With a sigh, he climbed down out of the plane.

  He didn’t know if talking to Halle about his feelings was the right idea, but he could do what he had so often done in the past—lose himself in the work that needed to be done.

  Right now, that was the work of survival.

  He went back to the tree line and began searching for firewood, thankfully for both his days as a Boy Scout and the fact that there was a lighter in the pocket of his jacket on the plane. Of course, he’d intended to use it to light a celebratory cigar after his meeting, but now he would use it to keep himself—and Halle—alive.

  He arranged his firewood carefully, went to get his lighter, and lit the tinder. Then he carefully unwrapped one of the frozen pizzas from the plane. He put a flat rock he had found in the flames to heat it up. After several minutes, he used two long sticks to scoop the rock out of the fire and set it beside him on the sand.

  He put the pizza on the rock and waited, hoping that this would work.

  A few minutes later, the cheese had begun to melt.

  Pleased, he unscrewed the top from one of his precious bottles of water and downed half of it quickly. It was all he would allow himself tonight. The rest would have to be rationed.

  And as for the other half of this bottle, that would go to Halle. She needed to drink just as much as he did.

  Of course, that’s assuming she’ll consent to take it from me.

  Chapter 20

  Halle

  Fishing had proven to be a complete fiasco.

  Halle had known it was a long shot, of course. But she’d had to try. If the alternative was going back over to the plane and asking Grayson for food, she would try anything.

  Now, though, she was hungry, and the sky was beginning to grow dark. She made her way back up the beach and collapsed beneath her palm tree. She hadn’t realized until this moment how tired her efforts had made her.

  The heat of the day had passed, and she was surprised by how cool the air had become as the sun went down. The fact that she was wet almost up to her waist wasn’t helping matters. She grabbed her tights and used them to dry her legs, but that didn’t do much good. Goosebumps rose on her bare skin.

  She glanced over at Grayson. In the dimming light, it was hard to see him, but she could see the flickering light of his fire. She felt both angry and jealous at the sight of it.

  Of course he has a fire. He has everything.

  She was sure he would let her sit in the warmth if she went back over there. But that would mean admitting that she had been too hard on him when she had walked away. She knew it was true, but she wasn’t ready to admit to it.

  She dug her bare feet into the sand, hoping to warm her toes, but the sand was cold now too. She closed her eyes and wrapped her arms around her knees, doing her best to shut out the elements.

  “Halle?”

  She looked up. He had walked over to her and was holding out a palm leaf.

  She didn’t say anything. She wasn’t speaking to him. Maybe it was immature, but they were stuck on this island together, and she didn’t have any other way of demonstrating her anger toward him.

  Besides, if she let herself speak to him, she was concerned that her anger might evaporate altogether. And she needed that anger. It was holding her together.

  He held out the palm leaf. “I brought you this,” he said. He tipped the leaf toward her, and she could see that there were two pieces of pizza on it.

  Where did he get pizza?

  She knew they had frozen pizzas on the plane. This must have been cooked over his little fire. But she couldn’t imagine how he had done that.

  She really wanted to ask.

  No. I’m not talking to him. She looked away from the palm leaf, even though she wanted to reach out for the pizza.

  “What?” Grayson asked. “You’re not hungry?”

  She said nothing, but her stomach rumbled, betraying her.

  She expected him to laugh, or to make some joke about how stubborn she was being. Instead, his voice grew soft. “You can eat it, Halle,” he said. “I mean, you can eat it and still be mad at me.”

  Something inside her was shivering. How had he known that was what she was so conflicted about? Accepting his pizza would be forgiving him for what he had done to get her here, wouldn’t it?

  He was saying it wouldn’t. He was saying she could eat and he wouldn’t take it that way.

  God, she wanted to eat. She was starving. It occurred to her, suddenly, that she hadn’t eaten all day.

  “You’re not doing yourself any favors if you starve yourself,” Grayson said. “I know you’re mad at me, Halle. I get it. But I don’t want you making yourself sick over it.”

  He’s right. There’s no point in not eating.

  She reached over and picked up one of the pizza slices. It was warm, and as she pulled the two slices apart, cheese stretched between them. Her mouth watered.

  “Oh,” Grayson said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a bottle of water. He put it in the sand beside her. “This is yours. We have to ration what we have, but it’s important to stay hydrated while we’re here, so you should drink it all, okay?”

  She gave him the barest of nods. She wasn’t going to be stubborn about water. Dehydration would kill her quickly if she didn’t take care of herself, and this fight with Grayson definitely wasn’t worth dying over.

  To her immense frustration, Grayson sank down to sit beside her in the sand. She closed her eyes to keep from glaring at him. She’d thought they were on the same page about what her accepting this food meant. It wasn’t an end to the argument.

  “You should really come back over by the plane,” he said.

  “I’m fine,” she said, her voice tight.

