Left Stranded by an Island Billionaire Husband

1. CHAPTER 1

KATHERINE

The sun is barely up and my husband is already losing a negotiation with a five-month-old.

“Hold still,” Kurt tells Sussanah, lowering the sunhat toward her head with the focus of a man defusing a bomb. She lets him get it on. She waits until he smiles. Then she rips it off and flings it into my coffee.

“Your daughter hates hats,” he says.

“Our daughter.”

He rescues the hat, shakes a drop of coffee off the brim, and tries again.

She rips it off again. This is their third round and she’s unbeaten.

I should be sympathetic, but I’m eating toast on my own veranda with my feet up, watching a billionaire get outmaneuvered by a person who can’t sit up unassisted, and sympathy isn’t what comes.

“She gets the stubborn streak from you,” he says.

“She gets it from the man currently attempting round four.”

Sussanah answers by spitting milk down the front of his shirt. A white bloom on gray cotton, right over the pocket.

Kurt looks down at the stain. He looks at her. She gives him the gummy grin, the one that has closed deals for him, I suspect, without him ever noticing. “She’s yours again,” he says, and hands her over.

I take her onto my lap and she settles against me immediately, warm and milky, fists kneading my tank top like she’s making bread.

Down at the dock, Noah is loading the supply boat, and he raises a hand to us without breaking stride.

Noah runs marine operations for the whole group and still loads his own boat, which tells you everything about Noah and half of what you need to know about why I trust him.

This is my favorite hour. The veranda faces east and the lagoon is doing its flat-glass morning thing, and the whole island smells like salt and the frangipani I talked the landscapers into keeping when everyone wanted something more sculptural.

Kurt’s helicopter doesn’t leave for another hour. For now he belongs to us.

He disappears inside and comes back in a clean shirt, carrying two mugs. One is from his Italian espresso machine, which cost more than my first car and hisses like it’s displeased with me. The other is my instant, made exactly the way I like it, which he pretends to find morally offensive.

“I can taste the granules from here,” he says, handing it over.

“You can’t.”

“I feel them. In my soul.”

“Your soul has a launch to get to.”

He sits on the veranda rail instead of the chair, close enough that his knee touches mine.

He’s tan and relaxed and barefoot, hair still damp from his swim, and there’s no version of this man that reads as CEO of anything until the phone starts.

On the island he’s just Kurt. The guy who carried a beam for the villa’s roof himself because the crane was a day late.

The guy who drew a bath at 3 a.m. every night of my third trimester without being asked.

The guy I’m about to ruin the morning for.

“The resilience centre,” I say.

His knee stops bouncing. “Kat.”

“Don’t call me Kat.”

“That’s Celsie’s thing, sorry. Katherine.” He rubs the back of his neck. “We talked about this.”

“We didn’t. You deferred it. There’s a difference.”

“The villa phase needs the capital first. The centre comes right after. I said that.”

“You said that last year. And the year before.” I shift Sussanah to my shoulder and she lets out a tiny, opinionated grunt.

“The plans have been done for eight months. The site survey’s done.

I’ve got three marine science programs who want to partner.

Everything is after launch, Kurt. Launch, then the next launch, then the next villa phase. There’s always another launch.”

“Tomorrow,” he says. “After this launch is done. Tomorrow we sit down, no phones, no company, and we actually talk about it. The real talk. Numbers, timeline, all of it.”

“You’ve promised me tomorrow before.”

“I know.” He says it plainly. No defense, which is the thing about Kurt that gets me every time. He knows when he’s been caught. “Tomorrow I show up with an actual answer. Deal?”

“Deal,” I say, because I love him, and because loving him has always meant giving him one more tomorrow than he strictly earned.

Inside, the television is murmuring through the open doors.

The weather segment. I catch the tail of it.

Cyclone Iris, a category two, tracking well offshore, expected to curve away from the atoll chain entirely.

The presenter has the bored tone of someone reporting on a storm that isn’t coming here.

Kurt glances at the screen and glances away, which is the correct amount of attention.

We’ve sat through a dozen of these. The villa is cyclone-rated, the island has procedures, and Iris is going to be someone else’s problem.

“See?” he says. “Even the weather’s behaving for launch week.”

I shouldn’t let it go. The staff housing thing has been sitting in my chest all week and the morning is already dented. “The cottages,” I say. “While we’re negotiating. I want all ten approved now.”

“There it is.”

“The crew on Grand Brooks are living in housing that wouldn’t pass inspection on the mainland, and cyclone season doesn’t care about your phasing plan.”

“Five this year, five next,” he says. “Guest villas return faster. The cottages get funded either way. This is sequencing, Katherine, it’s not a verdict on anyone.”

“People aren’t line items.”

He smiles, easy, the way you smile at an argument you’ve had before and survived. “Everything becomes a line item eventually.”

I let it go. Sussanah has fallen asleep on my shoulder mid-grunt, and the lagoon is doing the flat-glass thing, and my husband is about to leave for three days. I don’t want our last hour to be a budget meeting.

He finishes his coffee and stands, and I get up too, because there’s something I want to show him before the island swallows his attention.

“Walk with me,” I say. “Five minutes.”

“Kat—Katherine. The helicopter.”

“Five minutes. It’s on the way to the pad anyway. Sort of.”

We take the inland path, his bag over his shoulder, Sussanah deadweight asleep against mine.

