The Trouble With Paradise

FIFTEEN

Forget Ashton,

send the Coast Guard (and chocolate).

Five minutes later, Christian climbed straight up onto a plateau.

Shit.

Not high enough to see past the mountains behind them or the other side of the island, and not low enough to see any other routes, it was a dead end. “We could go into the rain forest, see if it leads anywhere,” he said over his shoulder to Dorie.

“Oh, God. Really?”

He let out a sigh. He’d come back on his own. “Back to the beach then.” He turned to Dorie, and caught her oogling his ass.

The sheer lust on her face created his own, which was bad. Very, very bad. “Dorie.”

She shut her mouth and closed her eyes. “Sorry.”

Sorry. How much of a jerk had he become that he’d made a woman sorry for wanting him?

“I’m going back now,” she said.

“Good idea. Come on.” He took her hand and they walked in silence back to the beach. Brandy was sun-bathing. Cadence was busy with the luggage. Andy was standing near the water’s edge, his Abercrombie and Fitch cargoes rolled up, his head down.

Dorie let go of his hand and headed for Andy, and Christian had no choice but to let her. He looked at the boat and tried to get his mind off her and whatever connection she was making with Andy. He’d tried to get the galley appliances working, but the water damage had been thorough. They had no working lights, refrigeration, or running water.

They would have to eat cold cuts and anything else that could go bad in the heat. By his own calculations, they would last approximately one more day without having to go search out food.

He hated the thought of barbequed snapping turtle.

Dorie was still with Andy.

“You really are something,” Andy was saying to Dorie. “Beautiful.” He touched her jaw.

Dorie swallowed hard. Christian’s stomach tightened.

Dorie smiled, but it was a little weak. “Um, I hath to go get thomething.”

Andy blinked. “Huh?”

She appeared to bite her own tongue, but she backed away. “I’m thorry, but-”

“Are you all right-”

“Thine.” She whirled then, apparently not as easy to seduce as Christian would have bet on, and ran-

Right into Christian.

“Oh,” she gasped as he caught her. “Sorry.”

He peered into her face. “What’s the matter with your tongue?”

“Nothing. Nothing now anyway. Excuse me.” Pushing away from him, she moved down the beach toward Cadence and Brandy, who were turning over their drying clothes on the rocks. It was like a Frederick’s of Hollywood sale, with panties and bras and things all over the place. Dorie sat in the center of it and pulled a pad of paper from her purse. She began drawing, her tongue between her teeth, her brow furrowed in concentration. With the humidity, her hair had gone wild, barely contained on top of her head with curly tendrils hanging down in her face, which she kept blowing away with an irritated huff.

She was no longer wearing his shirt, a fact for which he was grateful because the sight of his clothing on her had given him an unwelcome surge of possession over her. Now she wore a lightweight skirt and two camisoles layered over each other.

The clothes clung to her body, outlining her, a situation he couldn’t say was a hardship to take in. She was only average height, really, and he supposed average weight, more curvy than thin, which was a bonus if he’d been looking to hook up with her.

He was not.

Not going to mix business and pleasure. Not when he had other, more pressing things to do-like help them all survive.

Lifting her pad, Dorie showed Brandy and Cadence what she’d drawn. Then she grabbed a palm tree frond and began twisting it, maneuvering it into some shape… a visor, which she set on Cadence’s head.

Cadence laughed and handed her another frond for Brandy, and she twisted that as well, and they all laughed. Bonded.

Christian turned away. Ethan was gathering wood for a fire, and doing it rather ineffectively. With a sigh, Christian joined him, tripling the stack of wood in front of the makeshift fire pit in minutes.

“Thanks,” Ethan said, swiping sweat from his eyes. “I need a break.”

“We need to build a shelter first.” Between the two of them they used the palm fronds and sail remnants to create an overhang to protect them from the elements, the relentless sun, and later, the night, which would be darker than their guests could imagine.

Cadence immediately got busy making the shelter homey, keeping her hands busy. Christian understood the feeling. He needed to keep himself occupied as well. He glanced at Dorie, and caught her watching him. She licked her lips, a nervous little gesture that gave her away, but not as much as her nipples hardening, an impressive sight in those two thin, layered tops.

Andy wandered over there. Of course he did, blocking Christian’s view, to show Dorie his pants, which were ripped at the seam.

Dorie opened her purse and pulled out a small kit of some kind, doing something that included scissors and a needle and thread, all the while engaging in conversation with Cadence and Brandy. He had no idea how women could talk nonstop like that for hours on end; it was just one of those phenomena he attributed to having more estrogen than testosterone. But Andy didn’t appear to mind that, or having her hands all over him as she fixed the pants.

