High-Stakes Honeymoon

“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.