Shipwrecked with the Billionaire Rock Star

by Victoria Wessex

  “And what happens when they find the bodies and see the bullet hole?” said Eddie. “It still has to look like an accident.”

  “Then they can drown. We’ll lock the door,” said Simone. “I’ve still got my key.” And she jangled her master key on its chain. The yacht gave a warning creak. “This thing’ll be at the bottom in another hour. But what about Reg?”

  Eddie sighed. “We’ll make sure this thing goes down. Then we’ll whack him over the head again and dump him over the side.”

  “You son of a bitch,” said Adam, slowly sitting up. “You lying, traitorous—”

  “Shut up,” said Eddie. Simone leveled her gun at Adam and he went quiet.

  “Won’t they think it’s weird that she’s in here with him?” Simone asked.

  Eddie gave a smirk that had zero humor in it. “That’ll be the story. He was fucking the chef, and they’d got drunk and passed out in here after the strippers left. You tried and tried to reach them, but they’d locked themselves in here and you couldn’t wake them up….”

  Simone stared coldly at me. “You think they’ll believe it? That he was fucking her?”

  I wanted to kill her. But the anger didn’t stop it hurting. It was raw and ugly, stabbing straight through my heart.

  “You bitch,” said Adam, pulling me close.

  Simone’s face changed. “Oh my God,” she breathed. “You actually did, didn’t you? You actually fucked her on the island? You really will fuck anything, won’t you?”

  I was determined not to cry. Even if we were about to die, I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction. Adam made as if to get up, but Simone raised the gun again and she and Eddie backed out of the door. I heard the click of the key turning in the lock on the outside, and then the scrape as Eddie took it with him. Their footsteps retreated down the corridor.

  Adam jumped off the bed and into chest-deep water. He grabbed the door handle and rattled and yanked at it, but it didn’t move. The yacht gave a protesting creak and I felt the whole thing move against the rocks. The waves were freeing the wreck at last, and soon it would slip fully beneath the water. Eddie was right. They’d find our skeletons, months or years later, and Simone’s story would be backed up. A drunken fling by a rock star that ended in tragedy when his yacht was caught in a storm.

  The sun was going down, the room becoming steadily darker. The water was already an inky black sheet, rising slowly up our chests. Soon, it would be pitch black, and then I’d lose it completely.

  “I’m scared of the dark,” I said in a small voice. “Isn’t that stupid? We’re going to drown, but it’s the dark I’m scared of.”

  He clutched me to his chest, then lifted me onto the bed and climbed up onto it with me. It was floating higher as the water rose, rocking crazily as we shifted around on it. He lay down on his side next to me, gazing into my eyes. “Why?” he asked.

  I have a nervous little laugh. “Now? This is all happening, and you want to hear this now?” Hysterical, I thought. I’m getting hysterical.

  But then he reached out and swept a lock of damp hair back from my face. “Yes,” he said firmly. “I don’t want you to be scared. And I can’t think of a better way of going out, than talking to you.”

  I’d never told anyone before. You grow up, and you feel stupid for still having this fear lodged inside you, so you say nothing. And it sits there like jagged, black glass, and every time something happens to bring it to the surface, it cuts you a little more.

  “I was six,” I told him. “My parents had a house in San Fran. Weird old place. There was a cellar under the house—not much more than a crawlspace, really, and it was damp down there, so we couldn’t put anything in it. We’d boarded up the trapdoor so you couldn’t get down, but there was an opening at the front of the house, right on the sidewalk—I don’t know, I guess it used to be a delivery chute or something—and if you were small, you could slide down it into the cellar.”

  I swallowed, remembering. “I was meant to be at May’s house, three doors down. We were playing in her garden, doing the whole dolls’ tea party thing, but then we had this fight. I don’t even remember what it was about, I think it was about which doll was going to go to the ball. And I stormed out of there and went home. But my mom was out, and I wanted to have a good sulk, so I slid down the chute, down into the cellar. I sat there, right by the opening, and I figured I’d see my mom when she came home and I could climb back up and go give her a hug.”

