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
