“I’m not going to attack you,” Ren growled.

“M-more than you already have?”

“You’re alive, aren’t you?” he snapped. “At least for now.”

Wrong choice of words, he realised. He was grimly aware that she was trembling now. He hated her terror and wanted to explain everything, but he didn’t dare take the time.

“Look, I’m trying to help you. There are some nasty creatures out here after dark, not a few of them human. Trust me, sweetheart. I’m your best chance of getting out of this whole thing in one piece.” In desperation he handed her an oversized T-shirt and shorts. Anything to cover her skimpy bikini.

When she didn’t move, he grabbed the shorts and yanked them over her hips. She flinched when he touched the bare skin at her waist.

“If I had evil designs on you, don’t you think I’d be taking your clothes off, not putting them on?” he drawled.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rae Anne Thayne finds inspiration in the beautiful northern Utah mountains, where she lives with her husband and three children. Her books have won numerous honours, including a RITA® Award nomination from Romance Writers of America and a Career Achievement Award from Romantic Times BOOKreviews. RaeAnne loves to hear from readers and can be reached through her website at www.raeannethayne.com or at PO Box 6682, North Logan, UT 84341, USA.

Dear Reader,

Readers often ask me where I find ideas for my books. I’m afraid I have no secret stash of ideas. For High-Stakes Honeymoon, I created a sibling for a favourite character of mine, Daniel Galvez, while I was writing a previous book. I didn’t know anything about this sibling other than his name – Lorenzo “Ren” Galvez – and that he was very sexy, of course, and a scientist somewhere in Latin America.

And then I happened to catch a few minutes of a documentary about sea turtles in Costa Rica and I knew this was where I had to plunk Ren. I had to create a heroine just right for him, and I came up with Olivia Lambert, someone funny and smart but racked with self-doubt. Olivia brings out all of Ren’s protective instincts and she also proves herself to be brave and self-reliant.

I spent months immersing myself in the culture and the overwhelming beauty of Costa Rica. While I haven’t actually visited yet, it’s definitely on my life-list of travel destinations and I plan to go soon.

I hope you enjoy the journey!

RaeAnne Thayne

High-Stakes Honeymoon

RAEANNE THAYNE

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Chapter 1

Paradise sucked.

Big-time.

Olivia Lambert sat on her damp towel, her hands clasped around her knees, watching the sun sink into the Pacific in a blaze of color. Palm fronds whispered a soft song overhead, the warm, impossibly blue ocean gently kissed the sand at her feet and a soft breeze danced across her skin.

Behind her, the thick, lush rain forest teemed with color and noise and life—bright birds, exotic butterflies, even a monkey or two.

As a honeymoon destination, this remote, wild corner of Costa Rica seemed perfect, especially staying in a guest villa on the estate of a reclusive billionaire. It was romantic, secluded, luxurious.

The only trouble was, she’d left her groom behind in Texas.

Olivia sighed, gazing out at the ripple of waves as she tried to drum up a little enthusiasm for the holiday that stretched ahead of her like the vast, undulating surface of the Pacific. She’d been here less than twenty-four hours and had nine more days to go, and at this point she was just about ready to pack up her suitcases and catch the next puddle jumper she could find back to the States.

She was bored and lonely and just plain miserable.

Maybe she should have invited one of her girlfriends to come along for company. Or better yet, she should have just eaten the cost of the plane tickets and stayed back in Fort Worth.

But then she would have had to face the questions and the sympathetic—and not so sympathetic—looks and the resigned disappointment she was entirely too accustomed to seeing in her father’s eyes.

No, this way was better. If nothing else, ten days in another country would give her a little time and distance to handle the bitter betrayal of knowing that even in this, Wallace Lambert wouldn’t stand behind her. Her father sided with his golden boy, his groomed successor, and couldn’t seem to understand why she might possibly object to her fiancé cheating on her with another woman two weeks before their wedding.

It was apparently entirely unreasonable of her to expect a few basic courtesies—minor little things like fidelity and trust—from the man who claimed to adore her and worship the ground she walked on.

Who knew?

The sun slipped further into the water and she sighed again, angry at herself. So much for her promise that she wouldn’t brood about Bradley or her father.

This was her honeymoon and she planned to enjoy herself, damn them both. She could survive nine more days in paradise, in the company of macaws and howler monkeys, iguanas and even a sloth—not to mention her host, whom she had yet to encounter.

James Rafferty, whom she was meeting later for dinner, had built his fortune through online gambling and he had created an exclusive paradise here completely off the grid—no power except through generators, water from wells on the property. Even her cell phone didn’t work here.

Nine days without distractions ought to be long enough for her to figure out what she was going to do with the rest of her life. She was twenty-six years old and it was high time she shoved everybody else out of the driver’s seat so she could start picking her own direction.

Some kind of animal screamed suddenly, a high, disconcerting sound, and Olivia jumped, suddenly uneasy to realize she was alone down here on the beach.

There were jaguars in this part of the Osa Peninsula, she had read in the guidebook. Jaguars and pumas and who knew what else. A big cat could suddenly spring out of the jungle and drag her into the trees, and no one in the world would ever know what happened to her.

That would certainly be a fitting end to what had to be the world’s worst honeymoon.

She shivered and quickly gathered up her things, shaking the sand out of her towel and tossing her sunglasses and paperback into her beach bag along with her cell phone that she couldn’t quite sever herself from, despite its uselessness here.

No worries, she told herself. She seemed to remember jaguars hunted at night and it was still a half hour to full dark. Anyway, she had a hard time believing James Rafferty would allow wild predators such as that to roam free on his vast estate.

Still, she wasn’t at all sure she could find her way back to her bungalow in the dark, and she needed to shower off the sand and sunscreen and change for dinner.

She had waited too long to return, she quickly discovered. She would have thought the dying rays of the sun would provide enough light for her to make her way back to her bungalow, fifty yards or so from the beach up a moderate incline. But the trail moved through heavy growth, feathery ferns and flowering shrubs and thick trees with vines roped throughout.

What had seemed lovely and exotic on her way down to the beach suddenly seemed darker, almost menacing, in the dusk.

Something rustled in the thick undergrowth to her left. She swallowed a gasp and picked up her pace, those jaguars prowling through her head again.

Next time she would watch the sunset from the comfort of her own little front porch, she decided nervously. Of course, from what the taciturn housekeeper who had brought her food earlier said, this dry sunset was an anomaly this time of year, given the daily rains.

Wasn’t it just like Bradley to book their honeymoon destination without any thought that they were arriving in the worst month of the rainy season. She would probably be stuck in her bungalow the entire nine days.

Still grumbling under her breath, she made it only a few more feet before a dark shape suddenly lurched out of the gathering darkness. She uttered a small shriek of surprise and barely managed to keep her footing.

In the fading light, she could only make out a stranger looming over her, dark and menacing. Something long and lethal gleamed silver in the fading light, and a strangled scream escaped her.

He held a machete, a wickedly sharp one, and she gazed at it, riveted like a bug watching a frog’s tongue flicking toward it. She couldn’t seem to look away as it gleamed in the last fading rays of the sun.

She was going to die alone on her honeymoon in a foreign country in a bikini that showed just how lousy she was at keeping up with her Pilates.

Her only consolation was that the stranger seemed just as surprised to see her. She supposed someone with rape on his mind probably wouldn’t waste time staring at her as if she were some kind of freakish sea creature.

