Saving Miss Everly

Pretending she's her twin gets complicated when Hope is shipwrecked with a handsome castaway. When rescue comes, will she risk her heart to confess the truth or will they part forever?

Pretending to be her sister, Hope Everly finds an adventure at last. The Caribbean's warm waters and tropical islands fulfill nearly all her dreams. When an excursion to visit another island with a naturalist expedition is interrupted by a storm, Hope is stranded on a desert island where she and her fellow castaways are dependent on a handsome stranger for their survival. 

Alejandro Córdoba, trapped and alone on the island long enough to give up all dreams of rescue, knows nothing of what has become of his war-torn homeland or his family. When he finds the beautiful Miss Everly washed up on the shore, along with her companions, he does not know if their arrival is a blessing or a curse. 

Hope's behavior, acting one way with Alejandro and another with her friends, further confuses things when they begin to fall in love. If rescue ever comes, will telling Alejandro the truth mean losing him forever?

Another wave crashed against the shore, pounding and dragging at the white sand as though determined to claim every single grain for the ocean bed. Alejandro ignored the sound, a constant thrumming that had once nearly driven him mad, too used to it now to pay it any attention. His focus lay elsewhere, on a herd of seals basking on a small outcrop of rocks near the shore. 

Alejandro hadn’t seen a seal in months. He’d been living off of fish, crabs, and the occasional turtle. The island provided several edible plants, yet he took from them sparingly. His diet had little variety, which made a seal a most desired delicacy.  

They were beautiful animals, their smooth pelts glossy in the sun and their large eyes somehow reminding him of both a dog and a cow at the same time. Hunting them, eating them, would have filled him with guilt were it not a matter of his survival. 

The seals did not stir, unaware of his approach. He was downwind, and the waves masked any sound his bare feet might have made on the sand. He gripped the spear he had fashioned out of a tree limb and a knife, certain of where to strike. 

A little over a year ago, he never would have pictured himself in his current predicament. What would his father have thought, seeing his eldest son creep across an island half-naked, bare-footed, bronzed by the sun and with the physique of a malnourished laborer? Unshaven, washed only by the saltwater of the ocean when he went into the water to fish, his parents likely would not even recognize him. 

Hours later, as he used deadfall from the trees to cook a portion of the meat, Alejandro leaned back against the trunk of a large tree—the tallest on the island—and tried to remember his life before the island. What would he give for a pair of shoes? Or a warm bath? A large portion of his father’s wealth, easily. 

“I am Alejandro Felipe de Córdoba y Verduzco,” he said aloud, as he did every night. “Son of Felipe Abel de Córdoba y Castellano and Marie Josefina de Verduzco Loayza.” He repeated his ancestry back four generations on each side, the Spanish names falling from his lips like a prayer. Then he actually prayed, every prayer he could remember, and he made up several of his own.  

His mother, a gentle soul, had patiently helped him memorize his family history before he was ten years old. “It is important,” she had admonished him in her lilting Castilian, “to remember where you came from. You might be a criollo, but your people are from Spain. Your ancestors love you and will guide you in all you do.” 

If his family, his father, had remained in Spain, Alejandro’s life would look very different. As a criollo, a Spaniard born in Buenos Aires in the Principality of Río de la Plata, his life had been in constant upheaval. His mother nearly died of a disease no doctor knew the name of, and the same disease took his younger sister. Alejandro, along with his brother and his parents had made their way in the new world with their farm and cattle, hearts broken for her loss. 

“Where were my ancestors when the fighting started?” he asked the fire, poking at it with a long stick meant to join the flames. “When the British came? When the loyalists and the revolutionaries formed militias? Eh? Where were you, mi familia?” 

He switched from English to Spanish, then from Spanish to French, and always prayed in Latin. The learning of languages had come easily to him and repeating himself in each of them kept his mind sharp. 

He had read Robinson Crusoe as a boy when he had learned English. The story had fascinated him and he spent hours playing at being marooned upon an island. Living as a castaway had erased all pleasure he’d once had for that book. Whatever fool had written it barely understood what it was like to be alone for months, now a year, frightened that every storm would leave him without food. 

The seal meat tasted incredible. It did not taste like fish, or any land mammal he had ever eaten, but it was magnificent. The fat on the animal would hopefully give his body some reserves. A great deal of the meat he intended to dry, and the pelt would be useful in strips. Every piece of the animal he would use in one manner or another. 

In his former life, he had not thought himself wasteful. Yet how many times had he left meat on his plate, or seen a table laid with more food on its boards than those gathered could ever hope to eat? 

Those parties he had attended, flirting with young women dressed in bright colors and fluttering their fans in his direction, dressed in the finest fashions from Spain, had faded in his memory so he could not even conjure up the face of any señorita from his past. 

That night, even after his stomach was filled, Alejandro had work to do to preserve the seal’s meat. Working by firelight, Alejandro wasn’t bothered by the hours of toil. Nor did he fear remaining in the dark. He was the largest predator upon the island. The iguanas and geckos posed no threat to him. The birds were tiny, too, and bedded down at night. The most dangerous things on the island were the spiders, which were easily avoided if one knew where they preferred to hide. The poisonous trees were dangerous too, he supposed, but he had learned as a boy what that particular type of tree looked like. 

The silence of the island continually tore at his mind.

Why had he allowed his father to send him away to the former British colonies? He had wasted years there, then boarded the cursed ship to come home at last, to be with his family. Would he ever see their faces again? Ever embrace them? 

Alejandro did not sleep. He stayed awake, drying the meat over the fire and then the coals, carefully tending to it. The meat would last a while, if he could keep it dry. He’d learned this skill riding with the vaqueros as a boy when they went looking for stray cattle. Perhaps he could have discovered the technique on his own, but he uttered prayers for blessings on the heads of each man who had been there that night to explain the matter to him. 

Birds started their song before he had finished his task. The sun rose in the east, and he turned to admire it from his spot on the tree-covered hill. The beauty of a gray sky turning yellow, then blue, had long since stopped giving him any measure of hope. Yet if the sun kept rising, so too would he. 

“Dios mío, strengthen my faith. Give me hope.”  The day stretched before him as the horizon, empty and lonely.