Jax stared at Brenda as they both finished eating their breakfast. He couldn’t really believe she had said it the night before.

"I don’t want to leave here, Jax. Let’s not take the raft out after all. Let’s just stay here."

Two o’clock in the morning definitely wasn’t the time or place to discuss a matter like that. So Jax had patted her on the head and told her they would talk about it in the morning. He stroked her hair, and soon after that she was sound asleep. But he lay awake for a while afterwards, thinking about her words.

{Bloody h*ll! A fine time now for the woman to change her mind! Why didn’t she say so before I busted my @ss working on the raft!} It hadn’t been easy for Jax, working on the raft. It wasn’t like some kind of kitchen furniture that they could laugh about if it disintegrated underneath them. They would be in the middle of an unfriendly ocean. He had been more cautious about building it than he had about anything he had ever done in his life before. He made sure EVERY beam was secure and lashed down. Their lives depended on it.

Brenda interrupted his thoughts, bringing up the very thing that had disturbed him since the night before. "Jax, I don’t want to leave the island on the raft."

They sat opposite each other on the damp sand. After the heavy rain of the night before, the cool sand felt good in the morning sunshine. "Why, Brenda? Don’t you trust me? Don’t you think the raft is safe?"

Brenda moved closer to him. "It’s not that, Jax. You KNOW I trust you with my life." She looked down for a minute and played with the damp sand. "It’s just that there are so many things out there in the middle of the ocean that you can’t control." She put her hand on his arm. "I’m not trying to insult your raft-building abilities. Even if the raft were a solid steel cabin cruiser, there are still so many things out there that could kill us. What if a truly huge tropical storm comes up? What if the wind dies down and we just float for days in the open water? And if you don’t even know where we are to begin with, how can you hope to get us to another island?"

Jax sighed deeply. "So we just sit here – waiting for the owners of the heroin to come and kill us?"

Brenda got excited. "No, I’ve thought about that, too." She began to gesture with her hands. "See – we’ll STILL use the raft! We just put the heroin on the raft and float it way out into the water, and then throw it overboard. Even if that homing device thingy is still working, it will just lead them to the bottom of the ocean! And we can just stay here! As long as we don’t let them see us, they’ll just think the drugs went down out in the ocean and never be the wiser!"

Jax looked at her intently, not sharing her smile. "And what do we do in the meantime to survive?"

She put her hands on his thighs in excitement. "Just what we’ve been doing! Now that it rained so much last night we’ve got plenty of water! We’ve got the new garden to give us healthy food and there’s always plenty of fish to eat! We can just stay here until someone comes to rescue us." She began to deflate when she saw he didn’t share her optimism. "I mean – you said yourself that someone would be coming soon. And it’s been almost six weeks now. Somebody’s GOT to come for us."

Jax cupped her face in his hands. "No, they don’t, Brenda. It HAS almost been six weeks. Even with my family’s wealth, they won’t be able to keep up the search much longer. And what if we DO get another severe storm and it blows our water supply to kingdom come? Or what if one of us gets ill – I mean, SERIOUSLY ill?"

Realization hit Brenda like a pail of ice water. {It’s OK being with you for a while, but now he’s beginning to miss his wife and son. Why did you do it, Brenda? Why did you let yourself fall for him and his smooth talking and his "I love you’s"? You realized in the beginning that you would only be a temporary diversion for him. Why did you let him into your heart?} As the hot tears began to gather in her eyes, she knew she didn’t want to let him see her cry. She jumped up and began to run from him towards the interior of the island.

"BRENDA! What did I say? BRENDA!" Jax scrambled to his feet but she had gotten too much of a head start. He ran both hands through his blonde hair in frustration. {Women! Bloody confusing sex! First she’s suicidal at the thought of staying here with me, now she wants to stay here forever and become some kind of Robin Crusoe!} Deciding that it must be some kind of PMS thing, Jax sat back down on the sand to try to think of a way to explain things to her logically.

Meanwhile, Brenda kept running through the shrubbery until she found herself at the garden they had discovered the day before. She stopped for a while and bent over at the waist to catch her breath. {Men! Why do they have to be so d*mn stubborn! They can’t see the logic of something that’s as plain as the nose on their faces!}

She moved to the shade of a large mangrove tree to sit and catch her breath. She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them for a moment, but then straightened up and patted her chest gently until she burped softly. It left a sour taste in her mouth. {Geez, Brenda, did you have to have a fight with the man at breakfast? Now you’ve got indigestion to add to your hurt feelings.} She sighed, and then tipped her head back to rest it against the tree.

