His laugh was rough and sexy and made her toes curl. “Oh, you’re very, very welcome, Ms. Lambert.”
“No, I mean it. I didn’t…I’ve never…”
With a finger, he tilted her chin up and found her mouth again, his eyes almost black in the low light from the bedside lamp. She couldn’t analyze the expression in them but something in it sent her stomach twirling again.
What could he read in her eyes? she wondered, praying he couldn’t see the emotions she was afraid were all too obvious.
“Are you hungry?” she asked. “I can fix you something.”
He shook his head. “Maybe later. Right now, I don’t want to move from this spot. This is perfect. You’re perfect.”
She snuggled closer, fighting the languor seeping into her muscles. She didn’t miss the note of regret in his voice. He must sense, as she did, that these few stolen moments were all they would have together. When the sun came up, she would be on her way off the peninsula and out of his life. A lump of emotion rose in her throat, but she swallowed it.
She refused to ruin the moment by worrying about the future and the loneliness of a world without Ren Galvez.
“What will you do when you go back to the States?” he asked into the silence.
“Besides make sure Bradley Swidell is drawn and quartered? I don’t know. I’m still considering my options.”
She paused, then plunged forward. “I don’t want to go back.”
If she expected him to immediately offer her a spot on his research team, forever to cook him pasta and kayak across the Pacific with him, she was doomed to disappointment.
“You’ve got a tougher shell than you think, Liv,” was all he said. “You can face all the gossip and furor over your engagement.”
She decided not to correct his erroneous assumption. She didn’t care anymore about the mess she’d left behind. She only regretted the idea of not seeing Ren again.
“I never thought I was. Tough, I mean.”
“Are you kidding? I’ve never met a more resilient woman.”
She tried the word on for size and decided she liked it.
“This trip hasn’t turned out at all like I imagined,” she admitted. “I thought I would soak up some sunshine, enjoy the local culture, maybe do a little long-overdue self scrutiny. I landed in the middle of the rainy season and the only local culture I’ve seen has been monkeys and savage gold miners. Present company excluded, of course.”
He smiled.
“Though I guess it’s not a total failure. I did learn a bit about myself.”
“Such as?”
“You’re right. I’m tougher than I’ve always thought. And given the choice between climbing a hundred feet up a tree and sticking around on the ground with a deadly snake in the neighborhood, I’ll climb any day.”
He laughed out loud. “Knowledge I’m sure will come in handy back in Dallas. What else?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I was a little too busy fighting off crazy turtle men with machetes to do much poking around in my psyche.”
His fingers curved over her breast, his mouth twisting into a wolfish grin. “I think you lost the fight.”
“Did I?” she murmured, and arched into his hand.
* * *
They made love again, without the wild urgency of the first time. This was slow and sensual, like drifting through warm, torpid tropical waters.
She came apart in his arms with the same bewildered kind of joy that rocketed right to his heart, then she fell asleep almost immediately. Ren held her for a long time as he waited for his pulse to slow and his breathing to return to normal.
An uncomfortable tenderness welled through him from some hidden spring.
She was different from any woman he had ever known, and he hated the idea of saying goodbye. Already he could sense the void she would leave behind, an emptiness that stretched ahead of him like the vast, undulating waves of the Pacific from Playa Hermosa.
He didn’t want to think about it. Blast her, anyway. He wasn’t looking for this. He had no room in his life for pampered little rich girls.
The rain had stopped completely, the moon sneaking from behind the clouds long enough to send a shaft of moonlight onto the almond-wood floor. He stared through the filmy netting.
Without the rain, he could hear the siren call of the sea, beckoning him as she had been doing since that long-ago summer in central California.
Suddenly restless, unwilling to face the tide of emotion crashing through him for this soft, curvy woman in his arms, he slid from the bed and threw on his shorts. Her cell phone sagged heavily in the pocket and he quickly pulled it out, guilty all over again.
He hadn’t told her about calling her father yet. He’d tried half a dozen times but the words seemed to tangle in his throat.
He would wake her before daybreak to let her know, he told himself. How could he disturb the first real sleep she’d had in two days?
It was a rationalization, he knew. The truth was, he didn’t want to tell her, to ruin their last few hours together. She wouldn’t be happy about what he had done. And while he couldn’t regret calling her father—it was the one sure way to keep her safe and he would do it again in a moment—he wasn’t quite sure how she would react.
Instead of dwelling on it, he yanked the cell phone out of his pocket and set it on her dress, then threw on a shirt and a pair of Tevas and let himself out of the beachhouse.
The night teemed with life. A chorus of smoky jungle frogs whooped to the accompaniment of cicadas and the loud, smacking kissy sounds of a pair of geckos as he made his way to the beach.
The lights of Puerto Jiménez gleamed down the shore and across the Golfo Dulce, he could make out the distant lights of Golfito.
He stood on the beach, watching the play of moonlight on the waves and listening to the night and trying not to think of how empty his life would feel when Olivia returned to the States.
