Almost Paradise Read online

  Almost Paradise

  By

  April hill

  ©2015 by Blushing Books® and April Hill

  All rights reserved.

  No part of the book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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  Hill, April

  Almost Paradise

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-62750-716-5

  Cover Design by ABCD Graphics & Design

  This book is intended for adults only. Spanking and other sexual activities represented in this book are fantasies only, intended for adults. Nothing in this book should be interpreted as Blushing Books' or the author's advocating any non-consensual spanking activity or the spanking of minors.

  Table of Contents:

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  About April Hill

  Ebook Offer

  Blushing Books Newsletter

  About Blushing Books

  Chapter One

  The man and woman stood at a distance from one another on the beach, watching helplessly as the tiny white skiff that had gotten them ashore after the wreck fought for its life in the thundering surf. The outcome of the battle had never been in question though, and moments later, after being pounded against the rocks one last time, the skiff seemed to surrender to its fate. It lay wallowing in the shallows, calmly awaiting the next gigantic wave. Five minutes earlier, the brave little boat had skipped across a treacherous offshore reef, dodging and weaving its way through the crashing onshore breakers, until it had finally dumped its two grateful passengers just yards from the beach. The man had been trying to pull the skiff ashore when enormous rogue wave ripped it from his grasp and flung it against the rocks.

  The man’s name was Jack Garrison, and it was his charter vessel, the Sea Spirit, that had gone down more than twelve hours earlier, forcing the couple to abandon ship and take their chances on the Sea Spirit’s gleaming little skiff. Now, all that remained of either boat were the splintered bits of scuffed wood washing up on the sand.

  Here and there along the barren beach, Jack spotted a few larger sections of wreckage from the skiff’s “mother ship”—the sleek, fifty-six foot schooner he had designed and built almost single-handedly.

  Jack sighed. Was it only ten days ago, he wondered, that he’d been sole-proprietor of a small but thriving boat business, proud owner of the fastest vessel from the Cape York Peninsula to Brisbane, and a completely happy man? A contented man, making a pretty fair living at designing high-end yachts, and filling in the gaps with a seasonal charter business?

  An American by birth, Jack had lived and worked for the last fifteen years in what he was convinced was the most beautiful place on earth—a secluded inlet off Princess Charlotte Bay where his Australian grandparents had left him a small house and a troubled boat building shop that had been in the family for three generations. There, he had a cat, a tidy gray clapboard cottage with breathtaking views of the cape and the bay, and bills he could usually handle without breaking a sweat. On cool nights, with a warm fire in the old stone fireplace, and a cold pint in his hand, Jack was convinced that he had it all—everything a man could want. Except for the right woman, of course, and that would come later—if it was meant to be.

  And if the tax fellows had agreed with his assessment of things, that peaceful life could have continued. He wouldn’t have been forced by finances to accept that first charter, let alone the disastrous second one. The first had been simple enough—idling down the coast with a bunch of novice divers on their first trip to the Great Barrier Reef. But the second charter had started going bad from the first day out, when he agreed to pick up the three passengers in Moresby—not exactly his or anyone else’s favorite place to visit. It was the wrong season for island hopping, with typhoons always a possibility, and to make things worse, the idiots who’d booked the charter, claiming to be Hollywood film executives, didn’t know one island from another. Nor did they seem to care. They’d broken out the booze and began partying before the Sea Spirit even cleared the point, and hadn’t stopped until that final night, when all hell broke loose. The night the lovely Sea Spirit was sliced in two by some half-assed pleasure cruise ship.

  And now, the way Jack saw it, he was being punished for his multiple errors in judgment by being marooned for God only knows how long on this godforsaken pile of rocks, listening to a foul-mouthed shrew from Hollywood (or Hell), while watching the thing he loved most in the world being battered into wet kindling.

  “Damn it!” the woman wailed as another torn section of plank washed up at their feet. “Now we’ll never get out of here!”

  Jack said nothing, but gazed out to sea, watching the last bits of his beloved schooner’s little skiff disappear beneath the churning surf. Silently, he waded out to rescue one oar and a single, splintered plank—the remains of the schooner’s nameplate. In black enamel outlined in gold, a single word, Spirit, was still visible. Jack brushed the wet sand from both objects, tossed the plank up on the shore, and thrust the forlorn oar deep into the sand for safekeeping. Screwed to its slender shaft was a small, oval brass plate, reading Sea Spirit, 2011—a gift from his mother in Seattle, who had a fixation about labeling things.

  “Well, that’s just terrific,” the woman snarled. “Souvenirs are just what we need right now. As firewood, maybe, if we had a match, which we don’t, according to you. You might have tried to save something useful from the goddamned boat before it sank, you know.” She leaned down to pick up several more pieces of splintered wood, and hurled them up the beach with the other debris.

  When she bent over, Jack fought the urge to reach over and deliver a swift smack to the woman’s backside. It was a damned attractive backside, he thought, if only it hadn’t been attached to this screeching harpy.

  “The way I remember it,” he replied wearily, “I was too busy trying to save your ungrateful ass to get around to saving anything useful.”

