She had no choice but to stand by powerlessly while the blond behemoth bound Ren’s wrists and ankles with a cord he produced from his pocket.
A moment later, one of the Humvees approached and a third man, just as massive as the other two, climbed out and helped the first man stuff Ren into the backseat.
“What about the girl?” The giant holding her wrist yanked her forward with a jerk.
Any semblance of civility from Rafferty disappeared. “Tie her up, too,” he said, his voice cold.
He climbed into the front passenger seat of the Hummer without waiting around to see his orders carried out. Men such as him and her father didn’t have to doubt they would be, she supposed.
A moment later, she was stuffed into the backseat next to Ren, trussed and terrified. She didn’t know how much more adrenaline her body could manufacture without short-circuiting. Right now she wanted nothing more than to just curl up next to Ren’s warmth and pretend everything would be okay.
She couldn’t, of course. One of them would have to come up with a way out of this and since she was the only one conscious at the moment, she supposed the burden fell on her.
The other Humvee pulled out into the road first and they followed it just as the skies opened up again with another deluge. Good, she thought. Every moment longer it took them to reach Suerte del Mar was another moment she could try to figure out how she and Ren could escape.
They had tied her hands in front of her. With fingers that trembled in fear for Ren, she worked in the darkness trying to break free of the hastily knotted rope binding her hands.
Her fingers suddenly brushed something hard. The cell phone was still in the pocket of her dress. They hadn’t bothered to search her or they would have found it. Now if only the two men in the front seat would become conveniently deaf, she could call for help.
No chance of that, she knew, so she did the only thing she could think of. After much maneuvering, she pulled it out of her pocket and concealed it with her bound hands.
From too many wasted hours talking to her girlfriends, she knew the workings of it by heart, and she knew just what buttons to push to silence its tones. Since she couldn’t remember from her guidebook what emergency number to dial in Costa Rica, she did the only thing she could think of on the fly.
She hit Redial, hoping Ren had used her phone to call his friend at the police station.
“I’m confused about something, Mr. Rafferty,” she spoke suddenly, praying someone was on the other end of the line to hear.
“What would that be, Ms. Lambert?”
“Why not just turn Ren over to the authorities in Puerto Jiménez? Why do you have both of us tied up in the back of a vehicle heading back to Suerte del Mar?”
That had to be a plain enough message for any self-respecting policeman, rural or otherwise. Manny Solera better be there and he better be hearing all this.
“He’s a cold-blooded criminal,” Rafferty said. “He must be brought to justice.”
“I’ve heard about your brand of justice, Mr. Rafferty. Funny, but it’s remarkably similar to my ideas of extortion and murder.”
He laughed harshly. “I don’t know what lies Galvez has been feeding you, but I would expect a woman of your age and experience to have a little better sense than to believe the word of a stranger.”
“I trust Ren Galvez with my life.”
“And hasn’t that turned out well for you?”
“Say what you will, but I believe every word he told me about what he saw on Suerte del Mar.”
In the dim green light from the dashboard, she saw him raise an eyebrow. “Please. Enlighten me. What did Lorenzo Galvez claim he saw?”
“Two days ago, you killed a woman over gambling debts, and Ren had the misfortune to stumble onto the crime. He also heard you sharing plans to provide a similar fate to another guest of your villa. When he bumped into me, he correctly guessed I was that ill-fated guest.”
She prayed someone else was on the other end of the line, that they would get the message. At least if something happened to them, someone would know where to start looking.
After a long silence, Rafferty laughed. “My, my. For a scientist, Mr. Galvez certainly has a vivid imagination.”
She had said almost those same words to Ren a few hours earlier when they were tangled around each other. The memory clutched at her heart and she had to take a deep, cleansing breath.
“I don’t think so. I think my ex-fiancé owed you a considerable amount of money in gambling debts. I believe you planned to use me as leverage in some way to force Bradley Swidell to pay those debts.”
“An amusing story, Ms. Lambert. Too bad you have no way of proving any of it.”
“What are you going to do with us? Kill us? My father is a very wealthy, very powerful man. He’s not some helpless, in-over-his-head gambler. I assure you, if I’m not returned to him completely unharmed, Wallace Lambert won’t rest until he finds the truth about what happened to me. And the first person he’ll go to for answers is you, Mr. Rafferty.”
She thought she saw a flicker of unease in his gaze, but it disappeared quickly and she couldn’t be sure in the darkness. When he spoke, his voice was cool and unruffled.
“You’re not much of a gambler, are you, my dear?”
She almost laughed, thinking of how many times she’d spun the big old roulette wheel of fate in the last day. And she had sure poker-faced it just now with that big fat whopper about her father.
“I am,” Rafferty went on without waiting for a reply. “And right now I have to play the hands I’ve been dealt. I fully intended to return you to your father this evening, earning his undying gratitude. Not a small thing from a man like Wallace Lambert and something I’m sure would have come in handy at some point in the future. But you had to ruin everything by climbing out that window.”
Ren stirred suddenly beside her, and her attention was drawn away from Rafferty to him. Was he coming around? Please, God, let him be okay, she prayed.
When she wrenched her attention back to Rafferty, she sensed she had missed something important.
