High-Stakes Honeymoon

Chapter 2

“Where are you taking me?”

His hostage’s sexy voice cut through the darkness as he power-stroked as hard as he could.

He inhaled raggedly, the muscles in his arms aching from the exertion. He considered himself in pretty darn good shape, but this insane pace and the strain of paddling both of them were definitely taking a toll on him.

Since he didn’t have breath to spare, he chose not to answer her question with a long explanation. “We’re almost there. See those lights ahead and to the left?”

She looked in the direction he pointed. “Yes,” she answered after a moment, wrapping her arms around herself.

She couldn’t possibly be cold, could she? he wondered. It was a mild night, probably only low 80s, and slightly cooler out here on the water, but it was far from chilly. Of course, she was only wearing a bikini and she wasn’t paddling her guts out.

“That’s my research station. Playa Hermosa. I’ve got a Jeep there.”

She shuddered and tightened her arms around herself.

He grimaced, wishing he had time to offer her words of comfort. He wasn’t crazy about the idea of traumatizing a bride on her honeymoon, but it couldn’t be helped.

He allowed a quick moment to wonder where her groom might be lurking in this miserable drama and why he had left his luscious little wife even for a minute. Maybe out fishing on the missing yacht? The Pacific coast of the Osa Peninsula was rich with marine life, from marlins to sailfish to tuna.

Any groom who would abandon his bride to go fishing deserved to have her kidnapped. Ren certainly wouldn’t have let her out of his sight.

Something about Rafferty’s next intended victim appealed to him on some deep, visceral level. In the pale moonlight shimmering off the water, she looked lush and soft and delectable, with creamy skin and voluptuous features.

A blond cream puff, Rafferty had called her. Ren had a feeling she wouldn’t appreciate the nickname—or his sudden fierce desire to swallow her up in one delicious bite.

The discovery did not improve his mood. In two years, he hadn’t been able to drum up even a tiny smidgeon of enthusiasm for the whores in the rough and ready town of Puerto Jiménez, no matter how determined their attempts at seduction during his infrequent visits to the cantinas.

In the space of the last hour, he had witnessed a vicious murder, had kidnapped a woman for the first—hopefully only—time in his life and terrified her out of her skull, then paddled like hell across the ocean.

Yet here he sat with the biggest hard-on of his life.

Disgusted with himself, Ren growled a fairly vile curse in Spanish and felt like an even bigger pervert when the woman in front of him flinched as if he were planning to ravish her any second now, something he was fairly sure was impossible—not to mention rather ill-advised—in a sea kayak adrift on the open ocean.

He could ignore the heat and hunger. He’d had plenty of practice, after all. Excepting those first wild months after the fire when he hadn’t climbed out of a bottle, for two years he had focused his entire energies on his work, leaving no room for anything else.

Though he had the occasional research assistant and used volunteers to help him patrol the beaches for nesting sites, he lived a solitary life for the most part, and that was just the way he liked it. He had a few friends on the Peninsula, but most of the villagers considered him the Crazy Turtle Man of Playa Hermosa.

Early in his time in Costa Rica five years ago, a few heated altercations with poachers after the culinary prize of turtle eggs taken beyond the legal season had started the rumors. His wildness of the last two years had cemented the reputation.

He imagined this little escapade would probably add more fuel to the fire if word got out, which he had no doubt it would.

No help for it, he thought. Snatching Rafferty’s little blond cream puff had been an impulse, but he couldn’t regret it.

At least not yet.

When he neared Playa Hermosa, he paddled as far as he could and let the waves push them the rest of the way. Close to shore, he climbed out and pulled the kayak up the beach.

In the moonlight, his hostage looked numb, her features expressionless and dull, and he hoped to hell she wasn’t going into some kind of delayed shock and taking a mental vacation on him. That would be just what he needed right about now—a catatonic sexpot in a bikini.

Though he would have liked to consign Rafferty’s expensive kayak to the sharks, he couldn’t find it in him to waste such a sleek, beautiful craft. With Olivia Lambert still inside, he muscled it up past the high-tide mark, then reached a hand to help her out.

“Here we are. We’ll just grab my keys inside and a change of clothes for you and be on our way.”