Brenda was surprised to realize a few minutes later that she had dozed off, leaning against the tree like that. {Probably because you don’t get enough sleep at night! How much sleep can you get when the man keeps you up all night making love to you?} She stretched a little. Realizing that she was in the same garden they had found the day before, she began to dig at the dirt beneath the tree until she found another yam. {Well, I sure don’t want to go back to camp yet. I might as well make myself useful and dig up a few vegetables while I’m here.}

Brenda rose to her knees and began digging. Suddenly she stopped, sat back on her heels and put her hands on her hips, thinking of what a food she had been. {What’s the matter with you, Brenda? Aren’t you the same woman who stood up to that 6-foot drum player and told him he couldn’t have an orgy in his dressing room before the concert? Didn’t you stand your ground with that female vocalist who wanted to dye the hair on her head and the hair under her arms purple – to match? Just stand up for yourself. And if Jax wants to be a pig and go back to his miserable life with his miserable wife, let him. You’re strong. He’s not "all that", as the kids say.}

Brenda was so busy convincing herself that she could live without Jax’s love that she didn’t notice that she had dug up more than a half dozen yams. She felt a little dizzy when she looked up at the sun, and sat back on her heels. {That’s right, Brenda. How does that old song go?}

Why should a woman who is healthy and strong,

Brenda’s musical reverie was interrupted suddenly as the bile rose in her throat again. Grabbing her stomach, she was shocked when all of her breakfast came roaring back up and she turned to the side and vomited. When her stomach finally stopped heaving, she crawled over to a pool of water nearby and rinsed off her face.

{Well, Brenda, that should teach you. No more of those yams for you. Not as long as you can’t take a Pepcid first.} She glanced back at the pile of yams next to the tree and held her spinning head. {That’s probably what did it. The smell of the yams again after you ate so many of them last night.} She stayed by the water until she was feeling better and then made her way back to sit under the tree again. She put one hand to her forehead and was relieved to feel that she didn’t have a fever. {Then why do you feel so warm?} She stripped off her blouse and bra. {Oh…that feels SO good….I’m really going to be spoiled when we get back to civilization. I’m so used to not wearing bras that this one gets really uncomfortable fast!}

As she sat, indulgently nude to the waist, by the tree in the shade for a moment, she massaged her sore breasts. Her eyes had just about closed again when she suddenly sat up straight and slapped her hands down on the ground. Her eyes were wide and she was breathing hard. She glanced down at her breasts, wiped her mouth with the back of her trembling hand, and then looked down at her stomach.

{You don’t have indigestion, Brenda. You don’t have the flu. You’re not spoiled from going bra-less.} She buried her face in her hands. {What you have is just a slight case of pregnancy.}

She sat up and pulled her knees up to her chest, hugging them and rocking reassuringly. {You should have realized it, Brenda! You yourself mentioned not 15 minutes ago that you’ve been here almost six weeks! You haven’t had a period – you’ve been having 24-hour orgies with the most gorgeous man in the world – and there’s no 24-hour Walgreens around the corner where he can buy another box of Trojans. What did you expect?} As she straightened out her legs, she moved her hands to cup her still-flat stomach. She smiled, in spite of herself.

At least, if Jax decided to reconcile with his wife after they were rescued, she would always have a part of him to keep with her. {But what if you don’t get rescued? What if you have to have the baby here on the island? There’s no OB-GYN to talk you through it – no Lamaze classes to learn how to breathe – and, most importantly, NO EPIDURAL!!} She leaned back against the tree and stroked her stomach lovingly. She should have been scared, but she wasn’t. She should have been worried about the lack of pre-natal vitamins and ultra-sounds and fetal heart monitors, but she wasn’t. All she could think of was a little boy, with tousled blonde hair, sparkling blue eyes, and dimples deep as the ocean that separated them from civilization. She loved the baby already, and just ten minutes before, she hadn’t known that it existed!

{If it DOES exist! After all, there’s no EPT kits around here. Maybe it really WAS the yams, or the stress of the crash and the adjustment to life here.} Brenda pondered telling Jax about the baby. She knew that was going to tell him, all right. She had no doubts about that. But it would be unfair to tell him before she was absolutely sure. She could wait another week or two – it wasn’t like they had any pressing engagements in the future.

"Brenda?" She was shocked from her swirling thoughts by the voice of the man she now knew she loved more than anything in the world. He was standing over her, his face pale and drawn. He crouched down beside her and took her chin in his fingers. "Brenda? Are you OK?"

