At his touch, her lashes fluttered again, looking impossibly dark against her skin. This time, her eyes opened. She gazed at him like a bemused little bird for several seconds, her eyes cloudy and baffled.
He again felt that weird tug in his chest when she lifted a corner of her mouth in a half smile. It slid quickly away and he watched as awareness returned to her eyes.
She scrambled to sit and he eased his hold, though some small part of him he was afraid to acknowledge was reluctant to let go.
“Those men! Where are they?”
“It’s okay. They’re gone. You’re okay now. I’ve got you.”
He wouldn’t have expected her to find comfort from such a statement, but she relaxed a little against him and seemed content for now to stay there. “Who were they? They aren’t from Suerte del Mar, are they?”
“Those two? No way. They’re gold miners. Squatters who set up operations illegally in national parks and national forests. The Osa is lousy with them, though there aren’t as many as there used to be. A few years ago the rural police worked with the federal government to clear them all out, but over the years some have returned.”
“Why were they so angry at me?”
“My fault there.” Guilt pinched at him and an echo of the fear that had gripped him when he saw her in danger.
“The shortcut I heard about would apparently lead us right through their operation,” he explained. “Another half mile and we would be in the middle of it. Folks up here don’t take kindly to strangers wandering where they’re not wanted, and they must have been afraid you were spying on them or were after their windfall.”
She was silent for a moment but made no move to leave his arms—much to his relief, since he didn’t want to let go. She felt incredibly right in his arms, warm and soft and female.
“What will we do now?” she asked.
“Backtrack a mile or so and pick up the other trail. It’s the only thing we can do at this point. I gave them my word.”
“More hiking.” She sounded completely dispirited at the idea and he tightened his arms.
“I’m sorry, Liv. I should have just stuck to the original trail in the first place. I just want to get you to safety as quickly as possible.”
So far he was scoring a big fat zero in the protection department. He had dragged her away from Rafferty and thrust her right into more danger.
“What did you say to them to make them leave? I thought…I was sure they were going to kill us both. One moment, I thought we were dead and the next they disappeared. You must have been very persuasive.”
He focused on the canopy above them. Gauging the clouds overhead and trying to ascertain the imminent risk of rain was far easier than trying to face her right now. “I, uh, told them who I was,” he said after a moment.
“They know you?” she asked, surprise in her voice.
This revelation wasn’t exactly going to inspire her with confidence that he could get her out of here safely, but he didn’t see that he had any choice but to tell her the truth. “I guess they’ve heard of me. The population of the Osa Peninsula isn’t that big. Maybe 6,000 people. And, uh, I have a bit of a reputation.”
“A…reputation?”
He sighed. “A few of the locals call me the crazy turtle man.”
He supposed he had gone a little crazy after Mercedes died, when he had ripped the Peninsula apart trying to unearth the men who burned down the station. Once they were found and turned over to the rural police to face charges, he thought he would feel better, that somehow accomplishing that deed would take away the terrible ache he couldn’t breathe around.
He had been wrong. The craziness had still burned inside him. Desperate and guilty, he’d turned to the bottle then and he’d been a mean drunk, starting fights with anybody who looked at him crosswise.
He had been sober for eighteen months now—except for the occasional Imperial, he didn’t drink much at all—but his reputation still followed him around like those dark clouds up there.
At least in this case, a little notoriety had come in handy.
He wasn’t sure she would agree. After several more moments when she didn’t say anything, he risked a look at her and found her watching him out of those huge blue eyes.
“You’re probably thinking my, uh, unfortunate nickname explains a hell of a lot about the last twelve hours.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think you’re crazy at all, Ren. I might have at first, but I’ve never been so glad to see anyone in all my life as I was that moment you came bursting through the trees.”
He gazed back at her, stunned into speechlessness. Had anyone in his entire life ever looked at him with such total trust?
“Thank you,” she went on. “That’s twice now you’ve saved my life.”
She lifted her face to his, her eyes soft and grateful. Her mouth was inches from his. He could cross that tiny space in a heartbeat, he knew. The temptation was overwhelming, all-consuming.
He could think of a million reasons why he shouldn’t follow through on that urgent need. The miners could return at any moment, and he had given them his word he and Olivia would immediately turn around and head back the way they had come. The rains would be hitting soon, turning the whole trail into a slippery, sloggy hell. They had a long way to go before they reached Port J.
Yeah, all those things were important. But they paled against the overriding hunger gnawing in his gut to taste her.
He sighed and lowered his mouth the few inches to hers, abandoning every ounce of common sense.
Her mouth was warm and sweet, like biting into a fresh, ripe mango, and she sighed at the first touch of his lips.
He might have stopped after that brief, heady taste. But when she threw her arms around his neck and returned his kiss with unmistakable enthusiasm, he was lost. Heat surged through him, wild and potent and out of control, and he deepened the kiss.
She pressed herself against him, those miles of luscious curves that had haunted him since he saw her in the pale dusk on Suerte del Mar. He groaned, savoring the contrast between her softness and his instant hardness.
