Chapter 13

 

Ryan woke up in a hospital bed. One glance at the window told him it was night. Apart from that, there was no other information in his fog-filled head.

“What happened?” It felt like he was pushing the words past a mouth full of cotton balls.

“Hey, you.” Elle’s purple hair came into view. She held a plastic beaker with a straw to his lips. “You broke your shoulder and they had to operate. Drink.”

He didn’t have to be told twice. As he drank, he began to notice his surroundings. There was an IV line in his left arm, and his right shoulder had a thick dressing and was strapped up tight.

“Better?” Elle put the beaker on the table beside his bed.

“Where am I?” Before she could explain that he was in hospital, he added, “Which town?”

“Cusco. That was the nearest hospital. De la Cruz flew you in on the chopper a few hours ago. It will take another few hours for the anaesthetic to work its way out of your system. Until then, you’ll feel groggy.” She smoothed his hair back from his forehead in a sisterly gesture.

“What’s this for?” He lifted his left arm to indicate the IV line.

“Antibiotics. You’ll need them for a few days.”

A surge of panic ran through Ryan as he struggled to sit up. “I can’t stay here for days.”

“Hey, don’t go nuts on me.” Elle gently pressed his chest to push him back down. “You won’t even be able to stand right now. And where, exactly, do you think you need to be?”

“Belinda. Beast.” It was hard to think when his eyes felt so heavy. “Esperanza.” A vision of a mass of wavy black hair framing a heart-shaped face and large hazel eyes filled his mind. “Got to get back to Esperanza.”

“Who’s Esperanza?” Elle tucked the sheet in around him.

“She’s an angel.” Ryan smiled as his eyes closed. “Gonna marry her…”

And then the world faded as he sank back into sleep.

 

 

 

“It’s the drugs talking,” De la Cruz said as he sauntered into the room.

Elle was pleased to see he was armed with coffee. She gratefully took a cup from him.

“I once declared love to my dentist after getting my wisdom teeth out under anaesthetic. Proposed, too.” De la Cruz grinned widely, making her agree with Megan that he was one seriously good-looking man. “Mr Donahue was flattered, but seeing as he already had a wife and eight grandkids, he decided to pass.”

“I had my appendix out when I was a kid,” Elle said. “Woke up singing the Teletubbies theme song.”

De la Cruz threw back his head and laughed. The man was too attractive for his own good.

“Where’s Mrs De la Cruz?” Elle asked, before she could stop herself.

He cocked an eyebrow at her. “You want to audition for the part, bonita?”

Her cheeks flushed. “Just curious. Mrs De la Cruz?” She gave him a cheeky smile.

“She’s somewhere out there, waiting for me to find her.”

“Ah, a romantic.” She sipped her coffee.

“Something like that.” He pointed at Ryan. “What about him? Is Esperanza real?”

“Who knows. Ryan goes through women like…” She looked up at him. “I can’t think of any analogies that aren’t rude.”

“Don’t spare me, bonita, I like a woman who knows how to get down and dirty.”

She snorted. “You should be so lucky.”

He leaned back against the windowsill, the lights over the red roofs of Cusco acting as his backdrop. “Does that mean you’re spoken for?”

Elle hesitated, because the answer was complicated. She wasn’t dating anyone, but her thoughts were consumed by one man alone. He was her obsession and she wasn’t entirely sure why.

“Ah, you pine for my friend David.”

Elle bristled. Even the sight of De la Cruz’s disappointed smile didn’t appease her. “I wouldn’t say pine. That makes me sound like a puppy waiting for its owner to return.”

His eyes went wide. “He owns you? This is much more serious than I thought.”

She answered him with a gesture that made him chortle. “Shouldn’t you be back at the resort helping search for Beast and Belinda?”

“It’s dark. There’s no searching the jungle in the dark.”

“I can’t imagine being lost out there,” Elle said. “It’s beautiful, but terrifying.”

He shrugged. “I grew up out there. We lived on the edge of Maldonado. The Amazon was my backyard.”

“But you spent time in the U.S.” His accent testified to that. “Is that where you met David?”

He gave her a teasing grin. “You can’t wheedle information out of me about our friend. David’s secrets are his own. But me, I’m an open book.”

“Fine, explain the American accent, then.” She was mildly curious; mainly she wanted to know about his relationship with David. Did they both work for the same government? Would he tell her if they did? No, one look at the man told her he wouldn’t. He might ooze charm, but he had a spine of steel.

“It’s no mystery,” he said. “My father was Peruvian, my mother American. She was a scientist, researching in the jungle. He was a river rat, running supplies up and down the Amazon. They fell in love, got married, had kids, split up and Mom took us back with her to the States.”