She smiled at him. "Of course I am." {I just figured out that I’m probably carrying your baby. How could I NOT be OK?} "Why do you ask?"

Jax traced her face lovingly with his finger. "Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because you stormed out on me, and then when I find you, you’re in some kind of catatonic state, sitting half-naked under a mangrove tree."

Brenda blushed a little but then looked at him fiercely. "Well, I just thought I would take your advice for a change and not be such a prude! After all, it’s warm already this morning!"

Jax held his hands up in a sign of surrender. "OK! OK! I understand!" Then he took her hands in his and looked at her seriously. "And while I’m in such a humble mood, I should probably also tell you that I thought about it, and you were right about the raft and us leaving on it."

"Excuse me?"

Now it was Jax’s turn to blush. "You were right. It would be risky for us to go out on the raft, trying to find another island that may be thousands of miles away for all I know. And then, even if we somehow DO manage to find another island, it might be just as godforsaken as this one – or even worse." He stared down at the ground for a moment. "I guess I just let my masculine ego get in the way and I didn’t give your arguments a fair shake. I’m sorry."

Brenda nodded. "Apology accepted."

Jax grinned. "Good, because I don’t do that often – admit I’m wrong, I mean. Especially in the morning." He moved from his crouched position to sit next to her on the ground. "So, how does this sound? I’ll just take the heroin and get on the raft and when I figure I’m far enough out in the ocean, I’ll give it the heave and it can sink down to Davy Jones’ locker for all eternity. Then I’ll just have to get back to the island on the raft and we’ll go on as you said – waiting for the rescue party to come."

Brenda’s eyes grew worried. "How far out will you have to go? What if the wind dies and you can’t make it back here?" She was still elated with the thought of the pregnancy, but suddenly the concept of something happening to him seemed catastrophic. She knew that she could make it through the pregnancy with him beside her, but without him…..

"Brenda, I’ve been flying planes for years. I’m a good navigator. I won’t get lost, and I won’t go THAT far out. I promise – I’ll be careful." He smiled at her look of relief and then tapped her on the nose. "Now – why don’t we get back to camp?" He looked at the pile of yams. "Been busy while you were here, I see!"

Brenda nodded. {What are you going to do if he wants you to carry them back? That smell…..oh, this HAS to be what they call morning sickness. Nothing else could make the smell of those things make me feel this way.} "Yeah," she replied slowly. "But you know, right now I think I’m just anxious to get back to camp and wash off some of this sweat!" She rubbed the back of her neck, arching her back and thrusting her breasts at Jax temptingly. She slid her hands under the waistband of her shorts and pushed then down past her knees, standing before him completely nude. She hoped that he wouldn’t be able to resist her, and she wasn’t disappointed.

"Really?" He came closer to her, shrugging out of his shirt. "Need any help scrubbing your back? Maybe we should conserve the ocean water and bathe together!" He traced a finger down from her chin to the valley between her ultra-sensitive breasts.

"You think so?" she asked innocently. At his eager nod, she pretended disinterest. "Well, I guess maybe that’s a possibility……" She looked at him over her shoulder as she started to stroll seductively away, but then she stopped short and grabbed her heel. "Ouch!"

"Brenda! What’s the matter? Did you step on something?"

"Ouch! I don’t know!" She hopped on one foot and when he rushed to her side and leaned down to examine her foot, she held onto his head for balance.

"I don’t see anything here," Jax said cautiously.

"Good," Brenda sighed in relief, still balancing and holding onto his hair. Then, she suddenly pushed him backwards, putting the "injured" foot down. As he went sprawling into a mud puddle left by the storm, she laughed aloud. "Then it won’t stop me from beating you back to the hut!" Her laughter echoed through the trees as she sprinted off.

Jax watched her lithe nude body from behind and felt his desire stirring. "Don’t you bet on that, Ms. Barrett!" he shouted, scrambling to his feet. He looked down at his legs and lower torso, which were now coated with mud. {Oh, well….just another good reason why I need a bath!} He began to follow the sound of her giggles towards the hut.

Jerry Jacks leaned far over the front rail of the magnificent yacht, straining to see through the high-powered binoculars he held. Just two days before he had scoured this area in his reconnaissance plane and thought he had spied the remains of a plane on an island. He was too far up to see clearly and he couldn’t risk landing the plane on the small island, but he decided that there was enough of a chance to merit investigating it up close.

