Entangled (Serendipity Adventure Romance Book 2) (15 page)

Good thing she didn’t know what he had in mind.

“We have to get around the corner without the guards seeing us to get Lucy.” He motioned uphill.

“I thought we’re trying to get away from the village, not head back toward it.”

“Lucy’s not far. Come on!”

He peeked again. No soccer game, by the looks of it. The guards were standing at various corners of the bridge, scanning the scene. Actually paying attention, for a change.

Where was the World Cup when he needed it most?

He edged along the left side of the road, using leaves and vines for cover. A minute later, they padded around the bend and out of sight. Two minutes of puffing uphill to the massive tree trunk he used to remember the spot, and they were there. You couldn’t see a thing from the road, but good old Lucy was right where he left her, behind the shed-sized trunk of that tree. Vines were already curling around the wheels — the jungle worked that fast — but a couple of insistent heaves got her free, and with Cara’s help, he pushed the aging Kawasaki onto the dirt road.

Cara grabbed his arm. “How are we going to get over the bridge with all those guards there?”

“We’re not going over that bridge,” he said, handing her the backpack.

“Then what bridge are we going—” Cara went white. “Oh no. Not that bridge. Tell me you’re not thinking of that bridge.”

A voice rang out from up the road before he could answer, and they whipped their heads toward the source. One voice turned into several as three village men appeared, pointing and hollering and bringing their blowguns to their mouths. Running into view behind them came a couple of the drug-running gang. It was all a blur, but Tobin could tell by the camo. The scrappy beards. The rifles, pointing his way.

“Come on!” he yelled, pushing Lucy down the road. In five steps, they were around the corner and temporarily out of blowgun range — but back in the line of sight of the bridge guards, who still hadn’t taken notice of the action. But they would the minute he fired Lucy up, since there wasn’t a blaring television adding to the river noise.

Praying the old bike would fire up on the first try, he jumped on, hit the petcock and choke, and threw his weight into the biggest kick start of his life.

Lucy roared, sputtered to a near standstill, and then coughed back to life.

“Get on!” he shouted, pretty much the same second the bridge guards shouted and turned their way.

Cara slid on and he took off so fast, they’d have done a wheelie if it weren’t for the downslope. The barrels of several rifles swung their way as he curved left for a clear shot, then right, heading for the narrow riverside path he and Cara had come along minutes earlier.

The rat-a-tat-tat of a rifle sounded. A thousand birds fled the treetops in a giant whoosh. Cara clutched his ribs so hard, he could barely breathe, which was okay since he was barely breathing anyway. Not with a second and third rifle joining in.

He gunned the engine and they shot down the trail with a bump that nearly threw them into the air.

“Oh my God!” Cara screamed.

Yeah, that had been a little closer than he would have liked. But they were hammering down the trail now, and as long as they didn’t get guillotined by a low-hanging vine, the twisting path would provide cover from bullets and darts.

“Just hang on!”

He doubted they ever broke thirty, but the foliage blurred by like they were screaming down a highway at a hundred miles an hour. Having Cara on the back threw off the bike’s balance, and the number of times he barely averted a wipeout by sticking out a foot…well, he stopped counting.

The rope bridge popped in and out of view, and they shot past the point where he and Cara had slashed their way out of the jungle to join the path. Cara’s arms squeezed tighter as he revved to the edge of the rope bridge then stopped. He could feel her weight shift, hear her breath catch as she leaned over his shoulder to see.

“Tobin, are you totally nuts?”

Chapter Twenty-Five

Tobin gulped. The bridge extended before them in a low, elegant curve, dipping down, then climbing up toward the other side. Just like one of those perspective drawings, where everything narrowed on a point on the other side.

A very rickety perspective drawing over a very deep ravine. The roar of the rapids seemed angrier than it had been his first time here, and his stomach churned much like the water one hundred feet below.

The bridge was ridiculously narrow, rickety, and uneven. But it might just work.

Scratch that. It
had
to work.

Cara’s fingers tapped on his shoulder, either in prayer or in a silent series of calculations. He felt her haul in a long breath and let it out slowly.

