Jill Shalvis - The Trouble With Paradise

“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.

Dorie’s gaze stuck on Christian’s back, and the knife he held there, so that she nearly missed the huge, beautiful sailing yacht come closer. One of the men on board waved to them as conflicting emotions battered her.

Why did Christian have a knife?

“Ahoy!” one of the men on the boat called out.

Denny lifted a hand in greeting.

“Can I be of any service to you?” the man asked through cupped hands.

He had a British accent, Dorie noted. He wore baggy white linen pants and a matching white shirt with some sort of saint’s medallion at the base of his throat, held there by a thin piece of leather. He had a thin tattoo around each wrist, a diamond in one ear, and a smile on his face. He was dark from the sun, with melting dark eyes and darker hair, sun kissed on the ends, which curled to his collar. He could be a drug runner-a successful one. Or just a successful man.

He took them all in, including the fact that there was no boat anywhere near them, and raised his hands as if to say what happened ?

“We limped in after the storm,” Denny called out. “And lost our boat.”

“Ah.” The man handed his helm over to the man standing at his right, and hopped down into the water without regard to his clearly expensive pants. Water splashed up to his knees as he stepped onto the shore, holding out his hand to Denny. “Michael Phillips.”

“Denny McDonald,” Denny said, and the two shook hands.

“So you’re in a bit of a bind,” Michael said in that expensive British voice.

“You could say so.”

Ethan and Christian were behind him, tense and very watchful.