Riley's Sleeping Beauty

by Sherryl Woods

  “Then why couldn’t you respect my opinion,” he wondered aloud. “I’m the one with the experience here, Abby.”

  Obviously that thought had never entered her head. Now she was off, who knew where, alone, convinced that those maps she’d stolen would enable her—all on her own—to find the priceless Mayan tablet he’d been commissioned to locate. Worse, for all of the rumors about this rare archeological find, Riley didn’t even know for certain if the damned thing existed. Abby could be out there chasing a dream.

  What the hell had happened to his quiet, fragile, sensible Abby? When had she developed this wicked stubborn streak? When had she developed these nerves of steel? Her transformation thoroughly bemused him.

  And, he was forced to admit, enticed him.

  And, at the moment, terrified and infuriated him.

  “If I ever get my hands on her, I’m going to strangle her,” he vowed.

  That if, unfortunately, was a very big one. There was no predicting the direction in which she’d headed, even with those maps in hand. She was a novice at all of this, unless she’d been up to things back in Arizona that he knew nothing about.

  “Davis!” he bellowed as he exited her tent.

  Jared Davis, an expert in Mayan culture and in the terrain in this part of Chiapas, appeared at once. The tough, thirty-year-old archeologist was disgustingly alert given the early hour and the number of Corona beers they’d consumed the night before, after Abby had stormed off to her tent in a huff.

  “You look like hell,” Jared noted bluntly. “What’s up?”

  “Abby’s gone.”

  The amused glint in his old friend’s eyes died. “Gone? You mean back to the States?”

  “I wish.”

  Jared’s stunned, disbelieving expression summed up Riley’s feelings fairly accurately.

  “You’re not saying what I think you’re saying,” Jared said slowly.

  “Oh, yes, I am. The little fool has gone off to find the Mayan tablets on her own.”

  “On her own,” Jared repeated blankly, as if the concept were too outrageous to be grasped.

  Riley rubbed his aching head. “It’s my fault. I practically forced her to do it.”

  “How?”

  “By threatening to send her home. I should have realized how desperately she wanted to stay.”

  “She told you straight out she wanted to stay,” Jared pointed out with brutal honesty. “I heard her. Hell, the entire population of San Cristobal, sixty miles from here, probably heard her. How did you miss it?”

  “I didn’t miss it,” he snapped. “I just didn’t understand how important it was to her. I certainly had no idea she would do something like this.”

  “She can’t have gotten far.”

  “Probably not,” Riley agreed.

  “Then let’s get going.”

  Riley appreciated Jared’s brisk, no-nonsense willingness. “There’s just one hitch. There are three of us, if you count Manuel,” he said, referring to the practically ancient guide Jared had hired to lead them. “How the hell are we supposed to figure out which way she went and catch up with her? I don’t even know what time she left.”

  “It had to have been well after midnight. We were drinking until then.”

  “Okay, that’s good,” he said sarcastically. “We’ve narrowed it down to five, maybe six damned hours.”

  Jared clearly wasn’t daunted by Riley’s foul temper. “Shall I get Manuel and start packing up?” he asked quietly.

  Riley rubbed his head again. It was splitting, the throbbing dull and insistent. Not even that could block out the vision he’d been having of Abby lost and alone, trudging through the damned jungle, getting closer and closer to calamity with every foolhardy step.

  “Get Manuel,” he said. “I’ll start looking around to see if I can see any indication of which direction she headed in.”

  He’d spent less than ten minutes examining the fringes of the campsite, looking for paths carved through the thick undergrowth, when Jared came back, his expression grim.

  “Bad news,” he announced.

  “What?”

  “Manuel’s gone, too. My guess is she talked him into going with her. She’s been winding him around her little finger from the first day we got down here.”

  Riley didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. His admiration for Abby’s ingenuity leapt. Obviously, his sweet, innocent Abigail had the makings of an adventurer, after all. If she survived, if he ever found her, he would never doubt her grit and determination again.