The path climbs past the staff bungalows to the old maintenance shed, a corrugated-iron box from the original property, back when Little Brooks was a failing family hotel instead of a line on a billionaire’s portfolio.

The shed survived every cyclone the last century threw at this island.

It sits higher than everything else we built.

“I keep telling you to demolish that thing,” Kurt says.

“And I keep telling you it’s the highest, ugliest, most storm-proof structure on the island. There’s rope in there older than both of us that’s still sound. I checked.”

“You checked the rope.”

“I check everything. It’s a whole personality.” I nod at the shed’s rusted latch. “When I build the centre, I’m building it up here. Surge can’t reach this elevation. I want the training rooms facing the lagoon so the local staff can—”

“Tomorrow,” he says, and he’s smiling, but his eyes have already gone north, toward Grand Brooks, toward the launch. I know that look. It isn’t dismissal. It’s a man whose attention is a finite resource being called in by the louder creditor.

I kiss him anyway. Then I take his hand and press it flat against the shed’s warm iron wall.

“Feel that,” I say. “That’s sixty years of standing still while storms took everything around it. That’s what I want to build.”

“You’re going to get your centre,” he says. “I promise.”

His phone buzzes. He looks at it, silences it, looks at me.

“Answer it,” I say.

“It’s Celsie. She can wait.”

It buzzes again. Then again, thirty seconds later, which is Celsie’s signature move, the triple-buzz of a woman who believes her urgency outranks physics.

Kurt sighs and answers, and I listen to half a conversation about a celebrity whose yacht party wants the east beach reserved and a DJ who has demanded a specific brand of water.

“Tell them the beach is public-facing until six,” Kurt says. “And tell the DJ the tap water comes from a desalination plant that cost more than his fee.”

He hangs up. “See? I can be ruthless.”

“You’re going to be a delight all weekend.”

He leans down and kisses my forehead, then Sussanah’s, being careful not to wake her. “First helicopter back,” he says. “Sunday, weather permitting.”

I look up at him. “Do I still qualify for first helicopter? Because I seem to remember being bumped for a reality star with a handbag dog.”

“That was a medical evacuation.”

“The dog was fine.”

“The dog had a publicist.” He kisses me again, properly this time, coffee and sea salt. “You’re always first helicopter. You and the hat menace. That’s the rule. It’s been the rule since before she existed.”

“Since the fishing boat with the broken radio,” I say.

“Since the fishing boat.” He’d come out himself, in a chopper, when I was twenty-six and stranded on a survey trip, before either of us had any business feeling what we were already feeling. It’s been our shorthand ever since. When it matters, I come get you. No queue. No exceptions.

I believe him. That’s the thing I keep circling back to, later. I believed him completely.

He picks up his bag. Sussanah stirs and I put a hand on her back. “Say goodbye to your father.”

“She’s asleep.”

“She can sleep and wave. She’s talented.”

He takes her tiny hand and waves it at himself, solemn as a diplomat. “Goodbye, Bug. Don’t unionize while I’m gone.”

The phone buzzes a fourth time. He ignores it, then it starts ringing, because Celsie has escalated from buzz to ring, which means someone is on fire or someone is unhappy, and with Celsie those are the same emergency.

“Go,” I tell him. “Before she sends a search party.”

“Tomorrow,” he says. “No launch. No Celsie. Just us. I’ll talk about the centre and I’ll approve the ten cottages if you make me a decent argument and one of those breakfasts.”

“Hold on.” I fish my phone out from under the toast plate, hit record, and hold it up. “Say it again.”

“You’re recording me?”

“Say it again for the jury.”

He leans toward the phone, deadpan. “Tomorrow. No launch. No Celsie. Just us. The resilience centre and ten cottages get a real conversation and possibly my wallet.” He straightens up. “Happy?”

“Deeply.” I stop the recording and label the file before I can think about why I’m doing it. Evidence, my thumb types. Husbands are slippery. It’s a joke. It’s entirely a joke.

He heads down the path toward the helipad, bag over one shoulder, turning once to walk backward so he can look at us. “Sunday!”

“Weather permitting,” I call back.

“Weather’s fine. Iris is going to Tahiti or wherever storms go to retire.”

The helicopter is waiting on the pad out past the palms, blades already turning lazy circles.

I stand at the veranda rail with Sussanah against my chest and watch him climb in, watch him say something to the pilot, watch him put on the headset.

He finds us through the window and presses his hand to the glass.

Sussanah’s fist closes around my finger. She does this when she’s half-asleep, gripping like she’s holding the whole world together and it would be rude to let go.

The helicopter lifts, turns out over the lagoon, and heads north toward Grand Brooks, shrinking to a dark seed against the morning.

“Okay, Bug,” I tell her, testing it out. It doesn’t fit me the way it fits him. “Come on, Susie. Let’s go find your sunhat. It’s in my coffee.”

She doesn’t answer. She’s asleep, warm against my collarbone, and the sea is flat, and Iris is going to Tahiti, and tomorrow my husband is going to sit down with me, no phones, and finally talk about the future I keep drawing on napkins.

I carry Sussanah inside and put her down in the nursery, in the crib Kurt built with his own hands because he didn’t trust anyone else’s joinery. She sleeps. I stand there watching her chest rise. Then I go make another coffee. Granules and all.