She gazed at him blankly, and he wondered again if she’d lost her marbles somewhere out there on the ocean.

“It’s okay,” he tried to reassure her.

After a long pause, she slipped her hand in his and climbed out of the kayak as regally as a princess. Her small hand was cool and soft as the petals of the hibiscus and orchids and frangipani flowering around them, and she trembled only a little.

It was dark and would probably begin raining any minute, but for now the moon was full and clearly illuminated the short pathway from the beach to his station. He gestured for her to proceed him.

“Head through those trees right there,” he said. “We’re on the only developed road in this area, if you can call the mud track in the green season a road.”

He should have been tipped off to her intent, but her abstracted, out-of-it air fooled him. He was completely unprepared when she took just a shuffling step forward in the direction of the trail, then whipped around the other way and took off down the beach.

For about half a second, he was severely tempted to just let her slip away into the jungle. His life and the surreal trip it had become in the last hour would sure be a hell of a lot easier without having to deal with a soft dumpling of a bride who seemed on the verge of dissolving into a quivering mass of fear any second now.

He even took a step toward his research station, then he growled an oath and turned around. He couldn’t let her just wander off out here. The jungle was a dangerous place, especially for a soft thing like her.

She had several seconds head start and she was faster than he would have expected. She was almost to the thick shelter of trees, where he would have a much tougher time catching her.

Out of patience and breath, he finally lunged at her from the side in a classic football tackle his college linebacker of a brother would have been happy with, just before she would have slipped into the brush.

With an oomph, she hit the sand and his momentum carried him on top of her.

For a second, he froze there, some savage male beast inside him taking primitive delight in her soft curves.

He was aroused all over again, he realized with no small measure of disgust.

All his life, he had considered himself a pretty decent guy. His parents taught all three of their sons to treat women with respect and honor, and Ren thought he had completely absorbed those lessons.

So why did this woman—this situation—seem to bring out the worst in him and make him feel like some kind of rampaging beast?

She squirmed beneath him, fighting frantically to be free. “Please,” she whimpered. “Please don’t.”

Her words and the panicked fear behind them were like taking a dip in spring runoff back home in Utah. He stood up, this time keeping a close hold on her wrist.

“I’m not going to attack you,” he growled, tugging her back up the beach toward the station.

“M-more than you already have?”

“You’re alive, aren’t you?” he snapped. “At least for now.”

Wrong choice of words, he realized, when she hissed in a breath. He was grimly aware she was trembling now as she stumbled along behind him.

He hated her terror and wanted to explain everything but he didn’t dare take the time. Rafferty and his men hadn’t reached Playa Hermosa yet, but he knew they couldn’t be far behind. Her little attempt at escape and the subsequent delay it caused could turn out to be a deadly mistake for both of them.

He could tell her everything as they drove to the little police outpost in Matapalo, but for now they needed to get the hell out of Dodge.

“Look, I’m trying to help you here. You can believe me or not, but there are some mighty nasty creatures stalking the Osa after dark, not a few of them human. Trust me, sweetheart, right now I’m your best chance of getting out of this whole thing in one piece. If you run away from me again, I’m going to have to tie you up for your own safety and neither of us wants that.”

She muttered something under her breath he didn’t catch but he didn’t have time to waste wondering about it. He just headed up the hillside to the research station, keeping his hand firmly clamped around her wrist the whole way.

He had locked the station to protect his equipment inside when he headed down to Suerte del Mar earlier and his keys were zippered into the same waterproof bag on his kayak, but he quickly found the emergency spare snugged under Yertle, the huge leatherback carved by one of his research assistants the summer before.

With one eye trained on the hill for approaching headlights, he unlocked the door and yanked her inside behind him.

He didn’t dare let her go so he kept her wrist firmly in his grasp as he grabbed his Jeep keys, then headed to his bedroom and flipped on the generator-driven light. When she caught sight of his bed, she dug her heels into the concrete floor as if he were going to yank aside the mosquito netting and ravish her on the spot.

He sighed and forced away the annoyance. There was no time for it. If she wanted to think he was some kind of mad rapist, so be it.

