by Janet Dailey
An obviously puzzled officer looked once more to Gard. “Señor?”
There was another explanation in Spanish that Rachel couldn’t understand, but it was followed by Gard reaching into his pocket and producing identification. The edge was taken off her anger with the dawning realization of how she was being trapped.
“Would you care to show him your passport or driver’s license, Mrs. MacKinley?” Gard taunted softly.
“Señora, your papers?” the officer requested.
Dully she removed her passport from the zippered compartment in-her purse and showed it to him. A grimly resigned look showed her acceptance of defeat for the way Gard had outmaneuvered her. With the difficulties of the language barrier, she couldn’t hope to convincingly explain that even though their surnames were the same, they weren’t related.
When the policeman returned the passport, he observed her subdued expression. It was plain that he considered this a domestic matter, not requiring his intervention. He made some comment to Gard and grinned before touching a hand to his hat in a salute and moving to the side.
“What did he say?” Rachel demanded.
Before she could tighten her hold on the beach bag, filled to the top now with her morning’s purchases, Gard was taking it from her and gripping her arm just above the elbow to propel her down the sidewalk. Rachel resisted, but with no success.
“He was recommending a restaurant where we could have lunch,” he replied tautly, ignoring her attempts to pull free of his grasp.
“I’m not hungry,” she muttered.
“I seem to have lost my appetite, too.” His fingers tightened, digging into her flesh as he steered her around a corner.
The line of his jaw was rigid, hard flesh stretched tautly across it. Her own mouth was clamped firmly shut, refusing to make angry feminine pleas to be released. She stopped actively struggling against his grip and instead held herself stiff, not yielding to his physical force.
Halfway down the narrow cross street he pulled her to a stop beside a parked car and opened the door. “Get in,” he ordered.
Rachel flashed him another angry glance, but he didn’t let go of her arm until she was sitting in the passenger seat. Then he closed the door and walked around to the driver’s side. She toyed with the idea of jumping out of the car, but it sounded childish even to her. Her beach bag was tossed into the back seat as Gard slid behind the wheel and inserted the key into the ignition switch.
Holding her tight-lipped silence, she said nothing as he turned into the busy traffic on the Malecon, the main thoroughfare in Puerto Vallarta, which curved along the waterfront of Banderas Bay. At the bridge over the Cuale River the traffic became heavier as cabs, trucks, burros, and bicycles all vied to cross.
The river was also the local laundromat. Rachel had a glimpse of natives washing their clothes and their children in the river below when Gard took his turn crossing the bridge. Under other circumstances she would have been fascinated by this bit of local atmosphere, but as it was, she saw it and forgot it.
Her sense of direction had always been excellent. Without being told, she knew they were going in the exactly opposite direction of the pier where the ship was tied. It was on the north side of town and they were traveling south. The road began to climb and twist up the mountainside that butted the sea, past houses and sparkling white condominiums clinging to precarious perches on the steep bluffs. When the resorts and residences began to thin out, Gard still didn’t slow down.
Rachel couldn’t stand the oppressive silence any longer. “Am I being abducted?”
“You might call it that,” was Gard’s clipped answer.
Not once since he’d climbed behind the wheel had his gaze strayed from the road. His profile seemed to be chiseled out of teak, carved in unrelenting lines. She looked at the sure grip of his hands on the steering wheel. Her arm felt bruised from the steely force of his fingers, but she refused to mention the lingering soreness.
As they rounded the mountain the road began a downward curve to a sheltered bay with a large sandy beach and a scattering of buildings and resorts. Recalling his earlier invitation to spend the afternoon in some quiet beach area, Rachel wondered if this was it.
“Is that where we’re going?” The tension stayed in her voice, giving it an edge.
“No.” His gaze flashed over the bay and returned to the road, the uncompromising set of his features never changing. “That’s where they filmed the movie The Night of the Iguana.” His voice was flat and hard.
“You can let me off there,” Rachel stated and stared straight ahead. “I should be able to hire a taxi to take me back to town.”
There was a sudden braking of the car. Rachel braced a hand against the dashboard to keep from being catapulted forward as Gard swerved the car off the road and onto a layby next to some building ruins overlooking the bay.
While Rachel was still trying to figure out what was happening, the motor was switched off and the emergency brake was pulled on. When Gard swung around to face her, an arm stretching along the seatback behind her head, she grabbed for the door handle.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” he growled as his snaring hand caught her wrist before she could pull the door handle.
“Damn you, let me go!” Rachel tried to pry loose from his grip with her free hand, but he caught it, too, and jerked her toward him.
“I’m not letting you go until we get a few things straight,” Gard stated through his teeth.
“Go to hell.” She was blazing mad.
So was Gard. That lazy, easygoing manner she was so accustomed to seeing imprinted on his features was nowhere to be seen. He was all hard and angry, his dark eyes glittering with a kind of violence. He had stopped turning the other cheek. Recognizing this, Rachel turned wary—no longer hitting out at him now that she discovered he was capable of retaliating. But it was too late.
“If I’m going to hell, you’re coming with me,” he muttered thickly.
