Rainforest Honeymoon Page 5

  As if she needed that image in her head, too.

  “Great,” she mumbled.

  “We’ll have a gorgeous view in the morning.”

  She declined comment on that, quite certain daylight would only accentuate just how high up they were.

  He sat down across from her and dug around in his pack. A moment later, he pulled out a lantern.

  “I thought I had this in here,” he said. “Can you hold the flashlight for a minute?”

  She complied and watched as he lit the mantles. A moment later, the lantern buzzed on, illuminating their perch far better than the weak light of the flashlight.

  While she still clung to the trunk, he moved around the platform, pulling down and securing mosquito netting that had been rolled up and tied to the overhanging roof.

  It made a cozy, almost intimate shelter.

  “What is this place?” she asked.

  “Research station. Not mine. There aren’t too many sea turtles in the rain forest canopy.”

  His teeth flashed in the lantern light and she almost smiled back in reflex, then caught herself and jerked her features back into a cool expression.

  “A friend of mine is studying rain forest bromeliads. Plants that grow without soil, capturing rainfall and drawing nourishment from the air,” he explained, much to her relief.

  She’d had no idea what bromeliads might be—they sounded like nasty camel-shaped bugs—and she was very grateful she didn’t have to reveal her ignorance.

  “Her study grant ran out a few months ago,” Ren went on, “but she hopes to be back at the end of the rainy season.”

  As if on cue, the downpour started again, rattling against the wooden roof of their lofty shelter. There was no buildup to the rain here, she had discovered. One moment it was dry, the next the clouds let loose with a mighty torrent.

  She listened to the loud music of the rain, unlike anything she’d ever experienced before. It was a symphony of sound, the percussive clatter hitting the roof, the splat of hard drops bouncing off leaves, the low rumble of a distant river somewhere.

  And the smell. It was wild and dramatic, like earth and growth and life.

  She wasn’t much of a gardener, though she did grow a few vegetables and some herbs for cooking in containers in the small backyard of her condo. She loved the scent and feel of dirt under her fingertips. This was the same kind of smell, only on killer steroids.

  She couldn’t say she found it unappealing, just overwhelming.

  She couldn’t help comparing it to gentle summer rain in Texas, with the sweet, clean scent of wet pavement and wet grass.

  She couldn’t imagine any two more different experiences from the same act of nature.

  She wanted to go home.

  The sudden fierce craving for the familiar was so overwhelming she couldn’t seem to breathe around it. She wanted to be sitting on her tiny covered patio, with barely room for one lawn chair, listening to the wind sigh in the oak tree and her neighbor’s TV playing too loudly.

  She wanted the safety and familiarity of her normal routine, the comfort of things she had always taken for granted—electric lights and TiVo and warm running water.

  Would she ever see her condo again? Her father? Her girlfriends? She shivered, unable to bear the idea of dying, trapped in the middle of such foreignness.

  “You’re not cold, are you?”

  He had been right. It was much cooler up here than down in the murky soup of the understory, but she was still warm. She shook her head, trying hard to forget they were dozens of feet in the air.

  “I’m okay.”

  “I’ve got some MREs in my pack. You need to eat something.”

  She nodded, though for all her hunger of before, she wasn’t completely sure she could swallow anything with this ball of dread in her stomach.

  “You have everything in there, apparently.”

  “Pays to be prepared. I’ve got enough supplies for three or four days on my own in here, so we should be fine until tomorrow afternoon. I’ve been stranded by washed-out bridges or bad roads a few times and having an emergency pack has come in very handy. I keep one in my Jeep and one in the kayak, just in case.”

  His way of life was as foreign to her as this monsoon rain. She couldn’t fathom needing to live off her wits for days at a time.

  “While we’re up here, you might want to take your boots and socks off to give your feet a chance to dry out a little. Foot rot is a big problem when you’re hiking in the tropics.”

  Lovely. Just what she needed. While he pulled a couple of brown-packaged meals out of his pack and started to open them, she unlaced the borrowed boots and slid them off, wincing as fire scorched along her nerve endings.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “Blisters.”

  He dropped the MREs. “Let me take a look.”

  She didn’t want him coming any closer. She was shaky and off balance enough up here in their aerie.

  “That’s not necessary,” she mumbled. “I just need a bandage.”

  He frowned, ignoring her protest as he approached with the lantern. She felt supremely self-conscious as he knelt in front of her and reached for her still stocking-clad foot.

  He held her foot up to the light and hissed out a curse when he saw her socks were pink with blood at the heel and the widest part of her foot.

  “Why didn’t you say something?” he asked sharply.

  “I believe I told you several times I wanted to stay put.”

  “You didn’t tell me I was turning your feet into bloody stumps!”

  If she didn’t know he was a soulless monster, she would almost have thought he sounded guilty.

  “I’ve got a well-stocked first aid kit in my bag. Let’s put some salve on. Hang on.”

  She decided to take his words literally and continued to cling tightly to the massive trunk of the tree, listening to the rain pound the roof while he found what he needed.

  She expected him to simply hand her the ointment and bandages for her blisters. Instead, he sat on the floor in front of her and picked up her foot again. His hands were warm, his skin callused, but sensations rippled through her at his touch.

