The Trouble With Paradise

TWENTY-TWO

Afternoon of Day Three-

So how does a girl get

voted off the island?

Dorie watched Ethan stab at the fire with a large stick. His mouth was carved into a tight grimace. “A chef without food to cook,” he muttered.

“Don’t forget a sailing crew without a sailboat.”

“That, too.” The afternoon sun was beating down, and his face was streaked with perspiration. His hair stood straight up in spots, and not so straight up in others.

Under normal circumstances, Dorie would think he was a man on the very edge of his sanity, but these weren’t normal circumstances, and she had the feeling that they all were looking a little crazy.

But which of them looked crazy enough to kill? She eyed each and every one of them, slowly and carefully. Cadence was sitting on a rock, a stack of coconuts in front of her. In her usual frenetic, unable-to-relax fashion, she was cracking them open and cutting out the meat.

Brandy sat on a rock as well, painting Andy’s toenails.

“You have polish remover, right?” he asked warily.

“Right. Want a flower on your big toes?”

“How about a baseball?”

Christian came into the clearing, shirtless, damp with perspiration, dragging a large log for the fire.

Denny was still stalking back and forth along the beach, every few feet stopping to stare in disbelief at the spot where his boat had been.

Dorie shook her head. She’d have figured they’d have discussed the boat vanishing in detail, and they damn well should have, but no one brought it up. “It didn’t just sail away.”

Everyone looked at her.

“Well, even I know that much,” she said.

“The boat’s lost,” Ethan said. “Story over.”

“Yeah, but how do you lose a sailboat?” Brandy countered.

Ethan laughed harshly and went back to poking the fire. “It’s Bobby’s ghost, haunting us.”

“Why?” Cadence asked softly. “Because someone did this to him?”

Finally. Maybe they’d all been in shock from what they’d been through, and things were just now sinking in. But it was time to deal with it. Past time.

“I think someone pushed him,” Cadence said. “One of us.” Her voice wobbled, and her eyes were wide. She was losing it.

Dorie moved to her side and took her hand. “Honey-”

“No, it’s true. I heard you and Brandy talking about it, about the blood in the boat, and now the boat’s gone so there’s no proof.” Cadence pointed at all of them. “I’ve been thinking about it, trying to be logical, and you know what logic says? That it could have been any one of us, because we each had motivation!”

The silence became heavy, like a two-ton elephant standing on the beach between all of them, chewing on a secret.

“Whoever’s responsible,” Cadence continued, “Bobby is going to haunt you until you admit it!”

“Cadence,” Dorie said softly, nervous. She didn’t know how smart it was to stir that pot with no exit plan.

Cadence turned on her. “It could have been any of us, Dorie. Isn’t that driving you crazy? Any of us!”

“Stop.” This from Denny, who came toward her, crouching at her side to take her hand. “The situation sucks, but-”

“Yes, it sucks! He worked for you, and you talked to him like he was nothing but a stupid kid-”

“He was lazy as shit, yes. But not stupid.”

“Then why, on our first day out, when he hoisted a sail wrong, did you say ‘I’m going kill you, Bobby’?” She gulped hard. “I heard you.”

He looked around him, clearly blown away by the accusation. “That’s just a figure of speech.”

“Bad choice of words?” she asked. “Is that it?”

“Christ, yes. You don’t really think I could have-”

“I don’t know what I think.”

Denny took a step back, obviously hurt to the core.

Cadence shook her head again. “It’s not just you. Ethan called him”-she closed her eyes-“a ‘fucking moron.’ A couple of times.”

Ethan choked, but Cadence went on. “And then Bobby retaliated by using Ethan’s toothbrush to clean their toilet. When Ethan found out, he told Bobby he was going to kill him.”

Ethan was looking like all his brains were leaking out his ears. “How do you even know this?”

Cadence shrugged. “I have good hearing. And there’s more.” She looked at Andy. “Bobby owed you a lot of money, and he wasn’t going to pay you. You were really mad.”

“Well, yes,” Andy said. “But I never-”

“That first night on the boat, after all those drinks we all shared. You said you could ‘kill that little shit.’ ”

“Do you have a photographic memory or something?” Denny asked.

