The room suddenly seemed to spin as her brain tried to work around both those possibilities. She didn’t know which she found more far-fetched, that Ren would call her father or that her father would be at all worried about her.
“I…I need to sit down,” she mumbled.
“Of course, my dear. Of course.”
He led her to the couch and sat beside her, so close she couldn’t breathe for the smell of expensive cologne and Cuban cigars that clung to him.
Doubt began to creep in, vicious and demoralizing. How else would James Rafferty have found her, if Ren hadn’t called her father? The odds that the gambling mogul would pinpoint their location so exactly, here in this secluded beach house on the coast, were too astronomical otherwise.
Three million dollars must have seemed an awfully tempting prize to a man who lived in a concrete research station and drove an old, beat-up Jeep.
Ren had changed after he found out she was an heiress. She couldn’t deny that. All evening, he had been distant, distracted, and she had sensed something secretive and almost guilty in his eyes a few times when he looked at her.
Had he been after her money the whole time? Is that why he had made love to her, to divert her attention so she wouldn’t pay heed to his actions or any mysterious phone calls he might make or receive?
It certainly couldn’t be because he found himself suddenly overwhelmed with lust.
Rafferty squeezed her hands, and she didn’t have to feign her shiver.
“I can’t begin to tell you how much I regret that this horrible ordeal happened to you while you were my guest,” he said. “Your father will be so relieved you’re safe.”
She made a noncommittal sound, trying not to burst into noisy, humiliated sobs.
“When you disappeared from my villa at the same time as Galvez, I have to tell you, I feared the worst. The man is a vicious criminal. An animal. I am sorry to have to tell you this, but two nights ago, he killed a guest at my villa, a lovely woman whose only crime was spurning his attention. When my men tried to apprehend him, he fled into the night. I was sick to learn another of my guests had disappeared at the same time. I have been moving heaven and earth to find you, my dear.”
He certainly sounded convincing, with just the right notes of relief and concern in his voice. But at the starkness of his words, Olivia felt her sanity return.
He was lying. And poorly, too.
Ren would no more kill a woman who spurned him than he would start slaughtering sea turtles with his machete.
He wouldn’t kill a woman and he wouldn’t call Olivia’s father demanding a ransom for her return. She was ashamed of herself for even entertaining the idea for longer than half a second.
The man who had rescued her from the squatters, who had teased and cajoled her through the rain forest, who had made love to her with such unmistakable tenderness, would never be capable of the things Rafferty was saying about him.
She didn’t know how Rafferty had found them or what kind of game he was playing now, but she refused to believe Lorenzo Galvez would sell her out to her father.
As heartening as she found the assurance, renewed fear seemed to echo through her. Where was Ren?
Rafferty seemed to be waiting for an answer, an odd look on his features as if her reaction to his presence wasn’t at all what he expected.
“I’m sorry you’ve been put to so much trouble,” she lied, trying to school her features into an expression of bubbleheaded relief. She couldn’t underestimate Rafferty. He was clever and cagey and terrifying.
“You’re safe now. I won’t let anything happen to you.” He slid an arm around her shoulder and again she had to fight a shudder.
“I can’t tell you what a relief that is to hear,” she said. Her limited acting skills just wouldn’t stretch that far.
“You must come back to Suerte del Mar with me to await your father’s arrival.”
Alarm flashed through her. “Oh no. I’m sure I could wait here for my father.”
“No, I insist on it.” He smiled, but there was little warmth there. “It could be hours before he arrives. In the meantime, a warm bath and a safe bed will do wonders to put this ordeal behind you.”
Why did he want her back on Suerte del Mar so badly? Whatever the reason, she had a feeling more waited for her there than expensive bath soap and an empty bedroom.
Panic spurted through her again. She knew she would have to be smart and resourceful to get through this.
Resilient. Wasn’t that what Ren had called her? She could do this. No way was she placidly riding along beside James Rafferty, just quietly going along with the show. She was sick and tired of powerful men telling her what to do.
Not this time.
Biding for time, she decided to give him exactly what he expected. A blond cream puff, isn’t that what he called her? If he wanted a cream puff, he would damn well get one.
Putting on her bimbo game face, she leaned into him so her breasts brushed his arm. “I can’t believe my horrible ordeal is over at last.” Her drawl thickened into her best effort at a distressed Southern belle. “I am so glad you found me, Mr. Rafferty. It was awful. Just plain awful. The things he made me do!”
“What things?” His eyes took on an avaricious gleam, and she didn’t have to fake another shudder.
She grabbed at her hair. “Just look at this! It’s hideous! He put this horrible stuff on it, some kind of berries or something to turn it black. I washed and washed it until my scalp was raw, and it still looks like some kind of bird flew over and took a big ol’ crap all over it.”
“It’s not that bad.”
“You are a sweet thing, aren’t you? But you don’t have to lie to me, Mr. Rafferty. I’ve seen a mirror and I know I look like death warmed over. I’m going to need a week of facials just to get my pores opened up again. And look at my poor little feet.”
