High-Stakes Honeymoon

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.”

What kind of man was Ren Galvez that he could kill a deadly snake without even breaking a sweat? He had probably just saved her life and he didn’t appear to be fazed one iota.

She looked at the terrifying tree trunk, then back at the now blessedly still creature. She swallowed a whimper and straightened her shoulders.

“I’ll climb,” she said.

Chapter 4

She climbed until her arms were trembling with fatigue and her stomach was a hard knot of nausea. She didn’t even want to think about the journey back down.

The entire time she climbed, she was aware of him below her and the thin rope tethering them together. He had pulled it from his magic pack that apparently contained everything a person might need to survive in the rain forest in the middle of a nightmare.

She was tied to him, and his harness had a clip attached to the ladder bolted into the trunk. If either of them fell, theoretically the clip would keep them anchored to the tree.

She didn’t want to put that theory to the test anytime soon.

She could only concentrate on pulling hand over hand up the ladder, hoping his flashlight beam was aimed somewhere high above her and not at her chunky butt.

At last she reached the last rung on the ladder, just when she was beginning to think this whole thing would be easier if she just begged him to slice through her tether with his machete and let her tumble a hundred feet to the jungle floor.

“Great. Over you go. Good job.”

Though she was severely tempted to kick him right in his cheery little teeth, she didn’t have any energy to spare for the task. Instead, she pulled herself onto a swaying wood platform, perhaps eight feet in circumference, then spiderwalked to the trunk in the middle and flopped to her stomach, breathing hard and hanging on to the massive trunk with all her might.

He followed her up, pulling off his pack and stretching his shoulders. “Don’t like heights much, do you?”

“You could say that.”

She didn’t think he was interested in the root of her fear. During her first year of boarding school when she was eight, two of the older girls coaxed her onto the roof with promises to show her their secret clubhouse and then locked her there, clinging to a gargoyle for three terrifying hours until the headmistress found her well after dark.