“It should be easy,” he was saying. “I’ll just make it look as if when I caught you both and tried to transport you to my estate to await police, Dr. Galvez tried to escape, killing both of you in the process. It will be tragic, really. You were so close to safety.”
It was a terrible thing, to hear that death awaited her in the next few hours. She had to hope whomever was on the other end of the line heard the message. She glanced down at the concealed phone.
Nothing showed on the display. Absolutely nothing. The battery was dead, just like she and Ren would be now since her only brilliant idea didn’t work.
A sob escaped her. What was she supposed to do now?
Ren stirred again. It seemed important that she conceal his slow return to consciousness from Rafferty and his thug in the driver’s seat as long as possible.
The second time her sob was fake. She poured all her limited acting skills into it, all the while trying frantically to work the rope at her wrists free.
* * *
A soft sound of distress, like a small animal in pain, pierced the heavy fog enveloping him.
He wasn’t in any big hurry to come back to full consciousness, certain on some instinctive level that when he did, he was going to hurt like hell.
Instead, he slowly became aware of random, disjointed impressions. A lurch in his stomach from steady movement, a strange ache in his wrists, leather upholstery against his cheek.
He heard a low murmur of voices in front of him and that distressing sound again, somewhere next to him.
He didn’t want to open his eyes to face it. He wanted to stay right here in this half-conscious state, at least until his stomach stopped these wild gyrations. But he couldn’t block out that heartrending sound.
With mammoth effort, he pried open his eyes and nearly passed out again from the crushing pain in the back of his head.
; He was in a vehicle of some sort, in the backseat, driving through the dark, he realized. It must be raining, and hard, too, by the sound of it thrumming against the car’s roof and the rapid swish of the wipers.
For a long moment, he couldn’t for the life of him piece together what he was doing in this vehicle and why his head felt like a coconut somebody had tried to crack with a steamroller.
Beside him, someone wept noisily. That was the noise he’d heard. It was too dark to see who it might be, and he wanted to tell whoever it was to shut up and let him think for a second.
He opened his mouth to growl the words, then a scent drifted to him, something clean and sweet and female.
Olivia.
In an instant, the events of the evening rushed through his head—waking with her tangled in his arms, the incredible rightness of it, walking down to the beach to try regaining a little much-needed perspective, then that gut-churning fear when he saw Rafferty going into the house.
He wasn’t quite sure how they made it from that point to this, heading through the nightly rains in the backseat of a vehicle. He thought he remembered running through the jungle, trying to escape Al and Bobbi’s casita but everything was a little fuzzy.
He only knew Rafferty had won, despite everything.
Olivia wept beside him and he moved restlessly, heedless of the pain in his head or the nausea in his stomach, conscious only of an overwhelming need to offer whatever small measure of comfort he could.
He made some kind of noise, but the sound died in his throat when she gripped his thigh with bound hands.
“Shhhh,” she whispered, the command barely audible to him above the noise of the rain and the tires spinning in mud.
He frowned at that, even as he suddenly picked up a false note to her weeping. That impression was confirmed when his eyes became accustomed to the dark and he realized her fingers twisted and pried to work free the restraints on her wrists.
Clever girl! The crying was a distraction so neither Rafferty or his thug driving the Hummer paid much attention to the busy work of her hands.
He wanted to kiss her, a big loud smack right there in the backseat. He would have, if he didn’t want to give the game away—and if the idea of it didn’t make his head pound and the dizziness hover around the edges of his consciousness.
A moment later she made a tiny, triumphant sound and he saw through a sliver of moonlight that her hands were free.
Under the cover of darkness, she pulled his hands to her and started working on his restraints, keeping her movements subtle and easy so they didn’t attract unwanted attention.
For once, the rain was a blessing, Ren realized. The driver was preoccupied with driving, concentrating hard on keeping the Hummer on the road. Rafferty growled commands to the driver, apparently not content to just sit passively in the passenger seat.
Ren shouldn’t be passive, either. He needed to figure out some way to get them out of here. Focusing on the problem at hand wasn’t an easy task, especially when his brain felt as slow and sluggish as one of his Ridleys on dry ground.
It also didn’t help his powers of perspicacity to have Olivia so close, her hands smooth and cool on his and her clean, sweet scent filling all his senses, until he only wanted to lean into her, close his eyes and inhale.
Was she making progress? He couldn’t tell much in the dark, but he was certainly enjoying her efforts.
If she did get his hands free, what next? He could probably overpower Rafferty—though in his queasy, head-pounding state, he wasn’t a hundred percent certain of that. But even then, he’d still have the beefy driver to contend with. Either or both of them was probably armed, which complicated everything.
He was considering his options when the Hummer, going much faster than he was comfortable with in the dark and in the middle of the heavy rains, suddenly slid sideways in the mud and started heading for the side of the road and the steep hills below.
The driver hit the brakes much harder than he should have under the circumstances—a couple good taps were far more effective in a slide—and one of their tires actually hung over the side. He eventually regained control and brought the SUV back to the middle of the road.
“You idiot!” Rafferty yelled when the immediate danger had passed. “Are you trying to kill us all?”
