Rainforest Honeymoon Page 4

  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.

  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 overwhelming, 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?”

  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.

  That childhood trauma three stories up seemed like a walk in the park compared to this.

  “I’m sorry to put you through this,” he said.

  Oddly, she thought he meant it. His concern slid through her, warming the chilled corners of her psyche, until she sternly reminded herself he was the one posing a danger to her.

  “You’re safe up here. See, there’s a railing all the way around and I can even close off the opening we climbed through so you don’t have to worry about stumbling off in the dark.”