She held up her toes, with their raw blisters. That, at least, was a genuine complaint. “I can barely walk now after he made me tromp through that miserable jungle for hours and hours and hours. I thought I would never survive, let me tell you. And the mud. I have never seen such mud. It was everywhere! I had mud inside my ears. Do you have any idea how truly, horribly disgusting that is?”
She went on and on about the spa treatments she would need, how her cuticles were a complete mess, how the only thing he fed her was granola bars and beef jerky, for the love of Pete.
She threw in every complaint she could possibly drum up against Ren Galvez. By the time she started to run out of steam and wind down her litany, Rafferty’s eyes had started to cross.
“Yes, yes,” he finally broke in. “You’ve been through a horrible ordeal, I’m sure, but it’s all over now. I’ll take you back to Suerte del Mar, put you into my loveliest room and you can wait there for your father.”
A misnomer, his estate, she thought. She was afraid the luck of the sea would definitely not be with her if she stepped back there.
“Oh, thank you, Mr. Rafferty. Thank you, thank you.” She added a little sob, hoping she wasn’t laying it on too thick. No, she saw when she peeked out of the corner of her eye. He expected her to be Bradley Swidell’s rich little blond bimbo and that’s exactly what he saw.
“Let me just go use the little girl’s room to run a brush through this mess of hair. I’ll be right back, okay?”
He had the same glazed look her father tended to get when she was a teenager trying desperately to get him to pay a little attention to her and he looked almost relieved to have a reprieve from her inane chatter.
She closed the door behind her and turned on the water in the sink. The miserable boots were still in there from when she had showered earlier and she quickly shoved them on, not bothering with socks. Like the rest of the house, the bathroom had no screen on the window, just shutters that locked from the inside.
Maybe they wouldn’t need so many mosquito nettings on the beds down here if they would invest in some screens, for heaven’
s sake, she thought, then yanked her wandering mind back to the issue at hand.
Praying she would fit—what could be more ignominiously humiliating than being stuck with her big fat butt hanging out?—she backed through the window, squeezing out feet first through the small opening.
Add this to her growing résumé of random skills, she thought, bordering on hysteria. She could squeeze like a tube of toothpaste through a bathroom window when the only alternative was dealing with a homicidal maniac.
She lowered herself down to the ground, muscles poised to take off running. Before she could make it a step, someone stepped out of the bushes and grabbed her from behind, a hard hand covering her mouth.
Good grief. She almost sighed. Hadn’t she been through this already? She started to fight instinctively, then she caught a familiar scent on the tropical breeze.
“Shhh,” Ren murmured into her ear, removing his hand from her mouth. “Rafferty has three men out here.”
She stilled instantly, relief slamming into her so hard her knees swayed. As long as he was here, she could handle anything. She shifted so she could wrap her arms around his waist, hanging on with all her strength. He held her close and she thought she sensed the same relief in his embrace.
“They’re looking for you,” she whispered urgently. “You have to get out of here.”
“Not without you.”
He couldn’t seem to stop touching her, amazed all over again that she’d had the strength and courage to climb out the window. He had never been so relieved in his life as he was to see those boots coming out the bathroom window.
He wanted to do nothing but stand here and hold her, even though he knew Rafferty’s men were scouring the vicinity for them.
“You’ll be able to get away faster without me.”
“Forget it, Liv,” he said. “I’m not leaving you. We just have to elude Rafferty for a few hours until we can get in touch with Mañuel Solera when the sun comes up. That shouldn’t be too hard. Stick close to me and we’ll be okay.”
She nodded and he wanted to hug her all over again.
“Just a minute,” she said, “I have to tie my boots.”
He waited while she tried, but her hands were trembling too much to work the laces. With a careful eye out for the three men he had seen skulking around the area, Ren knelt and quickly tied them, then grabbed her hand and sidled around the house using the lush landscaping to conceal their presence as best he could.
“How did Rafferty find us?” he asked when they were a dozen yards from the house, heading inland.
She gave an odd pause and he could hear her rapid, sharply defined inhalations. He moderated his pace slightly to give her time to catch her breath.
“He…he says you called my father demanding a ransom and gave the address of the store down the road.”
He closed his eyes briefly. That damn phone call. He should have known Wallace Lambert would be in contact with James Rafferty. Rich white guys stuck together, didn’t they?
Lambert would probably never have guessed that his daughter might ever be in danger from someone whose face had graced the cover of Money magazine.
“Did you?” she asked after a moment.
“Did I what?” he stalled.
“Demand a ransom?”
He snorted a laugh. “Hell no. Yeah, I called your father, but just to tell him where to find you. At this point, if I had three million dollars, I would gladly pay him to take you back.”
She stopped dead in the cover of a huge purple jacaranda tree. “That was unnecessary.”
He stopped too, stung by the pain in her voice. “Ah, hell. That’s not what I meant. I just want you to be safe, Olivia. That’s all. I’m not good at this, at being responsible for someone else. I’m doing a miserable job of it and I just can’t bear the idea of anything happening to you.”
He didn’t miss the glare she aimed at him. “You’re not responsible for me. I can take care of myself. I climbed out that window, didn’t I?”
“You did,” he answered, bringing his fingers to her mouth.
To his complete disbelief, he had to fight a smile. He was insane. He had to be.
