piles of mud.
He could kayak down the coast far more quickly than they could drive to his place.
He cursed himself all over again. None of this would have happened if he had just slipped back the way he had come as soon as he figured out what was going down at the hacienda’s pool. Nobody would have even known he was there.
But seeing Rafferty standing over the body of a dead woman, the gun in his hand and the grisly hole in her forehead, had stunned him so much he had stood frozen like a damn piece of furniture as he watched Rafferty taunt the man tied to a lawn chair about the gambling debts he owed him and Rafferty’s uniquely effective form of debt collection.
The shock wore off quickly, leaving hot dread in his gut as he realized what a mess he had stumbled into.
He had tried to back out quietly. He was used to stealth—hell, he could sneak up on a twelve-hundred-pound nesting leatherback without making a sound.
He would have probably made it, if a howler monkey hadn’t chosen just that moment to come swinging through the trees and making a ruckus, giving away his position in the process.
One of the thugs Rafferty surrounded himself with had sighted him and he had given up on stealth and had just run like hell. A few moments later, he had stumbled onto the woman whose soft, hunched shoulders were currently trembling in front of him.
Ren sighed and slowed his frenetic paddling enough that he could catch his breath. They needed to hurry, but he could at least take a moment to allay her fears.
“Hold out your hands,” he said.
She turned, flashing him a wide-eyed look of fright in the moonlight, and he felt like some kind of perverted rapist again.
“Come on. I told you I won’t hurt you. If you promise not to jump out, I can untie you now.”
After a moment’s hesitation, she held out her trembling hands. Regretting her fear, he pulled his pocket knife out and cut through the leather binding her. She flexed her wrists and he thought maybe her big blue eyes lost a little of their panic.
“I’m Lorenzo Galvez. Ren. What’s your name?”
“Olivia Lambert. My…my father will pay to have me home safely.” Her voice faltered.
She had said that already, he remembered. And with that same note of doubt in her voice.
“You don’t sound a hundred percent convinced of that, sweetheart.”
“He will.”
“He a gambler?”
She blinked, her lashes looking impossibly thick and dark in the moonlight reflecting off the water. “Excuse me?”
“I’m just trying to figure out how you got messed up with Rafferty, Olivia Lambert. What are you doing at Suerte del Mar?”
“I’m…I’m here on my honeymoon.”
A raw, strangled laugh escaped him and he was tempted to smack the paddle against his head a few times.
Could his life get any more delightful?
“Your honeymoon. Perfect. So not only will we have a homicidal gazillionaire after us but a frantic groom looking for his bride.”
She made a sound he couldn’t interpret, but it was cut off when a dark shape moved past them in the water, brushing his paddles as it went.
“What was that?” she gasped.
He peered into the inky water. “Nothing to worry about. My guess is a triaenodon obesus. White-tipped reef shark. Around here they call them cazón coralero trompacorta. That’s what it looked like from here, but I could be wrong.”
“A…a shark?”
Her voice wobbled. Afraid she was about to cry, he hurried to reassure her.
“They’re relatively harmless. Pretty easygoing. Sometimes they even let divers hand-feed them. I’m a little surprised he would come this close to the surface, since they usually stay pretty close to the substrate at the ocean floor where they feed, but he was probably just curious about what we might be doing up here.”
“Are…are you a diver?”
He had to admit, she was taking all of this remarkably well, though he could sense every time the moments of panic seemed to creep in. As a scientist, he had to admire any creature that could adapt to its circumstances.
“When I have to be,” he answered. “I’m a research biologist. I study the nesting habits of sea turtles. Olive Ridleys and endangered leatherbacks.”
“And you moonlight as a machete-wielding maniac, apparently, capturing innocent women off the beach.”
Despite the grimness of their situation, the sweat pouring off him and the strain in his muscles as he paddled like hell down the coast, his lips curved at her tart reply.
“You know what they say,” he drawled. “It’s tough work, but somebody’s got to do it.”
Chapter 2
“Where are you taking me?”
His hostage’s sexy voice cut through the darkness as he power-stroked as hard as he could.
He inhaled raggedly, the muscles in his arms aching from the exertion. He considered himself in pretty darn good shape, but this insane pace and the strain of paddling both of them were definitely taking a toll on him.
Since he didn’t have breath to spare, he chose not to answer her question with a long explanation. “We’re almost there. See those lights ahead and to the left?”
She looked in the direction he pointed. “Yes,” she answered after a moment, wrapping her arms around herself.
She couldn’t possibly be cold, could she? he wondered. It was a mild night, probably only low 80s, and slightly cooler out here on the water, but it was far from chilly. Of course, she was only wearing a bikini and she wasn’t paddling her guts out.
“That’s my research station. Playa Hermosa. I’ve got a Jeep there.”
She shuddered and tightened her arms around herself.
He grimaced, wishing he had time to offer her words of comfort. He wasn’t crazy about the idea of traumatizing a bride on her honeymoon, but it couldn’t be helped.
He allowed a quick moment to wonder where her groom might be lurking in this miserable drama and why he had left his luscious little wife even for a minute. Maybe out fishing on the missing yacht? The Pacific coast of the Osa Peninsula was rich with marine life, from marlins to sailfish to tuna.
Any groom who would abandon his bride to go fishing deserved to have her kidnapped. Ren certainly wouldn’t have let her out of his sight.
Something about Rafferty’s next intended victim appealed to him on some deep, visceral level. In the pale moonlight shimmering off the water, she looked lush and soft and delectable, with creamy skin and voluptuous features.
A blond cream puff, Rafferty had called her. Ren had a feeling she wouldn’t appreciate the nickname—or his sudden fierce desire to swallow her up in one delicious bite.
The discovery did not improve his mood. In two years, he hadn’t been able to drum up even a tiny smidgeon of enthusiasm for the whores in the rough and ready town of Puerto Jiménez, no matter how determined their attempts at seduction during his infrequent visits to the cantinas.
In the space of the last hour, he had witnessed a vicious murder, had kidnapped a woman for the first—hopefully only—time in his life and terrified her out of her skull, then paddled like hell across the ocean.
Yet here he sat with the biggest hard-on of his life.
Disgusted with himself, Ren growled a fairly vile curse in Spanish and felt like an even bigger pervert