  Maybe he’d even dare to let her know how much he loved her.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “I thought you had to produce that Mayan tablet for your backers by the end of the month or lose the commission,” Jared said.

  He and Riley had set out at once in search of Abigail, rather than the treasure that half a dozen other intrepid explorers and quite a few shady antiquities dealers were probably hunting for right now. Riley had a sneaking suspicion that John Higgins and his two brothers, the worst of the lot of thieves, were slithering around the state of Chiapas already. It wouldn’t be the first time they had competed.

  “I’ll meet the damned deadline and I’ll do it before anyone else,” Riley responded tightly. “First I have to make sure that Abby gets out of this jungle alive.”

  “I see,” Jared said with the smug confidence of someone speaking about a man he’d known well for the past decade.

  Riley glared at him. “What are you smirking about?”

  “Your sudden shift in priorities. After all the years I’ve known you, all those glowing news stories I’ve read about your single-minded dedication, all of the legendary tales of your exploits, I never thought I’d see the day when world-class adventurer Riley Walker would put some woman—some engaged woman, I might add—ahead of the hunt for a priceless, long-lost relic.”

  “This is not just some woman,” Riley protested, probably a little too vehemently, given the truth in Jared’s words. “We’re talking about Abby.”

  “I see,” the archeologist said again.

  “Jared, will you shut up and concentrate on finding their trail before another thunderstorm washes away any last trace of them! As wet as it is in here, the blasted plants grow back practically as fast as they’re chopped down.”

  They trudged on for another twenty minutes in silence. The humidity sapped enough of their energy. Neither of them had any left to waste on arguing.

  Eventually Jared asked, “So tell me, are you planning to marry her yourself?”

  “I’m planning to throttle her,” Riley snapped back without hesitation.

  “I see.”

  Riley glared at his old friend. He’d instinctively turned to him to help locate the new Mayan find, allegedly located near the southern border of Mexico near Guatemala. Rumors about the discovery by a small tribe of Lacandon Indians had circulated for months now, but there had been no hard proof that the Mayan artifacts even existed. If they did, though, Riley would find them. He’d never failed yet to locate anything—or anyone—he went after.

  As for Jared, he was an exceptional interpreter, a renowned expert in Mayan artifacts and at this precise moment, a damned nuisance.

  “If you don’t stop saying I see in that smug tone, I’m going to throttle you first,” he warned.

  Jared simply grinned smugly. Eventually he must have figured it was safe to open his mouth again, because he cast a sly look in Riley’s direction and asked, “How long have you known her?”

  “Practically all my life.”

  “You never talked about her.”

  Riley had no answer for that. Abby had been in his heart. That had been enough. Besides, what would he have said? No one, not even Jared, would have understood his reasoning for giving up a woman who meant so much to him.

  “When did you fall in love with her?” Jared persisted determinedly.

  Riley frowned. He’d always prided himself on keeping his feelings hidden. It protected hi
m from messy entanglements. “Who said I was in love with her? I just feel responsible.”

  “Right.”

  That single word was laden with skepticism. “Look,” Riley said, “she’s like a sister to me, okay? She’s my best friend. I know her whole family. I have an obligation to all of them to look out for her. They trusted me. Her fianc;aae trusted me.”

  Not that he felt all that much sense of duty to return Abby to old Martin. If Martin truly cared for her the way he claimed, he would have been the one sharing an adventure with her. Abby would have been totally content with her life, and Riley would have been out of it. That was the role that suited him...outsider, with no one depending on him.

  “There’s absolutely nothing more between us,” he added, just to emphasize the point to his thickheaded friend.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You’re doing it again,” Riley warned.

  “Doing what?”

  “Being smug.”

  Jared shrugged. “I see what I see.”

  “I wish you’d stop seeing things that aren’t there and concentrate on finding their trail. Do you suppose Manuel has any idea where he’s going?”