It was three in the morning and they were on the run—again—from James Rafferty.
This time, he didn’t even have the most basic of survival supplies, he had no idea where to take her and he wasn’t sure what the hell they would do even after he told his story to Manny Solera.
He didn’t care. She was here and she was safe, and for now, she was his.
It was the last thought flickering through his mind before he heard a sudden whoosh of air, had an instant of crushing pain. Then the world faded to black.
CHAPTER 12
At first, Olivia didn’t know what had happened. One second Ren was arguing with her, the next he made a kind of strangled grunting sound and slid to the ground.
She thought maybe he tripped over a tree root or something, as she had done on the trail the day before. She reached to help him just as one of Rafferty’s behemoths stepped out from behind the trunk of a tree, a hefty branch still outstretched in his hand.
“If you run, I will hit you next,” he warned in gruff, heavily accented English.
He would drop her without a second thought, she knew. She wasn’t going anywhere, though. How could she even consider trying to escape on her own, leaving an injured Ren behind to face Rafferty’s fury?
With a hard glare to the thug, she knelt to ground where Ren lay motionless. He hadn’t moved once since that hard crack to the head, she realized with a slick ball of dread churning in her stomach. That blow was hard enough to do serious damage.
“Ren? Can you hear me?”
She rolled him slightly. In the pale moonlight, his features were as still as death and he didn’t respond at all when she nudged him.
She had a vague awareness of the man who had hurt him speaking tersely into a handheld radio but she was too wrapped up in her worry to pay much attention.
Moments later, Ren still hadn’t stirred when a second hulk of a man stepped out of the jungle.
“You kill him?” Thug Number Two said. He was as big as the first man and blond—obviously not local talent.
“No, just hit him hard with this.”
“I hope you haven’t done too much damage. Rafferty has plans for this one.”
Oh, she hated the sound of that. Though she longed to cover Ren’s motionless form with her own, to protect him from these nasty men, she didn’t have a chance.
“Take the girl,” the light-haired one said. “I’ll bring the crazy turtle man.”
Before she could summon a protest, the man who had struck Ren lifted her from the ground without any apparent effort and started dragging her toward the bungalow.
She tried to dig her heels into the dirt, but she was no match against his muscles. Probably oozing with illegal steroids, she thought bitterly.
She tried to look back to see what was happening with Ren, but it was too dark and the man dragging her moved too swiftly.
“You be careful with him,” she called back.
She heard low, amused laughter from behind her, but the man yanking her along like a pull-toy just moved faster. She had to run and stumble along to keep her arm from being yanked out of its socket.
She had screwed everything up. With her typical act now, think-later strategy, she had blown it, big-time.
If she hadn’t climbed out the window, Ren might have been able to escape on his own and she might have been able to fool Rafferty a little longer into thinking she knew nothing of the murder Ren had witnessed, that she was simply an innocent victim in all of this.
Rafferty said her father was on his way. She didn’t know if she believed him, but if it was true, surely she could have stalled until he arrived with more of her bubbleheaded blond routine.
By climbing out the window, she had messed up that chance.
What kind of crazy hostage escapes from her rescuers—unless she knew sh
e has far more to fear from the rescuers than from the man who took her in the first place?
Rafferty had to know by her escape that she had thrown her lot with Ren. She didn’t care so much for herself, because she still couldn’t quite believe he planned to kill her. But she hoped her escape didn’t make things harder for Ren.
She had to figure out a way to get them both out of this. Ren had risked his life to extricate her from Suerte del Mar and she would gladly do the same for him. But right now, as the thug dragged her toward the front porch of the bungalow, she was running mighty low on ideas.
Rafferty was standing in the weak porch light of the bungalow, looking urbane and sophisticated and slightly bored by the proceedings. She would have a difficult time believing he could murder a woman in cold blood, if not for the coldness in his eyes.
Her human handcuff dragged her up the steps to Rafferty and a moment later, the other man carried a motionless Ren up the steps and dropped him to the floor as if he were nothing more than a bag full of mulch.
She couldn’t hold in her instinctive protest and she tried to move forward to check on him, but she couldn’t budge the tight fingers around her wrist.
Rafferty no longer looked bored. It had been an illusion, she realized. Up close, she sensed that every inch of him seemed to simmer with fury. Still, his tone was incongruously polite. Solicitous, even.
“Ms. Lambert, I must admit, I’m baffled and hurt by your behavior. I’ve come a long way to rescue you, late at night and in poor driving conditions. I would have expected a little gratitude, rather than this pointless show of rebellion.”
She had to bite her tongue to keep from telling him what he could do with his gratitude.
When she said nothing, Rafferty turned to his henchmen. “Tie him up,” he ordered, in a voice as cold as an iceberg.
Olivia straightened. “I’m sure that’s not necessary. He’s unconscious, for heaven’s sake!”
He hadn’t stirred for going on three or four minutes now. That couldn’t be a good sign.
Rafferty’s smile didn’t come anywhere close to reaching his eyes. “I have wasted far too much time these last few days trying to find you and your slippery Señor Galvez to let you both escape again. This time, I’m afraid I’m taking no chances.”
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