KICK ASS: A Boxed Set (53 page)

Her lazy eyelids flashed open as she turned to the clock and groaned. “You have an appointment I don’t know about?”

“Actually,” he said, “yes.”

She grabbed the sheet and sat bolt upright. “I’m not going to like this, am I?”

“It’s hell living with a psychic,” he groused.

“I don’t have to be psychic to read the look on your face. What’s wrong?”

“So much, sweetheart, I don’t know where to begin.”

* * *

Rafe fulfilled his promise. Using the last of his energy, he drew the searchers away from the fallen tree trunk, giving Mariah just enough time to sneak out of her hiding place and circle around to the back of the pyramid. She considered taking the chance to really escape, but where would she go? She had no supplies. No flashlight or water or machete. No means to exit the country. And since she couldn’t risk carrying the stone with her in case she got caught, she couldn’t leave Rafe behind, either. The shaking pyramid proved that Pryce character possessed some means of magic. She had to trust Rafe’s instincts and attempt to do as he’d asked.

Fake an escape. Make them look for her. Give them a run for their money. And if she got caught, make sure it wasn’t until shortly before sundown.

It wouldn’t be easy, but she was certainly going to see what she could do.

Unfortunately, she managed to elude them for only an hour. She’d found a second great hiding place, but a scrambling family of monkeys gave her away. She took off before they’d sighted her, but… damned wrong turns. They got her every time.

“
Alto!
” a man shouted, punctuating his order by shoving the serious end of a Magnum .357 to her temple. She immediately put her hands up.

“Take me to your leader,” she quipped.

Unfortunately, the guy she’d grazed in the arm met them first. He punched her dead on the chin, and by the time she’d regained consciousness, she’d been dragged back to the pyramid, where the man named Pryce sat on the steps, contemplating his sword. His men tossed her to the ground. In addition to seeing stars, she was now also spitting dirt.

“Ah, there you are,” he said casually. He set the sword carefully on a stone step and extended his hand. “Farrow Pryce.”

She pushed herself up and glared at him, but didn’t stand. His men must have found this rude, because they wrenched her to her feet. With each arm held immobile, she gave her jaw a wiggle to make sure it still worked, licked away the blood that had gathered in the corner of her lips and hocked a loogie that just missed the toe of his shoe.

“Wish I could say it was a pleasure,” she cracked.

He frowned at her spittle, and then look very little care in grabbing her chin and checking out the damage. “You’ll have an ugly bruise. Not to mention a nasty welt. I’m sure that’s very painful. You really shouldn’t have shot one of my men.”

“It was self-defense, remember?” Soil coated the inside of her mouth, but she wasn’t sure about spitting again.

He hummed in exaggerated contemplation. “A truly unfortunate way of making first contact, I agree. So let’s try again.”

After his silent nod, the men let her go. She tumbled to the ground and lights flashed all around her. For a second, she thought that Rafe had finally reappeared, courtesy of his new power, but she had only her injuries to blame. She was going to face off with Farrow Pryce alone, surrounded by three men who looked like they’d love nothing better than to kick the shit out of her.

“What do you want?” she asked, attempting to buy time until sunset.

“I told you before,” Pryce said, motioning for one of the men to come forward with her bag so he could rifle through the contents. “I want the stone you stole from the site in Valoren.”

“That wasn’t a site,” she contradicted, pulling herself to her knees and attempting to blink away the stars still blurring her vision. “It was a forest. There wasn’t anything there.”

He made
tsk
ing noises that made her wonder if he’d studied Villains 101. Haughty, overconfident and sickeningly debonair, Farrow Pryce might have been a good-looking guy if he didn’t act like such a caricature of Professor Moriarty.

“One of my men had the stone in his hand briefly in your hotel room,” he replied. “So you might as well drop the whole ‘I don’t have it’ scenario and move on to the next phase. Which would be ?”

She forced a grin. “The ‘I don’t have it with me’ scenario.”

“Which I counter with the ‘I don’t believe you’ scenario,” he said, tossing first the package of coins and then the GPS onto the ground. Once he had completely emptied the bag, he turned to her with an expression of feigned regret, then smiled.

“Search her.”