  It was too late to carry through on the urge to deliver that smack, now, because the woman had already straightened up and turned around to continue her complaining. Too bad, he thought. If ever he’d met a woman who could use a few—no, a lot—of good, hard swats across her butt, it was this one. He’d been almost seventy-two hours at sea with the bitch before they’d washed up on the beach, and he’d spent most of that time fantasizing about throwing her overboard. Who’d know, right? Just another tragic victim of a collision at sea. Jack was finding it hard to believe that there was anyone who’d mourn the loss of this particular drowning victim.

  Robin Farrell kicked the sand sullenly. What the guy had just said was true, of course. If he hadn’t come below deck after the collision, virtually carried her up the darkened companionway, and then shoved her into the skiff, she would have gone down with the Sea Spirit. And later, after they capsized in the surf and she became pinned under some of the wreckage, he’d risked his own life by diving down to clear the debris and to pull her to the surface. There wasn’t much question, even to Robin, about what would have happened. Even struggling with all her might, she wouldn’t have been strong enough to fight the current and the booming surf. She would have been crushed ag
ainst the rocks, for sure, and drowned. He’d done all that for her, and she wasn’t even sure of his name. After they came aboard in Port Moresby, she’d barely seen him, again. It was the old guy called Charlie who’d kept them all in crushed ice and food, and turned down their beds at night. They had nicknamed the old guy “A Man for all Seasons”.

  “All right,” she conceded reluctantly. “You saved my life. I owe you one. What do we do now?”

  Jack shrugged. “Beats me. This is my first shipwreck, so I’m just winging it. I tried to get out an SOS just before we went down, but I’m not sure the radio was still working. We’d already lost the antenna in the squall, even before whatever it was ran us down. I’m not even completely sure of our position when we sank. We’d been out of any kind of contact for too long to make more than a guess.”

  “Do you think everyone got off all right?” she asked, staring out to sea.

  “I don’t know about the other boat—the one that rammed us, but everybody got off the Sea Spirit all right,” he said. “Besides you and me, it was just the two male passengers who came aboard with you, and I saw them rowing off in the inflatable with Charlie Engels. Crewmen don’t come any better than Charlie, so if anybody can get them to safety, he’ll do it. Were they—are they—close friends?”

  She shook her head. “No, not really. The short one, the guy who chartered your boat in Port Moresby is my boss, Herb Rudnick. And the other guy was some fabulously important client of Herb’s. We were there scouting locations for this cinematic epic about giant killer jellyfish.”

  “You picked a hell of a place to make a movie.”

  “Yeah, I know that, now. I always thought New Guinea was some island paradise, like Tahiti—before I got mugged on our very first night. In the parking lot of a damned Holiday Inn, for God’s sake! Anyway the VIP nixed the whole deal after he got a good look around. Herb arranged the cruise to try to get the guy back on the hook. I was just along for the ride really, to wait on them both, and make the repulsive toad client think he could get in my pants if he worked at it long enough.” She moaned. “After I nearly got my throat cut in the damned parking lot, Herb told me that if I didn’t bail out on him and fly home, he’d arrange this fabulous, sun-filled cruise to a lot of tropical islands—like Sandals, or Beaches—one of those places. It figures I’d end up out on the bounding main on some cheap, low-tech boat with an incompetent amateur in command. I thought all you people had little black boxes or something, so thy could find us when things like this happened.”

  Jack tried not to lose his temper, with only moderate success. They might be stuck here for a long time, alone with one another, so there was no point in making enemies so early, even if the woman was a pain in the ass and doing her level best to make everything worse. “Yeah, well, if you’d been on a 747 when a thing like this happened, you’d be right,” he explained, none too patiently. “You’d also be dead, so try giving it a rest for a while, will you? We’re alive, in one piece, and it looks like we’re in one of those goddamned island paradises you wanted. Just look around.”

  Robin swept her gaze along the seemingly endless, barren beach, and sneered.

  “Great! The Minnow sinks, and we’ve been washed up on fucking Gilligan’s Island. Am I supposed to be impressed, Skipper? We’re still marooned, and I wouldn’t call this shithole a paradise! I’d call it fucking Crab City! Get a load of those revolting things, over there, if you don’t believe me!”

  A few feet from where they stood, the beach was alive with hundreds, maybe thousands of small, blue-shelled land crabs, scuttling sideways up the beach, toward the trees.

  He smiled. “A little drawn butter and lemon, and we’re in business.” He wondered idly whether these particular crabs were poisonous, and wished he’d watched a few more Jacque Cousteau and National Geographic specials.

  “Yuck!” Robin yelped. “I’d rather eat rats, like they do on Survivor.”

  Jack shook his head. “I’ve got a feeling you’re about to get your wish. From what I know about the animal life around here, and that’s not a whole lot, the dining’s not likely to be fancy.”

  Robin plopped down in the sand and pointed seaward. “You could go out there and try to catch some fish, you know.”