  What on earth was wrong with her? The man had kidnapped her, for heaven’s sake. This would be a good time for her to kick him right over the side.

  Even as she thought the impulse, she knew she wouldn’t. For one thing, she wasn’t sure she could climb back down by herself.

  Instead, she sat motionless, doing her best to keep from trembling as he touched her. It was fear, she told herself, but the assertion rang hollow.

  In the lantern light, he looked mysterious and dark, all sharp angles and lean curves. He was extraordinarily handsome, she thought again. He didn’t at all fit her image of someone who would devote his life to science and the study of turtles.

  She might have suspected him of lying if she hadn’t seen his research station firsthand, with all the gadgets and gizmos.

  She supposed he could be a CIA agent or something, using turtle research as his cover. It was far easier to believe.

  His fingers moved with surprising tenderness as he rubbed salve on her skin. Her feet had always been sensitive and his touch felt incredibly soothing after the exertion of the last few hours. She couldn’t seem to control another shiver.

  He mistook her reaction for pain. “I’m sorry to have to hurt you more,” he said. “By tomorrow you’ll be safe and sound in Puerto Jiménez.”

  She flexed her toes as he stuck on a bandage. “So you say.”

  “I swear it, Olivia. It should only take us four or five hours to hike to El Tigre, and it should be easy to catch a ride from there to Port J on the colectivo, which is kind of like a bus.”

  Five more hours of hiking. She wasn’t sure she could bear even ten more minutes. She said nothing, though, and he finished bandaging her feet in silence. When he was done, he moved back to the MREs. She watched him put a tray that looked like a TV dinner
in a small green bag. He then poured water from a water bottle in with it.

  He repeated the actions with a second MRE, then set them both propped up against the railing at an angle.

  Finally, she had to ask, though she wanted to pretend none of this was happening and she was just waiting for a table at The Mansion on Turtle Creek back in Dallas. “What are you doing?”

  “Heating our dinner. MREs come with a heating element. You activate it with water. Believe it or not, it makes a pretty decent meal. There are some crackers and raisins in the bag. You can eat those while we wait.”

  She had to admit, the food tasted delicious, for something that had been shoved in the bottom of a backpack for heaven knows how long. When the entrées were done, he handed her one. The roast beef and mashed potatoes weren’t gourmet cuisine, by any stretch of the imagination, but she could see how the meals could sustain fighting men in the field.

  If she concentrated with all her might, she could almost forget she was eating it dozens of feet up in the air.

  “Your husband must be worried sick about you.”

  She made a noncommittal sound, fiercely hoping he would let the topic rest.

  She should have known better. Like everything else in this miserable evening, luck was not on her side.

  “You can call him from the police station in Puerto Jiménez tomorrow to let him know you’re safe.”

  “Am I?”

  He sighed. “I know you don’t believe me, but you’re far better off here than back at Suerte del Mar.”

  She set down her plastic fork and regarded him in the flickering lantern light. “You keep saying that. But I felt perfectly safe until you came along, Mr. Galvez. In the twenty-four hours I was there, nobody else pulled a machete on me or dragged me up a mountainside or made me climb a thousand feet up in the air. You’re the only one who appears to pose a threat to me.”

  “If I had left you there with Rafferty, your perception might be entirely different.”

  “What did James Rafferty ever do to you that would make you so desperate or angry or whatever it is that you had to kidnap a guest of his, an innocent woman, and drag me through all this?”

  He set his tray aside and studied her for a long moment. She knew she must look horrific, bedraggled and sticky, with her hair going in a hundred directions. She had to wonder what he saw on her features.

  She knew she had none of her mother’s lush beauty, the sex appeal that had drawn a shrewd, hardened businessman like Wallace Lambert to woo and marry a stripper he met in a Dallas bar.

  She had her mother’s figure, but on Olivia, it looked dumpy, bordering on chubby. And her face had none of Maelene’s radiance that came through clearly in all the photographs Olivia had seen of the mother she couldn’t remember.

  For the first time in years, she wished it were otherwise. What was the value in having a stripper for a mother when she didn’t have the first idea how to hootchy-kootchy?

  “You first,” he finally said. “Why, of all the possible destinations on earth, were you honeymooning on Suerte Del Mar?”

  She frowned, ignoring the niggle of guilt that she hadn’t told him the truth. For heaven’s sake, she thought. He kidnapped her. Why did she feel as if she had to share her life story with the man?

  “James Rafferty invited us,” she finally said.

  “I asked you before but you didn’t answer. How much money does your husband owe Rafferty?”

  “Nothing,” she mumbled, which was technically true since she didn’t have a husband.

  She was a lousy liar. She had been ever since childhood, when she used to hem and haw and blush fiery red whenever she tried to get a falsehood past her father.

  She could only be glad it was dark and he had turned down the lantern to conserve fuel. She had absolutely no poker face and was lousy in any game of chance.

  Bradley hadn’t been, she remembered. He lived for his weekly high-stakes poker game with his stockbroker and a few other Dallas-area movers and shakers.

  Could he have been caught up in online casinos such as Rafferty’s highly successful operations?

