As soon as I saw the raft, though, I knew that I had to leave. Something about the shriveled green raft made the fog disappear from my mind and I was able to look at the situation clearly. I had let my instincts and training take over far too much during our days on the island. I had been hired for a specific job, and when the Universe seemed to be giving me a gift of making that job far easier than it might have otherwise been, I decided not to accept it and instead go completely against it. I wasn’t necessarily supposed to kill Eleanor. That hadn’t been in my job description. By the wording of the description and the objectives, however, I couldn’t imagine that my client would have frowned too hard when discovering that Eleanor had been tumbled around in the spin cycle from hell and spat out on an island to wither away. In fact, if I could convince them that the ocean had teamed up with me to do the kidnapping and that eliminating my client’s need to handle the unpleasant dirty work that often came after such a kidnapping personally, I might even be able to secure myself a bonus. That would go toward the acres of very dry, very high land that I intended on finding and never leaving.
I was aggravated at myself for even allowing the situation to get to me the way that it had. It was like the time that I was forced to take away from my work had somehow melted the portion of my brain that ensured I made the right decisions and handled each job properly. I was suddenly soft and sympathetic, and those were not descriptions that were useful in my line of work. As soon as I had realized that the sopping, terrified woman that had clawed her way aboard my boat during the storm was Eleanor, I should have pitched Hunter’s ass back out into the waves, tossed her into storage below deck, and hightailed it to the mainland so that I could collect my paycheck and go about my life. Instead I had not only gotten them through the storm, but I had actually helped them survive on the island.
I was feeling far too much camaraderie with these people and that had to stop. I didn’t know what she had done or why she was so much of a problem, but there was a stack of cash waiting for me when I brought Eleanor in, and that was all that needed to matter to me right then. Finding the raft had been an omen. It was time to dislodge myself from what was happening on the island and let the situation unfold however it was going to. When I found a way to communicate with the outside world, I would get in touch with my client, let them know what happened, and do my best to direct them to the island. What happened to Eleanor and Hunter from there was their issue. They could use their skulls as accent points for the turrets of sandcastles for all I cared. By the time they got the moat dug, I would be paid and well on my way to the anonymity I got to enjoy after finishing a job.
Of course, that meant that I was going to have to figure out where the hell I was and how I was going to get in touch with anyone. The distance between the islands had taken far longer than I would have wanted it to, but the reality was that it likely wasn’t very far. I had wrestled the tiny-ass float across the waves as much as I had ridden it, and I was well beyond the point of believing that it would get me anywhere else. Unless I had somehow done exactly as we had hoped when finding the first island and stumbled on a cruise line stopping point, I was going to have to figure out my own way to get rescued. Since I didn’t hear any tinkling steel drum music or see any half-naked women limbo dancing their way toward me with tropical drinks, I was pretty well certain that the first option was out. That meant that I was either going to have to find my way to another island, or hope to get rescued.
Fan-fucking-tastic.
****
Snow
“What cruise line did you say that your Aunt Eleanor chose for the bridal party?” I asked, drying my hair as I walked into the lounge area of the hotel room.
I was staring down at my phone in my hand and when I looked up I saw that Noah was sitting in a white lounge chair beside the open door to the balcony, his naked body bathed in the morning sunlight streaming into the room. I couldn’t help the smile that came to my lips. My husband was gorgeous.
My husband.
That thought was still surprising to me and I had to remind myself that it was true every time that it almost came out of my mouth. Of course, the massive ring that still felt heavy on my hand helped make it as real, but it was the sight of this beautiful man, the man who I loved more than I ever could have even begun to imagine that I would love somebody, smiling back at me, that made me really feel like a wife.
“I thought that we agreed that we weren’t going to use our phones during our honeymoon,” he said with a mild hint of chastising in his voice.
“I know,” I said, “but going totally off-grid for three weeks doesn’t seem realistic when you have a company to run.”
“There are people who are doing all of that for me,” Noah said, swinging his legs down from where they were draped over the side of the chair so that he could stand up. “Remember? Mr. Royal said that he would be happy to take over for me for the next couple of months so that we could just enjoy our marriage.”
“Do you think that’s weird?” I asked, my shoulders sagging slightly under the thought that we might be taking advantage of the darling, trusting elderly man who had given me my career and then almost destroyed it forever by marrying the blast from the past bitch who had made it her life’s goal to ruin me throughout our youth. “I mean, you took over his company. Like straight took it out from under him. He went from owning the company and running it on his own to being an occasional contributor to the newsletter.”
“It wasn’t like it was a hostile takeover that involved months in court and a military coup,” Noah said, walking toward me. I could feel my mouth watering as my eyes traveled over his body. “He had been planning on selling the company to my father for a long time. Mr. Royal was ready to retire. All the nastiness with Lucille was just a hiccup.”
“That was one hell of a hiccup,” I said, shuddering just to hear the woman’s name. “I still get a little twitchy when I smell smoke.”
Noah nodded and reached out to wrap his arms around my waist, pulling me closer to him.
“I know,” he said. “It makes it a lot more difficult to create a romantic honeymoon suite when I’m not allowed to light candles. Those little battery-operated things just don’t have the same effect.”
“But they have a realistic glow and flicker,” I said, bringing my arms up to loop around his neck.
Noah grinned as he shook his head and leaned forward to kiss me. I sighed into the taste of his mouth and the feeling of his lips on mine. I was never going to get tired of that kiss.
“So, the future safety of the advertising industry and our company in it aside, what’s so important on your phone?”
The question brought me slightly out of the joyful stupor that I generally went into when he touched me and I stepped back away from him so that I could bring my phone back in front of me and read the screen again. It had gone dark and I poked at it with my finger, muttering at it as the article that I had been reading jumped in response to my touch and I lost my place. When I found it again, I turned it toward Noah.
“This says that two people went missing off of a cruise. It doesn’t say who they are, but the ship was about where I thought that their cruise would be.”
“When was this?” Noah asked.
“They noticed that they were missing about three days ago, but they think that they could have been missing for longer than that.”
“Don’t you think that if my aunt went missing on the cruise that she bought for our friends as a wedding gift to us, that someone would have thought that it would be important that they get in touch with me? Just a little heads up?”
I knew he was right. I was just being overly worried. I had never been one to trust cruise ships after the string of “people who went missing on cruise ships and never showed back up because they are probably abstract sculptures gradually becoming coral at the bottom of the ocean” specials shown during Shark Week. The fact that three of the biggest and supposedly most popular ships that sailed the big blue sea had experienced massive power failures that resulted in days of being giant floating tins full of seasick people with no reliable food refrigeration or bathroom facilities in the last year hadn’t given me much more reassurance. It was that particular dis-ease with cruises that had convinced Noah to let us bow out of the wedding celebration cruise and just head directly to our honeymoon villa. Part of me had felt like rejecting the offer from Noah’s favorite relative hadn’t exactly been a fantastic way to get started in my life as part of his family, but now that I was seeing that more passengers had just vaporized from the decks of a ship, I was feeling better about my decision.