Page 34 of Baby Daddy Billionaire SEAL

“There’s no hospital on this island.”

It was a sobering thought, and for a moment, both of us were quiet, taking in the reality of our situation. I regretted having said it out loud. Things were bad enough; I didn’t need to make the point that we were in too dire a situation to be able to help ourselves if we needed to.

“We’ll be okay,” I said quickly. “Someone will find us.”

“You think so?”

“Yeah, I mean, we’re due to land on Maui in a couple of hours. When that doesn’t happen, they’ll send out a search party, and it’ll be a matter of checking the flight path. The pilot will have radioed about the crash. It won’t be hard for them to find the place where we went down, and then they’ll come and get us.”

She sighed. “I hope so.”

“They will. Trust me.”

“How long do you think it’ll take?”

“I don’t know.” I didn’t want to give her false hope about that. It wasn’t like we were likely to be rescued this afternoon. “It could be a few days.”

“A fewdays? What are we going to do?”

“We’re going to be fine,” I told her firmly. “We’re going to do what we need to do to survive.” I’d spent plenty of time camping during SEAL training, and it wasn’t like we’d had RVs. I could rough it when I had to.

She was looking at me with fear in her eyes, though, and I knew she needed something to do to take her mind off the fact that we were in a survival situation. “Okay,” I said. “First things first. Firewood.”

“Firewood?”

“We need to build a fire,” I said. “We’re going to need that more than anything else.”

She nodded. “Do you want me to go look for wood?”

“Think you can manage?”

“I can do it.”

“Great. Don’t go far. Stay where I can see you, okay? I don’t want either one of us wandering off out of sight of the other while we’re here.”

She nodded.

“Start by bringing back a bunch of kindling,” I said. “Little stuff I can use to get a flame going. And a few bigger, dry sticks—it should all be dry stuff—so I can try to get a spark.”

“Can you do that?” she asked. “Can you spark a flame without a lighter or anything?”

“I’ve done it before.” It had been years, but it was a skill I’d learned back in Boy Scouts, and again in SEALs training. “I’m going to have to give it a try because we need to have a fire.”

She nodded. “I’ll go see what I can find.”

I occupied myself with digging a hole in the sand so that the fire pit would be sheltered as much as possible. I packed the walls of the pit hard, not wanting sand to slip down, and put the fire out. By the time I’d made something I was satisfied with, Olivia was back with the first armful of wood.

It was enough to get started. “Come here,” I said, laying out one of the bigger pieces. I took a stick, jammed it point-down against that piece, and began to spin it back and forth.

She knelt beside me and watched. “This is going to start a fire?”

“We’ll have to hope.”

“I’ve only ever seen this done on TV.”

“Hold the wood more still. You need to lean your full weight on it.”

“You could say please.”

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