Bridal Op

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“Rafe?” She moved toward him, and over the ringing in her ears she could finally hear something, a siren going off in the distance.

The explosion had been loud enough to be heard at the base. The Laderan military was about to come to investigate.

She hobbled toward Rafe, bent when she got there. “Get up.” She grabbed his shoulder. “The soldiers are coming. We have to get out of here.”

They didn’t have time to deal with the army now. The questioning could last days. Two foreigners involved in a bombing incident next to a Laderan military base—they could be in jail for weeks before the U.S. consulate got them out. Sonya couldn’t wait that long.

“Come on,” she said, and felt panic rising from a deep, dark well inside when he didn’t get up. How badly was he hurt?

He was lying on his back, moaning, or at least she thought he was. His lips were moving, his dark eyes rolled back in his head.

“Can you move?”

He blinked, focused on her, said something, repeated.

Am I dead? She read the words from his lips.

If he was joking, all was not yet lost. “Stop looking for the easy way out.” She helped him sit, then slipped under his arm and pushed him up, carrying most of his weight.

When they were almost standing, he lurched forward, nearly sending both of them to the ground again. Maybe she couldn’t do it. The panic was grabbing hold. What was she thinking? They both belonged on a stretcher.

Move. She struggled with the first step but managed without falling over. Okay. One more. Then another, then another. She dragged him like that to the edge of the woods. They’d rest later. Right now they had to find someplace to hide.

“Go,” he said. “Leave me.”

Now that his words vibrated inches from her ear, she could finally hear them.

He was in bad shape. It scared her breathless, but she couldn’t show it. “Get moving, drama queen.” She nudged him forward.

She didn’t know what lay ahead, nor did she care, her only thought being to get as far away as possible from the army base and the soldiers who were coming after them.

“There.” Rafe was pointing to an open stretch of rocks to the left, the remnants of a landslide some time ago.

“No, not in the open.” She ignored him and pulled him forward.

“Tracks,” he said.

Where? She strained to see, then realized after a moment that he was talking about their tracks, the ones they were leaving behind. She glanced back. He was right; with both of them dragging their feet, they disturbed enough leaf mold that an idiot could follow them.

“Okay.” She moved on toward the stony ground that wouldn’t leave telltale signs of their passing.

They crossed that without trouble and made it into the woods again. Her legs wobbled. Rafe wasn’t a small man. She couldn’t support him like this for long.

He seemed to come to the same conclusion and pulled away from her. “Stop,” he said and sank to the ground. “We’ll rest a few minutes.” The side of his face was covered with soot and blood. “How are you feeling?”

Her hearing was returning slowly. So far, so good. “Fine. You took the worst of the blast.” At the last second he had positioned his body between hers and the hut. The thought brought an odd tightening sensation to her chest. She went down next to him and looked at a long cut on his neck that seemed the nastiest of his visible injuries. “Where else are you hurt? Is anything broken?”

“I don’t think so. Just banged up pretty good.” He drew a breath, let it out slowly. “I’m pretty sure this shoulder is dislocated.” He nodded to the right.

She unbuttoned his ripped shirt and pulled it aside, stared at the bone that was clearly out of place.

No.

He couldn’t be injured.

He was the only one between the two of them who knew what the hell they were doing out here. What did she know about the jungle? What did she know about Ladera? She needed him, needed his strength.

And he needed her.

“Okay. We’ll fix it.” She clenched her fists then unclenched them again, wiped her sweaty palms on her pants.

“Hold on to my hand,” he said, sounding infinitely calmer than she felt.

She took his hand, squeezed it and felt a rush of doubt. “Maybe we could find a village doctor. You said there are some scattered villages on the hillside.”

“Hold tight,” he said and threw his body back.

The bone returned to its place with a crunching sound, ligaments snapping into place. His face went a sick ashen color for a moment.

Her stomach rolled over. Her muscles went weak. She took a deep breath then another as blood returned to her head.

“Thanks,” he said, and tested the arm carefully before lifting her hand to his mouth and kissing it.

“Better?” She cleared her throat, ignoring the heat that skittered across her skin.

“Good as new.” He smiled and seemed to regain color.

The relief that washed over her was short-lived. The sound of motors filtered through the woods.

“Four-wheelers,” he said. “The soldiers use them to chase after drug traffickers. I bet the men who have Sonya got theirs from the base somehow.”