“That must have been tough.” She couldn’t imagine her parents living so far apart. How would they argue?

“It is what it is. I got to spend summers down here, on the river with my dad. We had good times. It wasn’t a bad life.”

“Now you work for the Peruvian government? Or is it the U.S. government?” She tried to keep her tone light, but could tell from the amusement in his eyes that she’d failed miserably.

“I’m a free agent, bonita. I have skills and I hire them out.”

“Is that how you met David?”

He laughed hard, making Elle smile. There would be no getting information out of the man.

“Tell me this,” he said, when he’d stopped laughing. “Once you figure out who David is, and you catch him, what then?”

Elle stopped with her coffee cup halfway to her mouth. “I honestly don’t know.” And now she was wondering why she hadn’t thought that far ahead.

“Maybe you want to think about that, bonita. David isn’t a man you play with.”

There was a groan from the bed and Ryan’s eyes flickered open. “What happened?” he said.

“Here we go again,” Elle muttered. “I really hope the anaesthetic gets out of his system soon. I’m fed up repeating myself.”

She put the coffee down and went to tell Ryan all over again that he was just out of surgery. It was going to be a long night.

 

 

 

Beast woke to the sound of something large moving around, and he didn’t think it was human. For a start, they were enveloped in absolute blackness and there was no sign of a flashlight. Slowly, he inched his wrist up in front of his face. The faintly illuminated watch dial told him it was one a.m. He’d managed to sleep for a good few hours, which was a miracle in itself.

Sometime, while he’d been asleep, they’d shifted position. Now, instead of Belinda lying curled at his side, she was draped over him. Her knees were either side of his thighs, her arms were tucked in at his sides and her nose was nestled in the crook of his neck. One of his hands was tangled in her hair; the other had been resting in the small of her back—before he’d looked at this watch. Beast couldn’t help but notice that she moulded to his body perfectly. Her soft curves were a foil to his hard muscles, and the little mewing sounds she made when he moved reminded him of a kitten.

As he listened to the creature move around the clearing near their bed, he gently stroked Belinda’s back, soothing her—or maybe himself. Her skin was satin smooth under his touch, and he was deeply aware of the heat coming from between her legs as she straddled him. Against his will, he grew hard. It was a sweet agony lying there, with temptation in his arms, unable to do anything about it.

He shifted his hips slightly, trying to angle them so that his hard length wasn’t pressing against her mound. It was impossible; there was nowhere to move and no way to turn his body without waking Belinda and letting the animal outside their hammock know they were there.

She gave a little moan and shifted against him, rubbing against his painfully hard cock and making him swallow a groan. Reflexively, his hand tightened in her hair and he felt the moment she woke. She sucked in a breath and started to lift her head, ready to move away from him.

He turned towards her and whispered in her ear, “Don’t move—there’s something out there.”

She froze. And now the two of them were painfully aware of the condition he was in. She lifted her hips slightly, trying to put some distance between them. The sensation of her body dragging against his cock was almost too much to bear.

“No! Don’t move.”

They heard a snuffling sound, very close to their bed.

Belinda pressed her lips to his ear and whispered, “What is it?”

He bit back the answer that almost burst from him. She was talking about the animal, not his desperate dick.

“Jaguar?” Belinda whispered.

“Don’t know.”

A large form passed under their hammock, lifting them up and making them rock. Beast pressed Belinda’s face into his neck to stop her from crying out. The animal didn’t seem to notice them; it carried on walking, and they heard it crash through the brush and into the jungle, leaving them to sway in the darkness.

For minutes, they lay there, afraid to move. Eventually, Beast relaxed. The jungle noises were back to normal. Whatever it was had gone.

“I think it was a tapir,” Belinda whispered. “They’re nocturnal. They’re big like that. They’re related to the hippo. It felt like something big and wide under us, didn’t it? Not like the sleek back of a cat. And a cat would have scented us, wouldn’t it? Tapirs are herbivores. It wouldn’t have cared how we smell. Unless it was a jaguar and the smell from the white-lipped peccary is still clinging to us and put him off. What do you think?”

What did he think? He thought the animal, whatever the hell it was, wasn’t the only big and wide thing that wanted to move under her. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried hard to get his mind out of the gutter. It was tough.

“It’s gone now,” was all he could manage to say.

They lay tense against each other, painfully aware of every single thing they could feel.

Belinda cleared her throat. “I should, um, get off.”

“Hollywood, you’re killing me here.”

“I mean get off your body!” She groaned. “Never mind. I’m moving.”