“Yes, which is how I remember exactly when Brandy also said she was going to kill him.” Cadence turned to Brandy with apology in her eyes. “The night of the storm, when he took you to your room. He offered to help you undress.”

“No, what I said was, I’m not sure whether to fuck him or kill him.”

“But see? All of you said it at one time or another, and then he ended up dead.”

“Not me,” Dorie said. “I never said it.”

Cadence just looked at her.

“I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did. That first day, when he didn’t help you on board and you nearly lost your luggage.”

Oh, God. She had. “But I didn’t mean it…” She really hadn’t, but realized that none of them had meant it.

All but one of them…

Dorie glanced around. Everyone was silent, each of them with mixed emotions on their faces: horror, regret… and if she wasn’t mistaken, guilt.

How could everyone be feeling guilt?

Denny turned to each of them. “There’s no proof anything suspect happened to Bobby, so I think we all just need to relax-”

“No.” Cadence stood up. “I can’t relax anymore or my head is going to blow right off my shoulders.” Sticking her hands in her hair, she turned in a slow circle, eyes wild. “Eat. Relax. Can’t.”

Worried, Dorie looked at Christian, who spoke in a calm voice directly to Cadence. “Taking a moment is a good idea-”

“You only think so because you’re doing Dorie.”

Shocked, Dorie stared at Cadence, who covered her face with her hands. “I’m sorry. I am. It’s just that I’m so uptight and scared, and I don’t have the benefit of multiple orgasms to release the tension!”

“Oh! I have my vibrator,” Brandy offered. “And even some spare batteries-” She broke off when Cadence only groaned again.

“Just ignore me,” Cadence begged. “Please, just ignore me. I’m just overwhelmed with the shipwrecked thing, and then the boat vanishing, and now Bobby’s ghost-”

“I’m not crazy about ghosts either,” Brandy said, looking around her.

Again, Christian met Dorie’s gaze, his own hooded and unreadable. “I’m doubting it’s a ghost.”

“Yeah? So then what happened to the boat?” Cadence demanded. “And please don’t insult my intelligence and tell me it simply vanished. I might be stuck on an island, but I’m not stuck on stupid.”

“It doesn’t matter what happened to it,” Denny said. “Because we’re going to be found today. I feel it.”

“Oh, you feel it, do you?” Ethan jabbed a stick in the fire. “Do you feel what’s going to happen to your crew as well?”

“What do you mean?” Denny asked.

“Well, we’re basically homeless now, and jobless to boot. It’s not like we’ve set up job security.”

“You’re worried about job security?”

Ethan just kept stabbing at the fire.

Denny sighed. “Okay, listen. All of you. If I had ropes and some climbing equipment, I could get to the other side of the island, where I know there are people.”

“And you know this how?” Cadence asked.

“I feel them. And I told you I heard them.”

Ethan’s mouth tightened. “Do you feel food in our near future?”

“We’ll be okay,” Dorie said. “There are coconuts and pineapples. And fish, if we can catch them, right?”

“How should we catch them?” Ethan asked her. “Ship gone, remember? Fishing poles gone. Hope gone.”

“Stop it.” Dorie pointed at him. “We need positive thinking here.” She looked around them, saw the defeat and exhaustion sinking in, and felt her heart catch. “We can’t give up.” She looked at Christian. “We can’t.”

He met her gaze straight on, his steely eyes filled with depths she hadn’t imagined that first day when she’d bumped into him on the dock. More strength than she could have imagined. Passion. Intelligence. And a surprisingly sharp, quick wit that could make her smile even while on a deserted island with a bunch of quirky strangers and a missing crew member. “We can’t give up,” she said to him.

He nodded. He wouldn’t give up. Ever. It wasn’t in his genetic makeup. But then he straightened, staring out at sea. “What the-”

She whipped around, then felt her jaw drop in disbelief. There, on the horizon.

A boat.

