Bridal Op

“Let’s stop to rest,” she said, looking back at him, her concern for him easy to read in her eyes.

“No.” He kept on going. “We’ll stop at nightfall.”

Darkness would be here soon enough, in an hour at the most.

They reached a small plateau covered by short trees and grasses. Above it on the other side where the land rose sharply, large trees reached for the sky, ninety or a hundred feet tall. The treetops were surrounded by mist, giving them an otherworldly appearance.

“How beautiful,” she said with wonder in her voice when they reached the trees that towered to impossible heights above.

She stopped and was looking up at the trees with her head tilted, the muted light turning her strawberry-blond hair the color of antique gold. She looked like a wood sprite.

“Almost makes you believe in magic, doesn’t it?” She looked at him and smiled that sweet, sexy smile of hers. “I swear I feel something. Like there’s more here than just the trees.”

He wouldn’t have thought she, a foreigner, would pick up on that, and so fast. “The local tribes think so.” He shrugged noncommittally and tried not to think of another time when he’d been alone in another cloud forest, doing something he shouldn’t have been and had felt the anger of the woods.

Today the trees seemed welcoming in their majesty, Isabelle looking as if she’d always been here, as if she belonged. He watched the smile that played on her full lips and wanted her, in that moment, with unreasonable fierceness, to belong to him.

He caught himself stepping closer to her. Stopped.

This was nothing but an aftereffect of their close call with death. Something like that could make a person want to reach out and grab life with both hands. “We should go.”

They crossed the woods, their trek feeling more like a dream than reality. He kept his GPS out and consulted it often now.

“Have you been here before?”

“Around,” he said. “Not at this spot. My family is in Cedra, south of here.”

“So what are we going to do now?” She voiced the question that had weighed heavily on his mind for the past couple of miles. “Should we see if we can pick up the kidnappers’ trail?”

“The army would have ruined any usable tracks by now, looking for us.” Their only lead had been obliterated.

“I’m not going back without Sonya.”

In that, they agreed. Neither was he.

“The only two people we know for sure were involved with the kidnapping, Dr. Ramon and Fuentes, are both connected to Maggie. We need to talk to her.”

“Ethan talked to her already. You saw the interview footage. She’s locked up in a mental institute. I have a hard time seeing her orchestrating a complicated international kidnapping.”

“But everything comes back to her.”

“Not Juan’s assassination attempt just a month ago. What if that and the kidnapping are connected?”

They kept coming back to the same argument over and over again. He kicked a fallen branch in frustration. There had to be something more, a clue they were missing.

Who had Sonya now?

“It comes down to your attitude about women, doesn’t it?” she observed.

“I don’t have an attitude about women. I like them.”

“Exactly. You want to seduce them or protect them or both.”

“What’s wrong with that?” When it came to women, Ladera had very traditional family values.

“You don’t want to persecute a woman. The thought of putting Maggie in jail makes you uncomfortable.”

He hadn’t really thought about it before, but she was right. The whole “pick on someone your own size” deal.

“This protection thing, it’s not gentlemanly, you know.”

“It isn’t?” He was confused.

“It’s an appendage of your chauvinistic predisposition.”

“I’m not a chauvinist.” He respected women, Isabelle being a prime example. She was as tough and as skilled as any man he’d ever known. He would have picked her to be on his team over anyone.

“So you want to protect women because they are the stronger sex?” She drew up an eyebrow.