As her mouth tangled with his, he forgot everything—the squatters, Rafferty, the myriad dangers of the rain forest. All he could focus on was Olivia Lambert and the blood churning through his veins.
He wanted her. Right here, right now, with a hunger that roared through him like a jet fighter leaving contrails through his psyche. He wanted to rip her clothes off and devour that soft skin, taste those curves.
* * *
Now this was paradise.
Olivia arched against him, her hands caressing his hair and those broad, powerful shoulders.
She had absolutely no experience with this wild hunger, this urgent, primal need to tangle her body with his right here on the jungle floor. His mouth—ah, his mouth!—was fierce and possessive and demanding. His matching hunger seemed to soothe all the battered nooks and crannies of her soul.
Until this moment in Ren’s arms, she hadn’t realized how humiliated she’d been by Bradley’s infidelity, how she had been demoralized, her confidence in her own desirability completely shredded. Finding out Bradley had wanted to marry her for her money had finished the job his personal assistant’s Lewinsky had started.
None of that seemed important right now. It was all as distant as her dingy little office at Lambert Pharmaceuticals. For now, this vital, gorgeous man wanted her—dumpy, out-of-shape Olivia Lambert—and she found the passion in his kiss an incredible aphrodisiac.
She shivered as his strong hands tugged up her borrowed T-shirt and played at the bare skin above her waist. Her hands slid beneath his shirt to clutch at the hard muscles of his back.
His fingers drifted further north and she held her breath, waiting for him to reach the bikini top she still wore under her clothes. Just before he did, a huge explosion boomed through the jungle.
She froze, her breathing ragged, and drew her mouth away from his.
&nb
sp; “What was that?” she murmured.
“Nothing. Shotgun blast.” He trailed kisses along her jawline and she nearly forgot her train of thought. But nothing and shotgun blast were not phrases normally associated with each other in her mind and she couldn’t quite get past that.
She drew in a shuddering breath and started the complicated process of extricating herself from the tangle of his body around hers. “Wh-who’s shooting?”
It took Ren several seconds to answer, and she saw with some surprise that his eyes looked slightly unfocused and a pulse beat rapidly in his neck. “Uh, probably our buddies, the squatters, out looking for lunch, I’d guess.”
She couldn’t seem to breathe. All she could focus on was the grim realization that she had virtually attacked Ren Galvez in the dirt in the middle of the rain forest. Another sixty seconds and she would have had his shirt off and be exploring all those hard muscles and interesting angles.
Why, again, had she stopped?
She drew in another breath. She wasn’t her mother. She had spent a lifetime trying to control the traces of Maelene that threatened to emerge at odd moments.
“What are they shooting at?”
He shrugged, still looking disoriented. “Could be anything. Iguana, Macaw. Whatever they find.”
He gazed at her for a long moment, and she could feel herself flush at the heat still lingering in his brown eyes.
He must think she was some kind of desperate scorned bride willing to jump anybody warm who came along.
She wasn’t. She wasn’t. Making out with a man she barely knew was just not the kind of thing she did. She hadn’t even kissed Bradley until their fourth or fifth date, and that had been nothing to write home about.
Not like the embrace she and Ren had just shared. That was worth a whole lot more than just a measly letter home.
She licked her lips, tasting him there still. What was happening to her? This wasn’t her.
Sex was another area where she had pretty aptly demonstrated over the years she was a complete and abysmal failure. She supposed some women were just naturally good at it. She wasn’t. She never knew what to put where, how to respond, where to touch.
She had learned early not to give in to any excess of passion or she would earn a stern reprimand from her father. Stop that. You’re acting like your mother. How many times had she heard the words from her father?
As a result, she acquainted everything her mother had been with something undesirable. From everything she’d pieced together, Maelene had been lush and sensual, a drama queen, given to impulse. As a result, Olivia had tried, with limited success, to eradicate all those elements of her own personality.
She knew she was stilted and uncomfortable in the bedroom. She certainly didn’t catch fire in an instant simply from the intoxicating taste of a man’s mouth on her.
She must have malaria or something. Dengue fever, maybe. That was the only possible explanation for this insanity.
She rose to her feet. “We should, um, head out, don’t you think? Since we’re going to have to backtrack and all.”
She found some small solace that Ren still looked as if he’d been smacked on the head by a falling coconut.
“Right. You’re right.” He took a breath and shook his head slightly as if to clear it, then gave her a careful look. “You okay?”
She knew perfectly well he wasn’t referring to the encounter with the squatters. She tried to offer a cool smile, despite the blush that crawled over her features. “Why wouldn’t I be? I know we were simply reacting to the stress of the moment. It didn’t mean anything.”
“Right. Of course it didn’t.”
Conversely, his quick agreement annoyed the heck out of her, but she decided not to let it bother her.
“What were you saying about rushing to beat the afternoon rains? Let’s go, then.”
He gazed at her for a long moment, his dark eyes intense, searching. Then he nodded and rose as well, shouldering his pack on the way up. “You’re absolutely right.”
* * *
The next two hours were a blur of misery. He pushed them both hard, so hard she had to fight back tears at the ache in her muscles. Her poor feet would never be the same, she was very much afraid.