Come on. The bikini wasn’t that bad.

She opened her mouth to say something—she wasn’t quite sure what—but before she could come up with anything, he gave a quick look around, then grabbed her from behind, shoving the hand not holding the machete against her mouth.

Panic spurted through her as he dragged her into the thick, lush rain forest. Her flip-flops almost fell off but she dug her toes into them as she stumbled after him until they were swallowed up by the jungle, the trail completely out of sight behind them.

After a moment, he stopped, holding her tightly against his hard chest as he stood motionless. She was aware of every single breath against her bare skin and could feel her own hitching in and out of her lungs.

She was going to hyperventilate. She could feel her hands start to go numb and her breathing accelerate. A whimper escaped her, and his grip tightened on her mouth. She could taste his skin, salty and masculine and foreign.

“Quiete,” he ordered harshly in her ear and even Olivia, who had only pulled a C-minus in prep school Spanish, understood what he meant. She forced herself to breathe more slowly, evenly, though she could hear her pulse, loud and strident in her ear.

For what felt like forever, they stood locked together, unmoving. She was too afraid to struggle against the strong arms that held her, acutely aware of the machete he held at his side and of exactly how much damage that blade could do.

He spoke a few more low words to her in Spanish but she didn’t understand what he wanted, any more than she could interpret the hoots and peeps and calls of the night creatures all around them.

He stiffened suddenly and in the distance she saw the beam of a flashlight coming from the trail. Whoever held it aimed it in their direction, but its light couldn’t pierce the thick growth. She wanted to cry out, do anything to reveal their location, but she didn’t dare, ever conscious of that machete.

A moment later, she heard loud voices saying something that sounded like curses in Spanish, before the light disappeared.

The man breathing raggedly behind her waited a few more seconds, then he growled something else she didn’t understand in her ear, the normally fluid Spanish sounding guttural and sharp.

He dropped his hand, apparently expecting some kind of answer. She didn’t have a clue what the question had been, which didn’t seem to go over well with him. Her captor repeated the words, more harshly this time.

“I’m sorry,” she whimpered. In the dim light, she saw the whites of his eyes as they widened.

“You’re American?” he whispered. “I should have known.”

He growled a long string of curses—pungent and raw and all too understandable.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “Please don’t hurt me. Look, I have money in my bag and credit cards. Take them,” she pressed, thrusting out her beach bag. “Please take them and let me go.”

He grabbed the bag from her and rummaged through it, but apparently didn’t find whatever he was seeking.

He lifted the machete and she swallowed a scream that ended in a gasp when he severed one of the long leather handles. He handed the mangled bag back to her and when she reached for it, he grabbed her wrists and tied the ruined handle around them.

Her heart plummeted to her feet when he took off again through the thick growth with his machete swinging, tugging her behind him with the improvised restraint.

“Please don’t hurt me,” she tried again. “My father will pay you anything you want.”

She hoped, anyway.

Maybe Wallace would figure this was a fitting end to his total disappointment in his only child, that she die at the hands of a homicidal, machete-wielding maniac in the jungles of Costa Rica.

“It’s too late for that. I’m in a boatload of trouble here and you just landed your little bikini-clad butt right in the middle of it.”

As much as she wanted to, she couldn’t contain her small sound of distress.

“Look, I won’t hurt you.” He paused and even through the darkness she could feel the heat of his look. “Unless you try to run, anyway. Believe it or not, I’m pretty certain you’re far safer with me than you would be if I left you here.”

She dug around in her psyche for any tiny kernel of courage and managed to find one in a dusty corner. “That’s odd,” she retorted through trembling lips, “considering I’ve been here an entire day and this is the first time a madman with a machete has dragged me into the jungle.”

The momentary spurt of bravado disappeared when she heard a shriek nearby, then a swoop of wings and the unmistakably grim sound of something dying.

Her captor tugged her restraint and pushed on. “There are worse things on Suerte del Mar than a madman with a machete.”

While her imagination tried to ponder what that might possibly be, he cut through the heavy growth, roughly parallel to the shore. He seemed to have eyes like the jaguar she had mistaken him for earlier. While she stumbled in her flip-flops over roots and small plants, he plowed through, the machete scything away as he tugged her inexorably toward some destination she could only guess at.

After a few more moments, he shifted direction and headed down toward the ocean.

“Where are you taking me?” she finally dared ask.

“Rafferty keeps his boat docked here. It’s the only way we’re getting away.”

Oh, she didn’t like the sound of that. “Please,” she tried one more time. “Just leave me here. I’ll only slow you down.”

For about half a second, she thought he might be wavering, then he tugged her restraint. “Sorry, sweetheart. You don’t have a choice anymore. Neither of us does.”

He led her toward the dock she had noticed that afternoon when she had been soaking up the sun, feeling sorry for herself and thinking her life couldn’t get much worse.

Ha!

Ren Galvez was totally screwed.

He figured it out the minute he walked into Suerte del Mar. He only intended to talk to Rafferty about tightening the leash on his dogs. Earlier in the day, he had seen the vicious one, the Doberman, within a few hundred yards of the nesting site just down the beach from Rafferty’s estate.

He had warned the man and his goons repeatedly, and he was damn sick and tired of it.

He had planned to tell Jimbo that he was done playing nice. If Ren caught the dogs there again, he was going to start taking pictures and broadcasting them on every sea turtle blog and Web site he knew about.

That should have been enough to do the trick. Ren despised the man on several levels, but James Rafferty put up a good show of being the benevolent environmentalist, a billionaire dedicated to protecting the rain forest and the lush biodiversity of this largely undeveloped region of Costa Rica.

That image would be more than tarnished if Ren went public with pictures of Rafferty’s guard dogs harassing nesting endangered sea turtles.

When he kayaked over from his research station down the coast, Ren only intended to talk to the man and warn him for the last time about the dogs.

He hadn’t expected to walk into hell.

He blocked the grim images out and focused only on the job at hand, saving his own skin and that of the soft woman currently tethered to him, stumbling as she hurried to keep up.

“Can you slow down?” his captive said, her sultry, tequila voice breathless. “It’s a little hard hiking in flip-flops.”

He tightened his grip on the leather strap without risking a look in her direction. He couldn’t afford to get distracted looking at the vast expanse of skin bared by her skimpy swimming suit.

She was stacked. The kind of lush, voluptuous figure that turned men’s minds to mush and their bodies to putty.

Not his. Not now. He had other things to worry about than how long it had been since he’d had much interest in a woman’s curves—and how inconvenient that he should take notice of these particular curves, when he ought to be more worried about saving both their skins.

“By now they’ve let the dogs loose after me. You might not care if Jimbo’s Doberman takes a piece out of that pretty little rear of yours, but I can’t say the same.”

She stopped on the trail. “Dogs? Why would Rafferty set dogs after you? What have you done, besides kidnap an innocent woman?”

“Nice try. You’re not innocent or you wouldn’t be hanging out with James Rafferty.”

“I’m just a guest here. I haven’t even met the man yet! I was invited to dinner at the house and was just returning to dress for it. He’s going to be very upset if I don’t show up.”

“You don’t know the half of it, sweetheart.”

He thought of what he had heard her esteemed host say as he stood over the body of the woman he had just killed.

