High-Stakes Honeymoon

“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.