Of course, it didn’t help that seeing her in the light made him all too aware of her lush, curvy femininity, so blond and soft and different from anything to be found in this wild corner of Costa Rica.

He opened a drawer and grabbed a couple clean T-shirts and some shorts. They would be way too big for her, but they’d have to do.

“Here, put these on,” he ordered.

That blank stare was back—he saw it take over the stunning blue of her eyes—and he sighed. She seemed to retreat into some hidden corner of her mind, somewhere he couldn’t reach. Right now, he didn’t have the time or the patience to try.

“Look, we’re in for a wild ride to Matapalo if we want to make it before Rafferty and his goons find us. Unless I miss my guess, we’re going to have rain in a few minutes and even with the canvas top on the Jeep, you’ll be soaked. You’re going to need something else to wear.”

This would be a hell of a memory from her honeymoon, he thought, as he finally just grabbed the T-shirt and pulled it over her head. She cooperated enough to push her arms through the sleeves.

If her husband had left her at Rafferty’s to go fishing knowing he owed the bastard money, Ren hoped the idiot was impaled by a marlin and then stung by a couple thousand jellyfish.

He grabbed a pair of shorts and yanked them up over her hips. She flinched when he touched the bare skin at her waist.

“If I had evil designs on you, don’t you think I’d be taking your clothes off instead of putting more on?” he growled.

That seemed to pierce the haze of panic around her and he watched some of the blankness recede. He didn’t have time to be grateful for it as he suddenly remembered one more item that might come in handy. He hurried to his closet and dug for a moment, emerging a moment later with a large shoe box.

In the distance, he thought he heard the throb of an engine and he swore harshly. “Come on. We’ve got to haul ass.”

He half dragged, half carried her to his Jeep and threw her inside, tossing the box and a few other items he’d grabbed on the way out the door into the back seat, alongside the emergency survival pack he always kept there in case he found himself stranded on some remote beach somewhere by weather or tides.

He quickly reached across the seat to buckle her shoulder belt, earning a quick ragged breath for his trouble. As her chest expanded with the sharp inhalation, the movement pressed her voluptuous breasts to his arm and he felt the hairs there rise—along with other parts of him that had no business noticing her in the middle of running for their lives.

He had been too damn long without a woman.

His beat-up old Jeep started immediately—a minor miracle—and he gunned the engine down the rutted, bumpy dirt track.

At least the afternoon rains had dried somewhat so the roads were at least moderately passable for now, until the evening rains hit.

The few roads in this primitive part of Costa Rica were unreliable at best. This was the only route between Puerto Jiménez and Carate, the gateway to Corcovado National Park.

In the relatively dry summer months from December to May, he could usually count on being able to make it to Jiménez in only an hour, but in the rainy season—the green season, they called it to keep from scaring away the tourists—when it rained at least an inch or two every day, it could take him three times as long.

And he usually just counted on being stuck at the station for the entire month of October, with its near constant deluge, unless he caught a flight out of the airstrip at Carate.

Here in late September, he still had a possibility of making it safely. All he had to do right now was get them to the small police station in Matapalo. But if the rains hit while they were en route, this dirt road would become a slick, dangerous mess.

He just had to hope that didn’t happen.

As her captor gunned the rattletrap Jeep’s engine and sped away from his lair with his tires spitting mud and gravel, Olivia held on to the grab bar and divided her time between clamping her teeth together to keep from crying out and whispering a fervent prayer that her pitiful life would be spared.

She wanted to be numb, to tune it all out. It was taking every ounce of concentration to keep her emotions contained.

Instead of the blessed oblivion she would have vastly preferred, every sense seemed accentuated, as if the world had suddenly come sharply into focus. She was acutely aware of each jostling rut in the road, the throb of the engine, the heavy, humid air pressing down on her.

She was especially aware of the man beside her—his overwhelming size and strength.

For the last hour since he stepped out of the jungle, machete in hand, he had been simply a shadowy, threatening hulk of a man. She hadn’t caught a clear glimpse of him until he turned on the lights inside his spartan concrete research station.

Though he was no doubt at least six feet tall, he had not been quite as large as her imagination had conjured up, more lean and lithe than she expected.