This was a nice appetizer for the entrée I have planned later, Rafferty had drawled in an ice-cold voice to the horror-stricken man on the lawn chair next to the dead woman. Or perhaps I’ll save the little blond cream puff for dessert.

He’d been too busy trying to save his own hide to let the words sink in, until he realized the woman he bumped into on the trail must be Rafferty’s next course.

He couldn’t just leave her to face whatever Rafferty had planned for her. Blame it on this damn streak of chivalry he couldn’t quite shake, but he wasn’t about to leave her here to suffer the same fate as Rafferty’s other hapless guest—or worse.

As soon as he reached the dock, he realized that apparently Suerte del Mar’s famed luck didn’t apply to him. He was screwed again—the man’s elegant, outrageously expensive yacht, the Buena Suerte, was nowhere in evidence.

On the other hand, that might not be a bad thing. It meant Rafferty wouldn’t be able to come after them, at least not by water. “Come on,” he ordered his hostage.

“Where?”

“Rafferty keeps a kayak down here.”

“You’re just going to take it?”

He tried not to notice how soft and delectable she looked in that barely-there swimsuit. “I’ll leave an IOU. You got any better ideas?”

“Yes. Leave me here!”

He didn’t dignify that with an answer as they reached the sleek two-person sea kayak.

This kidnapping business was tricky stuff, he realized immediately. How was he supposed to haul the damn thing down to the surf while still holding his machete and the leather strap binding her hands?

He finally had to take a chance and toss the machete into the kayak and pull the craft one-handed down the sand while he dragged her along with the other hand.

It was hard, awkward work but adrenaline pushed him along, helped in large measure by the intense barking he could hear drawing closer.

“Get in,” he growled, when they reached the waves.

She froze, and in the moonlight she lifted stricken, terrified eyes to him. He wanted to assure her everything would be all right but he didn’t have time—and right about now, he needed somebody to convince him they would make it through this.

Instead, he picked her up and plopped her in the front cockpit, fastening the apron around her in one smooth motion.

“You’re going to have to trust me, lady, as insane as that might seem right now. If you don’t, we’re both going to end up dead, I can promise you that.”

“Please let me go,” she begged again. “Please. I won’t tell anyone I saw you, I swear. I don’t even know who you are or…or why you’re running away.”

She might not. But Rafferty certainly did. The gambling mogul would know as soon as his men found Ren’s own kayak at the other end of the beach who had come to call—and who had witnessed the whole ugly business by the pool.

By now they had probably found it, complete with his research notebooks and his satellite phone in its watertight pouch, which would have come in mighty handy right about now.

Their only chance was to make it two miles down the coast to his research station and his Jeep so he could head to the little rural police outpost in the next village to report what he had seen.

If anybody would even believe him. After his wildness of the last few years, he didn’t exactly have the greatest reputation among the villages on the Osa.

He pushed that depressing thought away as he towed the kayak out into the surf, then climbed in behind his hostage and started paddling like hell to get them away.

The woman was making small whimpers in front of him. He was sorry for her panic—terrifying a woman wasn’t something that sat well with Neva Galvez’s younger son.

His brother Daniel, the sturdy and honorable sheriff of Moose Springs, Utah, would probably frown on this whole business. But it couldn’t be helped. Right now he didn’t have breath left to explain anything. He could only work the oars with all his energy.

They made it to the point at the edge of the moon-shaped beach of the Suerte in half the time it would have normally taken him and only after they slid around it and out of sight of the estate did Ren begin to breathe a little easier.

They certainly weren’t out of trouble yet. Rafferty’s men had probably already found his kayak—easily identifiable to anyone around these parts—and figured out he was the idiot who had intruded on their boss’s private little party. But the roads in this section of the Osa were wild and primitive, requiring four-wheel-drive most of the time. This was the rainy season, when the roads turned into big sloshy piles of mud.

He could kayak down the coast far more quickly than they could drive to his place.

He cursed himself all over again. None of this would have happened if he had just slipped back the way he had come as soon as he figured out what was going down at the hacienda’s pool. Nobody would have even known he was there.

But seeing Rafferty standing over the body of a dead woman, the gun in his hand and the grisly hole in her forehead, had stunned him so much he had stood frozen like a damn piece of furniture as he watched Rafferty taunt the man tied to a lawn chair about the gambling debts he owed him and Rafferty’s uniquely effective form of debt collection.

The shock wore off quickly, leaving hot dread in his gut as he realized what a mess he had stumbled into.

He had tried to back out quietly. He was used to stealth—hell, he could sneak up on a twelve-hundred-pound nesting leatherback without making a sound.

He would have probably made it, if a howler monkey hadn’t chosen just that moment to come swinging through the trees and making a ruckus, giving away his position in the process.

One of the thugs Rafferty surrounded himself with had sighted him and he had given up on stealth and had just run like hell. A few moments later, he had stumbled onto the woman whose soft, hunched shoulders were currently trembling in front of him.

Ren sighed and slowed his frenetic paddling enough that he could catch his breath. They needed to hurry, but he could at least take a moment to allay her fears.

“Hold out your hands,” he said.

She turned, flashing him a wide-eyed look of fright in the moonlight, and he felt like some kind of perverted rapist again.

“Come on. I told you I won’t hurt you. If you promise not to jump out, I can untie you now.”

After a moment’s hesitation, she held out her trembling hands. Regretting her fear, he pulled his pocket knife out and cut through the leather binding her. She flexed her wrists and he thought maybe her big blue eyes lost a little of their panic.

“I’m Lorenzo Galvez. Ren. What’s your name?”

“Olivia Lambert. My…my father will pay to have me home safely.” Her voice faltered.

She had said that already, he remembered. And with that same note of doubt in her voice.

“You don’t sound a hundred percent convinced of that, sweetheart.”

“He will.”

“He a gambler?”

She blinked, her lashes looking impossibly thick and dark in the moonlight reflecting off the water. “Excuse me?”

“I’m just trying to figure out how you got messed up with Rafferty, Olivia Lambert. What are you doing at Suerte del Mar?”

“I’m…I’m here on my honeymoon.”

A raw, strangled laugh escaped him and he was tempted to smack the paddle against his head a few times.

Could his life get any more delightful?

“Your honeymoon. Perfect. So not only will we have a homicidal gazillionaire after us but a frantic groom looking for his bride.”

She made a sound he couldn’t interpret, but it was cut off when a dark shape moved past them in the water, brushing his paddles as it went.

“What was that?” she gasped.

He peered into the inky water. “Nothing to worry about. My guess is a triaenodon obesus. White-tipped reef shark. Around here they call them cazón coralero trompacorta. That’s what it looked like from here, but I could be wrong.”

“A…a shark?”

Her voice wobbled. Afraid she was about to cry, he hurried to reassure her.

“They’re relatively harmless. Pretty easygoing. Sometimes they even let divers hand-feed them. I’m a little surprised he would come this close to the surface, since they usually stay pretty close to the substrate at the ocean floor where they feed, but he was probably just curious about what we might be doing up here.”

“Are…are you a diver?”

He had to admit, she was taking all of this remarkably well, though he could sense every time the moments of panic seemed to creep in. As a scientist, he had to admire any creature that could adapt to its circumstances.

“When I have to be,” he answered. “I’m a research biologist. I study the nesting habits of sea turtles. Olive Ridleys and endangered leatherbacks.”

“And you moonlight as a machete-wielding maniac, apparently, capturing innocent women off the beach.”

