Читать книгу High-Stakes Honeymoon - RaeAnne Thayne - Страница 6

Chapter 1

Paradise sucked.

Big-time.

Olivia Lambert sat on her damp towel, her hands clasped around her knees, watching the sun sink into the Pacific in a blaze of color. Palm fronds whispered a soft song overhead, the warm, impossibly blue ocean gently kissed the sand at her feet and a soft breeze danced across her skin.

Behind her, the thick, lush rain forest teemed with color and noise and life—bright birds, exotic butterflies, even a monkey or two.

As a honeymoon destination, this remote, wild corner of Costa Rica seemed perfect, especially staying in a guest villa on the estate of a reclusive billionaire. It was romantic, secluded, luxurious.

The only trouble was, she’d left her groom behind in Texas.

Olivia sighed, gazing out at the ripple of waves as she tried to drum up a little enthusiasm for the holiday that stretched ahead of her like the vast, undulating surface of the Pacific. She’d been here less than twenty-four hours and had nine more days to go, and at this point she was just about ready to pack up her suitcases and catch the next puddle jumper she could find back to the States.

She was bored and lonely and just plain miserable.

Maybe she should have invited one of her girlfriends to come along for company. Or better yet, she should have just eaten the cost of the plane tickets and stayed back in Fort Worth.

But then she would have had to face the questions and the sympathetic—and not so sympathetic—looks and the resigned disappointment she was entirely too accustomed to seeing in her father’s eyes.

No, this way was better. If nothing else, ten days in another country would give her a little time and distance to handle the bitter betrayal of knowing that even in this, Wallace Lambert wouldn’t stand behind her. Her father sided with his golden boy, his groomed successor, and couldn’t seem to understand why she might possibly object to her fiancé cheating on her with another woman two weeks before their wedding.

It was apparently entirely unreasonable of her to expect a few basic courtesies—minor little things like fidelity and trust—from the man who claimed to adore her and worship the ground she walked on.

Who knew?

The sun slipped further into the water and she sighed again, angry at herself. So much for her promise that she wouldn’t brood about Bradley or her father.

This was her honeymoon and she planned to enjoy herself, damn them both. She could survive nine more days in paradise, in the company of macaws and howler monkeys, iguanas and even a sloth—not to mention her host, whom she had yet to encounter.

James Rafferty, whom she was meeting later for dinner, had built his fortune through online gambling and he had created an exclusive paradise here completely off the grid—no power except through generators, water from wells on the property. Even her cell phone didn’t work here.

Nine days without distractions ought to be long enough for her to figure out what she was going to do with the rest of her life. She was twenty-six years old and it was high time she shoved everybody else out of the driver’s seat so she could start picking her own direction.

Some kind of animal screamed suddenly, a high, disconcerting sound, and Olivia jumped, suddenly uneasy to realize she was alone down here on the beach.

There were jaguars in this part of the Osa Peninsula, she had read in the guidebook. Jaguars and pumas and who knew what else. A big cat could suddenly spring out of the jungle and drag her into the trees, and no one in the world would ever know what happened to her.

That would certainly be a fitting end to what had to be the world’s worst honeymoon.

She shivered and quickly gathered up her things, shaking the sand out of her towel and tossing her sunglasses and paperback into her beach bag along with her cell phone that she couldn’t quite sever herself from, despite its uselessness here.

No worries, she told herself. She seemed to remember jaguars hunted at night and it was still a half hour to full dark. Anyway, she had a hard time believing James Rafferty would allow wild predators such as that to roam free on his vast estate.

Still, she wasn’t at all sure she could find her way back to her bungalow in the dark, and she needed to shower off the sand and sunscreen and change for dinner.

She had waited too long to return, she quickly discovered. She would have thought the dying rays of the sun would provide enough light for her to make her way back to her bungalow, fifty yards or so from the beach up a moderate incline. But the trail moved through heavy growth, feathery ferns and flowering shrubs and thick trees with vines roped throughout.

What had seemed lovely and exotic on her way down to the beach suddenly seemed darker, almost menacing, in the dusk.