It made sense. The vehicles fitted the terrain.

“We have to go.” She stood and held out a hand to him.

“Thanks,” he said, but stood without assistance. “I’m not that bad now. Just got my bones rattled around.”

She glanced toward the base, the sound of motors growing louder. What now? The brief rest had helped, but still, neither of them were in the kind of shape it took to run. And even if they were, she doubted they could outrun the machines that were closing the distance behind them.

Chapter Three

His head was clearing finally, his body finding its way to working again. He still hurt all over, but at least he could walk on his own now, a step up from Isabelle having to help him.

Still, they were going too slow, and he couldn’t pretend it wasn’t him holding up the pace.

Rafe swallowed his frustration and pushed on.

They’d lucked out with the soldiers. The men had found the kidnappers’ tracks and rushed off to follow those while he and Isabelle hid not three hundred feet from the hut.

“Let’s stop to rest,” she said, looking back at him, her concern for him easy to read in her eyes.

“No.” He kept on going. “We’ll stop at nightfall.”

Darkness would be here soon enough, in an hour at the most.

They reached a small plateau covered by short trees and grasses. Above it on the other side where the land rose sharply, large trees reached for the sky, ninety or a hundred feet tall. The treetops were surrounded by mist, giving them an otherworldly appearance.

“How beautiful,” she said with wonder in her voice when they reached the trees that towered to impossible heights above.

She stopped and was looking up at the trees with her head tilted, the muted light turning her strawberry-blond hair the color of antique gold. She looked like a wood sprite.

“Almost makes you believe in magic, doesn’t it?” She looked at him and smiled that sweet, sexy smile of hers. “I swear I feel something. Like there’s more here than just the trees.”

He wouldn’t have thought she, a foreigner, would pick up on that, and so fast. “The local tribes think so.” He shrugged noncommittally and tried not to think of another time when he’d been alone in another cloud forest, doing something he shouldn’t have been and had felt the anger of the woods.

Today the trees seemed welcoming in their majesty, Isabelle looking as if she’d always been here, as if she belonged. He watched the smile that played on her full lips and wanted her, in that moment, with unreasonable fierceness, to belong to him.

He caught himself stepping closer to her. Stopped.

This was nothing but an aftereffect of their close call with death. Something like that could make a person want to reach out and grab life with both hands. “We should go.”

They crossed the woods, their trek feeling more like a dream than reality. He kept his GPS out and consulted it often now.

“Have you been here before?”

“Around,” he said. “Not at this spot. My family is in Cedra, south of here.”

“So what are we going to do now?” She voiced the question that had weighed heavily on his mind for the past couple of miles. “Should we see if we can pick up the kidnappers’ trail?”

“The army would have ruined any usable tracks by now, looking for us.” Their only lead had been obliterated.

“I’m not going back without Sonya.”

In that, they agreed. Neither was he.

“The only two people we know for sure were involved with the kidnapping, Dr. Ramon and Fuentes, are both connected to Maggie. We need to talk to her.”

“Ethan talked to her already. You saw the interview footage. She’s locked up in a mental institute. I have a hard time seeing her orchestrating a complicated international kidnapping.”

“But everything comes back to her.”

“Not Juan’s assassination attempt just a month ago. What if that and the kidnapping are connected?”

They kept coming back to the same argument over and over again. He kicked a fallen branch in frustration. There had to be something more, a clue they were missing.

Who had Sonya now?

“It comes down to your attitude about women, doesn’t it?” she observed.

“I don’t have an attitude about women. I like them.”

“Exactly. You want to seduce them or protect them or both.”

“What’s wrong with that?” When it came to women, Ladera had very traditional family values.

“You don’t want to persecute a woman. The thought of putting Maggie in jail makes you uncomfortable.”

He hadn’t really thought about it before, but she was right. The whole “pick on someone your own size” deal.

“This protection thing, it’s not gentlemanly, you know.”

“It isn’t?” He was confused.

“It’s an appendage of your chauvinistic predisposition.”

“I’m not a chauvinist.” He respected women, Isabelle being a prime example. She was as tough and as skilled as any man he’d ever known. He would have picked her to be on his team over anyone.

“So you want to protect women because they are the stronger sex?” She drew up an eyebrow.