The Perfect Storm, Chapter 3
*Beach reads *Second chance romance *Billionaire *Stranded in Getaway Bay *Series starter
Eden’s mind had blanked when she’d looked into Holden’s dark eyes. He wasn’t glaring, so they weren’t black, and he wasn’t about to kiss her, so they weren’t the storm cloud gray she enjoyed so much.
It was entirely unfair that he could be so handsome while covered in dirt and mud and blood. She cleared her throat and took out another wet wipe to clean up his forehead. As she did, the wound started to bleed a little bit. “This is going to need stitches,” she said, bottling up her emotions.
This was Holden Holstein. She knew exactly who he was, and what kind of power he held over her heart. He had the ability to shatter it into a thousand pieces, and she was still trying to find all of the shards from last time, thank you very much.
“Do you have any supplies?” she asked, peering at him.
“No,” he admitted. “I was just coming for a couple of hours.”
“That’s what everyone says,” she said, wishing she’d packed more food. But she was just coming for the afternoon too. She’d happened to pack lunch, and her backpack always had high-protein and calorie dense snacks in it.
“How long do you think we’ll be out here?” he asked.
“I thought it would just rain for a few minutes,” she said.
“It did,” he said. “It quit for a while, and then started up again.”
“It wasn’t supposed to rain today,” she said. “I checked the weather.” She waited for him to make some crack about how of course she had. But he didn’t. She realized that he only did that when they were together, when he was teasing her, when he could kiss her afterward.
Her face grew hot, and she didn’t dare look at him. He’d always had a way of being able to see what she was thinking, and he’d told her she wore everything on her face. She’d tried to hide things the way he did, but she simply didn’t know how.
The rain tapered off and stopped again, and Eden started to stand. Her back cried at her to go slower! She did, and she managed to stand all the way up and stretch the aches and pains from her legs and back and neck. “I’m going to go see what we’re dealing with.”
“Be careful,” he said, an urgency in his voice and on his face. So maybe he wasn’t as great at hiding things as he used to be. Or maybe he didn’t want to be all alone with no supplies. No matter what, Eden took precious seconds to put her backpack on so if she fell again, she’d at least have her phone, her snacks, and all the other stuff she’d brought with her.
She felt bad for Holden, but there was no way he was walking out of here. She’d either shoulder most of his weight down, or rescue hikers would be coming in to get him. That much was clear.
No, his leg wasn’t broken, but he was in a great deal of pain and couldn’t put any weight on his leg.
Outside of the ledge, the air held so much water it almost choked her when she breathed. It wasn’t raining, but the humidity was off the charts. The small space outside the half-cave was full of debris, and she couldn’t go more than a step or two without meeting mud.
She didn’t want that on her shoes or back in the cave, so she stalled. To her left was open air, something dripping from the path above—where she’d come from. She looked up and judged the distance to be maybe fifteen feet or so.
Shivers racked her body, and she looked away. Her situation could be so much worse, and she was glad she couldn’t look over the edge to see how much further she could’ve fallen. And what were the chances of finding another person and a cave in the span of ten seconds?
And not just any person.
“Holden Holstein,” she whispered. The very man who’d plagued her for years. She sighed, half-relieved she wasn’t stuck out here alone and half-annoyed she’d have to share her supplies with him.
To her right, another ten feet of ledge remained, and she carefully stepped that way, testing each section of rock to make sure it would hold her weight before committing to it. “The path is gone.” Even through the dim light, she could see the path Holden had come up, on the other side of a twenty-foot gap.
Even with two good legs, neither of them could make that jump. She didn’t have the right equipment to rock climb, though she was experienced in it. Holden had been too, at some point. After his mother’s death, he’d finished his computer science degree and gotten a job with The Web Developer, one of Theodore Fleming’s tech companies that had come to the island a few years ago.
It was Theo’s dating app that Eden had tried and failed with. As far as she knew, Holden didn’t use the app, but she couldn’t know for sure. Anyone could choose any screen name, and she could’ve communicated with him in the brief time she’d used the app.
But somehow, she didn’t think so. Holden was a man of few words, and he didn’t seem like the type to chat through an app with strangers.
Eden wished she didn’t taste bitterness on the back of her tongue when she thought about Theo. Yes, she knew him. She’d pitched him her line of survival gear a few months ago, and he’d started shaking his head before she’d even finished the first sentence.