“Ready?” she whispered.

Damn, that was supposed to be his line.

He turned his head and found her obsidian eyes shining at him. It was a look he hadn’t seen in a very long time. A look that said
I trust you
and
We’re in this together
and
Watch out future, here we come.

A look he wouldn’t mind getting used to seeing every day for the rest of his life.

A giant insect whizzed by his ear, and he ducked.

“Go!” Cara yelled, thumping him on the shoulder. “Go!”

It took him a second to process what she meant, until excited cries filled in behind the sound of the rapids. That wasn’t an insect. It was a poison dart. And the men shooting at them were swarming out of the jungle and into easy firing range.

“Go!” Cara screamed.

With a twist of the throttle, they shot across the last two yards of firm ground and hit the first footboard of the bridge. The moment the bike made contact, they dropped a foot before continuing across. The bridge swayed and groaned under the combined weight of Lucy, him, and his Italian princess.

Rat-a-tat-tat!
Now rifles were shooting, too. Whether that was the drug runners or the bridge guards, he didn’t know. Didn’t care what flavor of death found them first. Only wanted to get away.

A nudge between his shoulder blades told him that Cara had hidden her head there. He wished he could do the same — close his eyes and trust someone else to make sure everything came out all right.

But there was no one else. It was all up to him.

All up to him, and Christ, he didn’t even trust himself.

He clenched his teeth, forced his eyes wide and somehow kept the bike upright when the bridge went from bending beneath him to flexing back upward. They’d had a cat when he was a kid, a crazy cat who liked being tossed in a blanket. Tobin would hold two corners of the blanket while Seth held the others and they’d launch Mittens into the air like an astronaut hitting zero gravity.

Now he knew how Mittens felt, with two important differences.

The cat loved every minute of it. And cats had nine lives.

What the hell had he been thinking with this insane escape plan?

Pfft!
A dart whizzed in front of his face. As if the bouncing bridge weren’t enough.

His eyes kept wanting to slide sideways to the cables forming handholds on either side of the bridge. An inch of clearance on either side, max. One little wobble and the handlebars would snag. He could picture it all too easily: the sluggish drag on first contact, the wild swerve he’d put the bike into to pull free. Then he’d tangle with the cable on the other side and get pitched headfirst into the ravine. Him and Cara, flying, flying…

Unless he kept his eyes glued to the far side.

So he kept them glued, religiously, until his eyeballs burned and screamed to blink — just one little blink. But that could be the death of him, and worse, of her. So, no. No blinking allowed.

No blinking, no panicking when the bridge bucked and dipped a lot like his grandfather’s boat did when a wave fell away from under the bow and dropped it with a thud. He knew, because there’d been a lot of that when he and Seth sailed down from New England. But that had been thrilling. This was terrifying.

Something pinged. Without looking, he knew it was another dart, plonking off the fuel tank a hair above his thigh. It bounced off his leg before pitching into space and hurtling into the rapids below.

The bike lurched from footboard to footboard, bumping and bouncing and barely staying on course. Any time now, one of the rotting boards would pop and give way.

But they didn’t give way, and salvation — the far end of the bridge — kept inching closer and closer. He leaned forward like that would get them there sooner. Cara, too: he could feel her whole body hope, her lips mumbling a prayer against his skin.

Cara. Lips. Prayer.

All up to him.

His subconscious made a thousand dirty deals with the devil.
Get me through this, and I’ll give you every Friday night for the rest of my life. Every Saturday morning lie-in, too…

The list got longer and longer the closer they got to the other side. The devil could have his best pair of carving skis. His surfboard. Hell, the devil could have his firstborn child. Maybe the secondborn, too, especially if the kid turned out anything like the stories his mom told about him—

He brought that train of thought to a screeching halt. The only woman he’d ever want to have kids with was Cara, and there was no way he’d give anything that precious up. Never.

So he rode on through the impossibly narrow slot over an impossibly unstable surface until the front wheel was an inch away from the other side of the ravine. He yanked the handlebars up with everything he had to lift them over the lip between the last footboard and dry earth.