Despite the grimness of their situation, the sweat pouring off him and the strain in his muscles as he paddled like hell down the coast, his lips curved at her tart reply.

“You know what they say,” he drawled. “It’s tough work, but somebody’s got to do it.”

Chapter 2

“Where are you taking me?”

His hostage’s sexy voice cut through the darkness as he power-stroked as hard as he could.

He inhaled raggedly, the muscles in his arms aching from the exertion. He considered himself in pretty darn good shape, but this insane pace and the strain of paddling both of them were definitely taking a toll on him.

Since he didn’t have breath to spare, he chose not to answer her question with a long explanation. “We’re almost there. See those lights ahead and to the left?”

She looked in the direction he pointed. “Yes,” she answered after a moment, wrapping her arms around herself.

She couldn’t possibly be cold, could she? he wondered. It was a mild night, probably only low 80s, and slightly cooler out here on the water, but it was far from chilly. Of course, she was only wearing a bikini and she wasn’t paddling her guts out.

“That’s my research station. Playa Hermosa. I’ve got a Jeep there.”

She shuddered and tightened her arms around herself.

He grimaced, wishing he had time to offer her words of comfort. He wasn’t crazy about the idea of traumatizing a bride on her honeymoon, but it couldn’t be helped.

He allowed a quick moment to wonder where her groom might be lurking in this miserable drama and why he had left his luscious little wife even for a minute. Maybe out fishing on the missing yacht? The Pacific coast of the Osa Peninsula was rich with marine life, from marlins to sailfish to tuna.

Any groom who would abandon his bride to go fishing deserved to have her kidnapped. Ren certainly wouldn’t have let her out of his sight.

Something about Rafferty’s next intended victim appealed to him on some deep, visceral level. In the pale moonlight shimmering off the water, she looked lush and soft and delectable, with creamy skin and voluptuous features.

A blond cream puff, Rafferty had called her. Ren had a feeling she wouldn’t appreciate the nickname—or his sudden fierce desire to swallow her up in one delicious bite.

The discovery did not improve his mood. In two years, he hadn’t been able to drum up even a tiny smidgeon of enthusiasm for the whores in the rough and ready town of Puerto Jiménez, no matter how determined their attempts at seduction during his infrequent visits to the cantinas.

In the space of the last hour, he had witnessed a vicious murder, had kidnapped a woman for the first—hopefully only—time in his life and terrified her out of her skull, then paddled like hell across the ocean.

Yet here he sat with the biggest hard-on of his life.

Disgusted with himself, Ren growled a fairly vile curse in Spanish and felt like an even bigger pervert when the woman in front of him flinched as if he were planning to ravish her any second now, something he was fairly sure was impossible—not to mention rather ill-advised—in a sea kayak adrift on the open ocean.

He could ignore the heat and hunger. He’d had plenty of practice, after all. Excepting those first wild months after the fire when he hadn’t climbed out of a bottle, for two years he had focused his entire energies on his work, leaving no room for anything else.

Though he had the occasional research assistant and used volunteers to help him patrol the beaches for nesting sites, he lived a solitary life for the most part, and that was just the way he liked it. He had a few friends on the Peninsula, but most of the villagers considered him the Crazy Turtle Man of Playa Hermosa.

Early in his time in Costa Rica five years ago, a few heated altercations with poachers after the culinary prize of turtle eggs taken beyond the legal season had started the rumors. His wildness of the last two years had cemented the reputation.

He imagined this little escapade would probably add more fuel to the fire if word got out, which he had no doubt it would.

No help for it, he thought. Snatching Rafferty’s little blond cream puff had been an impulse, but he couldn’t regret it.

At least not yet.

When he neared Playa Hermosa, he paddled as far as he could and let the waves push them the rest of the way. Close to shore, he climbed out and pulled the kayak up the beach.

In the moonlight, his hostage looked numb, her features expressionless and dull, and he hoped to hell she wasn’t going into some kind of delayed shock and taking a mental vacation on him. That would be just what he needed right about now—a catatonic sexpot in a bikini.

Though he would have liked to consign Rafferty’s expensive kayak to the sharks, he couldn’t find it in him to waste such a sleek, beautiful craft. With Olivia Lambert still inside, he muscled it up past the high-tide mark, then reached a hand to help her out.

“Here we are. We’ll just grab my keys inside and a change of clothes for you and be on our way.”

She gazed at him blankly, and he wondered again if she’d lost her marbles somewhere out there on the ocean.

“It’s okay,” he tried to reassure her.

After a long pause, she slipped her hand in his and climbed out of the kayak as regally as a princess. Her small hand was cool and soft as the petals of the hibiscus and orchids and frangipani flowering around them, and she trembled only a little.

It was dark and would probably begin raining any minute, but for now the moon was full and clearly illuminated the short pathway from the beach to his station. He gestured for her to proceed him.

“Head through those trees right there,” he said. “We’re on the only developed road in this area, if you can call the mud track in the green season a road.”

He should have been tipped off to her intent, but her abstracted, out-of-it air fooled him. He was completely unprepared when she took just a shuffling step forward in the direction of the trail, then whipped around the other way and took off down the beach.

For about half a second, he was severely tempted to just let her slip away into the jungle. His life and the surreal trip it had become in the last hour would sure be a hell of a lot easier without having to deal with a soft dumpling of a bride who seemed on the verge of dissolving into a quivering mass of fear any second now.

He even took a step toward his research station, then he growled an oath and turned around. He couldn’t let her just wander off out here. The jungle was a dangerous place, especially for a soft thing like her.

She had several seconds head start and she was faster than he would have expected. She was almost to the thick shelter of trees, where he would have a much tougher time catching her.

Out of patience and breath, he finally lunged at her from the side in a classic football tackle his college linebacker of a brother would have been happy with, just before she would have slipped into the brush.

With an oomph, she hit the sand and his momentum carried him on top of her.

For a second, he froze there, some savage male beast inside him taking primitive delight in her soft curves.

He was aroused all over again, he realized with no small measure of disgust.

All his life, he had considered himself a pretty decent guy. His parents taught all three of their sons to treat women with respect and honor, and Ren thought he had completely absorbed those lessons.

So why did this woman—this situation—seem to bring out the worst in him and make him feel like some kind of rampaging beast?

She squirmed beneath him, fighting frantically to be free. “Please,” she whimpered. “Please don’t.”

Her words and the panicked fear behind them were like taking a dip in spring runoff back home in Utah. He stood up, this time keeping a close hold on her wrist.

“I’m not going to attack you,” he growled, tugging her back up the beach toward the station.

“M-more than you already have?”

“You’re alive, aren’t you?” he snapped. “At least for now.”

Wrong choice of words, he realized, when she hissed in a breath. He was grimly aware she was trembling now as she stumbled along behind him.

He hated her terror and wanted to explain everything but he didn’t dare take the time. Rafferty and his men hadn’t reached Playa Hermosa yet, but he knew they couldn’t be far behind. Her little attempt at escape and the subsequent delay it caused could turn out to be a deadly mistake for both of them.

He could tell her everything as they drove to the little police outpost in Matapalo, but for now they needed to get the hell out of Dodge.

“Look, I’m trying to help you here. You can believe me or not, but there are some mighty nasty creatures stalking the Osa after dark, not a few of them human. Trust me, sweetheart, right now I’m your best chance of getting out of this whole thing in one piece. If you run away from me again, I’m going to have to tie you up for your own safety and neither of us wants that.”