The experience proved just as awful as Mariah expected. The man with the bandaged arm took great pleasure in describing every curve of her body to his compadres as he groped and manhandled her in his quest to see if she’d shoved Rogan’s marker into one of her many pockets, beneath her clothes or in some hidden orifice. Luckily, Pryce assured him that the stone was too large for her most private areas, but by the time he’d gotten his jollies, she was minus her knife and panting with rage. It took all three men to hold her steady—a fact Farrow did not ignore when he ordered her tied to a nearby tree.

This wasn’t ending up at all as she and Rafe had planned. If the rat bastard tried to torture the information out of her, she’d… what? Scream? Who the hell was going to hear her out here?

“Why would I bring the stone with me?” she asked, fighting against the bindings that pulled hard on the joints in her shoulders and cut off the circulation to her hands. “I came here to look for those Mayan coins. They’re worth quite a bit. Why don’t you take them instead of some crappy rock I took as a souvenir?”

“And yet, you fought like hell to get it back. Won, too. Thanks to a mysterious man who appeared, if I can quote my man, out of nowhere?”

Farrow retrieved the sword again and was once again toying with the hilt, slipping his hand into the tangle of gold at the handle and turning the blade carelessly this way and that. Some might have assumed his movements were casual, but Mariah knew better. He meant to intimidate her. Wasn’t doing a half-bad job, either.

“The guy had great timing,” she said, aware of the irony of speaking in the past tense.

“And his name was?” Pryce asked.

Mariah swallowed thickly, wishing she had her canteen. And free hands with which to use it. “I didn’t catch it. He was gone before I had the chance to ask.”

“But came back in time to accompany you here.”

“That’s crazy,” she insisted. “I haven’t seen him since that night in the hotel.”

“And yet, the helpful couple at the outpost near the river said he was with you,” Pryce contradicted. “They did not meet him. He did not speak. But he was there.”

The price of discretion must have gone up in Mexico without her knowledge. “They’re lying. Telling you what you want to hear. You tracked me this far. Did you find one set of footprints or two?”

“One,” he replied. “But there was a double set leading from the hut where you acquired your donkey to the river where you camped the first night.”

Mariah forced a grin and laced her words with as much innuendo as she could. “That was the woman’s husband. He wanted to make sure I got to my campsite safely.”

Farrow frowned. “He didn’t say anything about going anywhere with you. And believe me, he was well compensated for every detail he provided.”

She chuckled. “You might have a fat wallet, but his wife carries a damned big gun. There aren’t enough pesos in this country to have him admitting his… private tour… in front of his wife.”

She was taking a chance, bluffing like this. But what choice did she have? She glanced at the shadows around her, which had already grown deeper and fainter, fading into the natural darkness created by the thick canopy of trees overhead. She didn’t know how much longer she could waylay Farrow Pryce, but she intended to keep up the conversation as long as possible.

Farrow licked his lips, and suddenly, the fact that the top two buttons of her shirt had been ripped off in the struggle made her squirm. His stare wasn’t exactly lecherous, but Farrow Pryce was clearly a man who liked women and sex.

“So you seduced Armando by the river, not the mystery man?” he asked.

“His name was Andreas, and let’s just say that his wife isn’t the only one in that family with a damned big gun.”

The sound of Pryce’s men chuckling froze the sweaty hairs on the back of her neck. Despite the pain in her shoulders, she forced herself to lean, relaxed, against the trunk of the tree.

“Although,” she said, eyeing his weapon, “what’s a gun when you can have a sword?”

He grinned. “You noticed my prize, have you?”

“Hard not to. I’m a treasure hunter, remember? Baby like that could fetch a tidy sum with some of the collectors I know.”

“I paid a tidy sum for it,” he replied. “Well, at the very least, I offered a fool’s ransom. When the owner resisted, I simply took what I wanted.”

“Man after my own heart.”

He leveled the sword at her, but not in a way meant to threaten. She could see by the adoration in his eyes that he simply wanted her to admire the workmanship. The men who surrounded her started to shuffle uncomfortably. The topic had strayed away from sex, and they weren’t happy about it.

“Tell me what you see,” he said.

