All the Single Ladies Read Free Page A

theory. The practice, nearly an hour later, diverged somewhat.
    I don’t know why Ellie popped up her head at that precise moment; frankly, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that she thrashed her arms and legs, walloping my back until Jen and
I looked up. The issue was immediately apparent.
    The distance we’d covered couldn’t have been more than a mile, but as we’d swum along in blissful ignorance, a crucial factor had changed: we were no longer alone.
    Stretching the length of the coast were so many boats they would have made the Spanish Armada look like pedalos at Center Parcs. They were all identical. What followed was a frantic few hours of
splashing, panting and panicking, all of which did precisely nothing in the quest to locate our vessel.
    We couldn’t get anywhere near the island because of the coral and, of course, there was no way we were going to ask anyone on the other boats for help. We might have been desperate, but we
were also British. The embarrassment would’ve been too much. But there comes a point when your sense of hopelessness overtakes your sense of self-respect – and it came to us in a
flash.
    Our thighs and our arms ached. Our eyes and our skin stung. Our stomachs cramped, our feet hurt and our heads throbbed.
    More than all that, though, was the now overwhelming conviction that, if we didn’t take drastic action, we were going to be left there, abandoned and destined to live a Lost -style
existence. With no food, water, Factor 25 or Matthew Fox, I didn’t like that prospect one bit.
    In short, in the space of ten minutes we’d gone from not wanting to bother anyone with our troubles to being so desperate we’d have stowed away on a white slave ship.
    Unfortunately, that point came at the exact moment when the boats fired up their engines and prepared to do the one thing we were keen for them not to do: leave.
    ‘Surely they won’t go without us. Surely,’ said Ellie, breathless. ‘What do you think, Sam?’
    ‘No, they won’t,’ I replied with a conviction totally at odds with how I felt. ‘Surely.’
    ‘Yep, I’m sure too,’ added Jen.
    ‘As sure as sure can be,’ Ellie said for good measure.
    As the boats started heading back one by one to the main island, there came a point – with about three left – when there was only one thing to do.
    Scream.
    I’d thought I was loud – until Jen opened her gob and emitted a noise like the wail of a demented banshee on her way to the seventh circle of hell. But no matter how loud we shouted,
how pathetic we looked, how blue in the face we turned in our attempts to catch someone’s attention, we were ignored by all but one.
    His voice swam across the Indian Ocean and swept me up. It had the lilt of an accent I recognized immediately, and although it said a dozen things it meant only one: we were going to be
saved.

Chapter 4
    Jamie had taken the job with the long boat company four weeks earlier and he told us that night that ‘incidents’ like ours were common. Very common. In fact, the
more pressure Ellie put on him to reassure us we weren’t imbeciles, the more common they became.
    I often reminisce about that first evening, when we ended up alone, drinking cold Singha beers on the beach and sharing stories beside a fire we’d built, its flickering flames reflected in
our eyes. It was terribly romantic – apart from the fact that chronic sunburn had left my shoulders, nose and forehead looking like a walking strip of pancetta.
    I had a sense even then that it was one of the defining moments of my life, an unforgettable snapshot that would remain with me for ever. But it wasn’t the setting that made such an
impression. It was Jamie.
    He was beautiful in a way I’d rarely seen up close. Lean and tanned, his body was the equivalent of a gorgeous, gooey cream cake I was never going to be allowed. So why did I think I
wouldn’t be allowed him? For a start, with his blue, cool-water eyes and a