She muttered something under her breath he didn’t catch but he didn’t have time to waste wondering about it. He just headed up the hillside to the research station, keeping his hand firmly clamped around her wrist the whole way.

He had locked the station to protect his equipment inside when he headed down to Suerte del Mar earlier and his keys were zippered into the same waterproof bag on his kayak, but he quickly found the emergency spare snugged under Yertle, the huge leatherback carved by one of his research assistants the summer before.

With one eye trained on the hill for approaching headlights, he unlocked the door and yanked her inside behind him.

He didn’t dare let her go so he kept her wrist firmly in his grasp as he grabbed his Jeep keys, then headed to his bedroom and flipped on the generator-driven light. When she caught sight of his bed, she dug her heels into the concrete floor as if he were going to yank aside the mosquito netting and ravish her on the spot.

He sighed and forced away the annoyance. There was no time for it. If she wanted to think he was some kind of mad rapist, so be it.

Of course, it didn’t help that seeing her in the light made him all too aware of her lush, curvy femininity, so blond and soft and different from anything to be found in this wild corner of Costa Rica.

He opened a drawer and grabbed a couple clean T-shirts and some shorts. They would be way too big for her, but they’d have to do.

“Here, put these on,” he ordered.

That blank stare was back—he saw it take over the stunning blue of her eyes—and he sighed. She seemed to retreat into some hidden corner of her mind, somewhere he couldn’t reach. Right now, he didn’t have the time or the patience to try.

“Look, we’re in for a wild ride to Matapalo if we want to make it before Rafferty and his goons find us. Unless I miss my guess, we’re going to have rain in a few minutes and even with the canvas top on the Jeep, you’ll be soaked. You’re going to need something else to wear.”

This would be a hell of a memory from her honeymoon, he thought, as he finally just grabbed the T-shirt and pulled it over her head. She cooperated enough to push her arms through the sleeves.

If her husband had left her at Rafferty’s to go fishing knowing he owed the bastard money, Ren hoped the idiot was impaled by a marlin and then stung by a couple thousand jellyfish.

He grabbed a pair of shorts and yanked them up over her hips. She flinched when he touched the bare skin at her waist.

“If I had evil designs on you, don’t you think I’d be taking your clothes off instead of putting more on?” he growled.

That seemed to pierce the haze of panic around her and he watched some of the blankness recede. He didn’t have time to be grateful for it as he suddenly remembered one more item that might come in handy. He hurried to his closet and dug for a moment, emerging a moment later with a large shoe box.

In the distance, he thought he heard the throb of an engine and he swore harshly. “Come on. We’ve got to haul ass.”

He half dragged, half carried her to his Jeep and threw her inside, tossing the box and a few other items he’d grabbed on the way out the door into the back seat, alongside the emergency survival pack he always kept there in case he found himself stranded on some remote beach somewhere by weather or tides.

He quickly reached across the seat to buckle her shoulder belt, earning a quick ragged breath for his trouble. As her chest expanded with the sharp inhalation, the movement pressed her voluptuous breasts to his arm and he felt the hairs there rise—along with other parts of him that had no business noticing her in the middle of running for their lives.

He had been too damn long without a woman.

His beat-up old Jeep started immediately—a minor miracle—and he gunned the engine down the rutted, bumpy dirt track.

At least the afternoon rains had dried somewhat so the roads were at least moderately passable for now, until the evening rains hit.

The few roads in this primitive part of Costa Rica were unreliable at best. This was the only route between Puerto Jiménez and Carate, the gateway to Corcovado National Park.

In the relatively dry summer months from December to May, he could usually count on being able to make it to Jiménez in only an hour, but in the rainy season—the green season, they called it to keep from scaring away the tourists—when it rained at least an inch or two every day, it could take him three times as long.

And he usually just counted on being stuck at the station for the entire month of October, with its near constant deluge, unless he caught a flight out of the airstrip at Carate.

Here in late September, he still had a possibility of making it safely. All he had to do right now was get them to the small police station in Matapalo. But if the rains hit while they were en route, this dirt road would become a slick, dangerous mess.

He just had to hope that didn’t happen.

As her captor gunned the rattletrap Jeep’s engine and sped away from his lair with his tires spitting mud and gravel, Olivia held on to the grab bar and divided her time between clamping her teeth together to keep from crying out and whispering a fervent prayer that her pitiful life would be spared.

She wanted to be numb, to tune it all out. It was taking every ounce of concentration to keep her emotions contained.

Instead of the blessed oblivion she would have vastly preferred, every sense seemed accentuated, as if the world had suddenly come sharply into focus. She was acutely aware of each jostling rut in the road, the throb of the engine, the heavy, humid air pressing down on her.

She was especially aware of the man beside her—his overwhelming size and strength.

For the last hour since he stepped out of the jungle, machete in hand, he had been simply a shadowy, threatening hulk of a man. She hadn’t caught a clear glimpse of him until he turned on the lights inside his spartan concrete research station.

Though he was no doubt at least six feet tall, he had not been quite as large as her imagination had conjured up, more lean and lithe than she expected.

During that hideous kayak ride as he had swiftly propelled them through the waves, she had tried not to look at him. It was the only way she could keep from letting the panic completely overwhelm her.

Her impression then had been only of some dark, terrifying stranger. The light inside his dwelling had revealed a man of extraordinary good looks. Her friends in Fort Worth would have drooled over someone like him, with those chiseled features, the dark, intense eyes, full mouth, and eyelashes so long they looked fake.

He looked nothing like any scientist she had ever seen. He looked more like some kind of Latino pop star, and she could easily imagine him on a stage somewhere crooning to thousands of screaming girls.

She wasn’t at all reassured that he wasn’t the hideous monster her imagination had conjured up. Somehow this man seemed far more dangerous to her peace of mind.

He was wild and rugged and beautiful, just like this isolated part of the world, completely out of her realm of experience.

Ren Galvez was exactly the kind of man she would have avoided in Dallas, someone strong and masculine and…and sensual.

She caught the word and grimaced at herself. What did she know if the man was sensual or not? Most likely, he was cold and analytical, more interested in facts than figures, at least the feminine kind.

But there had been that moment back on the beach when he had tackled her and his hard, muscled body had pressed her into the sand. Through her fear and the adrenaline pumping violently through her system as she tried to escape, she could swear she had detected definite interest from the man.

She thought for certain he would attack her there, press his obvious advantage in size and strength to overpower her. Instead, he had helped her to her feet and guided her to his utilitarian quarters, where he had proceeded to find clothes for her.

What on earth did he want with her? He continued to assure her he wouldn’t hurt her, but if rape wasn’t on his mind, what other motive could he have?

Was he after money? He had asked her name but maybe that was only to reassure himself he’d snatched the right heiress.

She had heard about prevalent ransom kidnappings in some Central and South American countries, but everything she had read about Costa Rica assured her the country was safe. Ticos were proud of their stable government and their relative prosperity, and the country went out of its way to eagerly welcome visitors.

Her imagination buzzed with possibilities. He said he was a scientist. The equipment in his dwelling certainly backed up the assertion. There had been that carved turtle on the porch and the sign over the door that said Playa Hermosa Turtle Institute.

