lying there with my head on his chest, he said, “You know what the stupid thing is? We had a great manager. Before Eddie.”

  I listened.

  “His name was Reg,” said Adam. “British bloke, from Birmingham. Been with us nearly since the start. He always took care of us; he was always there for us. And you know what I did?”

  I waited.

  “I fired him. Because he hid my coke one night, because he thought I’d had too much. And then I hired Eddie, and started this whole thing.” Adam shook his head. “I was just trying to…feel something real, you know? I thought if I got drunk enough or high enough or drove fast enough, I’d feel something I could write about.” He looked around at the island, and then at me. “And now I’ve found it. I’ve found…life. I’ve found you.”

  I needed to hear it. “I’m real?”

  “Hannah, you’re the realest girl I’ve ever met.” He looked around again. “And to find you, I had to get us both trapped on an island, waiting to die.”

  It was the clearest I’d heard him. The drink and the drugs were long out of his system, now. He was arrogant and cocky, but he’d finally stopped the self-destruction. And, just as he’d said, it was irrelevant, now.

  There was nothing to say. All I could do was cuddle into him, holding him close. After a while, Ozzy crept out of the jungle and jumped up into Adam’s chest next to my head, rising and falling with his breathing. Then the monkey joined us, scampering up onto my legs and then settling on my stomach. Our weird little family, all together.

  Except it wouldn’t last. We’d survived a few days, but long term? We couldn’t live on fish and bananas forever. What were we going to do: build a house? Plant crops? Neither of us had the remotest clue how to do any of that. As soon as one of us got seriously ill, we were done for.

  Chapter 18

  The next day, we lay there as the sun came up and the breeze dusted us with sand. Ozzy and the monkey long gone, probably playing together in the jungle. We were awake, but I think neither of us wanted to get up and face the first day of the rest of our lives. It’s amazing what a shift in perspective can do to you. Being shipwrecked and surviving while you wait for rescue is one thing. Knowing that you’re stuck there…that’s another. It felt as if we were just beginning life sentences, without the possibility of parole.

  And then a British voice with a broad accent I didn’t recognize hollered, “OI!”

  Adam jerked me upright, taking me with him. And that’s when we saw the boat, anchored just offshore.

  “That’s impossible,” Adam said, shaking his head. “No one knows we’re here. No one’s looking for us out this way. It’s a hallucination. It’s a mirage.”

  “Oi!” A short, dumpy figure was waving his arms on the deck of the boat, his hands forming a megaphone. “Do you dozy beggars want rescuing, or wot?”

  Adam’s expression changed. “REG?!” he yelled. And then he was grabbing me by the hand and dragging me towards the lifeboat.

  In theory, there was no huge hurry to leave the island. But remaining there even a second longer than we needed to felt like jinxing things. We both just wanted to get out of there, as quickly as we could. But we couldn’t leave without Ozzy. “Where’s—” I started to ask.

  At that moment, Ozzy exploded out of the trees with the monkey riding on his back. Using the dinghy as a step, they both sprang up onto us, Ozzy climbing up my back with no shortage of claws while the monkey raced up to Adam’s shoulder. Both of them looked accusingly at us.

  “Okay,” said Adam. “I guess you’re both coming with us.”

  I grabbed my faithful knives. Adam messed up the SOS sign until it was indecipherable and slung his beloved guitar over his back. As we pushed the lifeboat into the water and climbed in, I cast a long look back at the island. “You think we’ll ever come back here?” I asked.

  “I have no idea where ‘here’ even is,” said Adam. “But if you want to, we can. We could hire our own yacht, take a vacation around the islands….”

  And that was when I realized, with a jerk, that everything was different, now. When we’d been stuck on the island, I’d at first thought that that was the only reason he wanted me: I was available. Then he’d convinced me he was serious, but we were still isolated from the real world. Now….

  Now it was me, a curvy girl on a salary you’d describe as modest, with a gorgeous billionaire. Already, the whole experience on the island was starting to feel like a dream. Would we still work together when we woke up?

