Entangled (Serendipity Adventure Romance Book 2) (13 page)

But it had been impossible to resist, just like last night was impossible to resist.

It would be so easy to start all over again right now. Kiss her lips, run a hand along her ribs. Forget her presentation. Forget everything for the next couple of days. Just live. Love. Enjoy.

And he nearly did it, because staying in the rain forest until Sunday was a hell of a lot more appealing than rushing away on the wings of his cockamamie plan.

But he had a promise to keep. To her and to himself.

“Cara,” he whispered, giving her shoulder a shake.

She mumbled and rolled into his chest. He froze in round two of a silent inner battle of cock-versus-mind.

“Cara, we have to get up.” He pushed her gently away from his side. “Today’s the day.”

“What day?” she mumbled.

“Friday. And you have a presentation to make.”

She blinked.
Presentation? What presentation?

He smiled and dropped that into the memory bank for all the lonely years to come — the knowledge that he’d managed to capture Cara’s body and mind for a whole entire night.

“Come on, sleeping beauty.” He tried kick-starting his humor, even though it dug back on its heels. “Gotta go. Got an escape to pull off.”

She sat up and looked at him like he was nuts. “You mean it.”

He nodded. “Of course I mean it.” It might kill him to let her go at the end of this day, but yes, he meant it. He’d do what he promised to do.

They dressed quickly, then walked out at an agonizingly slow pace. If the villagers caught on to them now, they’d be sunk.

So Tobin smiled and played with the kids and licked his lips over breakfast, pretending he didn’t have a care in the world. Cara did, too, and she was a champ, playing it cool. When he packed his backpack, he left a couple of things behind to make it look like they’d be back soon. And then they set off, down the jungle trail.

“Wait!” Rodrigo’s voice shot out like a rifle behind them. “Where are you going?”

“The upper side of the waterfall, just like you said. Looking for butterflies,” he said. Birds, butterflies, elephants. Whatever.

“Wait, you need a guide!”

“I know the way,” Cara called, and it came out just right. Not too urgent, not too caring, nice and relaxed.

But Rodrigo stood glowering in the way, and they had no choice but to wait.

A butterfly fluttered overhead and Tobin barely noticed, entirely focused on what would happen when they got to the waterfall. The slowest minute of his life, because he had a deadline to make.

Finally, their guides jogged over, ready for a day in the jungle with their usual kit: loincloth, blowgun, nothing else. Cara gave him an anxious look, but he just shook his head. He’d been planning on them. Had been over the exact sequence of events a hundred times. The guides wouldn’t stick with them — not the route he planned on taking, anyway.

He was about to step onto the path and go — finally go — when the bushes on the far side of the village shook. So hard, so loud that maybe elephant wasn’t such a crazy image after all.

Then the bushes parted, and six men came out.

“Buenos días,”
the first one said.

For a split second, the whole village hushed. Then everyone scattered — women grabbing their children, hauling them out of sight. Girls first. Boys second. Men jumped to their feet and stepped toward the newcomers, just like the snarling dogs, then stepped back. You’d have thought Jesse James had just ridden into town and hopped off his horse the way the whole village tensed.

“Alfonso,” Cara whispered in a shaky voice.

“Alfonso,” Rodrigo spit out, his bronze skin going red.

“Alfonso and company.” Tobin nodded, his mind freewheeling, trying to find a gear.

Because there wasn’t just one desperado drug runner standing at the entrance to the village, but six. Six dirty men with rusty rifles and tangled hair. Their leader, a bearded Latino, doffed his cap with a nasty grin.

“Amigos!”
he announced to nobody in particular.

Every villager dropped their eyes and clenched their fists.

Chapter Twenty-One

The village was silent as death. Even the roosters were quiet. Something caught on Cara’s shirt, and she turned around.

A little boy stood behind her, tugging the fabric and waving her toward the waterfall path. One of the little boys who’d hiked with them yesterday. His eyes were making urgent signals toward the trail.

Let’s go. Hit it. Now.

Sounded like a plan.

She caught Tobin’s hand and squeezed until he turned around.