Maybe he was looking for funding and had hit on a rather unorthodox method of raising support. It seemed ludicrous in the extreme, but for the life of her, she couldn’t come up with any other explanation.

Why else would a turtle researcher snatch a guest from a neighboring estate, just to rush off through the night with her?

It all seemed so surreal. Things like this—mysterious strangers grabbing her at machete-point—didn’t happen to her.

Everything about this situation terrified her. Most of all, she hated not knowing what was happening and Ren Galvez—if that was his real name—seemed in no hurry to explain.

She desperately wanted to trust him when he said he wouldn’t hurt her. But then again, she had a lousy habit of fooling herself into believing the best in people.

Just look at her choice of erstwhile fiancés. For six months, she had convinced herself Bradley loved her. How many warning signs had she ignored, just to avoid stirring up the waters?

She had been so caught up in the unaccustomed sensation of pleasing her father, for once, that Bradley and her misgivings about him had almost seemed superfluous.

Not that any of that mattered right now while she was in the hands of a madman who was going to drive them both over a cliff into the Pacific. She swallowed a scream as the Jeep slid toward the edge, but her captor yanked it back to the middle of the track that passed for a road.

Her heart was still pounding when the sky unleashed the nightly rains he warned about.

Rain seemed like such a benign term for this. Growing up in Texas, she thought she knew about precipitation, but this was like nothing in her experience. It was as if someone had suddenly turned on a hot high-pressure shower and let it loose on the countryside.

Buckets of water gushed off the trees and cascaded down the road. The canvas roof of the Jeep offered some protection but not much. In only a few moments, Olivia was soaked.

The Jeep slid again, moving inexorably toward the side. This time she didn’t bother to contain her scream.

“I’ve got it,” he assured her. “Hang on.”

He muscled out of the skid, then downshifted for the next hill. She didn’t know how he managed it—years of experience, probably—but he managed to get them up the next hill, and they plowed through mud and muck and rivers of rain rushing down the road.

As abruptly as it started, the rain ceased, as if someone turned off that imaginary tap somewhere.

She thought she saw lights ahead and the impression was verified a moment later when he pulled up to a small cluster of buildings—two or three with what looked like a small general store and a couple of ramshackle houses.

He parked in front of the store, where Olivia was surprised to see a sign tacked to the window of the little storefront that said Policía. An odd destination for a would-be rapist, she had to admit, and found some degree of comfort from that.

Galvez turned off the engine. “This won’t take long. In a minute, this will all be over and you’ll be safe, I promise.”

Hope and confusion warring within her, Olivia watched him open his door and start to climb out.

And then the shooting started.

Chapter 3

For half a second, Olivia wasn’t sure what was happening. It sounded like firecrackers going off somewhere or a car backfiring, but then she hadn’t seen any other vehicles on the road.

Before the reality had really soaked in that those were bullets flying around, her captor suddenly leaped back into the Jeep and started the vehicle’s engine.

“Get down,” he yelled, driving with one hand and reaching the other across the Jeep to shove her head to her knees when she only stared blankly at him.

The Jeep slithered in the slick mud, then the rear wheels engaged. She heard a ping ricochet off the metal skin as bullets continued to rain around them. Miraculously, none hit the tires. A blowout in these conditions would be disastrous, she knew.

She huddled there, her hands over her head, numb with fear and certain that any moment now, Galvez could take a hit and the vehicle would go careening out of control.

Her breathing hitched and she fought hysteria, wanting nothing so much as to curl into the fetal position and disappear. She heard sirens behind them and could see the strobe of lights piercing the darkness as the Jeep rattled and shook its way down the trail.

She didn’t know how close the pursuers were—and she wasn’t completely sure whether she wanted to evade them or have them catch up. She wanted out of this situation now and at this point she was willing to take any rescue offered.

On the other hand, she wasn’t sure she was really crazy about turning herself over to police officers so willing to shoot first and ask questions later. They didn’t seem particularly concerned about her safety while they fired a barrage of bullets at the Jeep.

“Hang on,” Galvez ordered.

As if she could do anything else, besides pray. She gripped the roll bar with one hand and braced one hand against the dashboard to steady herself against the wild jostling of the vehicle.

“What are you doing?!” she gasped when he suddenly turned off the headlights, pitching them into darkness.

“Trust me,” he said.

Before she could tell him how absolutely ludicrous such a statement was under the circumstances, he jerked the wheel off the road into what looked like impenetrable jungle. There must be some kind of track here, but for the life of her, she couldn’t see anything. How did he know where he was going? she wondered, as rain-soaked branches whipped the Jeep.

At least the shooting stopped, but she fully expected them to ram headlong into a tree any moment now. Some moonlight filtered through the thick trees, but he couldn’t possibly see more than a few feet in front of them.

She was not cut out for wild moonlit rides through the rain forest. She had been known to have panic attacks in rush hour traffic, for heaven’s sake.

After several heart-pounding moments—each one that seemed to last a lifetime—he turned the Jeep again, this time driving over plants and around trees until they were off even that narrow track, swallowed up by the rain forest.

He shut off the engine and turned to face her, and she saw the gleam of his teeth in the pale moonlight.

“End of the road, sweetheart. I think we lost them for now.” He climbed out of the Jeep and reached behind the seat for a backpack.

She gazed blankly at him. “You’re…you’re just going to leave me here?”

He gave a short laugh. “Do you want me to?”

Some creature screeched in the night and Olivia shivered. She wanted to think she could find her way back to the main road, but she wasn’t completely certain.

The alternative—huddling here all night on the off chance that someone might come along and find her—was not at all appealing.

“What’s happening?” She hated the thin note of panic in her voice but seemed unable to keep it at bay. “Why were the police shooting at us back there?”

He pulled a few more items out of the back of the Jeep and set them on the ground, then opened her door and reached a hand to help her out—or rather, he didn’t really give her a choice in the matter, just tugged her out of the vehicle.

He had his machete out again, she saw with a spurt of fear. But as soon as she climbed down from the high-profile vehicle, he turned around and started scything away at the underbrush.

“My fault,” he finally answered, dragging several of the branches he cut over the Jeep. “I should have taken into consideration that Rafferty probably owns every officer of the law between here and Puerto Jiménez. There’s only one halfway decent road around the Peninsula to the Golfo Dulce and the bastard has probably already got roadblocks all along the way.”

He was trying to conceal the vehicle from their pursuers, she finally realized as he continued to cut branches and huge, leafy ferns. She stood with her arms wrapped around her, watching him work.

“I guess Rafferty and your groom—what’s his name?”

For a moment, she couldn’t think how to answer him. “Uh, Bradley,” she finally said.

“Right. Bradley.” He said the name with thinly veiled scorn. “I guess Jimbo and Bradley aren’t going to let me just run off with you after all.”

“Did you really think they would?”

“I wasn’t thinking, if you want the truth. If I had been, I would have realized that with one phone call, Rafferty has probably got his people up and down the whole damn coast, all the way to Jiménez, roadblocks in every one-donkey town from Agua Buena to Plataneres. He’s probably told the rural police some cock-and-bull story, all about how I stormed onto Suerte del Mar and kidnapped one of his guests.”

“The nerve of the man.”

Her sarcasm came out of nowhere, surprising the heck out of her. In the moonlight, she saw his teeth widen into an appreciative grin. She blamed her sudden breathlessness on the lingering adrenaline buzz.