He didn’t object. Having her straddle him was agonising, and he was close to breaking point. With some awkward manoeuvres that made the hammock swing, and a near-miss between her knee and his balls, Belinda ended up where she’d started—curled against his side.

For a few minutes, they lay there, listening to the night. Beast wasn’t a nature buff, but even he could tell that the majority of the calls going out through the forest belonged to bats and owls. Night predators searching for prey.

“I know I should pretend to be all tough and everything,” Belinda said softly, “but I want you to know I’m scared out of my mind.”

He tightened his arms around her. “We both are, Hollywood.”

“Really? You are too?”

He almost smiled at the incredulous tone. “They’re blowing stuff up and firing machine guns. We’re lost in the middle of the jungle and I’m a city boy. This is not in my realm of expertise.” Hand-to-hand combat—that he was good at. Give him one opponent, in a ring, and he’d turn him into hamburger. But this? This was something else entirely. “You going to tell me where all your jungle skills come from?”

“You won’t laugh?” She sounded vulnerable, and Beast hated it.

“I won’t laugh.” Even if she told him it was another Daniel Radcliffe movie.

“There’s a lot of downtime on movie sets, and I spend it watching the natural history channel or reading books on the military, survival, bush craft, that kind of thing.”

She paused, waiting for him to laugh. Mainly, he felt a little confused at her choice of subject matter, and grateful he was benefiting from it.

“Why those topics?” He couldn’t stop from curling his hand back into her silky hair as they talked. He missed having her weight, as light as it was, on top of him. Even with her wedged against his side, it somehow didn’t feel close enough.

“It was Bear Grylls. I told you I’d met him on a chat show?”

He nodded.

“Well, he was fascinating. He’d done all this exciting life-and-death stuff—things I’d only pretended to do for movies. I went away and read his biography, then the biographies of other explorers and adventurers, then I moved on to how-to books and became obsessed with wilderness shows.”

She stopped talking, and from the tension in her body, he got the impression she was debating whether to tell him something more. She waited so long to speak that he almost believed she’d fallen asleep again.

“I’m not smart like my sister,” she said at last. “Julia is practically a genius. I have a good memory and I can act. I love to act. Not because of the attention, but because I get to be someone else for a little while. It’s like living lots of different lives in one. You know? But sometimes, I wonder about packing it all in. Giving up the dresses and the shoes, and the senseless interviews where I answer bubble-gum questions about my hair and what it’s like to kiss Leo.”

Beast stiffened at the thought of her kissing anybody at all. Other than him. He wasn’t sure who this Leo guy was, but he had the sudden urge to introduce him to his fist.

“I sometimes wish I could be anonymous and travel the world having adventures, pitting my wits against nature, taking hours, days, months to watch all the fascinating things out there,” she said in a rush, as though making a confession, one whispered into the small, still hours of the night when people say things they would never say in daylight. “I’m grateful for my success. I worked hard for it. But sometimes, I’d like to be nobody famous, living life by the seat of my pants and hoping for the best.”

“Like now.” Beast felt shame that he’d never taken into consideration what it must be like to constantly live your life in the limelight. The pressure of being available for everyone. The constant scrutiny. The endless, mind-numbing questions and desperate pleas from people who only wanted a piece of you. “You act in your interviews too, don’t you?” Of course she did. She wouldn’t survive otherwise.

“I have a celebrity persona. It’s my brand. Imagine that I’m a company. The company of Belinda Collins is always bright, happy, funny, a little bit shallow and eager to talk about nothing at all. I’m the non-threatening girl at the party who guys want to dance with and girls want to gossip with. That’s my brand. But it isn’t who I am. Do you understand?”

“I’m beginning to.”

They lay in silence, listening to the night. The overwhelming sounds were a wall of white noise that wrapped around them. Beast knew they were exposed, with only a shabby net and a thin sheet between them and the rest of the jungle, but he didn’t feel that way. With the darkness, the blanket of sound and the sheet wrapping him and Belinda tightly together, he felt hidden. Secure. Apart. As though they’d stepped off the world for a moment and it was only the two of them in this place together.

“Can I ask you something, without you getting mad?” she whispered as she traced circles through the dusting of hair in the middle of his chest.

“Not sure.” He wanted to be honest with her. There, in that place together, it felt like there should only be honesty. “But I’ll try.”

He felt her take in a shaky breath. “Why do you hate being called John?”

Yeah, that wasn’t the question he’d wanted to hear. He took a minute to control his reaction, aware that his fingers had tightened in her hair. He let out a long, slow breath.