  I reached for Adam’s hand to reassure me, but he didn’t see. He was already reaching for the oars, grinning towards Reg. I slowly put my hand back down, feeling stupid.

  ***

  It didn’t take long to row out to Reg’s boat. When we climbed up onto the deck, I wasn’t ready for how much of a shock it was. Firstly, the roll and sway of a boat after days ashore. Secondly, the feel of something man made—smooth metal and polished wood, after days of everything I sat on being sharp rocks or scratchy sand.

  Reg was a little shorter than me, with an impressive girth and a nose that was peeling from the sun. He couldn’t have been all that much older than Adam, yet he was somehow the most dad-like man I’d ever met. He gave Adam a long-suffering look and then let himself be pulled into a hug.

  “How…?” said Adam, and I could see he was almost welling up. “How the hell…?”

  Reg shrugged and waved us below deck, out of the sun. In the air-conditioned cool of the living room, he said, “I flew over as soon as I heard. Lot of bollocks about you being dead. Adam Sykes doesn’t die, I said. He’s a rock god. But they wouldn’t listen. Kept saying your yacht sank miles from here.”

  “So how did you find us?” I asked, incredulous.

  He shrugged again. “I just looked on the map for the greenest, prettiest, most idyllic bloody island around. Stands to reason that’s where this clown would have washed up. He always lands on his feet.” Then he looked at me and grinned. “And he manages to get washed ashore with a beautiful lady. Bleedin’ typical.”

  I blushed down to my toes.

  “I love you, mate,” said Adam, throwing his arms around Reg.

  Reg sighed and patted his back, as if this wasn’t the first time. “Yeah, yeah,” he said. Then, when Adam released him, “Do I take it that you wish to re-employ me to serve all of your management needs?”

  “YES!” Adam almost yelled. “God, yes!”

  Reg gave a satisfied grin. “That moron Eddie you hired gave up on your straight away. He’s been more bothered about getting a book deal than helping with the search.”

  Adam groaned. “You don’t know the half of it.” And he told Reg how the sinking had been deliberate, and how Eddie was behind it all.

  Reg went pale. “Shit,” he said. “I mean, I thought he was an arsehole, but I had to keep him posted when I went looking for you. I saw the wreckage first thing this morning, so I called him. He said he’d tell the coast guard.”

  Adam jumped to his feet. “So he could be on his way here
now?”

  “No,” said Eddie, strolling down the steps from the deck. “He’s already here.”

  Chapter 19

  Adam dived at Eddie, but the older man had the element of surprise. He swung the wrench he was holding and it caught Adam under the chin. I screamed as he went down on the deck.

  Reg clambered to his feet and ran at Eddie, bellowing like a bull. But Eddie was far faster and in better shape, and his wrench caught Reg on the side of the head, sending him flying into the wall. I covered my hand with my mouth as he fell to the ground, his face very pale.

  And then there was just me.

  I thought that if I could get to the bridge, I’d have a chance. I fled through the living room’s other door, looking for a ladder, praying I could get to the radio—

  And that’s when Simone grabbed me and cracked my head against the wall.

  Everything went black.

  ***

  I woke up lying in semi-darkness, that old, familiar fear taking over before my eyes adjusted. The setting sun was just visible through a circular window—a porthole, I realized.

  “She’s awake,” said Simone.

  I sat up, and almost immediately fell back on the bed, clutching my head as pain shot through it. I could feel a lump on my forehead, and the pain was crippling every time I moved my head.

  Adam was lying next to me, just starting to stir. The sheets were freezing and sodden, and we were bobbing around as if on waves. But it wasn’t the boat that was floating. It was the bed.

  I realized we were in Adam’s flooded stateroom, in the wreck of the yacht. The water level had dropped a little, now that the wreck was up against the rocks, but it was starting to rise again. The bed was floating in the middle of the room, our heads only a few feet from the ceiling.

  “I still say we should just shoot them in the head,” I heard Simone say. I looked around to see her pointing a gun at us.