Something rustled in the thick undergrowth to her left. She swallowed a gasp and picked up her pace, those jaguars prowling through her head again.

Next time she would watch the sunset from the comfort of her own little front porch, she decided nervously. Of course, from what the taciturn housekeeper who had brought her food earlier said, this dry sunset was an anomaly this time of year, given the daily rains.

Wasn’t it just like Bradley to book their honeymoon destination without any thought that they were arriving in the worst month of the rainy season. She would probably be stuck in her bungalow the entire nine days.

Still grumbling under her breath, she made it only a few more feet before a dark shape suddenly lurched out of the gathering darkness. She uttered a small shriek of surprise and barely managed to keep her footing.

In the fading light, she could only make out a stranger looming over her, dark and menacing. Something long and lethal gleamed silver in the fading light, and a strangled scream escaped her.

He held a machete, a wickedly sharp one, and she gazed at it, riveted like a bug watching a frog’s tongue flicking toward it. She couldn’t seem to look away as it gleamed in the last fading rays of the sun.

She was going to die alone on her honeymoon in a foreign country in a bikini that showed just how lousy she was at keeping up with her Pilates.

Her only consolation was that the stranger seemed just as surprised to see her. She supposed someone with rape on his mind probably wouldn’t waste time staring at her as if she were some kind of freakish sea creature.

Come on. The bikini wasn’t that bad.

She opened her mouth to say something—she wasn’t quite sure what—but before she could come up with anything, he gave a quick look around, then grabbed her from behind, shoving the hand not holding the machete against her mouth.

Panic spurted through her as he dragged her into the thick, lush rain forest. Her flip-flops almost fell off but she dug her toes into them as she stumbled after him until they were swallowed up by the jungle, the trail completely out of sight behind them.

After a moment, he stopped, holding her tightly against his hard chest as he stood motionless. She was aware of every single breath against her bare skin and could feel her own hitching in and out of her lungs.

She was going to hyperventilate. She could feel her hands start to go numb and her breathing accelerate. A whimper escaped her, and his grip tightened on her mouth. She could taste his skin, salty and masculine and foreign.

“Quiete,” he ordered harshly in her ear and even Olivia, who had only pulled a C-minus in prep school Spanish, understood what he meant. She forced herself to breathe more slowly, evenly, though she could hear her pulse, loud and strident in her ear.

For what felt like forever, they stood locked together, unmoving. She was too afraid to struggle against the strong arms that held her, acutely aware of the machete he held at his side and of exactly how much damage that blade could do.

He spoke a few more low words to her in Spanish but she didn’t understand what he wanted, any more than she could interpret the hoots and peeps and calls of the night creatures all around them.

He stiffened suddenly and in the distance she saw the beam of a flashlight coming from the trail. Whoever held it aimed it in their direction, but its light couldn’t pierce the thick growth. She wanted to cry out, do anything to reveal their location, but she didn’t dare, ever conscious of that machete.

A moment later, she heard loud voices saying something that sounded like curses in Spanish, before the light disappeared.

The man breathing raggedly behind her waited a few more seconds, then he growled something else she didn’t understand in her ear, the normally fluid Spanish sounding guttural and sharp.

He dropped his hand, apparently expecting some kind of answer. She didn’t have a clue what the question had been, which didn’t seem to go over well with him. Her captor repeated the words, more harshly this time.

“I’m sorry,” she whimpered. In the dim light, she saw the whites of his eyes as they widened.

“You’re American?” he whispered. “I should have known.”

He growled a long string of curses—pungent and raw and all too understandable.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “Please don’t hurt me. Look, I have money in my bag and credit cards. Take them,” she pressed, thrusting out her beach bag. “Please take them and let me go.”

He grabbed the bag from her and rummaged through it, but apparently didn’t find whatever he was seeking.

He lifted the machete and she swallowed a scream that ended in a gasp when he severed one of the long leather handles. He handed the mangled bag back to her and when she reached for it, he grabbed her wrists and tied the ruined handle around them.

Her heart plummeted to her feet when he took off again through the thick growth with his machete swinging, tugging her behind him with the improvised restraint.

