Читать книгу High-Stakes Honeymoon - RaeAnne Thayne - Страница 8

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.”

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 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.”