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.