"See anything yet, my friend?" Jerry startled as a swarthy-skinned, dark haired man came up to stand next to him at the rail. While Jerry was dressed in denim cut-off shorts and an old J&J Charters polo shirt, the other man was dressed in crème-colored linen trousers and a pale mint short-sleeved silk shirt. He was almost the same height as Jerry but his speech had a much more Continental accent than Jerry. He gazed at the horizon and finally could see the faint outline of the island that had excited Jerry so.

"Not yet, but maybe when we get closer," Jerry said impatiently. He looked up at the blazing sun and then back at the dark man. "You know, Thao, I’ll never understand why you prefer traveling by boat to traveling by air. It takes bloody forever to get anywhere this way!"

"Ahhh, but that is part of the charm and the romance, my friend!" Thao responded smoothly. "Sometimes the journey can be just as exciting as the destination!" His face sobered when Jerry didn’t share his double entendre. "But I understand your impatience, Jerry. I, too, am anxious for Jax to be found." He looked down at the binoculars in Jerry’s hands. "May I?"

Jerry handed the binoculars over with a sigh. "Sure. Knock yourself out." He started to pace the deck of the yacht nervously as Thao peered at the distant island.

"And just what is it I am supposed to be seeing through these?" Thao asked, straining to lean over the rail.

Jerry stood on the deck and stared up at the sun, combing his hands through his hair. "I thought I saw it the other day. Some wreckage from the plane." He let out a long breath. "I don’t know how I’m going to do it, Thao."

Thao put the glasses down. "What?"

Jerry looked up at him with misty eyes. "Tell Lady Jane that I didn’t find him. She’ll be heartbroken. She’s so sure he’s still alive." He rubbed the sides of his arms with his hands. "It’s like some d*mn maternal sixth-sense or something. She says she can just tell he’s not dead."

Thao shrugged. "Maybe she is right. Maybe there is some kind of special feeling that a mother gets about her children."

Jerry’s mouth set in a grim line. "Yeah, well I wish she would have gotten that sense when Jax brought old Randy around to meet the family for the first time." He shook his head. "God, that woman’s a leech! You ought to see her at the house, parading around in widow’s weeds already, just hoping that I won’t be successful in finding my brother so she can milk this for all it’s worth." He put his hands on his hips. "And you can be d*mn sure she’ll make it worth a lot when it comes to her bank account."

Thao came and put his arm around Jerry’s shoulders. "Don’t torture yourself thinking of her, Jerry. You’ve been doing all you can, searching night and day for Jax. Why don’t you come below and have some lunch? It will be several hours before we are close enough to the island for you to get a good look. Then, if you still think it’s worth investigating, I’ll have them lower the dinghy and you can go to the island yourself."

Jerry nodded and held the binoculars up to his eyes again. "Come on, Jax. Be there, d*mn you. Be there."

"Jax?"

"Hmmmm……."

"Jax!" Brenda lay in Jax’s arms, their bed of grass and ferns dappled with the afternoon sunlight. He had finally caught up to her and swooped her into his arms, running into the surf and sharing in her "bath." Cleanliness turned to passion quickly, and after he made love to her on the beach, they had shared a lunch of bananas and roasted yams. Somehow, if the yams were roasted and Brenda stayed upwind of them while they were cooking, she could stand the smell and she actually found she was hungry for them.

Between bites of food and shared kisses, passion flared again and Jax carried her to the shade of the trees near where they were building the raft. He made love to her again, slowly this time, driving her almost to the point of delicious insanity before he let her see the paradise they created together. As they lay together and Brenda was tracing little patterns in his chest hair, she could only imagine how beautiful their baby would look and how much she wanted it. She dozed off for a few seconds, but then startled when she realized the sun had gone past its mid-point in the sky.

"Jax! Shouldn’t we be working on the raft?"

"Hmmmmm……the raft." He opened one crystal blue eye and looked down at her askance. "You would rather work on the raft than lay here in nubile splendor, worshipping my naked body?"

She raised her eyebrows and her hand paused on his chest. "Excuse me? Nubile splendor? Worshipping YOUR body? Is that what we were doing?"

Jax chuckled. "Well, if you don’t know, maybe you need me to remind you." He reached for her breast, but she sat up straight.

"Jax, be serious," she pouted. "I mean, I know I said we shouldn’t take the raft out ourselves, but I DO think we should try to get rid of those drugs right away. So we should keep working on it, don’t you think?"

Jax sighed. "OK, you slavedriver, you. I can see your sense of amorous abandon has been used up for the day." He sat up beside her and propped his elbows on his bowed-out knees, folding his hands.