  I could feel the fear now, prowling and circling like an animal, coming closer and closer. “I knew I was being naughty. I knew May’s mom would be looking for me because I’d run off in the middle of our play date, but I just couldn’t go back there and face them and I kept thinking, ‘my mom will be home any minute.’” I was starting to feel sick, now, a chill creeping up me and making my voice shake. “But what I didn’t know was, they were going to dig up the street outside. Suddenly this huge wheel rolls across the opening, blocking it off. The guy had driven right up onto the sidewalk to park the truck. It went black. I mean, totally black. There were no windows, no doors, nothing.”

  I suddenly choked to a halt. I lay there stiff, staring straight in front of me, not even seeing the man I’d fallen for. And then a huge, warm hand grasped mine, and I could breathe again.

  “I started stumbling around. That was a stupid thing to do, but I was six. I thought maybe I could find a door somewhere. But because we didn’t use the cellar, it had bricks and stuff in, stuff left over from when work had been done on the house, I guess. It was a maze down there, and it was barely tall enough to stand up in, and by the time I’d gone around three corners, feeling my way with my hands, I realized”—I caught my breath—”I realized I couldn’t find my way back.”

  Adam wrapped his arms around me.

  “So I started screaming. But the guys outside had started digging the street up with jackhammers, and no one could hear me. I crawled and stumbled around, getting bruises all over me, and I was all alone, and no one came.” I sniffed the tears back. “See, my mom had come home, and May’s mom was frantic, because May had said I’d gone home, but I’d never arrived. Everyone thought I’d been abducted or something. They called the cops.”

  My breathing slowed. My voice became almost mechanical. “They didn’t find me until that evening, when the construction crew stopped for the night and someone heard me screaming. They had to give me a sedative, at the hospital, to get me to go to sleep even in a brightly-lit room.”

  I finally looked up at him. “And that’s why I’m scared of the dark. Even twenty years later.”

  He was shaking his head in wonderment. “I can’t even begin to imagine how scary it was for you, when the ship went down.”

  I looked around the stateroom. It had only been a little darker than it was now. “I would have died in here,” I said. “I would have drowned, if you hadn’t saved me.”

  He clasped both my hands in his. “I’ll always be there for you,” he said. “You’re not alone any more.”

  I pressed my forehead to his. And then my ear brushed against the ceiling. I looked around in shock. The bed had floated higher and higher while we’d been talking, the cabin almost full of water. “Jesus!”

  He made a shh-ing noise. “It’s okay,” he said softly. Then he took a deep, shuddering breath and said, “But we have to go, now.”

  “What? Go where? How?”

  “There’s a hatch in the floor, down to the bilges. They didn’t think of it, because the bed’s normally on top of it—you can’t get the thing open. But now that the bed’s floating all the way up here…..”

  I looked at him incredulously. “Why didn’t you say so? Why did you let me babble on about—” I rolled off the bed and into the water, which was now up to my chest. Together, we ducked under the surface and felt for the hatch. Adam got it eventually, heaving up on a ring, and the hatchway swung open. He was right: the hatch barely cleared the floating bed. We couldn’t have gone any sooner. But
why hadn’t he told me? We could have been planning our escape, instead of—

  “You go first,” he said. “I’ll be right behind you.”

  I shook my head. Whatever. We’d get the hell off the wreck, and then I could bawl him out for letting me think we were going to die. I stepped towards the hatch—

  He was looking at me strangely. In fact, he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking everywhere except in my eyes. “Go on,” he said. “Just take a deep breath and swim straight towards the other end. You’ll be able to get out where the yacht snapped in two.”

  I felt for the hatch with my feet. Took a deep breath and stepped down into the bilges, then squatted down, my shoulders brushing the sides of the hatch—

  Oh God.

  I surfaced. “You won’t fit!” I yelled. “You won’t fit!” I knew now why he hadn’t told me until the last minute. He hadn’t wanted any arguments. “You stupid, arrogant—”

  He shook his head, tears in his eyes. “Hannah, there’s no time.”