“Please don’t hurt me,” she tried again. “My father will pay you anything you want.”

She hoped, anyway.

Maybe Wallace would figure this was a fitting end to his total disappointment in his only child, that she die at the hands of a homicidal, machete-wielding maniac in the jungles of Costa Rica.

“It’s too late for that. I’m in a boatload of trouble here and you just landed your little bikini-clad butt right in the middle of it.”

As much as she wanted to, she couldn’t contain her small sound of distress.

“Look, I won’t hurt you.” He paused and even through the darkness she could feel the heat of his look. “Unless you try to run, anyway. Believe it or not, I’m pretty certain you’re far safer with me than you would be if I left you here.”

She dug around in her psyche for any tiny kernel of courage and managed to find one in a dusty corner. “That’s odd,” she retorted through trembling lips, “considering I’ve been here an entire day and this is the first time a madman with a machete has dragged me into the jungle.”

The momentary spurt of bravado disappeared when she heard a shriek nearby, then a swoop of wings and the unmistakably grim sound of something dying.

Her captor tugged her restraint and pushed on. “There are worse things on Suerte del Mar than a madman with a machete.”

While her imagination tried to ponder what that might possibly be, he cut through the heavy growth, roughly parallel to the shore. He seemed to have eyes like the jaguar she had mistaken him for earlier. While she stumbled in her flip-flops over roots and small plants, he plowed through, the machete scything away as he tugged her inexorably toward some destination she could only guess at.

After a few more moments, he shifted direction and headed down toward the ocean.

“Where are you taking me?” she finally dared ask.

“Rafferty keeps his boat docked here. It’s the only way we’re getting away.”

Oh, she didn’t like the sound of that. “Please,” she tried one more time. “Just leave me here. I’ll only slow you down.”

For about half a second, she thought he might be wavering, then he tugged her restraint. “Sorry, sweetheart. You don’t have a choice anymore. Neither of us does.”

He led her toward the dock she had noticed that afternoon when she had been soaking up the sun, feeling sorry for herself and thinking her life couldn’t get much worse.

Ha!

Ren Galvez was totally screwed.

He figured it out the minute he walked into Suerte del Mar. He only intended to talk to Rafferty about tightening the leash on his dogs. Earlier in the day, he had seen the vicious one, the Doberman, within a few hundred yards of the nesting site just down the beach from Rafferty’s estate.

He had warned the man and his goons repeatedly, and he was damn sick and tired of it.

He had planned to tell Jimbo that he was done playing nice. If Ren caught the dogs there again, he was going to start taking pictures and broadcasting them on every sea turtle blog and Web site he knew about.

That should have been enough to do the trick. Ren despised the man on several levels, but James Rafferty put up a good show of being the benevolent environmentalist, a billionaire dedicated to protecting the rain forest and the lush biodiversity of this largely undeveloped region of Costa Rica.

That image would be more than tarnished if Ren went public with pictures of Rafferty’s guard dogs harassing nesting endangered sea turtles.

When he kayaked over from his research station down the coast, Ren only intended to talk to the man and warn him for the last time about the dogs.

He hadn’t expected to walk into hell.

He blocked the grim images out and focused only on the job at hand, saving his own skin and that of the soft woman currently tethered to him, stumbling as she hurried to keep up.

“Can you slow down?” his captive said, her sultry, tequila voice breathless. “It’s a little hard hiking in flip-flops.”

He tightened his grip on the leather strap without risking a look in her direction. He couldn’t afford to get distracted looking at the vast expanse of skin bared by her skimpy swimming suit.

She was stacked. The kind of lush, voluptuous figure that turned men’s minds to mush and their bodies to putty.

Not his. Not now. He had other things to worry about than how long it had been since he’d had much interest in a woman’s curves—and how inconvenient that he should take notice of these particular curves, when he ought to be more worried about saving both their skins.

“By now they’ve let the dogs loose after me. You might not care if Jimbo’s Doberman takes a piece out of that pretty little rear of yours, but I can’t say the same.”

She stopped on the trail. “Dogs? Why would Rafferty set dogs after you? What have you done, besides kidnap an innocent woman?”