“I’m in technology,” he’d said. “This is physical products.”
“Maybe I could start selling with an app,” she said.
He’d smiled and said, “Our apps are very expensive.”
And that had been that. Eden had left his office feeling like a fool, and she’d vowed never to approach another billionaire looking for money. Then she’d gone and done it again.
Well, she’d learned some lessons, hadn’t she?
Don’t repeat the same mistakes.
She turned back to the cave, where Holden waited for a report on their situation. He was definitely a mistake she was not going to make again.
But she didn’t want him to die in that cave, either. She moved back inside, glad that the interior of the cave felt so much more secure than the ground outside. “We’re not getting out of here without help,” she said. “There’s nothing to the left—the landslide wiped everything out in that direction. And there’s a huge gap in the path going back down. There’s this, oh, I don’t know.”
She blew her breath out, trying to make mental calculations. “We’ve got about twenty feet across, and eight outside of the cave, most of it covered with mud and shrubs and rocks. We might be able to clear it, but I don’t know why we would.”
Depression lanced through her, but she might as well finish. “And this cave, which is what? Fifteen feet back? So twenty feet by twenty feet.” Four hundred square feet. Her bedroom was bigger, and she didn’t have to share it with her ex-boyfriend.
“Not only that,” she continued when Holden said nothing. “But we have half a bottle of water between us, and….” She yanked open the zipper on her backpack and pulled out the plastic zipper bag where she kept the snacks. “And maybe one meal each.”
She met his eyes, but it was too hard to look at him for long. Too many memories. Too many things left unsaid.
Glancing away, she stuffed the protein bars and single-serving bags of nuts back in her pack. “If it rains again, I’ll set the bottle out to collect the water. I have a can as well. We can survive for several days without food, but not without water.”
“Several days?” Holden asked, the first words he’d spoken since she’d returned.
“Holden, there is no direct path to where we are. We’re on the side of a cliff, and no one knows where we are.”
“I’ll call Dean.”
“I already texted my sisters,” she said. “Let me call them and see if they can get someone to come help right away.”
Holden put his phone to his ear too, but Eden wasn’t going to let him be the only one to call. She’d told her sisters if she didn’t call within the hour to send help, and they needed more information.
“My phone’s dead anyway,” he said. “Maybe I can use yours after you call Iris.”
“How did you know I was going to call Iris?” She paused in her tapping, now wanting to call Orchid instead. But Orchid was probably already crying, and Eden didn’t want to deal with that right now.
She saw she had twenty-seven new texts, but she ignored them and tapped Iris’s number while Holden said, “You always call Iris,” in a voice barely loud enough to hear.
“Eden,” Iris said, heavy relief in her voice. “Ivy, it’s Eden. Where are you? Do you need help?”
“Yes,” Eden said. “We need help.”
“We?” Iris said—another reason Eden called her. She picked up on little details.
“Yes,” Eden said, working very hard not to clear her voice. “I’m here with Holden Holstein, and he can’t walk.”
“I can walk,” Holden said at the same time Iris squealed and said, “Holden Holstein?” in the loudest voice possible. Leave it to her flirty little sister to focus on who Eden was stranded with instead of the fact that she was stranded on a mountain with the man who’d broken her heart.
“We have very little food and water,” Eden said. “I brought several of my inventions, but they won’t make food out of mud and rock.”
“Where are you?” Iris asked.
“I parked just past mile marker forty-six,” she said. “There’s a path across the highway that leads up to the Bald Mountain Cliffs. I went up about an hour or so. We’re in a little cave just below that path.” She twisted toward Holden. “I’m not sure how Holden got here.”
“I parked at the entrance to Cowboy’s Beach,” he said.
Eden knew the place. “His truck—” She looked at him, and he nodded. “Is at Cowboy Beach. He must’ve taken the trail that goes north from there. It comes up this way. But Iris, it’s out. There’s a huge gap in the path near where we are. I’ve got flags in my backpack, and I’ll set them out in the morning.”
“The morning? You’re going to stay there overnight?”
As much as Eden didn’t want to, she knew there was no way they were getting down tonight. “Yes,” she said, meeting Holden’s eye and holding it this time. “We’ll have to stay here overnight.”