  “No! NO! I’m not leaving you!” I was sobbing. “You asshole, you fucking asshole! You were going to let me swim out of here! I’m not letting you die all alone here—”

  He grabbed me and pulled me to him. “I’m not alone.” He wrapped his arms around me, holding me tighter than I’d ever been held. “Not anymore. But I need you to be alive. Understand?”

  Tears were streaming down my face. I could hardly see. “Adam—”

  He kissed me, long and deep, and it felt so good, so right, that I hated him for it. Because I knew I was never going to be with him again.

  He pushed me over to the hatch and I barely had time to take a lungful of air before he shoved me through. I kicked desperately forward into the gloom, but he was right: the bilges ended abruptly where the ship had been torn in two, and I swam right out into the open ocean.

  I broke the surface just in time to see the sun sink beneath the horizon. The wreck was creaking and groaning next to me, gradually settling lower and lower. Eddie’s boat was anchored close by, still tied up alongside Reg’s—I guessed they were hanging around to make sure the yacht went to the bottom, this time. Luckily, the rocks were between us, shielding me.

  I treaded water for a moment, staring at the creaking, sinking hull. The water was turning from the deepest blue to pure impenetrable black.

  I’d lost him.

  Chapter 20

  However unlikely it had seemed when we first met, he’d been the one. He’d connected with me, understood me, in a way no one else ever had. I’d told him more about myself, more honestly, in a few days than I’d told Nathan in all the months we were together. He’d never known about me being trapped in the cellar. He wouldn’t have got it.

  He’d been the best thing that ever happened to me...and now he was gone.

  I swam over to the wreck and put my hand on the hull. He was in there, no more than twenty feet away but totally unreachable, pressing his face to the ceiling as the water filled to the room. Dying alone in the blackness.

  It hit me that I was going to have to go back to the island...alone. Hide, and wait for Eddie and Simone to leave, and then try to survive on my own. No one was ever going to find me. I didn’t even have my knives. How long would I last? Days? Weeks?

  The funny thing was, I didn’t care. Dying on the island, a week or more from now, didn’t scare me as much as the thought of the next ten minutes without him.

  Tears were rolling down my cheeks. I couldn’t get the image out of my mind of him clawing at the ceiling, searching for the last bit of air. It would be pitch black in there, by now.

  Why couldn’t they just have shot us? We could have gone together, maybe even holding hands. To die in a locked room...it was Eddie who’d insisted on sticking to the plan, but it was Simone who’d come up with the slow death by drowning. And she’d still had her famous master key to make it possible—

  There was another key.

  I could see it in my mind, hanging in the little wall cupboard on the bridge. There was a key for every room there—Adam’s stateroom had a blue tag. I could swim down and get it and unlock the door and save him.

  I looked at the gaping maw of the wreck. The sun had sunk below the horizon, now, and the hole was pitch black. Beyond it lay a maze of flooded corridors and rooms, and all of it would have to be negotiated in total darkness.

  I grabbed hold of a splintered rail and started to haul myself in.

  ***

  Climbing out of the water and up to the main corridor wasn’t easy, now that the yacht was tilting and sinking. I could barely see where to put my feet, and the ragged end of the yacht, where it had broken in half, was starting to disintegrate. Twice, I nearly fell when my handheld gave way completely and came off in my hand.

  But all of that was nothing compared to the corridor itself.

  As I finally hauled myself up to it and looked down its length, all I could see was...black. I knew in my head that it stretched the length of the ship. But there was nothing to indicate depth, no cues at all. It was just a featureless black void that could have been twenty feet deep or could have been twenty thousand. The fear welled up inside me, spreading like ice through my torso, making it difficult to breath. My limbs went leaden. I couldn’t walk.

  I have to.

  He was down there. He was down there running out of air, and he’d saved me. Now I was going to save him.

  Lifting my foot to take that first step was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. It was like stepping off a cliff. As the blackness enveloped me, I didn’t look back at the faint hint of starlight behind me. I knew that if I did, I wouldn’t be able to leave it behind.