She looked back at him and giggled, turning away and covering her mouth. "What’s so funny?" he asked seriously.

She stifled a giggle and looked back at him. "…..you!"

He pretended shock and hurt. "Me? What’s so funny about me?"

"You think my naked body is FUNNY?" But Brenda couldn’t stop the attack of the giggles that was consuming her and she rolled to the side, holding her ribs and laughing. "I’ll show you FUNNY!" Jax gasped, and as he tried to roll to tickle her, she slithered out from beneath him and scampered into the trees. Jax bounded to his feet and watched her naked form fleeing from him. "YOU CAN RUN BUT YOU CAN’T HIDE, BRENDA!" he shouted in delight, and took off after her.

#####

Jerry had been watching through the binoculars the entire time the dinghy was being rowed to shore. His excitement had tripled once the Isabella got closer to the island and he was able to spot what he thought was a crudely built shack. He looked down at the bottom of the boat and flushed a little. He was ashamed of himself – after all, cursing the man rowing wouldn’t make the process go any faster. The poor man was doing his best.

Once the dinghy was close enough to shore, Jerry hopped out into the shallow water and helped the man pull the boat in himself. He told the man to stay with the boat, and he began to move cautiously down the beach. He had only gone a few hundred feet when he came upon the wreckage of the Lear and his heart leaped in his throat. He poked through the wreckage and when he discovered part of the fuselage showing a marking of "….& J Char….", he let out a yell of victory and pumped his fist in the air. As he was about to explore it further, he heard a sound like a tinkling bell in the distance and he moved back to the beach to use the binoculars again.

But he wasn’t prepared for what he saw. He lowered the binoculars and rubbed his eyes in disbelief. But when he looked through them again, he saw her – some kind of nymph or water sprite. She was completely nude and was sprinting down the beach, doing some kind of pagan happiness dance. She had long dark wavy hair that hung down her back and she was so petite – she had to be some kind of vision. She certainly didn’t look anything at all like the woman that the newspapers showed as Jax’s passenger on the flight. Jerry strained his eyes but still didn’t see Jax. He lowered the binoculars and broke into a smile. If he knew his brother at all, Jax was probably close behind. Leave it to Jax to manage to conjure up some kind of island spirit to keep him company.

#####

Brenda was breathing hard trying to keep ahead of Jax in their foot race. She had never been like this, even as a child. Ready to drop all of her responsibilities and go on a totally carefree footrace, completely nude, no less. She looked behind her and saw Jax was gaining as she was getting ready to break through the foliage and run onto the beach. "What’s the matter, old man?" she shouted happily. "Can’t keep up with a mere woman?" She heard Jax’s grunt of determination and knew she would pay the price when he caught her – not that the price was that disagreeable! {So much for working on the raft this afternoon!}

The exuberance of her newly discovered pregnancy and her confidence in his love gave Brenda a rosy glow as she began to run down the beach. She kept looking back over her shoulder, watching to see if Jax had broken through the shrubs yet, but there was no sight of him. She stopped for a moment and bent over to catch her breath. {He’s probably found some new shortcut. When I stand up straight, he’ll probably be standing there 5 feet in front of me, ready to claim his prize as victor.} She smiled to herself as she thought of the prize, and then stood up straight again, pushing her hair out of her eyes as she did. "Still think you can catch me, old man?" she shouted over her shoulder, not looking ahead of her.

As she turned to continue down the beach, she was stopped short by a solid wall of male flesh. He grabbed her arms above her elbows and held tight. As she looked up into his twinkling eyes, a laugh rumbled up from his chest. "I think I already have!"

Brenda’s face lost its color and her eyes grew wide. Her smile turned to an expression of abject horror. The solid wall of male flesh wasn’t HER solid wall. He was short and dark haired, and his eyes sparkled with excitement, which scared her even more. She tried to pull out of his grasp, but he was too strong for her to do any good. As she began to struggle in earnest, he laughed harder and held her tightly.

"Let me go!" she screamed in fright, and suddenly wished she hadn’t been such a good student in Jax’s school of "How Not to be a Prude." She continued to struggle as the man held her arms. Finally, she let loose with another blood-curdling scream that probably sent all of the fish nearby swimming out to deep water for their lives.

"Hey there now, take it easy! I won’t hurt you!" he said, still trying to hold onto his vision before she disappeared. But she only responded with another scream.

At that moment, Jax burst through the bushes. "Brenda! What’s the matt….." He stopped short at the sight before him. "Bloody h*ll!!!"

To be continued…..