by Beth Bolden
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Epilogue
Stay Connected
The #hotrio2016 Collection
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
Jemma’s best friend once told her nothing good ever happens after 2 AM.
When her phone rang, blaring through that still, silent calm right before dawn, Jemma fumbled to answer it with equal measures of dread and adrenaline pulsing through her veins—and Colin’s words echoing menacingly in her head.
But the problem wasn’t even on the shortlist of fears she’d had only that brief moment to compile. It was her boss.
“He’s been taken to a hospital in Rio,” Duncan, the owner of Five Points, the sports and pop culture blog they both worked for, said. “Knife wound to the stomach. Stabilized but just barely.”
Jemma was barely awake but she was still full of questions, half-clipped phrases because she couldn’t quite finish any of them. “Did he—was he—is he going to be alright? What even happened?”
“From what I hear,” Duncan said wryly, an echoing exhaustion in his own voice, “he was being himself.”
Jemma got dressed in the dark, throwing on enough clothes to cover herself, not even stopping to consider anything else, and went to the office because that seemed like the most normal thing to do when your boss, who you weren’t even sure you liked, got himself stabbed in a foreign country while on assignment.
“Good, you’re here,” Duncan said absently as she walked in the conference room where everyone was gathered, smiles tight and eyes anxious.
Jemma didn’t mention that she didn’t remember a single block of her drive to the office. “I’m here,” she parroted uselessly, collapsing into a chair. The buzzing adrenaline in her veins keeping her if not exactly steady, then awake. The clock on the wall said it was 4:36 AM. “Can someone tell me what the hell is going on?”
A cacophony of answers spilled out across the gleaming wood of the conference table. Half the people in the room, Jemma was convinced, didn’t even know her name before this morning. She was only Nick Wheeler’s just-out-of-college intern. The one who wrote that article and got hired because of it. There hadn’t been much acknowledgement of her existence otherwise; half the time, Nick himself barely acknowledged her.
She held up a hand. It was too overwhelming and the reality of the situation was just beginning to leak through the numbness all the adrenaline had afforded her. “Just . . .no,” Jemma said. “One at a time, please.”
“Nick got stabbed in one of the favelas during a mugging,” Duncan said. “I guess because he wouldn’t hand his phone over. He’s still in surgery. Will be for a few more hours. Then when he’s stabilized, we’ll fly him back to LA.”
Only then it hit Jemma that Nick wouldn’t be covering the Olympics in Rio. How could he, from a hospital bed in Los Angeles?
“So, who’s going to Rio?” Jemma asked, and every pair of eyes around the table swiveled to her.
Duncan gave a dry chuckle. “You, Jemma.”
“But I . . .I don’t . . .” Jemma couldn’t say she didn’t write. She’d been hired to write. She was a bona fide journalist, complete with shiny new degree, even if she only did research and fact-checked for Nick. The issue was that she’d been working for him for almost a year and she still couldn’t figure out why he’d hired her.
Nick liked edgy stories; stories that sent hate email by the gigabyte to his inbox. Jemma considered herself adventurous, but she didn’t get some kind of weird adrenaline high by writing something guaranteed to piss people off.
And now she was supposed to go to Rio de Janiero and write all the Olympic coverage for Five Points, when Nick had shared exactly zero of his sources or his story ideas.
Piece of cake.
It was supposed to be hot. Steamy, even. Warm enough to melt the foundation and mascara right off her face. But as Jemma lifted her face to the painfully blue sky, she didn’t feel a drop of her drugstore foundation wilt under the sun’s rays. Being closer to the equator than LA, Jemma had just assumed it would be warmer than the city she’d come to call home, but as it turned out, Rio wasn’t anything like what she’d expected.
Not that there’d been time to consider very much. It had been a sleepless, packed day before her flight, everything tinged with an edge of hysteria.
She laughed now, a little of that hysteria breaking through, the sound dispersing into the wide blue sky.
Even with all the research on Rio as a city and Brazil as a country and all the obscure historical facts she’d been able dredge up about the Olympic Games, it turned out Jemma had never once looked up the weather.
It made sense; she’d been gathering her information under the assumption that when the Opening Ceremonies in Rio kicked off, she wouldn’t be sweltering under the Brazilian sun, she’d be sitting in the Five Points’ office in LA, providing backup to Nick.
But as it happened, less than twenty-four hours later, Jemma was standing in the Rio airport, wondering why her makeup wasn’t actually melting off her face, and trying to figure out who, of the several dozen or so official looking drivers milling about on the sidewalk, was the one who was supposed to pick her up and drop her off at her hotel.
None of the signs had her name written on them. None of the signs said Five Points.
Neither of these possibilities had been ones that Jemma had considered. Of course, she’d been in such a frazzled rush to get packed that she hadn’t really had the opportunity to consider much of anything. But now in Rio, there was sudden clarity and a moment to think, and she was a little terrified.
After all, she’d been the one doing all the research on Rio’s crime rate, on the neighborhoods or favelas, that were not only not pacified, but were often run by either drug lords or local, rogue militias. The furthest Jemma had ever been from home had been a semester studying abroad in London, interning at one of the papers there, and while it had seemed quite adventurous at the time, nothing had seemed particularly foreign.