“Exactly,” he said. “I am not going to let the bastard pin this on me. He knows exactly why I rescued you from Suerte del Mar, but you can bet the house he’s not going to share that bit of information with the policía.”

Rescued? Is that what he called scaring the life out of her, dragging her down the beach at machete-point and paddling her across the open ocean with sharks circling them?

“The chief of police in Puerto Jiménez and I go way back,” he went on.

Somehow she didn’t find it surprising that this man had had brushes with the law before, given his criminal record so far. Ren Galvez’s name was probably engraved on a cell somewhere, at the very least.

“He’s a good man, a rare breed among officials down here who can’t be bribed. If we can make it there, I know I can convince Mañuel Solera of what really happened.”

He smiled again, looking entirely too cheerful under the circumstances. “Good thing I brought you some decent shoes.”

He rummaged through a box and held up a pair of hiking boots.

The sight of them filled her with dread. “Uh, why do I need decent shoes?”

“There’s a trail through the Gulfo Dulce Forest Reserve to El Tigre. We can hook up with it back on the track we were just on. The good news is, it’s only ten miles or so. Once in El Tigre, we can catch a ride into Jiménez.”

She did not like the sound of this. Ten miles or so? He couldn’t be serious. He couldn’t really expect her to walk ten miles through the jungle, could he?

“Um, I’m not much of a hiker. I should probably tell you that up front. You’re obviously in a hurry and I’m afraid I’ll only slow you down. Why don’t you just go on ahead? I’m sure I can find my way back to the road.”

Maybe.

“Nice try. Trust me, sweetheart. You don’t want to wait for Rafferty to find you. He won’t be in a pleasant mood.”

If they were going to talk about moods, she was pretty certain she had James Rafferty beat when it came to lousy ones right about now. She was tired and scared and hadn’t eaten in about seven hours.

The jungle around them teemed with life, buzzing insects and the flap of fruit bats overhead. She heard a rustle in the bushes of some unseen creature, then a terrifying, low-throated yowl from what sounded like only a few yards away.

She gasped and grabbed for him in the darkness, grabbing hold of his shirt and a good portion of warm skin. When faced with the alternatives, a delusional man with a machete didn’t seem like such a bad bet.

“What was that?” she gasped.

He shrugged and she felt his muscles ripple. “Sounded like a puma. They’re pretty common out here. He’s farther away than he sounded, though. And he probably won’t bother us.”

Probably was not exactly reassuring.

“If you’re talking mammals, it’s not the big cats you should worry about so much out here as the white-lipped peccaries.”

“P-peccaries?” She realized she was still clinging to his arm and quickly released him. Immediately, she felt chilled, even though the air was still heavy and warm.

She had seen a small herd of wild peccaries once while visiting her grandmother in south Texas and had no desire to bump into any out here in the dark.

“It’s not uncommon to see a herd of twenty or more out here. Don’t worry, though. You’ll smell them and hear the cracking of their teeth long before you see them. Once you hear them, all you have to do to get away is climb a tree.”

She swallowed a sob. She so didn’t want to be here. She wanted to be safe and dry and blessedly cool in Fort Worth in her condo, even if that meant she had to deal with all the wedding gifts that needed to be returned and hear a dozen messages from her father on her answering machine trying to change her mind.

Sometimes you’ve got to just play the cards you’re dealt, sugar. She could hear her maternal grandmother’s drawl in her ear and knew Belinda was right. She didn’t have a lot of choices. At the moment, this man didn’t seem inclined to hurt her and had actually gone out of his way to be solicitous. Though it seemed insane, she was going to have to trust him, at least until she could figure out a way out of this mess.

“Sit down and let’s change your shoes. You’re going to have to wear a pair of my socks. Sorry about that.”

He pulled out a flashlight and a moment later a beam of light shone into his pack. He dug around for a moment, then produced a pair of thick socks. “Hurry.

We don’t have much time,” he said as he handed them to her, then pulled a pair of hiking boots from the box he’d thrown into the Jeep at the last moment.

She leaned against a tree trunk and hurriedly pulled them on, wincing a little at the pinch of wearing someone else’s shoes. Surely not his. They were far too small, most definitely made for a woman’s foot.

It seemed an odd, almost ominous sign to her. Why would he have a pair of women’s hiking boots when she’d seen no signs of anyone female living at his abode?

Maybe he was some kind of crazed serial killer who dressed his victims in hiking boots and marched them into the rain forest.

She cursed herself for her vivid imagination. That’s what came from watching too many crime dramas on TV.

When the boots were laced, he reached a hand to help her from the trunk.

“Sweet thing like you is going to be eaten alive out here,” he murmured, standing entirely too close. Her pulse cranked up a notch. Here was the part where she should probably decide she would rather risk the jungle than whatever grisly fate he had in store for her, but somehow she couldn’t make her legs cooperate.

She held her breath, praying he couldn’t hear the harsh pounding of her heart. A moment later, she winced at her foolishness as he doused her with bug spray. “That’s going to wear off in an hour, so remind me to spray you again.”

Without another word, he shouldered his backpack, aimed his flashlight into the thick vegetation, and headed off without looking back to see if she followed.

She could escape right now, just turn around and race through the trees until she was out of his sight. She could try to find her way back to the main road and take her chances with Rafferty’s mood.

Or she could stay here and let the pumas and the jaguars and the white-lipped peccaries get her.

Torn, her insides churning with indecision, she froze. Finally, he must have clued in that she wasn’t behind him. He stopped and aimed his flashlight at her. “Come on. We’ve got a long walk ahead of us, but with any luck you’ll be on a plane back to the States by this time tomorrow.”

He could have just been telling her what he thought she wanted to hear. A madman would have no reason to tell the truth. Though she warned herself to be cautious, she still found great comfort in his words.

With a long, resigned sigh, she followed him, feeling as if she were leaving more of her common sense behind with every step she took in the unfamiliar boots.

Though it was full dark and had to be past nine o’clock at night by now, the heat still weighed heavily on her. It pressed against her in every direction until she felt as if she were walking through hot gelatin. The trail was muddy from the rains earlier—the constant rains, apparently—and soon the mysterious new boots were caked in it. With every step, more mud clung to the boots until she felt as if she were lifting half the trail as she stepped.

After only a few minutes, she was drenched in sweat and wholly miserable. She couldn’t see anything but the mud in front of his flashlight beam as it cut through the darkness.

“I hesitate to point this out,” she said, “but all the guidebooks say it’s not wise to be in the jungle after dark.”

“That’s what they say.”

“Yet here we are.”

He aimed his flashlight toward her and in the reflected light, she saw his mouth lifted into a half smile. “You have any better suggestion? Maybe a float plane stashed somewhere I don’t know about?”

“Of course not.”

“Neither do I. We could kayak around the peninsula, but that would take much longer and would be far more dangerous in the dark. Rafferty’s got a power yacht that can move a whole hell of a lot faster than I can paddle. He can patrol the whole coast looking for us and there’s nowhere to hide out on the open water. So unless you can come up with some other option, as far as I can tell, we don’t have any other choice but to keep walking.”

Apparently, Ren Galvez wasn’t of the curl-upright-here-and-die school of thought. She sighed and kept walking.

She never knew it was possible to hate someone with such a fierce, all-consuming passion.