He yanked her closer, a muscled arm going around her and trapping her arms between them as he crushed her to his chest. His fingers roughly twisted into her hair, tugging at the tender roots until her head was forced back.
When the bruising force of his mouth descended on her lips, Rachel pressed them tightly shut and strained against the imprisoning hand that wouldn’t permit her to turn away. The punishment of his kiss seemed to go on forever. She stopped resisting him so she could struggle to breathe under his smothering onslaught. Her heart was pounding in her chest with the effort.
As her body began to go limp with exhaustion the pressure of his mouth changed. A hunger became mixed with his anger and ruthlessly devoured her lips. She was senseless and weak when he finally dragged his mouth from hers. Her skin felt fevered from the soul-destroying fire of the angry kisses. The heaviness of his breathing swept over her upturned face as she forced her eyes to open and look at him.
The fires continued to smolder in his eyes, now tempered with desirous heat. He studied her swollen lips with a grimness thinning his own mouth. The fingers in her hair loosened their tangling grip that had forced her head backward.
“Woman, you drive me to distraction.” The rawly muttered words expressed the same angry desire she saw in his solid features. “Sometimes I wonder if you have any idea just how damned distracting you are!”
Her hands were folded against his muscled chest, burned by the heat of his skin through the thin cotton shirt. She could feel the hard thudding of his heart, so dangerously in tune with the disturbed rhythm of her own pulse. She watched his face, feeling the run of emotions within herself.
“I know that I made you angry yesterday,” Gard admitted while his gaze slid to the sun-browned hand on her shoulder. “When I watched you rubbing that lotion over your body, I wanted to do it for you.”
As if in recollection, his hand began to glide smoothly over the bareness of her arm. His gaze became fixed on the action while images whirled behind his smoldering dark eyes. Rachel didn
’t have to see them. She knew what he was imagining because she could visualize the scene, too, and the sensation of his hands moving over her whole body, not just her arm. A churning started in the pit of her stomach and swirled outward.
“But I knew if I touched you”—his gaze flicked to her eyes and looked deeply inside their black orifices—“I wouldn’t be able to stop. Instead I had to lie there and pretend it didn’t faze me to watch you spread oil all over your skin.”
She dropped her gaze, unwilling to comment. It was disturbing to look back on the scene yesterday on the beach and know what he was thinking and feeling at the time.
“And I’ve made you angry this morning,” Gard continued on a firmer note. “I never claimed to be without flaws, but damnit, I want to spend the day with you. Do you want to spend the day with me? And answer me honestly.”
When she met his gaze, she had the feeling she was a hostile witness being cross-examined by a ruthless attorney and sworn to an oath of truth. Discounting all her petty resentments, Rachel knew what her answer was.
“Yes.” She reluctantly forced it out. “Do you always ask such leading questions?”
Some of the hardness went out of his features with the easing of an inner tension. There was even the glint of a smile around his eyes.
“A good lawyer will always lead the conversation in the direction he wants it to go, whether in contract negotiations or court testimony,” he admitted. “Unfortunately you objected to the way I was leading.”
“But my objection was eventually overruled,” Rachel murmured, relenting now that the outcome was known and she had a clearer understanding of why it had happened.
“And you aren’t going to appeal the decision?” His mouth quirked.
“Would you listen?” Her voice was falling to a whisper. She wasn’t even sure if she knew what they were talking about as his mouth came closer and closer.
It brushed over her tender lips, gently at first, then with increasing warmth until he was sensually absorbing them. His tongue traced their swollen outline and licked away the soreness. Rachel twisted in the seat and arched closer to him, sliding her hands around his neck and spreading her fingers into his hair.
The quarters of the car were too restricting, forcing positions that were too awkward. Breathing heavily, Gard pulled away from her to sit back in the seat. He sent her a dryly amused look.
“It’s impossible but every time I get into this with you, the surroundings go from bad to worse,” he declared. “Last time it was the dubious comfort of a single bed. Now it’s a car seat.”
Her laughter was soft; the fire he had ignited was still glowing warm inside her. As he started the car’s motor she settled into her own seat.
“You never did tell me where we’re going,” she reminded him after he had pulled onto the road again.
“Believe it or not”—he turned his head to slide her a look—“I’m taking you to paradise.”
“Promises, promises,” Rachel teased with a mock sigh.
“You’ll see,” Gard murmured complacently.
When she looked out the window, she was amazed to notice how clear and bright the sky was. The steep mountains were verdantly green and lush. Below, the ocean rolled against them in blue waves capped with white foam. Afterward her gaze was drawn back to a silent study of Gard. There were flaws, but none that really mattered.
Chapter Eight
They followed the paved road for several more twisting miles before Gard turned onto a short dirt road that led to a parking lot. Rachel read the sign, proclaiming the place as Chico’s Paradise.
“I told you I was taking you to paradise,” he reminded her as he braked the car to a stop alongside another.
“What is it?” Rachel climbed out of the parked car. The ground seemed to fall away in front of it, but she could see the roof of a building below . . . several buildings loosely connected, as it turned out. “A restaurant?”
“Among other things,” Gard said, being deliberately close-mouthed when he joined her.