His lips were sealed in a grim line, his brow furrowed. The blood drained from her face, because Tobin didn’t do furrowed or grim. Tobin did easygoing and relaxed.

Tobin was trying not to show it, but he was scared stiff.

The drug runners swept into the village with cocky arrogance, led by a tall man who kicked at a dog, gestured for water, and flopped down on the stool designated for the chief. Cara’s skin crawled. If it were just Tobin there, he’d find a way to play the danger off. Share soccer scores, crack a couple of jokes, and tactfully turn down their offers of a drag of weed. They’d come, they’d go, no problem.

A white man in a rain forest village could get away with buddying it up with a gang of drug runners. A white woman, on the other hand…

The leader’s eyes swept over the village and landed right on her. Skidded to a stop, was more like it. His gaze swept down, then up, lingering on her breasts. A broad grin crept across his face.

Her blood went cold. The feeling a jungle animal must get staring down the barrel of a blowgun. Staring down an ugly fate.

Alfonso stepped to the leader’s side and gestured toward Cara. All six men looked her way. Their rifles dipped, momentarily forgotten.

One of them murmured something to Lefebvre, and he answered with a disinterested wave that said,
Take her. I couldn’t care less.
Or maybe,
Teach these gringos not to come wandering too far off the beaten track.

Tobin stepped in front of her, blocking her out of sight. He started stepping backward, muttering out of the corner of his mouth.

“Let’s get going.”

She could have strummed his voice and produced a note, it was strung that tight.

She turned for the path and took a couple of slow steps. Tobin was behind her, feeling his way into each backward step, refusing to take his eyes off the intruders.

A commotion broke out — the chief cutting the men off, judging by the sound of the ancient, brittle voice — and Tobin pushed her shoulder.

“Go! Go!” he grunted.

She broke into a trot, then an all-out run. Around the bend and down the trail, with the little boy flying along at her side.

The guides stuck with them, too, jabbering with each other in an urgent exchange.

Cara flew down the path just short of full tilt, because one misstep and a tree root would send her sprawling or a vine would grab at her shirt.

Tobin, by the sound of his footsteps, slowed down to look back, then hurried to catch up.

“Are they following us?” she shot over her shoulder.

“Not yet.”

Yet.

She plunged on, wondering what was going on in the village. The drug runners looked surprised to see her, as if they hadn’t believed Alfonso. They’d probably come to the village to squeeze a couple of free meals out of people who couldn’t afford to say no to the hot end of a gun. Maybe they’d come looking for trouble, or what they might call fun.

Fun. She shuddered to think what their version of it might be. How they might want to include her in on it.

Tobin would try to stop them, but what could he do against six men with guns? Get himself killed, that’s what he’d do. They’d shoot a dozen extra bullets into his body and then turn those hungry eyes on her…

“Faster!”

She forced her legs into a higher gear and sprinted down the narrow trail, hitting brush and oversized leaves as she fled. No time for a machete now; it was all about leaping, ducking, running full tilt.

Her breath came in heavy puffs, but she slogged on, wishing she’d thrown some sprints into her morning jogs back in Panama City.

She ran on and on. The rain forest was a blur of green, brown, and earthy black, the sounds of its inhabitants more urgent than ever. Gradually, the mumble of the distant river grew to a roar.

A roar punctured by a shout from one of the two guides as she flew around a bend and skidded to a stop on the edge of a cliff. A cliff opening on to the side of a waterfall. She held her breath and flapped her hands, tipping over the edge.

Tipping, tipping…

Her mind processed it all in slow motion. The tangle of blue-green jungle extending all around. The slopes of the river valley below. The cool rush of a river on her right, where it gushed over the lip of rock and plunged into nothingness. The space under her toes terrifyingly empty of anything but thin air.

She had just enough time to snap a mental picture and scribble a caption on it.
The End.

Then something jerked her backward, and a strong arm wrapped around her waist.

“Holy shit…” Tobin murmured, dragging her back from the precipice, then mashing her against his heaving chest. His arms closed around her, and she hid in the den he created, trying to get her heart back in time with her lungs.