She had been angry with Bradley for his gross betrayal, devastated by her father’s complete lack of filial support, hurt at her friends and coworkers for whispering about her behind her back, for acting as if she were the crazy one to get so bent out of shape over a little infidelity before any vows had been spoken.

But she never knew what it meant to loathe someone until just this moment. She decided she despised Lorenzo Galvez, with every aching, exhausted, itchy cell of her being.

She hated him. She hated this. She was tired, she was hungry, her feet ached from boots that were too tight and her thighs burned from hiking uphill through the mud.

After perhaps an hour—or two or three or ten, she was too numb to really know for sure—he stopped abruptly. She was so focused on plodding forward, lost in her trance of misery, that she wasn’t aware he had planted his feet on the trail until she plowed into him.

He turned and steadied her to keep her from toppling over. “Easy there, sweetheart. Need a drink?”

The air was so humid she felt as if she could swallow it every time she opened her mouth, but at his words, she became aware of a fierce thirst. She had to admit, a big, icy piña colada would be delicious right about now. Instead, she apparently had to settle for the water bottle he pulled out of his pack.

She had a sudden violent urge to bash him over the head with it. Instead, she inhaled a deep, calming yoga breath—the only thing that had sustained her thus far on this hellish journey—and grabbed the bottle from him.

She wanted nothing more than to slump against the nearest tree and collapse, but fear of scorpions or fire ants or any of the other creepy crawlies she’d read about in the guidebooks kept her upright.

Hydrating her system helped allay the worst of her homicidal urges. She still didn’t feel exactly favorable toward the man, but at least the impulse to see if she could gouge his eyes out with the mouth of the water bottle seemed to fade.

“We’ve got to keep moving,” he said after only a moment or two.

She drew in a shaky breath, pouring all her energy into keeping her sobs at bay. Just the thought of trying to lift her muck-laden shoes another step felt over whelming, impossible.

“I can’t,” she moaned.

“You have to. Just another mile and then we can take a rest, Mrs. Lambert.”

She ground her teeth, absurdly infuriated by the address, as if that were the least of his offenses toward her. “Olivia,” she snapped.

“Olivia.”

He stepped closer, and in the darkness, he seemed like some terrifying, nebulous creature. Still, she could feel the heat emanating from his skin, the energy that surrounded him.

“Close your eyes,” he ordered.

“Why?” she asked warily.

“Bug juice. Time for a refresher.”

She complied, wishing she could keep her eyes closed and just block this entire ordeal out. She felt vulnerable, exposed, as he moved around her with the deet. She was oddly aware of him, her subconscious registering his location in space every second, even with her eyes closed.

How was it possible for her to be so physically aware of him and yet to fear and despise him at the same time?

She had to be sick and twisted, in addition to this amazingly violent streak she was only just discovering.

“You’ve been great so far. Twenty more minutes, okay?”

One or both of them would be dead by then, she was fairly certain. If the miserable conditions and the myriad dangers out here didn’t kill them, she would do the job herself.

He started off down the trail, just expecting her to blindly follow along, but somehow she couldn’t make her legs cooperate. She stood helplessly watching after him as the light disappeared.

The light was back in just a few seconds, with Ren looking disgruntled and frustrated at the end of it. “I know you’re worn out, but I’m afraid it’s going to rain again soon and we can’t stay out here without any kind of shelter. You’ve got to press forward a little farther. I don’t think I can carry both you and the pack for a mile.”

Okay, she really loathed him now. Yeah, maybe she’d had an extra roll or two for lunch. But where would she be now without those extra few carbs?

“I’m coming,” she snapped.

He gave her an encouraging smile that made her want to deck him and then he took off again up the trail.

As she slogged along behind him, she entertained herself with the various revenge scenarios she would enjoy enacting when this was all over. Something involving fire ants and a gallon of honey topped the list, though covering him with truffles and staking him in the middle of a rampaging herd of peccaries came in a close second.

She didn’t understand any of this and he didn’t seem in a big hurry to explain but somehow as time ticked on, she became less and less convinced he would hurt her.

Whether she was going to hurt him was another question entirely, but he seemed genuinely concerned for her safety.

She was certain it was longer than a mile—it had to be three or four, at the least—but he finally stopped.

“Here we go. We can rest here for a few hours, catch some sleep, get something to eat.”

She looked around, wondering just how well-camouflaged the shelter must be. She couldn’t see anything but trees and understory, even with his high-powered flashlight. It looked no different from the acres of forest they had already trudged around.

“Where?” she asked.

He pointed his flashlight up and for the first time she saw small handholds in the massive trunk of a giant tree, extending farther than the reach of the flashlight beam.

She hitched in a breath as cold fear washed over her like an arctic tide. She had survived having a machete held to her back, being a midnight snack for every insect for miles around and walking through the terrifying jungle. But this was beyond her.

“No. Absolutely not.”

“It’s not hard, I swear. Okay, a little trickier at night than it would be in the daylight, but we’ll be tethered together and I’ll be right behind you the whole way. You’ll be just fine.”

“I know. I’ll be just fine down here on solid ground because I am not climbing up there. You can’t make me.”

She didn’t care how childish she sounded. Climbing a gigantic tree was not in the tour description here.

“Did I mention the mosquito netting? And it’s about fifteen degrees cooler up in the canopy. Come on, Olivia. I won’t let you fall.”

Peccaries weren’t good enough. How about fire ants and peccaries and a couple dozen starving pumas?

“No. No way.”

She almost thought she could hear his teeth grinding from here. “Do I have to remind you about the machete?” he asked in an out-of-patience kind of voice.

She crossed her arms across her chest. She wasn’t afraid of him anymore, she decided. There simply wasn’t room for fear around the loathing.

“Go ahead. Break out your machete. Cut off an arm or two. What’s the difference? At least without arms, you can’t make me climb and I’d rather bleed to death than go up there.”

He gave a short laugh, then clipped it off midway through.

“Hold still,” he uttered suddenly, his voice barely a hush amid the whirs and peeps and calls of the rain forest at night.

He whipped his machete out and advanced slowly on her and her breath caught. Maybe he wasn’t quite as harmless as she wanted to believe.

“Okay, okay,” she squeaked out. “I was bluffing. I’ll climb.”

“Don’t move,” he growled. An instant later—before she could even take take another breath—the machete flashed through the night and struck the ground inches from her feet. A shaft of moonlight piercing the canopy gave just enough light for her to see a vine writhing at her feet.

Not a vine, of course. A snake.

Her insides churned and if she’d had anything in her stomach, she was fairly certain she would have lost it right then.

He held out his flashlight and shined it on the headless, still moving snake with a curiously beautiful geometric pattern along its skin. “There you go. Fer-de-lance. The deadliest snake around. A hundred people a year are killed by them in Costa Rica.”

She was going to hyperventilate now for sure. She couldn’t seem to catch her breath and the world seemed to spin alarmingly. She drew in a cleansing breath, then another and another until the moist, oxygen-rich air loosened the gnarled tendrils of panic.

“Up in the canopy is just about the only place we can rest without having to worry about them. But it’s your choice.”

What kind of man was Ren Galvez that he could kill a deadly snake without even breaking a sweat? He had probably just saved her life and he didn’t appear to be fazed one iota.

She looked at the terrifying tree trunk, then back at the now blessedly still creature. She swallowed a whimper and straightened her shoulders.

“I’ll climb,” she said.

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