Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
Dressed in my bikini and jean shorts, I followed a thumping noise to the beach, where I found Hunter erecting a part of the block and tackle system.
Yesterday, as we gathered all the lines Hunter had and selected the healthiest and strongest-looking trees, he explained the simple engineering behind the pulley and lifting design we were building today.
The easiest part was assembling this system and the structure where the Reely Nauti would be lifted or something like that.
But the challenging part was reeling the sunken boat out of the ocean—a many-thousand-pound beast, full of water, resting on its side on the seabed. Several days max.
A few hens pecked the ground, a group of young chickens following them.
Tuesday sunbathed on driftwood on the beach, and Monday hid in low bushes, his tri-colored face not blending well with green.
I kept in the shade and watched Hunter work as if I’d never seen a man before.
Hunter’s shirt hung on the corner of the workbench as he stood tall with both hands holding up a large joist, trying to connect it to a structure with pulleys and cables attached and threaded between other timbers.
As he lifted it, sweat ran down his muscled back and disappeared in the waist of the shorts which hung low on his hips.
His broad shoulders and clean-cut muscles were those of a man who didn’t spend hours in the gym huffing in front of a mirror but earned through hard labor.
This wasn’t the first time I’d seen him without a shirt on, but right now, scorching heat spread in my chest and reached deep down into my core.
Before I forgot how to breathe (and that we should be a team), I asked, “Need my help?”
Hunter peered over his shoulder at me. “Please.”
Joining him, I flattened my palms next to his on the beam.
“Hold it in place.” Hunter wiped his damp forehead with his forearm and stepped back to grab a hammer.
“Watch your fingers.” He came up behind me, so close the heat of his body gave me a long-forgotten lustful thrill of being so close to a hot (figuratively and literally) man.
He hammered nails into the wood’s top corners.
Then we shifted to work on the lower corner, my shoulder brushed his side. Or did he brush against me?
“You slept late,” he commented.
“You should have woken me up. And thanks for the breakfast.” And fresh flowers in a jar next to the bowl of scrambled eggs and cut-up fruit salad. “What time is it?”
He glanced at his watch. “Almost eleven.”
Hunter hitched his right shoulder and rubbed the side of his face, then returned to aligning the two boards above our heads.
“You need a clock in the hut or the kitchen,” I said.
“I’ll make you a sundial,” he grunted, through squeezed tight teeth, concentrating on the board that wouldn’t go in its place.
Tilting slightly toward him, I took a deep breath. He smelled … well … sweaty. What else did I expect? And Heavens to Betsy I loved this smell. What was wrong with me? I needed a distraction. Quickly. Anything.
“Do you want to get acquainted more? Or talk about anything?” I said louder than intended.
“I’m right here. You don’t have to yell,” he said around a nail between his teeth. His answer wasn’t a splash of cold water, but it calmed my inner crazy. “I’m not sure I want to talk right now.”
I focused on the small grains in the wood. “We don’t have to talk. We can play This or That.”
“That involves talking,” Hunter grumbled as he tried to pull a broken nail out of the wood that didn’t go in quite right.
“I know, but we could learn more about each other since we are roomies for the next few days or weeks.” I couldn’t resist and glanced at the dance of Hunter’s muscles as he moved.
Pinching the crooked nail, he pressed it against the beam and slightly tapped it to straighten it. The nail didn’t cooperate. Hunter took a deep breath and tossed it into a bucket. “Fine. I’ll go first.”
“But we should set rules.”
“Rules?” Hunter gave a huffy laugh and started to hammer the nail, shaking his head at whatever thought he was thinking.
“You can ask five questions, and then it’s my turn.”
“Any other rules?”
“Answer quickly with what comes first to mind. And nothing too personal.”
“I thought the point of this game was to learn more about each other,” he said, his voice tinged with irritation. Hunter dropped the hammer, grabbed his shirt off a post, and wiped his face with it.
“Yes, but you can’t ask me, say, if I’d prefer a strawberry or a banana-flavored condom.” I needed to smack myself for saying that.
Hunter’s movement paused, and then he chuckled.
“I know for sure it won’t be coconut flavor.
” He cleared his throat. “Okay. No condom questions.” He did a quick sweep around the beach with his eyes.
“Watermelon … or vanilla-flavored…” His gaze turned to mine.
My temperature skyrocketed, and I tilted my head in a warning.