Andy leaned in to kiss her, and she surprised both men by turning her head and giving him her cheek.

Andy kissed her, sliding his finger over her shoulder, his gaze briefly dropping to her breasts.

So did Christian’s.

Her nipples were no longer hard.

She didn’t get turned on by Andy, not like she had for Christian. He really wished he didn’t know that.

“Here he comes,” Cadence whispered.

Dorie’s heart thumped hard. “Christian?”

“Baseball Cutie.”

She turned. Yep, Andy was back, looking determined. Oh boy. He held out a frond. “Do me?”

“Uh…” Once again her tongue swelled and stuck to the roof of her mouth.

“Make me a visor?”

“Oh! Sure.” She began twisting the frond, concentrating on that instead of her tongue, but then he sat close enough that their thighs brushed.

She glanced over at Cadence, who moved away to give them privacy, and then back to Andy. “Andy, I think I’ve given you the wrong impression.” She couldn’t believe she was going to do this. “I think you’re a really great guy.”

“Uh-oh,” Andy said. “The ‘great guy’ speech.”

Oh, God. This was hard. But after the past few days, after the way her body had sort of taken over and reacted to Christian, she couldn’t continue with Andy. “I just don’t think I’m right for you.”

“You’re exactly right for me. You’re beautiful, sweet, and unjaded. You’re like a fresh breeze, and I-”

“Andy.” She let out a disparaging sound. “Crazy,” she said to herself. “I’m crazy for doing this.”

“It’s the heat,” he told her earnestly, looking so gorgeous it physically hurt to look at him. “It’s getting to me, too.”

“No.” She covered her face, then dropped her hands and looked right into his eyes, determined. “It’s not the heat. You’re not right for me.”

He blinked, the rejection clearly new and foreign territory for him.

“I’m so sorry-”

“No. No problem. It’s okay, I understand.” And with a baffled smile, he moved off.

“Don’t feel too bad, honey,” Brandy said, moving in close. “In his world, women throw panties and phone numbers at him, nightly. They wait outside his locker room to have him autograph their boobs and to tuck their hotel keys into his pants. They blow him in those hotels, they don’t blow him off. So really, you’ve done him a favor by giving him this experience.”

It didn’t feel like a favor. “It’s all my tongue’s fault.” “Hey, a tongue knows what it knows.”

Was that even possible? Because Christian wasn’t what she wanted… or at least not what she wanted to want.

First night on deserted island-

Where’s Jeff Probst when you need him?

As the day turned into the dreaded night and they weren’t rescued, Denny announced that they’d scout out the other side of the island first thing in the morning, by whatever means they could.

In the meantime, faced with impending dark and the resulting helplessness, they got a rip-roaring fire going, then sat around it, eating a feast of leftovers from the boat, prepared by Ethan.

He hoisted a bottle of vodka and took the first swig. “To Bobby,” he toasted somberly, and passed the bottle around.

They each toasted to their fallen ship hand, while Dorie looked around at all their faces, trying to see who felt the most panic at being trapped here overnight.

But if someone was jumpy-not to mention guilty as hell-they kept it close to their vest.

She eyed the thick, lush rain forest that seemed to rise straight upward in the falling night, covering the volcanic peaks, stretching so high into the dusk sky that she had to tip her head way back to see it all. From inside that dark jungle came a steady stream of sounds that upped her nerve factor, though Andy assured her most of the strange, eerie calls came from birds.

Most.

But not all.

The thought would have brought more terror to her gut if there’d been any more room for it, but on the fright scale, she was just about maxed out, something not helped by the low fog that rolled in, upping the creep factor. The wet grayness moved with shocking speed, slipping over the craggy cliffs, like that from a smoke machine on a horror movie set.

“Oh, God, another storm.” Cadence held her hands out as the first drops of rain fell.

“It’ll only last a few minutes,” Christian assured her. “The clouds snag on the mountains. The trees on the top trap the moisture until it’s too heavy, and it all drops.”

“A self-watering forest,” Cadence murmured, still looking unnerved.

“It’ll be over as soon as the cloud passes overhead.”

Sure enough, less than three minutes later, when the cloud had passed, so had the rainfall, leaving the sky clear again. It might have all been just a part of the adventure and romance of the cruise, if the Sun Song hadn’t been on its side in the shallow water, permanently grounded. Oh, and if Bobby hadn’t been missing.

After eating, Christian and Denny used material from the Sun Song’s wrecked sails to add strength to the frond overhang they’d erected, and as darkness fell, Dorie was grateful for the protection, meager as it might be. Cadence worked on the inside of the shelter like a woman possessed, smoothing out the sand floor until Denny made her sit down and relax because she was making him dizzy.