“Nice try. You’re not innocent or you wouldn’t be hanging out with James Rafferty.”

“I’m just a guest here. I haven’t even met the man yet! I was invited to dinner at the house and was just returning to dress for it. He’s going to be very upset if I don’t show up.”

“You don’t know the half of it, sweetheart.”

He thought of what he had heard her esteemed host say as he stood over the body of the woman he had just killed.

This was a nice appetizer for the entrée I have planned later, Rafferty had drawled in an ice-cold voice to the horror-stricken man on the lawn chair next to the dead woman. Or perhaps I’ll save the little blond cream puff for dessert.

He’d been too busy trying to save his own hide to let the words sink in, until he realized the woman he bumped into on the trail must be Rafferty’s next course.

He couldn’t just leave her to face whatever Rafferty had planned for her. Blame it on this damn streak of chivalry he couldn’t quite shake, but he wasn’t about to leave her here to suffer the same fate as Rafferty’s other hapless guest—or worse.

As soon as he reached the dock, he realized that apparently Suerte del Mar’s famed luck didn’t apply to him. He was screwed again—the man’s elegant, outrageously expensive yacht, the Buena Suerte, was nowhere in evidence.

On the other hand, that might not be a bad thing. It meant Rafferty wouldn’t be able to come after them, at least not by water. “Come on,” he ordered his hostage.

“Where?”

“Rafferty keeps a kayak down here.”

“You’re just going to take it?”

He tried not to notice how soft and delectable she looked in that barely-there swimsuit. “I’ll leave an IOU. You got any better ideas?”

“Yes. Leave me here!”

He didn’t dignify that with an answer as they reached the sleek two-person sea kayak.

This kidnapping business was tricky stuff, he realized immediately. How was he supposed to haul the damn thing down to the surf while still holding his machete and the leather strap binding her hands?

He finally had to take a chance and toss the machete into the kayak and pull the craft one-handed down the sand while he dragged her along with the other hand.

It was hard, awkward work but adrenaline pushed him along, helped in large measure by the intense barking he could hear drawing closer.

“Get in,” he growled, when they reached the waves.

She froze, and in the moonlight she lifted stricken, terrified eyes to him. He wanted to assure her everything would be all right but he didn’t have time—and right about now, he needed somebody to convince him they would make it through this.

Instead, he picked her up and plopped her in the front cockpit, fastening the apron around her in one smooth motion.

“You’re going to have to trust me, lady, as insane as that might seem right now. If you don’t, we’re both going to end up dead, I can promise you that.”

“Please let me go,” she begged again. “Please. I won’t tell anyone I saw you, I swear. I don’t even know who you are or…or why you’re running away.”

She might not. But Rafferty certainly did. The gambling mogul would know as soon as his men found Ren’s own kayak at the other end of the beach who had come to call—and who had witnessed the whole ugly business by the pool.

By now they had probably found it, complete with his research notebooks and his satellite phone in its watertight pouch, which would have come in mighty handy right about now.

Their only chance was to make it two miles down the coast to his research station and his Jeep so he could head to the little rural police outpost in the next village to report what he had seen.

If anybody would even believe him. After his wildness of the last few years, he didn’t exactly have the greatest reputation among the villages on the Osa.

He pushed that depressing thought away as he towed the kayak out into the surf, then climbed in behind his hostage and started paddling like hell to get them away.

The woman was making small whimpers in front of him. He was sorry for her panic—terrifying a woman wasn’t something that sat well with Neva Galvez’s younger son.

His brother Daniel, the sturdy and honorable sheriff of Moose Springs, Utah, would probably frown on this whole business. But it couldn’t be helped. Right now he didn’t have breath left to explain anything. He could only work the oars with all his energy.

They made it to the point at the edge of the moon-shaped beach of the Suerte in half the time it would have normally taken him and only after they slid around it and out of sight of the estate did Ren begin to breathe a little easier.

