Noise alerted us. Excited raised voices.
“They must have picked up our scent,” Chami hissed. “They’re coming after us.”
“Split up,” Nolan said tersely. “I’ll go north. Chami, you go south. We’ll act as decoys and make plenty of noise; that plus the obvious smell of our sunscreen should draw them after us. Milady, you keep heading straight. You’ll come out of the jungle in a mile or so onto the coastline highway. Stay on the road; there’ll be hotels and resorts. Go to the nearest one and wait for us there.”
Chami and Nolan turned and started crashing through the foliage in opposite directions. Heart racing, I made my way forward as quickly and quietly as I could.
Rapid commands were issued in Spanish, and twigs and branches snapped and cracked as our pursuers split up. But it wasn’t into two parties, it was three, and the one coming after me was moving silently and swiftly with a tangible, distinct presence that brushed up against mine. It was the Monère and he was after me.
No need for silence or stealth now. I leaped and sprang in inhumanly long bounds, crashing through the underbrush at a speed that would have left a human far behind. But my pursuer wasn’t human. He proved that by keeping pace with me, and even more worrisome, narrowing the distance between us. The rubbing of awareness between us was like an invisible marker getting closer and closer. Whoever he was, he was superbly fit.
I broke out of the jungle onto the edge of the highway and took in my situation in a brief, panicked glance. The human heartbeats that I had heard and used as guidance were those of men my wily hunter had posted along the road, not of tourists or staff from a nearby hotel as I had been expecting, though one such resort was visible several miles down the road. I knew they weren’t innocent tourists because they were carrying small automatic pistols that looked like mini machine guns.
That smart son-of-a-bitch Monère had set a trap and flushed me out into the open.
The gun-toting men posted along the empty, narrow highway seemed as surprised to see me as I was to see them. What to do? Normally I would have tried to bluff my way out: Nothing but a lost tourist. Thank God there’s a hotel down the road! Could you let me pass? But the hypercharged presence behind me closing in fast negated that option, so I simply turned and ran north up the road, and didn’t even try to pass for human. I ran full out, which meant I was just a blurring streak to the other men.
Gunshots rat-a-tatted behind me, whizzing by, spraying the ground around me.
“No disparar!” roared my pursuer. I hoped like hell he was telling his men not to shoot me, which it seemed he had because no more gunshots sounded. But my hopes of getting away died when I heard a soft swoosh and felt something painful thud into my back. Reaching between my shoulder blades, I yanked out a blood-tipped dart.
Well, fuck, I thought, as I felt the strength leech out of my body at alarming speed. The bastard shot me with a tranquilizer dart. I might have preferred being shot with a real bullet instead. This was just too damn embarrassing.
My unchecked momentum took me a few more strides before my legs stopped working. One minute I was running full out; the next moment I slammed to the ground as my legs suddenly collapsed beneath me.
There was a bright flash of splintering pain as the right side of my head hit something hard on the ground. Then, lights out.
FOUR
ONE MOTHER OF a killer headache had me in its merciless grip as I sluggishly rose back to consciousness. I groaned, raised a hand to touch the side of my head, and whimpered when my fingers touched the egg-sized lump over my right temple.
“Easy, lucerito,” murmured a voice that was velvet soft, an alluring sound that made me want to open my eyes.
I cracked my lids open a cautious sliver. When my head didn’t explode, just kept to that constant pounding headache, I opened my eyes fully.
“Ow!” I said for lack of anything else better to say as I stared up at a dark, masculine face. A stranger I didn’t recognize, sitting next to me as I lay in bed. Gingerly I sat up and took in my surroundings. A strange man, a strange, luxuriously furnished bedroom . . . and we were not alone. Two other Latino men were in the room with nasty-looking guns in their hands. Bodyguards. Their weapons weren’t pointed at me yet, but I had the feeling that they would be if I so much as blinked wrong, which was a complete puzzle. This whole thing was, actually.
“Where am I? And who are you?” I asked woozily, fighting back a groan as my shift in position added in nausea to the mix. I had to swallow and close my eyes for a brief second before the headache lessened back down to not-wanting-to-puke-your-guts-out bearable.
My eyes reopened and focused on the unfamiliar face in front of me. He was a very attractive devil, I observed distantly like someone viewing a lovely work of art. He had glossy black hair and dark eyes, but whereas my skin was fair, his was tanned, though not as swarthy as his two armed bodyguards.
For the moment, my discomfort preempted feelings of anything else like alarm, but it hovered close, within touchable reach.
“You are in my home in Cancun,” said Mr. Dark and Lovely. His English was perfect, accented lightly with a sexy Latin cadence and fluidity. “My name is Roberto Carderas. What is your name?”
“Lisa. Lisa Hamilton.” I blinked again, as if that would help clear up his words better. “Cancun? You mean, like in Mexico?”
Roberto nodded, his dark, intelligent eyes observing my reaction.
“Why the hell am I in Mexico? I live in Manhattan. My job . . .” Worry spiked, intensifying the blistering headache.
“What do you do?” asked Roberto.
“I’m a nurse.” God, there was nothing but confusion in my head. Confusion and pain. “What day is today?”
“Wednesday.”
“Crap, I should be at work! It’s nighttime. Is Mexico in the same time zone as New York? What the hell am I doing in Mexico?” I muttered. “I have to call the hospital and let them know I won’t be able to come in tonight.” Carefully, I turned my head, searching for a phone.
“Easy, lucerito.”
I didn’t know what the heck lucerito meant, only that it sounded almost like an endearment. “Do I know you?” I asked.
“You don’t remember?”
“Remember what?”
“Meeting me on the island. On Cozumel,” he clarified.
“No. Where’s Cozumel?” I’d heard of the popular vacation destination but didn’t know its exact location on the map.
“It’s an island not too far from here,” he said. “You fell and hit your head, and I brought you to the mainland. The hospitals are much better here than the small clinic they have on the island. They x-rayed your head and determined that you had no fracture, just a bad concussion, so I brought you back to my home to rest. Did you come with anyone else? A boyfriend or perhaps a husband?”
“No, no one. Just me.”
“No family?” he persisted.
“No.”
“What about friends?”
I shook my head, immediately regretting the action as another severe wave of pain pounded my skull, enough to make me cry out. When the sharp pain eased back to a bearable throb, I focused on . . . what was his name again? . . . Roberto.
“Why did you help me?” I asked. “We obviously don’t know each other that well, do we?”
“No, I saw you on the island. I was vacationing there myself. As to helping you—it was the decent thing to do.”
“Thank you,” I murmured, touched by how much trouble and expense he seemed to have gone to help me. “I’ll pay you back,” I assured him.
“De nada,” Roberto said, dismissing my pledge with the easy, telling grace of someone accustomed to wealth. “No need to pay me back. Medical care is much less expensive here in Mexico than in the United States. It pleases me to be of service to you.”