During that hideous kayak ride as he had swiftly propelled them through the waves, she had tried not to look at him. It was the only way she could keep from letting the panic completely overwhelm her.

Her impression then had been only of some dark, terrifying stranger. The light inside his dwelling had revealed a man of extraordinary good looks. Her friends in Fort Worth would have drooled over someone like him, with those chiseled features, the dark, intense eyes, full mouth, and eyelashes so long they looked fake.

He looked nothing like any scientist she had ever seen. He looked more like some kind of Latino pop star, and she could easily imagine him on a stage somewhere crooning to thousands of screaming girls.

She wasn’t at all reassured that he wasn’t the hideous monster her imagination had conjured up. Somehow this man seemed far more dangerous to her peace of mind.

He was wild and rugged and beautiful, just like this isolated part of the world, completely out of her realm of experience.

Ren Galvez was exactly the kind of man she would have avoided in Dallas, someone strong and masculine and…and sensual.

She caught the word and grimaced at herself. What did she know if the man was sensual or not? Most likely, he was cold and analytical, more interested in facts than figures, at least the feminine kind.

But there had been that moment back on the beach when he had tackled her and his hard, muscled body had pressed her into the sand. Through her fear and the adrenaline pumping violently through her system as she tried to escape, she could swear she had detected definite interest from the man.

She thought for certain he would attack her there, press his obvious advantage in size and strength to overpower her. Instead, he had helped her to her feet and guided her to his utilitarian quarters, where he had proceeded to find clothes for her.

What on earth did he want with her? He continued to assure her he wouldn’t hurt her, but if rape wasn’t on his mind, what other motive could he have?

Was he after money? He had asked her name but maybe that was only to reassure himself he’d snatched the right heiress.

She had heard about prevalent ransom kidnappings in some Central and South American countries, but everything she had read about Costa Rica assured her the country was safe. Ticos were proud of their stable government and their relative prosperity, and the country went out of its way to eagerly welcome visitors.

Her imagination buzzed with possibilities. He said he was a scientist. The equipment in his dwelling certainly backed up the assertion. There had been that carved turtle on the porch and the sign over the door that said Playa Hermosa Turtle Institute.

Maybe he was looking for funding and had hit on a rather unorthodox method of raising support. It seemed ludicrous in the extreme, but for the life of her, she couldn’t come up with any other explanation.

Why else would a turtle researcher snatch a guest from a neighboring estate, just to rush off through the night with her?

It all seemed so surreal. Things like this—mysterious strangers grabbing her at machete-point—didn’t happen to her.

Everything about this situation terrified her. Most of all, she hated not knowing what was happening and Ren Galvez—if that was his real name—seemed in no hurry to explain.

She desperately wanted to trust him when he said he wouldn’t hurt her. But then again, she had a lousy habit of fooling herself into believing the best in people.

Just look at her choice of erstwhile fiancés. For six months, she had convinced herself Bradley loved her. How many warning signs had she ignored, just to avoid stirring up the waters?

She had been so caught up in the unaccustomed sensation of pleasing her father, for once, that Bradley and her misgivings about him had almost seemed superfluous.

Not that any of that mattered right now while she was in the hands of a madman who was going to drive them both over a cliff into the Pacific. She swallowed a scream as the Jeep slid toward the edge, but her captor yanked it back to the middle of the track that passed for a road.

Her heart was still pounding when the sky unleashed the nightly rains he warned about.

Rain seemed like such a benign term for this. Growing up in Texas, she thought she knew about precipitation, but this was like nothing in her experience. It was as if someone had suddenly turned on a hot high-pressure shower and let it loose on the countryside.

Buckets of water gushed off the trees and cascaded down the road. The canvas roof of the Jeep offered some protection but not much. In only a few moments, Olivia was soaked.

The Jeep slid again, moving inexorably toward the side. This time she didn’t bother to contain her scream.

“I’ve got it,” he assured her. “Hang on.”

He muscled out of the skid, then downshifted for the next hill. She didn’t know how he managed it—years of experience, probably—but he managed to get them up the next hill, and they plowed through mud and muck and rivers of rain rushing down the road.