High-Stakes Honeymoon

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.”