He was in love with her.
It seemed impossible in such a short time but as he stared out at the sea, he knew he couldn’t deny the truth.
He was in love with Olivia Lambert, with her strength and her spirit and her vulnerability.
Hell of a lot of good that would do him.
He let out a slow breath. He wasn’t ready for this again. Mercedes’s death had just about destroyed him. Not because he had loved her with a grand, never-to-be-repeated passion, though he had certainly cared about her.
More because it had starkly demonstrated what a selfish bastard he could be, not a pleasant realization for any man.
More than anything, he wanted to go back in time and live that day over—no, live the entire six months he spent with her again.
She had wanted him to take the day off. She was tired, she said. Not feeling well. They had been working sixteen-hour days for weeks without reprieve trying to finish their research, and she needed a rest.
He had berated her for it, he remembered now. Worse, he had accused her of trying to sabotage the project for her own petty reasons. It had been a vicious blow, completely uncalled for. She worked as hard as he did most of the time. Harder, sometimes.
She could have thrown the news of her pregnancy in his face then. That would certainly have shut him up in a hurry. It still surprised him that in the midst of one of their typically passionate arguments, she hadn’t said a word and had let him kayak off with anger simmering through him.
She had known, he found out from a sister to whom she had sent an e-mail with the news. She had known for days that she was nearly three months pregnant and hadn’t said a word.
Was that why she wanted him to stay home that day? If he’d stayed, would she have told him about the baby?
He didn’t know, but he was almost certain that if he’d been there, he could have prevented the arsonists from burning down their research station. He hadn’t been there. He’d been off nursing a snit while he collected data and then had gone to the cantina in Carate for a beer while Mercedes died from
smoke inhalation, their unborn baby with her.
The real hell of it was, after the fire he had thought long and hard about what his reaction would have been to the news of her pregnancy. He wanted to think he would have been thrilled, that he would have stepped up and done the right thing.
In truth, he just didn’t know. He probably would have married her—his parents’ example being what it was—but he had a feeling a marriage between them would have ended in disaster.
They had been lousy for each other in a lot of ways—competitive and self-absorbed professionally, and hot-tempered and reactionary when it came to their personal relationship.
After the needless tragedy of her death, he had figured things were easier if he packed that part of his life away. He planned to focus completely on his work and let that be enough for him.
He never expected a chance encounter with a bombshell in a bikini would completely turn his heart upside down, but there it was. Olivia Lambert had blasted her way through the hard shell around him, shattering it into a million pieces.
He was going to have a devil of a time piecing it back together when she left again.
He heard the sudden strident call of a vermiculated screech owl and sighed. He only had a few hours left with her. Why, exactly, was he out here on the beach moping about what he would do after she left, when he could be inside holding her right now?
He turned to go back to the bungalow, just as he heard the low throb of an approaching engine. Headlights suddenly turned up the road toward Al and Bobbi’s house.
Two vehicles.
His heart sank and he picked up his pace. Her father was here already? He swore. To make it to Puerto Jiménez so quickly, Wallace Lambert must have already been in San José and chartered a plane.
Though he hurried, he was still thirty feet away when one of the vehicles—a Hummer—stopped and a man climbed out. He started to call out a greeting but some instinct stopped him.
The moonlight shifted suddenly, and every muscle inside him clenched in sudden dread.
That wasn’t Wallace Lambert climbing out of that Hummer.
It was James frigging Rafferty.
CHAPTER 11
She awoke to a slow, languorous contentment.
She had no idea it was possible to feel so incredibly good. By rights, every muscle in her body should be aching right now. Instead, she was limber and relaxed, and she wanted this loose, easy feeling to last as long as possible.
A breeze whispered in through the open windows, sweet with the heliconia outside and a hint of the sea. The rain must have stopped sometime while she had slept because she could only hear the murmur of the ocean, soothing and peaceful.
She opened her eyes to find moonlight cutting across the room and the bed empty beside her. She stretched a hand out to the indentation on the other pillow and the linen was cool to the touch, indicating Ren had been gone some time.
A tiny, instinctive flicker of panic bubbled through her but she quickly pushed it aside.
He wouldn’t have left her here alone.
She knew it with solid certainty. If he were the sort of man to abandon her, he could have done it anytime along their journey up to now, before he knew her at all.
She couldn’t believe he would callously walk away after what they had shared.
A smile teased at the corners of her mouth as she touched his pillow again.
My word. She supposed the last few hours laid to rest any fears she might have harbored about being unresponsive and cold in bed. Her body stirred again, just remembering the heat and tenderness between them.
Three times.
She remembered her wild response and had to press her palms to her suddenly hot cheeks. She would have been mortified if Ren hadn’t been just as wild for her. He acted as if he couldn’t seem to get enough of her, and she couldn’t quite get over her astonishment.
She pulled the empty pillow to her chest and dipped her head to inhale the scent of him lingering there.
She was in love with the man.