A deep breath, right against his shirt, and her trembling nerves filed slowly into place. She pulled back an inch and stared at the gap behind her, then at Tobin. They stood beside the first stage in the waterfall — a sheer cliff she’d nearly fallen off.

“Remind me to rescue you sometime, hotshot. I owe you.”
Again.

His eyes pooled a little before he crushed her in another hug. “You’ve got to stop getting ahead of my plan.” Then he paused as if cuing a protest of some kind. Something like,
Plan? Tobin Cooper has a plan? Since when?

She could practically hear the dismissive voices of his parents and hers. Them, and all the others who’d underestimated Tobin over the years.

She squeezed him even tighter and willed her thoughts into his mind. He was Tobin — her Tobin. Of course, he had a plan.

“Right,” she said, letting him go. “Which way?”

He blinked and drew a long breath.

“That way,” he whispered. Nothing moved but his lips, though.

A smile took shape on her lips, her cheeks, her whole soul. She whispered back. “I’m with you,
mi marido.
All the way.”

His eyes glowed a little, but he didn’t say a word. Just squeezed her hand tighter and gestured to the right. “This way.”

They picked their way downhill, slipping and sliding down a muddy trail beside the waterfall. Then the slope bottomed out, and they emerged into a clearing. Tobin skirted a foaming pool of water and sloshed through ankle-deep water, right to the edge of another cliff.

The sun lit the way like a spotlight, and she joined Tobin on the top of the cliff. They were at the top of the third stage in the falls. Before her was a mighty view fit for a conquistador. She could picture the likes of Balboa standing there, sweating bullets and wondering if the jungle ever ended. The new bridge was a strip of gray to the left, the river a shining silver line edged with the browns of the ravine.

She looked up, back along the way they’d come. Two stages of the waterfall stretched above them. The third was in front of her where another cliff fell away, flooded by a gushing mass of water. At the bottom lay the pool she’d swum in the day before.

She peered down that final stage of the waterfall. At the very, very long drop.

“Um, Tobin? What exactly is the plan?”

Chapter Twenty-Two

Tobin edged forward and looked down.

Way down. Over a thundering waterfall that crash-landed into an emerald pool.

A hell of a long way down.

The drop looked even higher than it had the day before, when he’d been at the bottom. From down there, the pool looked bigger, the waterfall shorter. Now it was the other way around. The lake at the bottom looked like a kiddie pool, and the height had grown by a couple of stories overnight.

Cara squeezed his hand. “Um, Tobin?”

He couldn’t bring himself to say it. He didn’t need to, because half a second later, Cara caught a sharp breath and went tense all over. Yep, she had just figured out his plan.

“Um, Tobin, are you sure?”

He slid his jaw left, then right without answering. Yesterday, he’d been sure. This morning, he’d been sure. Now, he felt more like taking off in search of butterflies than following through with this crazy plan. He wouldn’t even have to go far to find any, because he had a whole flock of them fluttering wildly in his gut.

He let out a slow breath and went over the plan in his mind. He’d checked the lower pool carefully. It was deep and free of jutting rocks. So, yeah, he was…kind of sure.

“We don’t have to do this,” Cara whispered, pulling him back. “It’s not that important…”

The words set something off in him, because suddenly it seemed very important. Critical that he not back out now.

He tightened his fingers around hers and pulled her closer. “We can do this.” It was a whisper, barely above the roar.

Her eyes were huge, her lip trembling.

“We can do this,” he repeated, more to himself than to her.

One of the guides made a protesting sound behind him, and though Tobin didn’t speak the language, he knew just what it meant.
Hey, mister, don’t get so close to the edge.

He looked down and gulped.
Maybe we don’t have to do this,
his gut yelped.

A shout rang out and tore his attention away. A shout in Spanish, not the guttural local language, and he whirled.

He caught a glimpse of jungle camo, the gleam of a gun.

“Oh God,” Cara murmured. “They’re here.”

His heart revved higher, right into the red zone, judging by the squeeze in his chest. The drug runners had caught up with them and were closing in.