Heated Pursuit (Alpha Security #1)(46)
*
From far away, the sound of Penny’s name echoed in her head. She groaned, burrowing her face into her hard pillow as her sleep-addled brain slowly connected a trail of dots…the smell of earth, of sweat…of cold, rushing water.
Penny sat up with a start. Her head cracked against something solid, making her wince.
“Damn, sweetheart.” At the sound of Rafe’s low curse, she lunged in his direction. He caught her and pulled her into his lap, still rubbing the spot where her head connected with his jaw. “If I didn’t already guess it, now I know you have a hard head.”
“Where are we?” She blinked repeatedly, squinting into the darkness. “Oh God. Are we dead? Did something eat us when we dove into the water?”
“If we’re dead, someone should really talk to the Big Guy Upstairs about his accommodations.” Rafe brushed his hand over her cheek, pushing a strand of wet hair off her face. “We jumped. We lived. We’re fine.”
Everything slowly started coming back to her. The bullets. The kiss. The damn freaking cliff. When they’d managed to swim their way to the bank of the river God only knew how many miles from where they had jumped, Penny had been ready to pass out from exhaustion. And it looks like she had.
“You’re fine?” she asked. “No bullet holes? No missing limbs?”
“I’m whole and intact. Right as f*cking rain.”
Good. Because she’d hate to hit an injured man. She swatted his chest, making him chuckle. She went to smack him a second time, but he grabbed her wrist and pulled her into a kiss. As far as methods went for silencing someone, she favored this one. By a lot.
Anger at being forced to leave him behind evaporated, or maybe it washed away in the river, because with one brush of his tongue, she kissed him back with everything she had. Tongue. Teeth. The shift of her body. The embrace was short but loaded with so much electrically charged heat that it took a while to register that she was still drenched from head to toe.
The kiss turned salty. She tried to pull back, but Rafe slipped a hand into her hair, ensuring she didn’t go far as his thumb wiped away the errant moisture on her cheeks. Lip to lip, his mouth brushed against hers as he said, “Please tell me you’re okay.”
Now that he held her, she was hunky-dory. As the fear that she’d never see him again slowly poured from her body, her heart rate leveled. Penny was in more trouble than just being stranded in the middle of the jungle with no charted way out. Because if she hadn’t thought it before, she knew it now. Her risk of falling hard for Rafael Ortega had grown exponentially.
“Red?” Rafe asked again, pulling her from her own thoughts.
“What was it you said? Right as f*cking rain?” She forced a quivering smile. When compared to the possibility of future heartbreak, the persistent throb in her leg was nothing. “But what about you? Are you sure you’re okay?”
With Rafe’s body as her guide, she ran her palms over his shoulders and down his chest. She’d worked her way toward his abdomen and waist when he caught her roving hands.
“Keep doing that and you’re going to see just how okay all my limbs are, sweetheart.”
“Oh.” Warmth flooded into her cheeks. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to do…that.”
“You do that a lot without meaning to. It’s become my permanent physical state when I’m around you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m not.”
She closed her eyes on a mental whimper. No touching! “What are we going to do now? And what about Carlotta? We can’t just leave her there to fend for herself.”
“I’m sorry, but that’s exactly what we have to do. At least for now. We’ll be no good to anyone if we’re caught and hooked up to intravenous drips of Freedom. That cliff was our saving grace. It’s going to take Fuentes’s men time to scale down or go around, and before that happens, I want to make sure we’re long gone. Something tells me Senior has nothing on his mini-me in the psycho department. You good to move?”
“I may need a little nudge,” Penny admitted.
With gentle hands, he helped ease her out of their makeshift hidey-hole. The cave was no more than a dent built into the face of the cliff, but it served its purpose and had kept them hidden from Diego’s searching men for the last…
“How long have I been sleeping?” Penny asked, absently stretching her sore muscles. A zap of pain zipped through her thigh, making her wince.
“Not long. A half-hour at most. You needed a rest and I needed to re-group. Hopefully Fuentes’s men will think we’re dead and will stop looking for us and turn the hell around, but I wouldn’t place all my money on it.”
The shift of moonlight confirmed that at some point while she’d been sleeping, Rafe had channeled his inner jungle mercenary. A combat vest stretched over his broad chest. It was adorned with a collection of ammo clips for the AK-47 draped over his shoulder and the Glock strapped to his thigh.
From head to toe, he looked mouthwateringly good—and dangerous. He tossed a black bag she hadn’t seen before on a nearby rock and began pulling out its contents. Camo pants. Boots. The last thing to come out was a knife with a seriously lethal-looking blade.
“Was there a department store around here that we passed? Or a hunter’s lodge?” she asked.