“Oh my God,” Cadence cried, jumping up and down. “Here,” she screamed. “We’re here, we’re here, we’re here-”

Dorie put her hand on Cadence’s arm. “It’s okay, they’re coming.”

Cadence stopped jumping to hug her. “We’re rescued. Ohmigod, we’re saved!”

It was a sailing yacht, definitely heading toward them, and Dorie turned with a smile to Christian, but it slowly faded. He hadn’t relaxed. In fact, there was a stillness about him now, one that suggested he was prepared for whatever came his way, including battle.

Cadence and Andy were too busy hugging each other to notice, and yelling and laughing and crying. Brandy stood right next to them, quiet, lost in thought.

Denny and Ethan were eyeing the ship with a watch-fulness Dorie didn’t understand. “What is it?” she asked. “What’s the matter?”

Christian stepped closer to the water, so that it lapped at his feet as he watched the boat come into the cove. “Denny.”

“On it.” Denny turned to Andy. “Stay where you are, back from the water. If I tell you, take the women into the rain forest, behind the waterfall-”

“What?”

“Just listen to me. If we tell you to run, do it.”

Dorie’s heart began pounding hard and heavy and fast. Why would they have to run from anyone with a boat? “Could they be… bad guys?”

The answer was all over the crew’s faces. Oh, God. They were worried about modern-day raiders who crept up on unsuspecting boats-or in this case, shipwrecked passengers-and took whatever they wanted.

Pirates.

Did they still rape and pillage? Dorie held hands with Brandy and Cadence and watched as the boat moved in closer, then closer still, but wasn’t able to make out how many people were on board.

Or if they were smiling.

Not that that mattered. Pirates smiled. Or they did in the movies. “Friend or foe?” she whispered.

Cadence had finally gone still, the happiness faded from her face. “This never occurred to me.”

“It occurred to me.” Brandy patted the back pocket of her Daisy Dukes. “But don’t worry. I’m armed.”

Dorie wouldn’t worry.

Much.

Christian stood shoulder to shoulder with Denny as the boat came in closer toward them. That was the good news.

He just hoped there wasn’t any bad news.

“A fifty-eight-foot Hatteras,” Denny noted, eyeing the boat. “Nice.”

About half a million dollars worth of nice. On it stood two men, watching them as carefully as they were being watched.

“Two of ’em,” Ethan said quietly, coming up on Denny’s left.

“I see.”

“Might be more below.”

Christian tried to get a read on the men, but the sun was in the wrong position, casting their faces in shadows. He’d been out on these waters a damned long time, a lifetime it seemed, and for much of that, it’d been the friendliest place on earth.

But they’d run into trouble before. They’d been held up three times actually, always out in the middle of nowhere, once while on an island such as this one. He glanced at Denny, who nodded.

Christian drew a deep breath, and then, as he had on that other island, reached into his pocket for the knife he’d tucked there, knowing damned well the women behind him could see exactly what he was doing.

It wouldn’t be a stretch for their overworked nerves and adrenaline to focus on his weapon. Except for one interesting fact-plenty of them seemed to be armed in some manner or another as well. Funny, that. On the surface they were a group of people brought together to a closeness only achieved by sharing near death.

But he knew the truth, that beneath that surface closeness, they were all perfect strangers. Well, not all perfect strangers, because he’d let Dorie in a lot more than he’d ever intended. He couldn’t claim not to know her, or that she didn’t know him. Risking a glance at her, he found her eyes wide on his.

She’d seen the knife. “It’s going to be okay,” he told her, told all of them.

Denny glanced at him in surprise. Yeah, yeah, so he wasn’t exactly known for his gentle bedside manner. That was usually Denny’s area of expertise, babysitting the passengers. Just another example of how far Dorie had wormed her way into his heart. So much so that he’d been awake all last night trying to figure out how to make a go of this thing with her. A real relationship. A long-lasting one. He’d come up with nothing. But he didn’t want to think about that now, not with his heart pumping and adrenaline flowing as the boat came closer.

Normally, he had only himself to think about, worry about. That had changed, and wasn’t that just the crux of his problem. For the first time in far too long, he had something to lose.

Someone, to be exact.