  “Has he had any other business dealings with Rafferty?” Galvez asked her. “Investments that might have gone sour, that kind of thing?”

  “No. As far as I know, they met through mutual friends.”

  “Rafferty doesn’t have any friends,” he said flatly. “Nor is he the sort to do magnanimous favors like inviting newlyweds to honeymoon at his Costa Rican villa just for the hell of it.”

  “You know him so well?”

  “No, I don’t think anybody really knows the man. But we’ve been neighbors for several years and I’ve learned a few things in that time. And more tonight than I ever wanted to know.”

  Questions crowded through her mind. Perhaps at last she would find some answers to a few of them.

  “What did you learn tonight?”

  He looked for a moment as if he would answer her, but he changed the subject instead. “Where was your husband when I found you on the beach trail?”

  She didn’t have a husband. But her unlamented ex-fiancé was probably at home playing naked Twister with his personal assistant. “Um, I don’t know,” she answered, again telling the truth as far as she could.

  “What does he do for a living?”

  She bristled at the interrogation. “I’m not telling you another thing about…about anything until you give me some information in return. What is this all about? Why do you think I’m in danger from James Rafferty? I’m nothing to him. Less than nothing! I’ve never even met the man.”

  “But your husband has, and that’s the important thing.”

  A strange, unearthly cry echoed through the night and she shivered again, pulling her knees up and wrapping her arms around them. Peccaries couldn’t climb, but what about jaguars or pumas? And were any monkey species around here carnivores? She wasn’t sure she wanted to ask.

  “From everything I’ve heard about Rafferty, he gives millions away to charity and has personally revitalized the economy of this area with his ecotourist resorts. He’s considered quite an environmentalist. I would think a biologist like you would have nothing but praise for the man. What could you possibly have against him?”

  He shrugged, looking suddenly hard and dangerous. “Call me old-fashioned, but it kind of pisses me off to watch him murder a woman in cold blood over her sugar daddy’s gambling debts.”

  She gasped. “You’re making that up.”

  “Am I?”

  He had to be. That sort of thing just didn’t happen among civilized people. Rafferty had been written up in a dozen financial magazines for his success in business and for his philanthropic efforts. Bradley had showed her a few during their engagement.

  “I wish I could agree with you and say this is all some kind of horrible mistake. But it’s true. I saw it. Why do you think his goons were chasing me? Why were the police shooting at us? Not for the hell of it. Because Rafferty is trying to shut me up—and you, by default.”

  “Me? I didn’t do anything! If what you say is true, why did you have to drag me into this?”

  He sighed. “Five minutes before I bumped into you on the trail, I watched your benevolent philanthropist shoot a bullet into the brain of a woman at his pool, then taunt the woman’s lover about how his wife and kids would be next unless he paid what he owed. I saw the whole damn thing and Rafferty knows it. That’s why he wants me dead and why I had to get the hell out of Dodge.”

  “None of which explains why you decided to take me along for the ride!”

  He studied her in the darkness, the silence broken by the steady rain plopping against the leaves around them.

  “As Rafferty was standing over the body of the woman he had just killed, he made reference to you. Or at least to a blond cream puff he planned for his next course. I’m assuming he meant you.”

  Cream puff? Rafferty had called her a cream puff? She flushed. Okay, so she had a little more than the avera
ge woman up top and her hips were unfortunately on the bimboesque side, but that didn’t make her a cream puff, for heaven’s sake.

  Is that the way Galvez looked at her as well?

  “I think Rafferty planned to use you to enforce your husband’s gambling debts in some way. Since I had just witnessed his particular form of debt collection, when I bumped into you, I assumed the worst.”

  “You think he planned to kill me too?”

  “Or hurt you somehow until your husband paid what he owed. I could be totally way off base and this whole thing could be a huge mistake. There wasn’t a lot of time to think everything through. I just went with my gut and decided I had to get you out of there, too.”

  “That’s why you were going to the police?”

  “Right. I wanted to tell them about the woman before Rafferty had time to feed her body to the gators. At this point, I’m sure he’s hidden all the evidence, but at least I can get you to Mañuel Solera, my friend on the Puerto Jiménez police force, and he can help you get safely back to San José and then catch a ride to the States.”

  He hesitated. “I can’t guarantee your husband’s safety, though. I’m sorry. He’s still there on Suerte del Mar. The only thing we can do is contact him when we get to town and urge him to get the hell away from Rafferty while he still can. If it’s any consolation, I don’t think Rafferty will kill him. Dead men don’t pay their debts.”

  She couldn’t seem to work her brain around this. It seemed impossible, completely out of the realm of believability. James Rafferty as a cold-blooded enforcer? She couldn’t quite reconcile that picture with the man she’d read about in such glowing terms.

  To believe Galvez, she would have to buy both that premise and the idea that Bradley owed him some vast sum of money.

  She thought back over her fiancé’s behavior the last few months of their courtship and the four-month engagement that followed, culminating in his concentrated efforts to convince her to go through with the marriage despite his infidelity.

  As he tried to change her mind about canceling the wedding, he had shown an edge of desperation very unlike the polished, confident Bradley Swidell.