She’d at the very least spoken the right language.
For a moment, she considered dragging her phone out of the carry-on bag she had slung over one shoulder, but the articles she’d read about theft of electronics made her hesitate. She didn’t know what she’d do with it anyway—she couldn’t call Duncan because they’d arranged for her to use a cheap pre-paid phone in Rio and it was waiting for her at the hotel.
Jemma supposed she could always attempt to use the translation app she had downloaded, but she’d need Wi-Fi to do that. At the very least, she couldn’t continue to stand out here with no idea what to do, but she wasn’t sure going back inside would help either.
She was debating which option was worse when a very large tanned hand settled on her shoulder, jolting her out of her reverie.
Jemma whirled around to come face to face with a man that looked like he lifted weights for breakfast. And then ate girls like her for a snack afterwards.
He was dressed in dark jeans, and the gray t-shirt he wore did nothing to hide his rippling biceps. Jemma had a very uncomfortable vision of them flexing as they squeezed the life out of her. Dark, wavy hair, a tanned, chiseled face, a hawk of a nose, and intense dark eyes. His perfect poker face didn’t give a clue away as to what Jemma should expect.
He was hot. Eyebrow-singing hot, if Jemma was being honest, and w
hen those serious eyes swung her direction, also heart-poundingly terrifying.
Jemma’s palms started to sweat despite Rio’s very moderate temperature. She waited a second, and then another, praying he wouldn’t mug her. All she knew was that no matter how much she adored her phone, she wasn’t about to get attacked for it. Unlike Nick, if asked, she was going to be very willing to hand it over.
But he didn’t say a word, merely stared at her with an inscrutable expression as if she was psychic and knew exactly what he wanted.
“Can I help you?” she finally bit out after a good thirty seconds of stare-off. Usually Jemma was more game for silent confrontation, but she just really wanted to know if he planned to rob her. She’d almost forgotten about how attractive he was—almost.
“Jemma Keane?” was all he asked, in a non-accented voice. An American voice. She nodded and he continued in the same blank, nearly robotic monotone, “I’m here to get you.”
“You’re here to drive me to the hotel? That’s great.” She had been hoping for a little more friendly Brazilian and a little less intimidating body-builder, but either one would get her where she needed to go; it just happened that the latter made her pulse race a bit faster, that’s all.
He gave her a look like she was crazy. Jemma mentally corrected her previous thought to, “made her pulse race with annoyance.”
“What else?” he asked. His face broke into a grimace, like a jagged crack in a clay pot. Wow, she thought, that’s just rude.
“Then let’s go,” Jemma retorted, trying to bury the testy edge to her voice with a hesitant smile. Her mother’s sickly sweet voice echoed in her head, reminding her that you could always catch more bees with honey than with vinegar.
But what if I don’t want to catch this particular bee? she couldn’t help but think. Frankly, he seemed more likely to sting the shit out of her.
The man who had yet to introduce himself said next to nothing in the car.
Or, Jemma translated mentally, actually nothing, if you didn’t count grunts as responses to questions. She didn’t.
She wasn’t even sure why she was still trying to extract information from someone so profoundly uncommunicative, but she was stubborn enough not to want him to win the battle. He didn’t want to talk, so damnit, she wasn’t going to shut up.
“How far is the hotel?” she asked sweetly, as if they’d been chatting gaily this entire trip and he’d not once ignored her questions in favor of grunting.
Nothing. Complete and utter silence.
“Have you lived in Rio your entire life?” That one she could even answer for herself, as he most certainly had an American accent.
More silence. What an ass, Jemma thought.
“Is there a good public transportation system in the city?”
Don’t say you, Jemma almost added, but it wouldn’t have mattered because she didn’t get an answer anyway.
“Do you plan on checking out any of the Olympic events?”
Even more nothing. It seemed he’d dropped the grunting in favor of a chilly silence that he probably hoped would shut her up.
“Do you know a good tour guide?”
He sighed profoundly, as if she’d actually, finally, hounded him to death. Finally, she’d struck gold.
“You don’t need a tour guide or public transportation because I’m it for you. I’ll be at whatever events you go to, because I’m not letting you out of my sight.”
Jemma’s mouth dropped open a little. “He speaks!”
She could feel the force of his eye roll even though she couldn’t actually see it in the rearview mirror. “I’m not deaf or dumb or a mute.”
“Just rude,” she added.
He was silent, and Jemma decided that, in this case, silence was acquiescence.
“I thought you were just the hired driver.” It was rather satisfying to feel perfectly fine being as rude to him as he was to her. A nice outlet after twelve hours of panic topped by another fourteen hours cramped in a coach plane seat.
“As far as you’re concerned, I’m it. Driver, tour guide, bodyguard.” He glanced back in the rearview mirror, and where there’d only been a blank wall before, Jemma saw determination glimmer.
“Bodyguard?” she questioned incredulously. Jemma wasn’t sure she liked the sound of that. The idea of someone protecting her wasn’t a terrible one considering what had happened to Nick, but she also planned to be a hell of a lot more cautious than her boss had.
