High-Stakes Honeymoon. RaeAnne Thayne

still,” he uttered suddenly, his voice barely a hush amid the whirs and peeps and calls of the rain forest at night.

      He whipped his machete out and advanced slowly on her and her breath caught. Maybe he wasn’t quite as harmless as she wanted to believe.

      “Okay, okay,” she squeaked out. “I was bluffing. I’ll climb.”

      “Don’t move,” he growled. An instant later—before she could even take take another breath—the machete flashed through the night and struck the ground inches from her feet. A shaft of moonlight piercing the canopy gave just enough light for her to see a vine writhing at her feet.

      Not a vine, of course. A snake.

      Her insides churned and if she’d had anything in her stomach, she was fairly certain she would have lost it right then.

      He held out his flashlight and shined it on the headless, still moving snake with a curiously beautiful geometric pattern along its skin. “There you go. Fer-de-lance. The deadliest snake around. A hundred people a year are killed by them in Costa Rica.”

      She was going to hyperventilate now for sure. She couldn’t seem to catch her breath and the world seemed to spin alarmingly. She drew in a cleansing breath, then another and another until the moist, oxygen-rich air loosened the gnarled tendrils of panic.

      “Up in the canopy is just about the only place we can rest without having to worry about them. But it’s your choice.”

      What kind of man was Ren Galvez that he could kill a deadly snake without even breaking a sweat? He had probably just saved her life and he didn’t appear to be fazed one iota.

      She looked at the terrifying tree trunk, then back at the now blessedly still creature. She swallowed a whimper and straightened her shoulders.

      “I’ll climb,” she said.

      Chapter 4

      She climbed until her arms were trembling with fatigue and her stomach was a hard knot of nausea. She didn’t even want to think about the journey back down.

      The entire time she climbed, she was aware of him below her and the thin rope tethering them together. He had pulled it from his magic pack that apparently contained everything a person might need to survive in the rain forest in the middle of a nightmare.

      She was tied to him, and his harness had a clip attached to the ladder bolted into the trunk. If either of them fell, theoretically the clip would keep them anchored to the tree.

      She didn’t want to put that theory to the test anytime soon.

      She could only concentrate on pulling hand over hand up the ladder, hoping his flashlight beam was aimed somewhere high above her and not at her chunky butt.

      At last she reached the last rung on the ladder, just when she was beginning to think this whole thing would be easier if she just begged him to slice through her tether with his machete and let her tumble a hundred feet to the jungle floor.

      “Great. Over you go. Good job.”

      Though she was severely tempted to kick him right in his cheery little teeth, she didn’t have any energy to spare for the task. Instead, she pulled herself onto a swaying wood platform, perhaps eight feet in circumference, then spiderwalked to the trunk in the middle and flopped to her stomach, breathing hard and hanging on to the massive trunk with all her might.

      He followed her up, pulling off his pack and stretching his shoulders. “Don’t like heights much, do you?”

      “You could say that.”

      She didn’t think he was interested in the root of her fear. During her first year of boarding school when she was eight, two of the older girls coaxed her onto the roof with promises to show her their secret clubhouse and then locked her there, clinging to a gargoyle for three terrifying hours until the headmistress found her well after dark.

      That childhood trauma three stories up seemed like a walk in the park compared to this.

      “I’m sorry to put you through this,” he said.

      Oddly, she thought he meant it. His concern slid through her, warming the chilled corners of her psyche, until she sternly reminded herself he was the one posing a danger to her.

      “You’re safe up here. See, there’s a railing all the way around and I can even close off the opening we climbed through so you don’t have to worry about stumbling off in the dark.”

      As if she needed that image in her head, too.

      “Great,” she mumbled.

      “We’ll have a gorgeous view in the morning.”

      She declined comment on that, quite certain daylight would only accentuate just how high up they were.

      He sat down across from her and dug around in his pack. A moment later, he pulled out a lantern.

      “I thought I had this in here,” he said. “Can you hold the flashlight for a minute?”

      She complied and watched as he lit the mantles. A moment later, the lantern buzzed on, illuminating their perch far better than the weak light of the flashlight.

      While she still clung to the trunk, he moved around the platform, pulling down and securing mosquito netting that had been rolled up and tied to the overhanging roof.

      It made a cozy, almost intimate shelter.

      “What is this place?” she asked.

      “Research station. Not mine. There aren’t too many sea turtles in the rain forest canopy.”

      His teeth flashed in the lantern light and she almost smiled back in reflex, then caught herself and jerked her features back into a cool expression.

      “A friend of mine is studying rain forest bromeliads. Plants that grow without soil, capturing rainfall and drawing nourishment from the air,” he explained, much to her relief.

      She’d had no idea what bromeliads might be—they sounded like nasty camel-shaped bugs—and she was very grateful she didn’t have to reveal her ignorance.

      “Her study grant ran out a few months ago,” Ren went on, “but she hopes to be back at the end of the rainy season.”

      As if on cue, the downpour started again, rattling against the wooden roof of their lofty shelter. There was no buildup to the rain here, she had discovered. One moment it was dry, the next the clouds let loose with a mighty torrent.

      She listened to the loud music of the rain, unlike anything she’d ever experienced before. It was a symphony of sound, the percussive clatter hitting the roof, the splat of hard drops bouncing off leaves, the low rumble of a distant river somewhere.

      And the smell. It was wild and dramatic, like earth and growth and life.

      She wasn’t much of a gardener, though she did grow a few vegetables and some herbs for cooking in containers in the small backyard of her condo. She loved the scent and feel of dirt under her fingertips. This was the same kind of smell, only on killer steroids.

      She couldn’t say she found it unappealing, just overwhelming.

      She couldn’t help comparing it to gentle summer rain in Texas, with the sweet, clean scent of wet pavement and wet grass.

      She couldn’t imagine any two more different experiences from the same act of nature.

      She wanted to go home.

      The sudden fierce craving for the familiar was so overwhelming she couldn’t seem to breathe around it. She wanted to be sitting on her tiny covered patio, with barely room for one lawn chair, listening to the wind sigh in the oak tree and her neighbor’s TV playing too loudly.

      She wanted the safety and familiarity of her normal routine, the comfort of things she had always taken for granted—electric lights and TiVo and warm running water.

      Would