“I can’t think with all that blubbering,” the other man complained.
Olivia returned her hands to her own lap a fraction of a second before Rafferty turned around to glare at her.
“Enough with the crying,” he growled. “It’s a miracle Galvez didn’t throw you off a sea cliff just to put himself out of his misery!”
In answer, she sobbed louder. Even though Ren knew she was manufacturing the tears, he had to fight the urge to reach for her.
“I mean it,” Rafferty snarled. “Shut up.”
“I can’t help it,” she sniffled.
“Figure out a way or I’m going to shoot you here and dump you into the river for the alligators.”
“What difference does it make if you kill me here or kill me at Suerte del Mar? I’m dead either way.”
Ren held his breath at her defiance, watery though it was. Don’t push him too far, he thought, but he was stuck beside her playing dead and could say nothing.
Rafferty suddenly pulled out a gun, dull and black and deadly, and Ren froze, his heart racing and fear pulsing through him.
Olivia apparently was far more sanguine than he. Her chin lifted. “Go ahead. Shoot me,” she said. “I don’t care.”
Ren wanted to groan. A man who could build a billion-dollar gambling empire in only a few years wasn’t the sort likely to back down from a challenge.
He didn’t know whether to cover her with his own body or shove her out the damn door.
“Here’s a better idea,” Rafferty drawled. “How about you stop your whining or I’ll shoot the scientist.”
Olivia drew in a sharp breath and reached for his hands blindly. Before Ren could even react, Rafferty swung the gun in his direction. He heard a sharp pop and Olivia screamed.
CHAPTER 13
The acrid smell of burnt leather and gunpowder filled the interior of the Hummer. Olivia threw herself across his chest, sobbing in earnest now.
With his wrists bound and trapped between their bodies, Ren could do nothing but lean his cheek on her hair and gaze at the tiny plume of smoke spiraling from a hole in the leather seat, just three or four inches from his head.
“You missed,” he drawled. His voice sounded rusty, strangled, but he still managed to get the words out.
Rafferty laughed. “I figured that would wake you up. Or at least get you to stop faking being out of it. Looks like it worked.”
“Waste of perfectly good leather, if you ask me.”
His teeth gleamed in the darkness in a feral smile. “We do what we have to do. Feeling better?”
He shrugged and then had to fight a wince as the slight movement sent an army of jackhammers pounding cheerfully away in his brain. “Can’t complain.”
Rafferty laughed again. “I always liked you, Galvez. You’re one crazy son of a bitch but you’ve got titanium cojones.”
He wasn’t sure anyone could consider that a compliment, coming from a man who had just fired a Sig Sauer into his own upholstery. “We do what we have to do,” he parroted.
Olivia’s cries had dwindled to sniffling sobs but she didn’t seem in a hurry to move. Her hands were fluttering between them in the vicinity of his lap, stirring up all kinds of inappropriate reactions, given the circumstances.
It took his befuddled brain a full minute to realize she was only continuing her efforts to untie the rope around his wrists, too bad for him.
Rafferty studied them. “You two certainly look cozy. Am I missing something here? I thought Ms. Lambert was supposed to be on her honeymoon. And with quite a different gentleman, if I’m not mistaken.”
Olivia slid away and Ren realized his hands were now free as well, the r
ope draped loosely around them for appearances in case Rafferty or his driver took a yen to look closer.
“Bradley Swidell is no gentleman,” she said, her voice low. “He owes you money, doesn’t he? And lots of it.”
“I’m afraid I don’t bandy about the names of those with accounts outstanding at any of my online operations. Discretion is so important in my particular business. I’m sure you understand.”
The bastard was enjoying this, Ren thought. He savored having them at his mercy—and loved even more that they knew it and were helpless to do anything about it. Rafferty reminded him of a jaguar playing with its prey, tossing it from pad to pad until it tired.
Olivia wiped at her eyes and Ren could almost see her straightening her spine, vertebrae by aching vertebrae. He couldn’t understand how she could ever consider herself a wimp. She was quite possibly the strongest woman he had ever met.
“Bradley promised to pay you from my trust fund after we were married, didn’t he?” Her voice was restrained but firm. “That’s why he insisted we come to Costa Rica on our honeymoon, so he could flaunt me in front of you and prove to you the deed was done. I was his golden egg.”
Rafferty gazed out the window for a moment as if debating what to say, then turned back around to face to them. “I suppose there’s no reason not to tell you now.”
Ren did not like the sound of that, though it came as no surprise to him that Rafferty believed anything he said now would go with them to their graves.
“You’re absolutely right,” he went on. “Your intended groom owes me a considerable amount of money. One-point-two million dollars.”
Olivia inhaled sharply at the amount and Rafferty smiled that devil smile.
“As we both know, you are worth far more than that. When he found himself in…difficulties, Mr. Swidell promised to hand-deliver a check once he was married to you. I took him at his word. More fool, me. Then you showed up at Suerte del Mar alone and I learned to my considerable chagrin that the wedding was off. Not only would Mr. Swidell not be accompanying you to Costa Rica but, more importantly, he would not have access to the money he promised me. As you can imagine, I was not pleased.”
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