Absently Rachel noticed that he was carrying her beach bag, but since they were high in the mountains and some distance from the ocean, she presumed he had brought it rather than leave it in the car where it might possibly be stolen. The lush foliage grew densely around the entrance path, leading down to the buildings. It was barely wide enough for two people to walk abreast.
Gard took her hand and led the way. The first adobe building they passed housed a gift and souvenir shop. Then the path widened into a small courtyard with a fountain and a statue of a naked boy. To the right a woman was making flour tortillas in an open shed area.
It appeared to Rachel that the path dead-ended into an open-air restaurant, but Gard led her through it to a series of stone steps that went down. There was a tangling riot of red bushes that looked to be some relation to the poinciana.
A second later she caught the sound of tumbling, rushing water. She looked in the direction of it. Through the flame-red leaves she saw the cascading waterfall tumbling over stone beds and creating varying levels of rock pools. When she turned her widened eyes to Gard, he was smiling.
“I told you I was taking you to paradise,” he murmured softly and offered her the beach bag. “The changing rooms are down here if you want to slip into your swimsuit.”
A second invitation wasn’t required as she took the beach bag from him and skimmed the top of the steps as she hurried to the small adobe building. When she returned, wearing her lavender swimsuit, Gard had already stripped down to his swimming trunks. He used her beach bag to store his clothes.
Rushing water had worn the huge gray boulders smooth and gouged out holes to make placid pools while the musical cascade of water continued on its way down to the sea. A dozen people were already enjoying the idyllic setting, most of them sunbathing on the warm stone.
“Watch your step,” Gard warned when the crudely fashioned steps ended and they had to traverse the massive boulders.
Luckily Rachel had put on her deck shoes. The ridged soles gave her traction to travel over the uneven contours of the huge stones, part of the mountain’s core that had been exposed by centuries of carving water. Once they were at the rushing stream’s level, Gard turned upstream.
There was no formal path, no easy way to walk along the water’s course. Moving singly, they edged around a two-story boulder, flattened against its sheer face with a narrow lip offering toeholds. They passed the main waterfall, where the stream spilled twenty feet into a large, deep pool, and continued upstream. It seemed to require the agility of a mountain goat, climbing and jumping from one stone to another. Sometimes they were forced to leave the stream to circle a standing rock.
No one else had ventured as far as they did, settling for the easy access of the rock pool at the base of the waterfall and the lower-level pools that weren’t so difficult to reach. Rachel paused to catch her breath and looked back to see how far they’d come.
The open-air restaurant with its roof of thatched palm leaves sat on the bluff overlooking the main waterfall. Tropical plants crowded around it. At this distance the brilliant scarlet color predominated, looking like clusters of thousands of red flowers.
Almost an equal distance ahead of Rachel she could see a narrow rope bridge crossing the stream. On the other side of the stream there was a knoll where a long adobe house sat in the shade of spreading trees. A large tan dog slept on a patch of cool earth, and from somewhere close by a donkey brayed. But always in the background was the quiet tumble of water on its downward rush to the sea.
“Tired?” Gard’s low voice touched her.
“No.” Rachel turned, an inner glow lighting her eyes as she met his gaze. “Fascinated.”
He passed her a look of understanding and swung back around to lead the way again. “I found a place.” The words came over his shoulder as Rachel fell in behind him.
Between two boulders there was a narrow opening and the glistening surface of a mirror-smooth pool just
beyond it. Gard squeezed through the opening and disappeared behind one of the boulders. Rachel ventured forward cautiously. From what little she could see of the rock pool, it was walled in by high, sheer stones.
But there was a narrow ledge to the right of the opening that skirted the pool for about four feet. At that point it curved onto another boulder lying on its side, forming a natural deck for the swimming hole. It was secluded and private, guarded by the high rocks surrounding it. Gard stood on the long, relatively flat stones and waited for her to join him.
“Well? Was it worth the walk?” There was a knowing glitter in his eyes when she traversed the last few feet to stand beside him.
“I don’t know if I’d call it a ‘walk.’” Rachel said, questioning his description of their short trek. “But it was worth it.”
His finger hooked under her chin and tipped her head up so he could drop a light kiss on her lips. His lidded gaze continued to study them with disturbing interest, causing a little leap of excitement within Rachel.
“Get your shoes off and let’s go for a swim.” His low suggestion was at odds with the body signals he was giving, but it seemed wiser to listen to his voice.
“Okay,” she breathed out.
While he kicked off his canvas loafers, Rachel sat down on the sun-warmed stone to untie her shoelaces. When both shoes were removed, his hand was there to pull Rachel to her feet. Gard held onto the boulder as he led her down its gentle slope to the pool’s edge.
“Is it deep?” She didn’t want to dive in without knowing and tentatively stuck a toe in the water to test the temperature. She jerked it back. “The water’s cold.”
“No,” Gard corrected. “The sun is hot, and the water is only warm.” His hand tightened its grip on hers and urged her forward. “Come on. Let’s jump in.”
“Hmm.” The negative sound came from her throat as she resisted the pressure of his hand. “You jump in,” she said and started to sit down to ease herself slowly into the cool water. “I prefer the gradual shock.”