She let out a breath, unable to deny the realization. Her friends would be stunned and would probably call this some foolish infatuation. Just a natural reaction to a stressful situation, misplaced gratitude for a man who had saved her life.
It was more than that. She knew it with absolute certainty. The emotions poured through her like storm runoff cascading from a cliff.
She was in love with Lorenzo Galvez, marine biologist, adventurer and would-be rescuer.
He was strong and honorable, a man who would risk his own life to save that of a woman he had never even met. He was passionate about his work, about his family, about this unique and rare world in which he lived.
All those things were part of the reason she had developed feelings for him with such quicksilver immediacy, but they weren’t the only reasons she loved him—or even the most important.
How could she do anything but love a man who could bring out such amazing things in her?
All her life she had felt inadequate, glaringly imperfect. A blond bimbo, just like her mother.
Ren didn’t treat her that way. With him, she felt better, stronger, smarter. The Bionic Woman, only without the lithe figure, superacute auditory skills or the ability to twist a man to pieces with her bare hands.
When Olivia was with him, she felt as if she could do anything—climb a hundred-foot tree, fight off a pair of angry squatters, dye her hair, pose as a voluptuously pregnant villager.
Orgasm thrice in less time than it takes to paint her fingernails. She certainly never would have believed herself capable of that.
She covered her smile with her fingers, amazed at herself all over again.
She heard a door open somewhere in the bungalow, and anticipation swirled inside her.
Maybe he was hungry. She could warm up some of the pasta for him or throw something else together. They’d never even made it to the gingered fruit waiting in the fridge.
She slid out from the mosquito netting onto the floor and reached for her borrowed sundress.
Something clattered to the floor—her cell phone, she realized with surprise. An odd place for it. Ren must have left it for her to find. She picked it up and slipped it into the wide pocket of her dress, then headed for the bedroom door.
It opened before she could reach for the knob. She smiled a greeting but it froze instantly on her features and she gasped a little scream.
“Stop right there.”
The voice wasn’t Ren’s. Instead, it belonged to a strange man standing in front of her with a gun pointed at her heart.
She obeyed—what else could she do, with boneless knees and muscles that suddenly seemed locked into place?—and they stared at each other for a long moment.
He looked familiar, but she was certain she’d never met him before. Surely she would have remembered those cold blue eyes and the hard, handsome features.
She suddenly knew exactly who this stranger was. James Rafferty. She remembered his image from the magazine article Bradley showed her.
Her breathing quickened and panic spiraled through her as he inclined his head into the bedroom—a gesture not aimed at her, she realized, but at two large, intimidating men who stood behind him in the living area.
They obeyed instantly, moving with brusque alacrity past her into the bedroom. She was afraid to move—or even to blink, for that matter—but she could hear them behind her rummaging in the closet, the bathroom, even under the bed.
Where was Ren? she wondered frantically, but didn’t have time to dwell on her worry. They didn’t know either, obviously, or Rafferty wouldn’t be ripping the house apart looking for him.
When the two men inside the room shook their heads at coming up empty, Rafferty dropped his weapon and advanced on her, his large features twisted into a solicitous expression.
“Olivia Lambert, I presume.” He reached for her hand before she could shove it into her pocket. “Thank God we found you. You’re safe now.”
/> Her fingers clenched in his and she was certain he must feel them trembling. “I…I am?” she asked weakly.
“Where is Galvez?”
She would like to know that very thing, though she wasn’t about to admit that to Rafferty.
She couldn’t seem to make her brain work to come up with a convenient lie, so she decided it would probably be safer to stick to the truth. “I…I don’t know,” she finally admitted. “He was gone when I woke.”
He swore sharply and viciously, his hand tightening on hers. “He could be halfway to Panama by now.”
She had to hope so. Olivia had no desire to deal with James Rafferty alone, but she didn’t want Ren to come charging in unarmed against the man and at least two of his thugs.
“What now?” one of the men asked in heavily accented English.
Rafferty made an impatient gesture. “Search the grounds. Just find him.”
The men left swiftly, leaving her alone with Rafferty. Right then, she would have given anything to be back in the jungle, covered in mud and facing a dozen white-lipped peccaries looking for dinner.
“Did he hurt you, my dear?” Rafferty asked, still holding her fingers tightly.
He studied her for a long moment, and she could feel color creeping over her features. Oh, she hoped to heaven her lips didn’t look as swollen as they felt, that she didn’t have whisker burns on her skin.
“How did you find me?” she countered.
“Galvez called your father a few hours ago, demanding three million dollars for your safe return and giving the store down the road as a drop site. We were able to track your location from that brief phone call.”
“He…he what?”
Her stomach roiled and she was suddenly hot and cold at once. Ren called her father and demanded a ransom for her? It couldn’t be possible. He would never do that.
Still, enough doubt lingered that she had a hard time concentrating on Rafferty’s next words.
“Your father promptly called me as he’s still several hours away in Miami, and I have been acting as his representative here on the peninsula during the investigation until he can arrive himself. He’s been sick about all this.”
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