weren’t good enough. How about fire ants and peccaries and a couple dozen starving pumas?
“No. No way.”
She almost thought she could hear his teeth grinding from here. “Do I have to remind you about the machete?” he asked in an out-of-patience kind of voice.
She crossed her arms across her chest. She wasn’t afraid of him anymore, she decided. There simply wasn’t room for fear around the loathing.
“Go ahead. Break out your machete. Cut off an arm or two. What’s the difference? At least without arms, you can’t make me climb and I’d rather bleed to death than go up there.”
He gave a short laugh, then clipped it off midway through.
“Hold still,” he uttered suddenly, his voice barely a hush amid the whirs and peeps and calls of the rain forest at night.
He whipped his machete out and advanced slowly on her and her breath caught. Maybe he wasn’t quite as harmless as she wanted to believe.
“Okay, okay,” she squeaked out. “I was bluffing. I’ll climb.”
“Don’t move,” he growled. An instant later—before she could even take take another breath—the machete flashed through the night and struck the ground inches from her feet. A shaft of moonlight piercing the canopy gave just enough light for her to see a vine writhing at her feet.
Not a vine, of course. A snake.
Her insides churned and if she’d had anything in her stomach, she was fairly certain she would have lost it right then.
He held out his flashlight and shined it on the headless, still moving snake with a curiously beautiful geometric pattern along its skin. “There you go. Fer-de-lance. The deadliest snake around. A hundred people a year are killed by them in Costa Rica.”
She was going to hyperventilate now for sure. She couldn’t seem to catch her breath and the world seemed to spin alarmingly. She drew in a cleansing breath, then another and another until the moist, oxygen-rich air loosened the gnarled tendrils of panic.
“Up in the canopy is just about the only place we can rest without having to worry about them. But it’s your choice.”
What kind of man was Ren Galvez that he could kill a deadly snake without even breaking a sweat? He had probably just saved her life and he didn’t appear to be fazed one iota.
She looked at the terrifying tree trunk, then back at the now blessedly still creature. She swallowed a whimper and straightened her shoulders.
“I’ll climb,” she said.
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