High-Stakes Honeymoon

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?”