James Rafferty beat when it came to lousy ones right about now. She was tired and scared and hadn’t eaten in about seven hours.
The jungle around them teemed with life, buzzing insects and the flap of fruit bats overhead. She heard a rustle in the bushes of some unseen creature, then a terrifying, low-throated yowl from what sounded like only a few yards away.
She gasped and grabbed for him in the darkness, grabbing hold of his shirt and a good portion of warm skin. When faced with the alternatives, a delusional man with a machete didn’t seem like such a bad bet.
“What was that?” she gasped.
He shrugged and she felt his muscles ripple. “Sounded like a puma. They’re pretty common out here. He’s farther away than he sounded, though. And he probably won’t bother us.”
Probably was not exactly reassuring.
“If you’re talking mammals, it’s not the big cats you should worry about so much out here as the white-lipped peccaries.”
“P-peccaries?” She realized she was still clinging to his arm and quickly released him. Immediately, she felt chilled, even though the air was still heavy and warm.
She had seen a small herd of wild peccaries once while visiting her grandmother in south Texas and had no desire to bump into any out here in the dark.
“It’s not uncommon to see a herd of twenty or more out here. Don’t worry, though. You’ll smell them and hear the cracking of their teeth long before you see them. Once you hear them, all you have to do to get away is climb a tree.”
She swallowed a sob. She so didn’t want to be here. She wanted to be safe and dry and blessedly cool in Fort Worth in her condo, even if that meant she had to deal with all the wedding gifts that needed to be returned and hear a dozen messages from her father on her answering machine trying to change her mind.
Sometimes you’ve got to just play the cards you’re dealt, sugar. She could hear her maternal grandmother’s drawl in her ear and knew Belinda was right. She didn’t have a lot of choices. At the moment, this man didn’t seem inclined to hurt her and had actually gone out of his way to be solicitous. Though it seemed insane, she was going to have to trust him, at least until she could figure out a way out of this mess.
“Sit down and let’s change your shoes. You’re going to have to wear a pair of my socks. Sorry about that.”
He pulled out a flashlight and a moment later a beam of light shone into his pack. He dug around for a moment, then produced a pair of thick socks. “Hurry.
We don’t have much time,” he said as he handed them to her, then pulled a pair of hiking boots from the box he’d thrown into the Jeep at the last moment.
She leaned against a tree trunk and hurriedly pulled them on, wincing a little at the pinch of wearing someone else’s shoes. Surely not his. They were far too small, most definitely made for a woman’s foot.
It seemed an odd, almost ominous sign to her. Why would he have a pair of women’s hiking boots when she’d seen no signs of anyone female living at his abode?
Maybe he was some kind of crazed serial killer who dressed his victims in hiking boots and marched them into the rain forest.
She cursed herself for her vivid imagination. That’s what came from watching too many crime dramas on TV.
When the boots were laced, he reached a hand to help her from the trunk.
“Sweet thing like you is going to be eaten alive out here,” he murmured, standing entirely too close. Her pulse cranked up a notch. Here was the part where she should probably decide she would rather risk the jungle than whatever grisly fate he had in store for her, but somehow she couldn’t make her legs cooperate.
She held her breath, praying he couldn’t hear the harsh pounding of her heart. A moment later, she winced at her foolishness as he doused her with bug spray. “That’s going to wear off in an hour, so remind me to spray you again.”
Without another word, he shouldered his backpack, aimed his flashlight into the thick vegetation, and headed off without looking back to see if she followed.
She could escape right now, just turn around and race through the trees until she was out of his sight. She could try to find her way back to the main road and take her chances with Rafferty’s mood.
Or she could stay here and let the pumas and the jaguars and the white-lipped peccaries get her.
Torn, her insides churning with indecision, she froze. Finally, he must have clued in that she wasn’t behind him. He stopped and aimed his flashlight at her. “Come on. We’ve got a long walk ahead of us, but with any luck you’ll be on a plane back to the States by this time tomorrow.”
He could have just been telling her what he thought she wanted to hear. A madman would have no reason to tell the truth. Though she warned herself to be cautious, she still found great comfort in his words.
With a long, resigned sigh, she followed him, feeling as if she were leaving more of her common sense behind with every step she took in the unfamiliar boots.
Though it was full dark and had to be past nine o’clock at night by now, the heat still weighed heavily on her. It pressed against her in every direction until she felt as if she were walking through hot gelatin. The trail was muddy from the rains earlier—the constant rains, apparently—and soon the mysterious new boots were caked in it. With every step, more mud clung to the boots until she felt as if she were lifting half the trail as she stepped.
After only a few minutes, she was drenched in sweat and wholly miserable. She couldn’t see anything but the mud in front of his flashlight beam as it cut through the darkness.
“I hesitate to point this out,” she said, “but all the guidebooks say it’s not wise to be in the jungle after dark.”
“That’s what they say.”
“Yet here we are.”
He aimed his flashlight toward her and in the reflected light, she saw his mouth lifted into a half smile. “You have any better suggestion? Maybe a float plane stashed somewhere I don’t know about?”
“Of course not.”
“Neither do I. We could kayak around the peninsula, but that would take much longer and would be far more dangerous in the dark. Rafferty’s got a power yacht that can move a whole hell of a lot faster than I can paddle. He can patrol the whole coast looking for us and there’s nowhere to hide out on the open water. So unless you can come up with some other option, as far as I can tell, we don’t have any other choice but to keep walking.”
Apparently, Ren Galvez wasn’t of the curl-upright-here-and-die school of thought. She sighed and kept walking.
She never knew it was possible to hate someone with such a fierce, all-consuming passion.
She had been angry with Bradley for his gross betrayal, devastated by her father’s complete lack of filial support, hurt at her friends and coworkers for whispering about her behind her back, for acting as if she were the crazy one to get so bent out of shape over a little infidelity before any vows had been spoken.
But