His mouth turned into a cocky grin. “Chapstick.”
“Vanilla.”
“Fiction or nonfiction?”
“Fiction.”
“City or countryside?”
“City.”
“Rain or snow?”
“Sun.”
“That wasn’t part of the question,” Hunter said.
“I know, but I didn’t like either option.”
“The last question is…” He drummed his fingers on the wooden beam we worked on. “Over or under?”
My skin lit on fire again. “Hunter!”
“What?”
“We agreed. No personal questions.”
He did a double look at me with surprise. “Was that too personal?”
“Of course it was. Asking me if I enjoy having sex on top or not is way too personal.”
He stared at me. I stared back at him. He threw his head and laughed. “That’s not what I meant.”
I was confused now. “Then what did you mean?”
“Toilet paper: over or under?”
I banged my forehead on the tree trunk and my shoulders shook with laughter. “I’m such an idiot.”
“Not an idiot. But we know where your mind goes.”
“It doesn’t go there,” I lied. In Hunter’s get-your-panties-wet presence, it was hard not to fantasize about dicktopia.
Especially after three years of not shagging.
Sex with Phill was like having wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am with a male blowup doll: clinical, quick, and slightly deflated in crucial places.
“Your turn to quiz me.” Hunter placed a nail on the wood and slammed the hammer on it.
To look away from his washboard abs as he worked would’ve been a sin.
Was it a good idea for us to continue this game?
I was doomed to ask a question I’d regret for the rest of the day, or worse, until we could get off this island.
“Perhaps we should just focus on the boat rescue,” I said.
“Wonder Woman, are you afraid you’ll ask a dirty question?” His teeth grazed his full bottom lip.
“No. I lost interest in the game.”
“Sure you did.”
Hunter linked his arms behind his head and bent his torso, first to the right, then to the left.
As he stretched, his body got leaner, and his shorts dropped even lower on his hips, exposing a little more of where the happy trail led.
Was he doing it on purpose? Was he showing off his well-cut body in front of me?
What a bastard.
I swallowed with difficulty. “Your shorts are missing a button. And you should put your shirt on. Protecting your skin from direct sunlight keeps the body temperature lower.”
Hunter stopped his peacock act, gave me a playful whatever look, and then picked up a pulley with a bundle of thick cable. “Can I ask you why you dislike coconut flavor so much?”
I groaned. “You will think it’s stupid.”
“Try me.”
“Phill, my ex, loved coconut mojitos. After he stripped me of half of my money during our divorce, I woke up the following day just absolutely hating the taste. At first, it was so bad I would gag if I came close to it.” I chanced a glance at Hunter.
His face held no trace of judgment, but his eyebrows were drawn together like something bothered him.
“From now on, I’ll avoid cooking with coconut. I wish I could offer you a different shampoo, but that’s all Edward stocked up with on the island.”
“Don’t worry.” I planted my hands on my hips. “Okay, what’s next?”
“Grab the blue ropes and follow me.”
Once we had a sturdy system, Hunter swam to the Reely Nauti and dived to hook it up to the rope (thank goodness we had enough of it to reach).
Then he linked ten lifejackets and six old fishing buoys together and attached them to the boat in the hope that it would give some buoyancy and help to fight against the laws of pushing force and friction.
Well, it didn’t. No matter how many times we tried to pull on the cable.
After several attempts, my hands and arms were tired, and I sweated more than I had ever done in my life.
Hunter also grew frustrated. His answers became short grunts, and the groove between his eyebrows grew deeper than the Mariana Trench.
Finally, I had to call it a day and suggest using the rest of our energy on cryptic numeric messages.
Hunter and I took turns in the ice lake, and regrouped in the hut to work on the numbers.
We agreed that if the digits were indeed an enciphered message or instructions, they would surely (hopefully) be written in English.
Even more hopefully, the words would be close enough to modern language that we could understand their meaning.
Without the internet and limited knowledge about the cryptography used in the 1800s, our next best bet was to use mathematical concepts and principles.
The obvious thing was that numbers two, three, six, and nine held the key or keys to solving the puzzle or puzzles.
“Okay. One of the problem-solving principles my father liked to follow was Occam’s Razor. The law of parsimony. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one,” I began. “We’ll start with replacing each occurrence of a number with the designated letter.”
Hunter wrinkled his forehead. “There are thousands of possibilities.”