Vrooom!
The bike roared away from the swing bridge, running for its life. Gone were the thunder of the rapids, the wobble of the bridge, the blur of the cables left and right. Everything was steady, straight.

Christ. Never in five thousand miles of sailing had landfall been such a relief.

Chapter Twenty-Six

It was ten minutes before Cara worked up the nerve to open her eyes, and another hour before she stopped glancing over her shoulder, watching for the militia she was so sure would appear in hot pursuit. Tobin kept the bike hammering along until the lumpy dirt road joined another that was only very bad, which eventually led to a paved road. That, in turn, spit them out on a highway with a sign that could have said
Heaven
, only it was spelled P-a-n-a-m-a C-u-i-d-a-d. Panama City. She risked a look at her watch as Tobin slalomed the bike around yet another overloaded truck.

She had to look twice and hold her watch against her ear, thinking the waterfall must have busted it. But no, it really was ten a.m. and she really was on her way to the meeting. Even with Tobin pushing the limits like this, though, it would be tight to make it by three. Super tight. The drive out had taken eight hours, and they only had five.

On the other hand, what hadn’t been a tight call today? The waterfall, the shooting guards, the rope bridge. Jesus, had they really done all that?

She nearly gave a triumphant whoop when she realized they were clear, until she noticed how white Tobin’s knuckles were around the grips.

“Hey,” she leaned into his ear and whispered instead of cheering. “We made it.”

He slowly shook his head left, then right. “Could have missed.”

She barely heard the words over the engine noise, but the layer of muscle bundled around his ribcage had gone all tight. When he exhaled, it was slow and shaky.

“Come on, you’ve done a hundred risky things in your life.” Nothing scared Tobin. Nothing!

“Never with you on the back of my bike.”

She could see the thin line of his lips in the sideview mirror. He’d never looked so much like his brother Seth, the serious one.

The next hour must have been the quietest of his life, and hers, too, because everything he’d done for her in the past few days replayed in her mind. The grip she had on his ribs barely eased, though it became a different kind of clutch. The kind that comes from a million regrets and the knowledge that she’d never, ever be able to make it up to him. The only thing she could hope for was forgiveness. A clean slate.

Some example she was, because she hadn’t ever offered Tobin that, had she?

She turned her face away from the mirror and closed her eyes.

A long hour later, Tobin clucked at the fuel gage. “We need to make a quick stop.”

When he pulled over at a gas station, she felt a hundred years old: stiff and spent and creaky. If Tobin felt the same, he didn’t show it. He jumped right off the bike and shot her that trademark smile that had won a thousand women’s hearts.

A thousand women, and the only one he wanted was her.

The smile was a little tight, fraying around the edges with worry. He glanced at his watch instead of the cold drinks display. His foot tapped the ground as he waited for the tank to fill.

The man was on a mission, and that mission was her.

“Damn,” she murmured when she swung the backpack off. Her things were still in the cheap hotel she’d stayed at before heading to the village a week — an eternity — ago. Well, she could come back for it later, if at all. Everything she needed was right here, anyway.

Tobin, Tobin, and Tobin.

She reached for the outer flap of the backpack and froze.

“What?” His impossibly blue eyes latched onto hers.

She swung the bag around so he could see the dart stuck in it. Right at the top, an inch away from where her neck would have been.

“Christ.” He shook his head. “The kids deserve a new roof on the school, but there has to be a better way.”

Roof? What roof? “What do you mean?”

“That’s what the village was supposed to get in exchange for delaying you. A new roof for the school.” Tobin spit on the ground. “Hell of a way to raise money.”

She pictured the smiling kids, the friendly women. The patient elders, the clever hunters. Even Rodrigo — they all struck her as good, honest folk. She considered the dart for a good minute, then grabbed a newspaper out of a trash can and wrapped the dart in it. She stashed the whole bundle in a plastic bag and shoved it into the bottom of his backpack. Then she walked to the toilet on shaky feet and washed her hands for a long, long time.