She took a deep breath and blinked, trying to remove some of the sand and grit from her vision. “Double-edged sword. Tempered steel. Spanish-style handle. Hand-forged by a master swordsmith.”

“And the gem?”

She met his gaze straight on. “Fire opal. About… thirty-five carats.”

His eyebrows rose a notch. “Forty. What are the chances, do you think, that this faceted beauty was cut from the same mother stone as the one embedded in the rock you stole from Valoren?”

She pressed her lips together tightly, considering his suggestion with a professional air. “Well, fire opals generally aren’t very large, though there have reportedly been some as sizable as a man’s fist. The color of yours there is a vivid red in the shade, but in the light,” she said, noticing there was very little left, “it’s a bright orange?”

He nodded.

She continued, “Well, I didn’t get much of a chance to look at the stone back in Texas, but they certainly look the same in terms of color and style of cut. But like I said, I didn’t have very long to look at it. My priority was to retrieve the Mayan coins. Velez will have my head if he doesn’t get those coins in the next few days.”

“How do you know I won’t kill you first?” Pryce asked.

“I don’t,” she replied. “But either way, I’m dead. Now, later—what difference does it make?”

Their stares didn’t break, and Mariah realized by the slightest twitch in Pryce’s right eyelid that she’d struck a nerve. He wanted her alive.

“After your thugs tried to steal the stone,” she continued, “I hid it. You likely searched all the most obvious places before you followed me here or you wouldn’t have bothered to come this deep into the jungle. Once I deliver the coins to Velez, I’m willing to negotiate with you for the stone.”

Farrow ran his fingers lovingly over the opal on the hilt of the sword, then down the blade, though he was careful not to cut himself.

“You’re not exactly in any position to negotiate,” he said.

She rolled her eyes. “Why do guys like you always say that? I might be trussed up and beaten up, but you still need me. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t have followed me here, and you certainly wouldn’t have kept me alive this long.”

As she waited for Farrow to reply, she noticed something that sent another ripple of chills over her body.

The jungle was silent.

Dead silent.

Not a bird cawed. Not an insect buzzed. Even the wind seemed to have stopped tousling the treetops. In that instant, she realized that while darkness had not yet totally descended, the sun had set. And with it, an instant later, came a black and billowing fog.

It rolled out of the openings in the Mayan pyramid and covered them completely. She heard Pryce yell out, but the beams from the flashlights he’d called for could barely break through the soupy atmosphere. Fearing asphyxiation, she held her breath, but then her bindings suddenly sprang free and a sexy, familiar voice whispered, “Run,” in her ear.

Rafe took her hand. In seconds, they’d disappeared into the cover and the air cleared. She caught a brief glimpse of his eyes, watery from the smoke, before he pulled her tight against him, kissed her and caused them both to disappear.

Eighteen

The kiss cleansed him. Combined with the elemental magic he drew upon from the threads that weaved through the ancient jungle, Rafe spirited them back to the clearing beside the river where they’d first made love. He held on to Mariah, rubbing his hands all over her, partially to make sure she was not hurt, but mostly to erase the revolting touch of the man who’d searched for the stone.

She pulled away, and her eyes, first wide with shock, suddenly shut tight. She wavered, then pushed him violently, ran to a nearby bush and vomited.

He slid to his knees beside her, gathering her hair from her face as she retched up the contents of her stomach. “Mariah?”

She shook her head, unable to speak. He waited, smoothing his hand up and down her back until the sickness subsided. She rolled onto her backside, drew her knees up and gasped for calming breaths.

Closing his eyes, he conjured a bouquet of herbs, including one that not only would settle the stomach, but cleanse the mouth.

“Chew this,” he ordered.

She took it, but did not obey. “What is it?”

“Mint,” he replied. “Do it.”

She sniffed. Satisfied, she plucked a few leaves and put them into her mouth, closing her eyes as if bracing herself for another round of heaving. Rafe produced a canteen with fresh water. He held tight to the threads of the jungle as he did this, to ward off the aftereffects of using Rogan’s magic, but his grasp to the ancient power here, nearer civilization, was tentative at best. Night had fallen. They needed supplies. But they also needed to get out of the jungle before Farrow Pryce’s men backtracked and found them.