  Jack yawned. “Sorry, fishing’s not my thing. I went fishing one time when I was a kid, with my Uncle Harry. I even caught a trout. Real pretty, but it was too small to be legal, so I had to throw it back. That’s about it. There’s probably a wild boar or two around here, somewhere. I know that, because I saw South Pacific six times. But I don’t hunt, either, so don’t get your heart set on pork chops.”

  Robin rolled her eyes. “So tell, me, Skipper. Just what is it you can do?”

  “I can design yachts,” he said mildly, “and rent them to idiots.”

  “Oh, I see,” she said smugly. “You’re not really a sea captain?”

  Jack grinned. “Horatio Hornblower was a sea captain. Jack Aubrey and Captain Ahab were sea captains. Even Johnny Depp was a sea captain. I just sail boats.”

  “Well, we’ve already seen how good you are at that! Up until now, my experience with your sailing skills has not been encouraging, Mr…?”

  “Jack Garrison. And yours is Farrell, if I remember correctly?”

  “Robin Farrell, from Los Angeles.”

  “And what is it you do, Robin Farrell from Los Angeles?” Jack asked. “Besides bitch and whine and make life generally miserable for everyone you meet?”

  Robin stood up and brushed the sand from her rear end. “Go fuck yourself, Gilligan.”

  As she strode away, Jack watched with a mixture of amusement and irritation as her nicely rounded ass swung up the beach. He sat down on the sand, picked up the small piece of broken plank that read, Spirit, and slapped the wet wood against his palm, wincing at the sting. And that’s when it occurred to him that this very plank would make a quite serviceable paddle—if the need should arise.

  Jack Garrison was not in the habit of paddling strange women, or even familiar women, for that matter. He had never given a lot of thought to spanking anyone at all, except in the occasional moment of lust, when the occasional woman expressed an interest in having something of that nature done to her willing bottom. But this woman wasn’t like those women, who had squirmed agreeably under his playful swats. It seemed to him that this Farrell brat was virtually begging for the real thing, just like he recalled being spanked as a kid—hard, long, and painfully. Jack smiled to himself. If someone didn’t come along to rescue the two of them fairly quickly, he thought, the little lady just might get what she was asking for.

  Meanwhile, Robin Farrell stood alone under the shelter of a small grove of palm trees and studied Jack Garrison with curiosity. He was undeniably attractive, extremely tall and well-built, with a sort of rugged, tanned look that might have been interesting in L.A. In this stinking hellhole, he was just annoying. She swore, and slapped at her leg a half-instant too late to avoid being bitten by a nasty-looking bug that then scurried away under a rock. Robin swore again, and cursed her bad luck. Stuck on an island, probably thousands of miles from civilization, with no electricity, no curling iron, man-eating bugs, and a very irritating man she couldn’t stand. She might just as well have been back in Medicine Bow, Wyoming.

  “It looks like we’re in for a storm,” the man named Garrison called from the beach. “Start looking around for something we can use to rig a shelter.”

  Robin looked around her, and saw nothing but low bushes, and a few palm trees.

  “Okay, Robinson Crusoe, since you’re apparently the world-famous hut-design expert of the group,” she shouted back, “what am I looking for? Vinyl siding, or aluminum?”

  Ignoring the crack, Jack pulled a fat red pocketknife from his pocket and walked up the beach to join her.

  “I’ve never even opened this thing,” he explained with a grin. “A gift from my mother. See? It has my name on it. It’s got about fifteen blades on it, so we have a complete too
lbox. Of course, a Home Depot would be handy, but I guess we can start with fronds from these gently swaying and very picturesque palm trees. Why don’t you start collecting some of the fallen ones, while I scout around and see what I can find. I noticed a lot of what looks like bamboo farther down the beach.”

  “So, why won’t that kind of stuff just blow away?” she asked irritably.

  “It probably will, eventually, but it’s the best we can do, for now.” He glanced up at the sky. “Better than getting soaked, anyway. We’ll look around for something sturdier tomorrow.” With that, he folded the knife and disappeared into the trees. Robin wandered beneath the palms without enthusiasm, gathering armfuls of the fallen, dried palm fronds.

  Half an hour later, Jack emerged from the forest, carrying several long bamboo poles, and dragging piles of bamboo branches thick with leaves.

  “There were only a few of these poles on the ground,” he said. “We’ll have to improvise some sort of tool to take more of them down. The saw on this fabulous Swiss Army Knife is three inches long, and barely makes a dent. I’m guessing they don’t have a lot of bamboo in Switzerland.” He walked slowly around the small clearing where they stood, and settled on a spot deep in the trees to begin construction.

  Robin picked up the knife and opened the blades one by one until she came to a small corkscrew. “Aha! Finally, something useful. Too bad you didn’t remember the white wine, Skipper. Or do we need red wine with crab? I always get that mixed up.”

  “Could you put the knife down and come help me with this?” Jack called. “I think we can prop the longer–”

  Robin screamed, and followed the scream with a stream of obscenities. “Shit! I cut my damned finger with your fucking knife!” She crammed the bleeding finger in her mouth, and sucked it. “Just my luck. I’ll probably get blood poisoning, now, or beriberi. Or jungle rot. Perfect!”