  Immediately, she regretted having spoken. Now he would make some wisecrack about how he had gotten her to speak to him again.

  But he didn’t. “You’re not fine,” he said. “We don’t know what lives on this beach.”

  “It’s a beach,” she said. “What could possibly live here?”

  “Well, crabs, for one,” he said.

  “Crabs won’t kill me.”

  “No, but do you really want to wake up with one crawling on your face when there’s a perfectly good plane right over there?”

  “I wouldn’t call that plane perfectly good,” she said, aware that she was being needlessly mean. “It had a malfunction that landed us here.”

  “All right, fine,” Grayson said. “But it’ll do perfectly well for shelter. That’s what I meant.”

  “I know.” She took another bite of her pizza and ignored his request.

  “You’re really going to sleep out here on the beach?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s hard to imagine sleeping at all right now.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Are you sure you’re not hurt?” he asked.

  “Why do you keep asking me that?”

  “I’m worried.”

  “Why, though?”

  “Your adrenaline was probably pretty high during the crash,” he said. “You might not have noticed it if you hurt yourself.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” Halle said. “I mean, why do you care if I hurt myself or not? If I did, it’s obviously not serious enough to worry about, so what difference does it make to you?”

  “You don’t think it makes any difference to me if you get hurt?” Grayson asked.

  “I don’t think anything I do makes much of a difference to you,” Halle said.

  “You really couldn’t be more wrong,” he told her. “I care about you, Halle.”

  She barked out a laugh. “You don’t care about me.”

  “How can you say that? I told you that you were the closest friend I had.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “I was an idiot for letting myself be suckered into believing that that was something that mattered. I wasn’t your closest friend because of anything about me. It was just the fact that you don’t have any other friends. Anyone who was willing to talk to you would have been your best friend.”

  “No,” Grayson said. “That isn’t true, and you know it, Halle. It wasn’t just convenience that brought us together. There was a connection between the two of us.”

  Halle picked up the water bottle and took a long drink to spare her from having to answer.

  He was right.

  Of course he was right.

  There had always been something special between the two of them.

  She had been drawn to him even before she had liked him. Why else would she have gotten sucked into a flirtation with him? Even when she’d thought he was annoying, she hadn’t been able to resist engaging in banter with him. And she couldn’t kid herself—she’d known she was flirting.

  She had tried to pull away, but she had been unsuccessful.

  And when he’d asked her to come home with him, when he had turned off all the lights and put on an old movie and put his arm around her—of course she had known what those moves meant. She’d been involved with enough men to recognize where that night was heading.

  She had ignored the signs, because she hadn’t wanted to admit the truth to herself—that she would have been there by choice, if he’d asked her outright. That she had known exactly what was going on, and she had wanted it.

  I can’t blame him for what happened between the two of us. It’s not right.

  And she couldn’t blame him for reestablishing some distance between the two of them, either. He’d told her going into that evening that it was a one-night thing. She was the one who had expected things to be renegotiated after they’d had sex.

  “Okay, fine,” she said. “We had a connection.”

  “So of course I would care if you were hurt,” he said.

  “Even now? Things have been awfully different between us lately.”

  “I know that,” he said. “You said you didn’t want to talk about that.”

  “I don’t. There’s nothing to talk about.”

  “You still won’t tell me why you wanted to quit?”

  “God, Grayson, you know why I quit. You said it yourself, remember? I got what I wanted from you.”

  He shook his head. “That was mean,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “You meant it.”

  “No, I really didn’t,” Grayson said. “I was…I was hurt, that’s all. You hurt my feelings. And I didn’t know how to deal with that.”

  She stared at him. She’d never heard him sound like this before. Humble. Vulnerable. The closest he had come had been when he had told her how lonely his life was—but even then, he’d sort of made a joke out of it, as if he wasn’t really lonely, but just found it funny that he was alone all the time.

  He didn’t sound like he thought anything was funny right now. He was tracing a pattern in the sand with his finger and looking extremely uncomfortable.

  “I wasn’t trying to hurt your feelings,” Halle said quietly. “Honestly, I didn’t know that I could hurt your feelings.”

  “I didn’t know you could either,” Grayson said. “That’s why I pushed you away, after that night we spent together.”

  She was surprised he was so willing to admit that he had done that. “I didn’t hurt your feelings then, did I?” she asked. “I thought we had a good night. That’s part of why I was so shocked.”

  “We did have a good night,” Grayson said. “It was…well, to be perfectly honest with you, it was one of the best nights of my life. That’s what scared me.”

  Halle didn’t need to ask him what had been so scary about that. She understood completely. She’d felt exactly the same way when she’d woken up that morning and realized he was sending her away.

  “You cooled things off because you didn’t want me to have the chance to do it first,” she said.