She tried to ignore her discomfort, focusing instead on the exotic splendor of the rain forest, though it was a tough sell to her aching muscles. Ren no longer seemed inclined to point out a colorful bird here or a unique plant there. In fact, he was brusque, bordering on uncommunicative, and she discovered without his expert commentary, everything sort of lumped together into a big wall of green.
Still, she tried to pick out the few plants and wildlife she recognized to pass the time. What she tried not to do was dwell on that stunning kiss and the hormones still zinging crazily through her body.
Darn him anyway for getting her so stirred up, setting fire to this deep yearning inside her for more.
Finally they reached the summit of the highest mountain and started down the other side. She could see the blue of the Golfo Dulce spread out before them, with the mainland on the other side.
Not long now, she thought, trying not to sob with relief. Surely she could make it a little longer.
And then it started to rain.
Like the rains of the night before, there was no warning drizzle or even a stray droplet or two. One moment the trail was dry, the next they were trapped in the deluge that instantly soaked them both and turned the trail into a slick mess.
He didn’t stop even then, the monster, and she decided she definitely hated him.
Those few moments of stunning heat were an aberration. She couldn’t possibly be so fiercely attracted to such an inhuman machine.
The trail channeled all the runoff from the trees above them and they were soon slogging through ankle-thick mud that stuck to her boot with every step. In no time, she was coated in it up to her knees.
Still Ren pressed on down the hill without even looking back to see if she followed. She plowed along behind him, cursing him the whole way, then suddenly stumbled on some impediment on the trail, a rock or a tree root, maybe, concealed by the mud.
Arms flailing, she struggled to keep her balance on the slippery trail but it was a losing battle. Her boots slid out from under her, and gravity did the rest.
She could only be grateful Ren’s back was to her so he missed her ignominious, completely graceless slide into the mud. She managed to keep her face clear of the muck, but that was the only portion of her anatomy that escaped.
The fall snatched the breath from her chest and for several seconds she could do nothing but lay there in the cold, sticky mud trying to catch it again, aching and trembling and miserable.
How much lower could she sink? she wondered. She thought she’d hit bottom two weeks ago when she called off her wedding. But then, being kidnapped on her solitary honeymoon showed her she could slide a little lower. And now this seemed the absolute bottom. There couldn’t possibly be anywhere left to go but up from here.
Her father was right. She was a complete and utter failure. A walking disaster. She drew in a shaky breath, then another and another, aware of hysteria hovering in the wings.
Her life was a joke. She was a joke.
She let other people tell her what to do—her father, Bradley, even Ren. Other women might have put up a fuss when a stranger jumped out of the jungle with a machete.
Not Olivia.
She had gone with him without a murmur. Okay, she might have showed a little belated spirit by trying to escape and run away down the beach near his research station, but she hadn’t had any kind of concrete plan, had just acted from delayed instinct.
After he caught her, she had just gone along with whatever he wanted of her. Climb a tree? Sure. Sleep in a swaying hammock a hundred feet in the air? No problem. Hike behind him for miles, until she could barely move? Sign me up.
She was tired of it. She sat in the middle of the rain forest covered in mud from head to to
e and more disheartened than she’d ever been in her life. She couldn’t do this anymore. Not the hike, though that was miserable enough, but the way she’d been living her life for twenty-six years.
From this point on, she was done trying to please everyone else. She was going to grab hold of life on her own terms, damn it.
Ren must have finally realized she wasn’t trudging along behind him like a good little soldier. He turned around and even from twenty feet away and even in the middle of a blinding rain storm, she could see surprise register on his dark, masculine features, then concern.
He hurried toward her. “Liv, what happened? Are you okay?”
“Swell,” she muttered. “Can’t you tell?”
As he moved closer, she stared at him in disbelief. No way. It couldn’t be possible, but somehow Lorenzo Galvez had just slogged through a damn monsoon rain and come through with only his boots covered in mud.
He was soaked, his T-shirt molding to strong, chiseled muscle, but he was somehow still relatively clean.
Red-hot fury exploded in her. Even before she fell, she had been coated in the stuff up to her thighs, each step splattering more and more on her skin.
Now it was in her hair, covering her shirt, soaking through the cotton fabric to insinuate into every nook and cranny of her person, and the fact that he had emerged unscathed from this torment he was inflicting on her seemed the worst sort of injustice.
She wasn’t anybody’s wuss anymore. Hadn’t she just decided that? She would never be a superhero, but she could damn well correct this particular wrong.
Without stopping to think it through, she dug her fists into the inches-deep mud and picked up a good, juicy handful. She drew in a deep breath, took aim and let it fly.
It was a lucky shot. The wad of mud plopped against his cheek with a satisfying thud.
With mud dripping off his cheek, he gazed at her as if she were nuts.
“Why the hell did you do that?”
“Sorry,” she lied, then demonstrated her complete lack of repentance by picking up another glob and chucking it at him. This one splashed against the hard planes of his chest and dripped down below his rib cage. “There. A few more and we’ll be a matched set.”
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