  “He grew up in Comitan,” Jared reminded him. “He knows this area like the back of his hand, and he’s trustworthy. That’s why I hired him, rather than some of the professional guides who turned up for the interviews. It sure as hell wasn’t for his cooking skills. His coffee tastes like sludge, and I shudder to think what’s in that god-awful stew he makes. Anyway, Abby will be perfectly safe with him. They may not find the Mayan ruins, but he won’t let her come to any harm.”

  Jared’s reassurances were scant consolation. “He can’t stop an entire guerrilla army if they see a way to use Abby as a hostage,” Riley countered.

  “We’ll find them before anything like that happens,” Jared countered. “Come on, stop worrying. We can’t be that far behind them.”

  Two days later, despite Riley’s insistence that they stay on the move each day until a thick, impenetrable darkness closed around them, they seemed no closer to catching up to their quarry. Tracking two people who didn’t want to be found in an overgrown wilderness not exactly teeming with witnesses wasn’t quite the snap he had hoped it might be. The gnawing sensation in the pit of his stomach was getting worse by the hour, and an aching emptiness seemed to have settled in the region of his heart.

  What if he never saw her again? The very possibility filled him with dread. How the devil had he let this happen? He’d sworn a thousand times that he’d never again care about anyone. It was the only way he could see to avoid the anguish that came with their inevitable loss.

  Somehow Abby had slipped through that wall of defenses. More likely it was just that she’d always been inside that wall, a constant in his life that he’d taken for granted, like the sun and the moon. He’d never examined his feelings for her too carefully, because then he might have had to drive her away as he had everyone else who’d dared to get too close the past few years.

  He thought of all the times he’d instinctively wanted to reach for her and held back. He remembered each and every time he’d taken her hand in his, the casual gesture innocent enough in and of itself, but more memorable than far more provocative caresses with other women. To his amazement he could vividly recall the softness of her skin, its whispered scent of jasmine, its vibrant warmth. There were lovers whose touches he did not remember so clearly.

  With the memories came a yearning so sharp, so painful, it robbed him of breath. How could he not have seen before now how badly he wanted her, how desperately he needed her?

  How the hell could he have let her slip away?

  Slip away, he thought ruefully. What a joke! He’d driven her away, threatened to send her packing back to a man she wasn’t one bit suited for. The mere thought of her in the arms of old Martin made him grind his teeth. A woman as vital and alive as Abby would wither and die in a dull marriage. If he hadn’t seen that before, her precipitous departure from their camp two days earlier had proven it. Sensible, reliable Abigail Dennison, to his astonishment, had a wild streak that some man was going to have one hell of a time taming. He envied the man who met that challenge.

  Too bad it couldn’t be him, he thought with a heavy sigh of regret.

  The truth was, no matter how badly he wanted her, no matter how deeply he cared for her, he refused to make the kind of commitment that a woman like Abby deserved. Life had taught him that commitments meant nothing. People still died and left a person all alone. He’d told her his feelings about commitment a hundred different times, subtly warning her off whenever he’d sensed that her expectations might be getting out of hand. It was unfortunate that he’d ignored all those stern admonitions himself and allowed her to make this trip. She’d managed in a few short days to turn both of their lives topsy-turvy and make mincemeat of his resolve.

  Jared’s hand on his shoulder interrupted his thoughts. “What?” he demanded.

  “Over there,” Jared said, not releasing his grip on Riley’s shoulder. “Manuel.”

  The Mexican lay on the ground, a bullet wound in his shoulder, another in his leg, his face battered, blood everywhere. There was no sign of Abby.

  With his own heart thundering in his chest, Riley rushed to the older man’s side, knelt down and felt for a pulse. Finally, after what seemed forever, he felt a faint beat. “Manuel! Come on, amigo. Hang in there. We’ll get help for you.”

  Dark brown eyes blinked open. “Sorry, se;atnor.”

  “Don’t apologize. Just tell me what happened.”