  Grayson nodded. “I think so,” he said. “And I know how pathetic that is. At the time, I actually thought I was being strong, if you can believe that. I was protecting myself. And I couldn’t let you see…”

  He trailed off.

  “Couldn’t let me see what?” Halle asked.

  “Who I really am,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “People respect me for my business savvy,” he said. “Or because they think I’m an easygoing bachelor. If anyone found out that I’m disappointed with my life, it would ruin the way I’m thought of.”

  “You can’t imagine I’d think less of you,” Halle said. “Not for something like that, Grayson.”

  “You never liked me,” Grayson said.

  “That isn’t true,” Halle said. “But I always liked you most when you acted like a human being.”

  Before he could reply, they were interrupted by a mighty crack of thunder. Grayson looked up at the sky.

  “Storm clouds,” he said, jumping to his feet. “The sky’s about to break open. Come on. We need to get back to the plane before we get soaked.”

  And though Halle had promised herself that she wouldn’t, she got to her feet and followed him.

  Chapter 21

  Grayson

  They made it back to the plane just in time.

  By the time they’d gotten into the cabin, the first raindrops were already striking the metal body of the plane, sounding harsh and brassy overhead. Halle started to pull herself into one of the armchairs, bracing herself with her feet so that she could sit in it without falling over.

  Grayson shook his head. “This is no good,” he said. “You can’t sit there.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re going to fall right out of the chair. The plane is tilted too far to the side.” He took her hand. “Come on, let’s go back to the bedroom.”

  She bit her lip. “The bedroom?”

  “The bed’s our best choice,” he said. “It’ll still be at an angle, but it takes up so much of the room that we aren’t likely to fall off. Besides, it’s at the rear of the plane, and that’s the part that’s least tipped.”

  She looked slightly uncomfortable. Grayson could understand why.

  “I’m not trying to make anything happen,” he said. “I promise. I just want us to be comfortable. We’ll leave the door open, and you can come back out here if you want to. I just think you’re going to have it a little easier tonight in the bedroom.”

  “I do have my own bedroom,” she reminded him.

  “Yeah,” he said. “But that’s at the front of the plane. I mean, if you think you’ll be more comfortable there then go for it, but I think this is your best bet.”

  She sighed and nodded, then followed him back into the bedroom.

  Grayson had been right. He could see that immediately. The bed was definitely sitting at an angle, but it was much less severe than the furniture toward the front of the plane. He settled back onto the bed, farther over to one side than he usually slept to make room for Halle. She climbed up beside him, arranged a couple of pillows behind her back, and leaned into them.

  “Are you tired?” he asked.

  She shook her head, looking up at the ceiling of the plane, where raindrops could now be heard striking like bullets. “I don’t think I could sleep for a million dollars,” she said.

  “Too loud?”

  “Too loud, too much…” She waved her hand around, indicating their circumstances at large. “It’s just been a big day.”

  “I know what you mean,” Grayson said with feeling.

  He was feeling a little shaky. He hadn’t believed anything more dramatic than a plane crash could possibly happen to him—and maybe it was a stretch to say that making himself vulnerable to Halle was more dramatic than the crash had been. And yet, somehow, it had felt more dangerous.

  Maybe it was because, during the crash, he’d been in at least some amount of control. He had been able to steer the plane. He had been able to choose his landing site. It had been frightening, but he had always known what he needed to do to give himself the best possible chance of survival.

  With Halle, that wasn’t true.

  Now that he had confessed his true feelings to her, he had no idea what would happen next. He had no idea how he was going to give himself the best chance to survive this.

  So yes. It had been a very big day.

  Halle looked over at him now. “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?” He felt himself flush. Sometimes it felt like she could see right through him.

  “You have a look on your face,” she said.

  “What look?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never actually seen it before,” she said. “And I’m pretty familiar with most of your expressions. Were you hurt in the crash?”

  “No,” he said. After getting out of the plane, he’d walked around, carefully testing all his joints for any sign of pain. “I’m all right.”

  “Are you worried about your plane?” she asked. “I’m sure it can be repaired.”

  “I don’t think it can, actually,” Grayson said. “It’s hard to imagine getting it off this island. I’ll probably have to scrap it. We can’t very well take off from the beach. But no, that isn’t it. I can get a new plane. I was thinking of upgrading anyway.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Of course you were.”

  She was making fun of him, he knew, and yet there was a fondness in it that he had never noticed until it was gone. Every time she had criticized him like this before, had she really been showing that she cared? Was that too much to hope for?

  “You’re not saying that because you don’t like me,” he said hesitantly. “You’re not saying you dislike that about me.”

  She looked away. “It’s complicated.”

  “I’ll see if I can keep up.”

  “It annoys me,” she said. “It bothers me that you have so much money to throw around, and that you don’t even seem to think about it.”

  “I do think about it,” he said.

  “You don’t act like you do.”