Marooned with the Rock Star (A Crazily Sensual Rock Star Romance, with Humor) by Dawn Steele Page B

anything.
    Later, much later, when she has decided to
speak to me again, she says, “So what do we do now, Mr.
Cock-of-the-Walk?”
    I laugh. “So you’ve decided to forgive
me.”
    “Do I have a choice?”
    “Why don’t you tell me?” I lean back on my
elbows, watching the stream.
    I’m actually quite worried as to how we are
to find our next meal. I’m hungry again, and I know we have to find
something more substantial than eggs and paw paws.
    She bites her lip, and then says: “I think we
should go back to the beach and put up a SOS signal just in case
any rescue plane looking for us is going to fly by the island.”
    As usual, she makes perfect strategic
sense.
    I pretend to stroke my chin. The bristles
right now are sharp and poky.
    “OK,” I say. “If we can actually find our way
back to the beach.”
    “It’s easy,” she says with a smirk. “We just
follow the stream.”
     
    *
     
    Why don’t I think of things like these? I
groan inwardly. I certainly feel like hitting my own forehead
repeatedly.
    We do as Rebecca suggests, of course, and
follow the stream downward. It is going to lead someplace for sure,
either to a lake or to the sea. I’m willing to bet it’s the
sea.
    Along the way, we find banana trees – broad
leafy, stumpy trees with bunches of both green and yellow bananas.
Bananas are more substantial than paw paws, and so we dine on them.
Later, I stuff as many bananas as I can take into my pockets. For
the first time, I rue the fact my pants are so tight.
    “No problem,” Rebecca says.
    She fashions my tattered shirt into a
makeshift bag, gathers as many bananas as she can, and wraps it all
up. Then she slings it across her shoulder and sets off.
    I can’t help admiring her butt inside that
tight green dress as she walks. The dress is made all the tighter
by the seawater.
    By late evening, we glimpse the shining sea
again. It has been a long, weary trek, and as soon as we hit the
beach, we collapse onto the sand and sprawl there as if dead. The
stream has become a small river mouth, and this empties out into
the ocean beyond.
    “Do you know how to fish?” asks Rebecca.
    “Only with a fishing line.”
    “Maybe we can fashion one.”
    I groan. “Can’t we rest here a bit?”
    “I’m hungry.”
    Actually, so am I. And it’s a man’s job to
fish for a woman.
    Where did I get my Neanderthal ideas?
    I make myself get up anyway. We go into the
forest again to hunt for vines that may be able to do the trick.
Then we dig for earthworms, which are consistently evading us
today. There aren’t even the prerequisite earthworm mounds to
suggest that they might have made their homes there.
    “I found some sort of beetle,” I say, picking
up the wriggling blue and black thing. I hope these tropical
beetles don’t bite. “Do you think the fish would like these?”
    She wrinkles her nose. “If not, I hope they
like bananas.”
    Still, we fashion a sort of hook out of a
gnarly piece of wood. Then we cast the line with the dying beetle
into the mouth of the stream, where we can see fishes swimming
against the current.
    I guess not too many people do fishing here,
because after fifteen minutes, we get a bite. I triumphantly pull
out one wriggling silver fish.
    “Don’t let it go!” Rebecca yells as the fish
tries to dance out of our slippery grasps.
    “Yeah, I was just going to unhook it and
throw it back into the sea,” I deadpan.
    We plop the fish into the sand and slowly
watch it heave its final breaths, its gills opening and
closing.
    “Wicked,” I remark.
    “I know.” She stares at the fish, fascinated.
“It’s a wonder not more people are vegans.”
    “I don’t feel like a vegan. I feel like a
fruitarian.”
    “There’s always the problem of not being able
to start a fire.”
    I grin. “Fancy eating sashimi?”

REBECCA
     
    We are so exhausted from our long trek that
we fall asleep after a nice meal of sashimi (not sushi, Kurt
corrected me, because sushi has rice in