  “It was the se;atnorita’s wish to go on. I could not refuse her. She said she would go alone.” He shot Riley an accusatory look. “She could not have managed on her own.”

  “I’m sure she was very persuasive, Manuel,” Riley said dryly. “Where is she now? What happened?”

  Manuel struggled for breath. “The guerrillas.”

  “Dear God in heaven,” Riley murmured, fighting back the rising tide of panic that threatened to engulf him. Even though he’d anticipated something so terrible, he clearly hadn’t been prepared to face the reality of it.

  “They took her?” he asked, filled with fury and the first flicker of an unwavering resolve to make them pay.

  “S;aai, s;aai. They took to hospital. Promised.”

  Riley was confused. “They didn’t shoot you?”

  “No, se;atnor. It was bandidos. Three of them.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “They took the maps, nothing else.”

  Three of them, Riley thought with a sinking sensation. Higgins and his brothers? It was all too likely.

  Manuel interrupted his thoughts. “The guerrillas found us. Promised to take Se;atnorita Abby to hospital.”

  “Why didn’t they take you as well?” Riley asked.

  “I could not go. More important that I come to tell you what happened.” He regarded Riley apologetically. “I tried, se;atnor. I could go no farther.”

  “How badly was she hurt?”

  Manuel sketched the sign of the cross across his heaving chest. “No s;aae. She was...”

  He searched for the right word, while Riley’s heart thudded dully. “What, Manuel? Tell me.”

  “Unconscious,” he said finally. “I am very afraid for her, se;atnor.”

  Riley closed his eyes against the unbearable anguish that swept through him. She couldn’t die! She couldn’t!

  He glanced at Jared.

  “Go,” his friend said. “You’ll reach her faster if you’re alone. I’ll see that Manuel gets help. We’ll meet up at the hospital.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’ll pray for her,” Jared promised.

  And for me, Riley wanted to say. Because if Abby died, he was very much afraid his soul would go with her.

  * * *

  She was so terribly, terribly pale, Riley thought, as he stared down at Abby more than twenty-four hours after finding Manuel and learning that she’d
been wounded. Like the Mexican, she had been shot and beaten, more savagely, it appeared. Probably because she had fought back, he guessed. She was too willful not to.

  Every time he looked at her swollen face, the vicious black-and-blue bruises, Riley wanted to weep. The gunshot, which had barely grazed her shoulder, according to the doctors, seemed to be the least of her injuries.

  This was all his fault. He’d brought her to Mexico. He’d driven her away from their camp with only an old Mexican guide to protect her. Guilt became his constant companion as he sat by her bedside, listening to the steady beep of the monitors for reassurance that she was still alive.

  For hours now he’d been holding her hand, murmuring words of comfort and praying harder than he’d ever prayed for anything in his entire life. None of the entreaties from the nurses or the commands from the doctors had gotten him to budge from his place by her bed.

  It had been only three days since he’d been this close, three days since she had angrily stolen away from their camp and set off to find the Mayan artifacts on her own. But that was long enough for him to think long and hard about what he’d lost, long enough to conclude that his overly protective attitude had been exactly what the situation had called for. Just look what had happened. She was in the hospital, damned close to dying. If she’d listened to him, she would have been safely back in Arizona by now.

  He still couldn’t quite believe that she’d defied him so stubbornly. Even as he’d trailed after her through the jungle, he’d told himself that surely Manuel was guiding her back to the airstrip in Comitan. He’d wanted desperately to believe that she had left the camp just to taunt him, that she was far too sensible to do anything as dangerous as trying to go on with the search for the Mayan site. Discovering that she had not, that she was lying unconscious in a hospital bed, had infuriated him almost as much as her condition terrified him.

  Now he drank in the sight of her, her normally rosy complexion as white as the hospital sheets, her long hair a tangled fan of ebony against the pillow. More devastating than her pallor somehow was that absolute stillness.