“I need to keep busy,” Cadence whispered, and shivered even though it wasn’t cold.

Worried about her, Dorie pulled her back to the bonfire, where she sat next to her new friend and stared at the flames. Gazing at the red glow, Dorie tried to put things in perspective. So they were shipwrecked, so what. This was the new millennium. There were no uncharted waters. They’d be found in no time. Besides, big picture? She was a Shop-Mart salesclerk who’d managed to get herself halfway around the world and was getting an up-front and personal experience on a South Pacific island.

And, bonus, she was living her life.

“Truth or dare,” Brandy said, plunking down next to them. “I pick dare. Someone dare me to go skinny-dipping in the waves. I’ve always wanted to do that.”

“How about a PG version?” Dorie asked, not wanting to get naked.

Brandy sighed. “Fine. Truth.”

Cadence looked at her. “Truth? Why aren’t you freaked out about being here?”

“Hell. Skinny-dipping would have been much more fun.” Brandy tipped her head up to the sky, which was becoming littered with stars as night took over. “Maybe I’m enjoying the break from my life.”

“You think of this as a break?”

Brandy laughed, but it was mirthless. “Believe me, Cadence, when I tell you there are far worse things than being stuck on a gorgeous deserted island for a few days.” Brandy nudged Dorie. “Truth or dare?”

She wasn’t ready for truth. “Dare.”

“Go kiss one of our resident studs.”

“Did I say dare? I meant truth.”

Brandy smiled. “Okay, then. If we were playing the X-rated version of truth or dare, which stud would you have kissed?”

Oh, God. There was only one. Giving herself away, she glanced at Christian and found his gaze on her, intense and hot enough to singe her skin. Matching heat flooded her from the inside out. “Uhm…”

A scraping sound in the sand had her glancing down, where she discovered that not three inches from her sandals crawled-

“Alligator,” she cried out.

The crew came running at her shriek of terror, Christian at the head of the pack.

Dorie didn’t move, just stared down at the foot-long, dinosaur-looking creature strutting past all of them as if it was king, holding a still squirming frog in his mouth.

“Iguana,” Christian said.

The thing had wide beady eyes with a vertical pupil that gave it an alienlike expression, not to mention the prickly spiked ridges over each eye that almost made it look like it was wearing glasses. Its teeth were disarmingly plentiful, gripping its prize.

“He’s got his dinner,” Ethan noted.

Dorie did her best not to lose hers. “That poor frog is still alive!”

“Not for long.” Ethan offered the bottle of vodka. “Here, this might help.” He also had the last bag of chips. “Anyone?”

Brandy took the alcohol.

Cadence wanted to share.

Dorie went for the chips, and wished they were chocolate.

Denny went back to brooding on the Sun Song, and Christian and Andy tended to the fire.

Ethan stayed with the women. “Pass the vodka.”

Dorie offered to pass the chips around as well, but Brandy shook her head. “I might as well lose a few pounds while I’m here, because if we don’t get rescued in a timely fashion, I’m going to get fired. Being fit will help me get a job somewhere else.”

“If I don’t get back soon,” Cadence said, “I won’t finish a painting I’m doing on spec for a customer, and I’ll lose my rent money for the month.”

“If I don’t get back…” Dorie paused. If she didn’t get back, what would happen?

Nothing.

Nothing would happen, and nothing would change.

Not such a great thought. “I think I have changes to make,” she said softly. “Serious changes.” She realized they were all looking at her. “It’s that whole waiting for life to happen thing. I need to stop doing that, and make it happen.”

“Well, you could always go kiss a stud…” Brandy took a big swig of vodka. “In the name of the game.”

Dorie’s gaze locked on Andy and Christian. Andy stood on the far side of the fire, staring in the flames. Christian moved from the pit, walking toward the water’s edge.

“Actually,” she murmured. “You might be on to something.”

“She is?” Cadence asked, shocked.

Brandy smiled. “You go, girl.”

“Wait.” Ethan snagged the bottle from Brandy and offered it to Dorie. “You might need a shot of this first.”

Dorie took a swallow, choked, then handed it off. She stood, grabbed her purse, and started walking.

“Which one is she going after?” Ethan whispered.

“Not sure,” Cadence whispered back. “But she has her purse and the box of condoms.”

“A box?” Brandy asked.

Dorie kept walking, past the fire.

She heard Cadence’s surprised intake of breath, or maybe that was her own. But she was no longer unsure of her next move. There was really only one thing to be done, probably there’d always only been one thing. Actually, one man.

And she headed directly toward him.