  At first, there was nothing. A treacherous downward slope, threatening to send me tumbling down to the depths with every step. I held my hands out in front of me and forced myself to keep moving. I had no idea what state the corridor was in now, after days of damage by the rocks. I’d been unconscious when Eddie and Simone carried me aboard. I had no idea if I was about to step into a hole in the floor, or if the wall I was leaning against was about to give way. If it happened, I’d barely have time to scream before I fell through to the bilges, snapping arms and legs on the way.

  I kept going. Halfway down, I gasped as I suddenly hit water, and it rose from my ankles to my calves to my hips in just a few steps. The yacht was going down, nose first. That meant the bridge must be completely underwater. God, I was going to have to dive down to get the key, feeling my way. I froze up, my knuckles white on a handrail, and started taking panic breaths. It was unthinkable. I just couldn’t.

  Adam’s stateroom wasn’t far aft of the bridge. It must be almost underwater, too.

  I had to.

  I pushed on through the water, until it got up to my neck. And then I heaved in air, filling my lungs, trying to clear my mind and not think about the million things that could go wrong. Trying not to think about getting lost and confused, as I had the night of the storm. Trying not to think about my hair getting snagged on something, and drowning kicking and begging, trying to tear it out by the roots—

  Adam. Focus on Adam.

  I dived.

  I was in the black. I thought it had been pitch black before, but this was worse. It was suffocating and thick, leeching behind my eyelids and into my mind. I kicked downward, feeling my way along the last of the corridor and then into the open space by the stairs. I had to visualize the door to the bridge, trying to remember its position. Then my searching fingers grazed the hard wood of the door frame and I was through.

  Immediately, I knew I was in trouble.

  I went coasting through the door and into the large open area of the bridge. I knew I had to stop, so I pushed out with my arms and legs...but how did I know if I’d stopped?! There was no sense of movement, no currents as there would be in the sea. I couldn’t tell if I had stopped, was now drifting backwards, or was still hurtling forwards. If I hit the windshield and went through them, the glass would cut me to pieces.r />
  I panicked and flailed, searching for something, anything, to cling onto. My foot kicked something hard and I lunged for it, grabbing on. I could feel the floor, hard and smooth, but what was the thing I was clinging onto? Why would there be something sticking out like this, for someone to trip over?

  It took me precious seconds and air to trace the shape with my fingers and figure out that it was a light fitting. I’d twisted upside down at some point and was clinging onto the ceiling. The feeling of helplessness was terrifying. I had no idea where in the room I was and no way to get back to the door. And I was running out of air.

  I could feel my guts clench with mortal dread. I am going to die in this room. I thought I was going to throw up with fear, and I knew that if I opened my mouth to be sick, that would be the end of me.

  I thought of the waterfall. The cool, clear water and the sound it made as it crashed down. So much better than my own terrified heartbeat. I shut out the darkness and imagined myself on the bridge in warm, bright daylight, seeing the layout. The door, and the key cabinet, were at the back of the room.

  I was still clinging to the light fitting. I realized the lights all pointed roughly in one direction. It wouldn’t make any sense to be shining lights out through the windshield, so they must be pointing into the room, to light up the charts and instruments for the crew. If I swam that way, I’d hit the back of the room.

  My lungs were getting tight, aching as if someone was bear-hugging me from behind. I kicked off fast and glided across the room, praying I’d aimed myself correctly.

  A moment later, my hand struck the smooth metal of the key cabinet. I had to resist the urge to cling to it. My lungs were burning, now.

  I swung the cabinet door open. I just needed one key, the one with the blue tag—

  How could I have been so stupid?!

  My fingers brushed across at least ten different keys, all identical in the blackness.

  I’d have to take them all, and try them all. I started pulling them off their hooks, knowing that if I dropped one, I’d likely never find it again. I had no place to carry them, so I stuffed five into one fist and six into the other and double-checked I’d got them all.