“I’m providing you with adequate protection in an unstable and somewhat dangerous environment.”
“It sounds like you’re reciting off a statement by the police,” Jemma observed.
“LAPD,” he replied in clipped tones.
“You’re a police officer,” was all she could say stupidly. And it made sense. His muscles—which she hadn’t exactly been able to ignore before, but she was now painfully aware of—and the rigid posture and the attempt to tame his hair. It all made sense.
He pulled the car up to a towering but gracefully aging building built of white stone. He opened her door before the bellboy could even rush over. “Welcome to the Belmond Copacabana,” he said with that same monotone voice, offering her a hand to help her out of the car.
“You’re taking over Nick’s room,” he continued to explain as he walked around the car. “Here’s the key. Room 1496.” He extended her a plain white key card and she took it, shoving it in a pocket of her jeans.
She’d expected him to let her follow the bellboy into the hotel and up to her room, but when she glanced back, he’d tossed the car keys to another uniformed staff member and was following right behind her as she walked toward the hotel.
Jemma could see her next three weeks in Rio unfolding so predictably: her attempting unsuccessfully to do anything without having Mr. Hot and Protective dogging every single step. And while she could see it being nice at first, she had no doubt that it was going to get old. Quick.
She turned to him, the brightest smile in her arsenal plastered across her face. He shifted his attention from navigating the doorway to her—all that intense focus right on her—and it took Jemma’s breath away a little. Up really close, his eyes were still dark, but they were flecked with these lovely gold specks, and his face was still hard, but she could see a shadow of scruff along his jaw. These little imperfections seemed to humanize him somehow. Jemma swallowed hard and reminded herself that she still didn’t know his name.
“Is this really necessary?” she asked quietly. “I’m at the hotel. I’m fine. You don’t need to come with me.”
His expression hardened a little, going implacable. “I do.”
“I know it seems that way,” she tried coaxing next, “but I promise, I won’t sneak off like Nick. I won’t go traipsing about any unpacified favelas. That’s really more Nick’s style than mine.”
He gave her one long hard look then shook his head sharply. “Don’t bother. You’re not getting rid of me.”
Jemma sighed. “I suppose we can’t even negotiate?”
“No.”
She sighed again. “Fine, let’s get this show on the road, then.” She led the way into the hotel and stopped short as they entered the lobby. The skylights dotting the roof of the massive atrium dappled the pristine parquet floors with sun, setting the Art Deco furniture and art glowing in the delicate, afternoon light.
He stopped next to her. “It’s beautiful,” Jemma observed softly, wistfully.
“It’s a hotel lobby,” he said impatiently, and she couldn’t help but wonder if he’d even taken in the details of the scene — the ivy creeping up the soft ivory columns, the rich antique gold velvet upholstery of the tufted sofas and chairs, their backs intricately carved with bougainvillea.
She reluctantly followed him through the atrium to the bank of elevators at the far end. He pushed one of the buttons and she watched him as he stood straight and silent facing the closed door. “This isn’t going to work, you realize,” Jemma said.
&nbs
p; “It’ll work a hell of a lot better than it did with Nick.”
“I never realized ‘constant vigilance’ was an actual thing that people did,” Jemma observed lightly as the elevator doors dinged and opened.
They stepped into the elevator and the doors shut. His back had become even straighter after her comment. “It’s not an insult,” she continued. “But what I’m telling you is that it’s just not necessary, and I’ll end up driving you crazy wanting to visit Christ the Redeemer fifteen times and wanting to take pictures from a thousand different angles. I’ll want to see the botanical gardens and go to all the rhythmic gymnastics competitions. I’m going to be a nightmare for you.”
“So you’re just trying to save me, yeah?” He glanced over at her, one eyebrow quirking up and sudden amusement playing over the corners of his admittedly attractive mouth. Jemma felt a little like a small rodent being stalked by a bird of prey. Maybe she shouldn’t have tried playing with someone so . . . so . . . something.
“Of course,” she replied diplomatically, though she knew she sounded a trifle less certain than she’d been only a few moments before.
The elevator stopped at their floor and they exited. He practically prowled down the hallway like he knew exactly where he was going.
And suddenly it occurred to her that he would. She was taking Nick’s old room. “Where are you staying?” she asked in a futile attempt to distract him from her previously futile attempt at manipulation. Honestly, Jemma wasn’t used to being quite so futile.
“Next door.”
“Crap,” she said before she could swallow the word back.
He stopped in front of a door. 1496 read the gold embossed sign on the navy blue door. He paused, something humanizing finally emerging across his handsome features. “Gabriel Rocha,” he said, matter-of-factly extending a hand for her to shake. She shook quickly then dropped as soon she could, reminding herself the whole time they were touching that he’d been a dick. “You can call me Gabe. Nick is my best friend.”
Jemma was quiet for a moment. She didn’t want to identify her primary emotion as guilt, but as she shuffled the pieces of her knowledge in her head and came up with a totally different interpretation of what had just transpired. He wasn’t rude, he was upset; he wasn’t silent, he was exhausted. He wasn’t an asshole; he was terrified.