They certainly weren’t out of trouble yet. Rafferty’s men had probably already found his kayak—easily identifiable to anyone around these parts—and figured out he was the idiot who had intruded on their boss’s private little party. But the roads in this section of the Osa were wild and primitive, requiring four-wheel-drive most of the time. This was the rainy season, when the roads turned into big sloshy piles of mud.

He could kayak down the coast far more quickly than they could drive to his place.

He cursed himself all over again. None of this would have happened if he had just slipped back the way he had come as soon as he figured out what was going down at the hacienda’s pool. Nobody would have even known he was there.

But seeing Rafferty standing over the body of a dead woman, the gun in his hand and the grisly hole in her forehead, had stunned him so much he had stood frozen like a damn piece of furniture as he watched Rafferty taunt the man tied to a lawn chair about the gambling debts he owed him and Rafferty’s uniquely effective form of debt collection.

The shock wore off quickly, leaving hot dread in his gut as he realized what a mess he had stumbled into.

He had tried to back out quietly. He was used to stealth—hell, he could sneak up on a twelve-hundred-pound nesting leatherback without making a sound.

He would have probably made it, if a howler monkey hadn’t chosen just that moment to come swinging through the trees and making a ruckus, giving away his position in the process.

One of the thugs Rafferty surrounded himself with had sighted him and he had given up on stealth and had just run like hell. A few moments later, he had stumbled onto the woman whose soft, hunched shoulders were currently trembling in front of him.

Ren sighed and slowed his frenetic paddling enough that he could catch his breath. They needed to hurry, but he could at least take a moment to allay her fears.

“Hold out your hands,” he said.

She turned, flashing him a wide-eyed look of fright in the moonlight, and he felt like some kind of perverted rapist again.

“Come on. I told you I won’t hurt you. If you promise not to jump out, I can untie you now.”

After a moment’s hesitation, she held out her trembling hands. Regretting her fear, he pulled his pocket knife out and cut through the leather binding her. She flexed her wrists and he thought maybe her big blue eyes lost a little of their panic.

“I’m Lorenzo Galvez. Ren. What’s your name?”

“Olivia Lambert. My…my father will pay to have me home safely.” Her voice faltered.

She had said that already, he remembered. And with that same note of doubt in her voice.

“You don’t sound a hundred percent convinced of that, sweetheart.”

“He will.”

“He a gambler?”

She blinked, her lashes looking impossibly thick and dark in the moonlight reflecting off the water. “Excuse me?”

“I’m just trying to figure out how you got messed up with Rafferty, Olivia Lambert. What are you doing at Suerte del Mar?”

“I’m…I’m here on my honeymoon.”

A raw, strangled laugh escaped him and he was tempted to smack the paddle against his head a few times.

Could his life get any more delightful?

“Your honeymoon. Perfect. So not only will we have a homicidal gazillionaire after us but a frantic groom looking for his bride.”

She made a sound he couldn’t interpret, but it was cut off when a dark shape moved past them in the water, brushing his paddles as it went.

“What was that?” she gasped.

He peered into the inky water. “Nothing to worry about. My guess is a triaenodon obesus. White-tipped reef shark. Around here they call them cazón coralero trompacorta. That’s what it looked like from here, but I could be wrong.”

“A…a shark?”

Her voice wobbled. Afraid she was about to cry, he hurried to reassure her.

“They’re relatively harmless. Pretty easygoing. Sometimes they even let divers hand-feed them. I’m a little surprised he would come this close to the surface, since they usually stay pretty close to the substrate at the ocean floor where they feed, but he was probably just curious about what we might be doing up here.”

“Are…are you a diver?”

He had to admit, she was taking all of this remarkably well, though he could sense every time the moments of panic seemed to creep in. As a scientist, he had to admire any creature that could adapt to its circumstances.

“When I have to be,” he answered. “I’m a research biologist. I study the nesting habits of sea turtles. Olive Ridleys and endangered leatherbacks.”

“And you moonlight as a machete-wielding maniac, apparently, capturing innocent women off the beach.”

Despite the grimness of their situation, the sweat pouring off him and the strain in his muscles as he paddled like hell down the coast, his lips curved at her tart reply.

“You know what they say,” he drawled. “It’s tough work, but somebody’s got to do it.”