“You don’t have to tell me,” she said. “I shouldn’t have asked. I’m sorry.”

His arm tightened reflexively and he cleared his throat. He’d never told anyone the story behind his name, but for some reason—maybe the intimacy of their predicament—he wanted to tell Belinda. He stared out into the blackness, but the images he saw in his mind were clear as day. Memories. A childhood no kid should experience.

“My mom was a street worker.” His jaw clenched and he swallowed hard. “A hooker.”

Belinda stopped playing with the hair on his chest and wrapped her arm around him, holding him tight.

“She was young,” he said, “a teenager, when she had me. I don’t know how long she’d been on the street before I was born. Her name was Ria Green. I always thought that was the wrong name for a hooker, but she never went by anything else. I don’t know where her family came from, or where she grew up. She rented a room in a run-down building not far from the boardwalk in Atlantic City. The woman who owned the boarding house, Miss Mabel, was about five hundred years old, smoked a pipe all day long and would look out for me while Ria worked the alleys around the casinos. We were there until I was seven. I pretty much raised myself.”

He didn’t bother describing the overwhelming loneliness of those years. The clawing hunger. The constant fear. Belinda didn’t need to know any of it. He cleared his throat. “One day, Ria went to work and never came home.”

He fell silent, seeing images from those years flash through his mind, like a movie montage: Miss Mabel, with skin the colour of liquorice, opening the door to his room and calling out to ask if he was okay before she went back to her daytime soaps; him stealing food from the grocery store, and hiding terrified in a closet because Ria had brought one of her clients home; trying to shake his mother awake when she was high on crack and lying in her own vomit…

“What happened to her?” Belinda’s soft question snapped him back to the present.

“She OD’d.”

Belinda stroked his chest as though to soothe him. He didn’t need it. It had happened a lifetime ago. He barely remembered her.

“What happened to you?”

“Foster care.” He’d wanted to stay with Miss Mabel, had begged, but she hadn’t wanted him any more than his mother had.

“You don’t need to tell me anything else,” Belinda said, as though she somehow knew how truly crappy things had been.

But Beast had started now, and somehow that made it easier to go on. “Ria didn’t know who my father was. She thought he might have been a Mexican-American guy who used her often during the right time frame.”

“That’s why she called you Garcia?”

“Not quite.” He felt the words solidify in his throat. The full, ugly truth about his start in life. The truth he carried with him every day. The one his mother had been kind enough to put on his birth certificate to remind him. “My full name is A. John Garcia,” Beast said.

Belinda gasped, and he knew she got it straight away.

“Yeah, she named me after my father—a john. And she used Garcia because she thought it sounded like gracias. It was sarcastic. She liked to laugh about it. A final thank you to the unknown man for his unwelcome gift.”

Belinda held him tight. “That was unbelievably cruel.”

That made him smile. Belinda Collins, darling of Hollywood, was outraged for him—a bastard mutt from the wrong side of the tracks. Who would have thought?

“I know she was your mum, Beast, but if she were here right now, I would be sorely tempted to slap her.”

He couldn’t help it. The thought of the delicate British celebrity taking on his street-toughened mother was just plain funny. He let out a bark of laughter that surprised them both and wrapped his arms around her, pulling her over his chest.

“She would have eaten you alive, Hollywood.”

“Not before I got a good smack in. Your mother was an irresponsible…terrible…person.”

He laughed again. “You can say bitch. Trust me, I get it.”

She stilled then reached up to cup his cheek. “I wish it had been different for you. I wish you could hear the name John and feel pride, because when I think of you as John, I think of a strong, honourable, accomplished, sexy man. It’s the name of presidents, of apostles, of musicians and actors. It’s an amazing name. And you fit it. If I were you, I’d claim the John and make it yours. Then I’d punch anyone who didn’t use it.”

Beast laughed again and pressed a kiss to her hair. “You think I’m sexy?”

She huffed. “That was your takeaway?”

“You think I’m sexy.” He grinned against her hair.

“I also think you’re annoying. Focus on that.”

“Belinda Collins, world-famous actress who’s worked with some of the sexiest men alive, thinks little old me is sexy.”

She pushed back from him with a frustrated grunt. “Trust me. On my list of sexy men, you are right at the bottom.”

“But I’m on the list,” he said smugly.

“I’m going to sleep, John.”

For once, the name didn’t make him angry. Instead, it made him laugh. Belinda was trying to twist around, to give him her back. Beast was having none of it. He pulled her into his side, took her hand, placed it back on his chest and kissed her hair.

“Sleep, Hollywood. You need your rest.”

“You need some too,” she grumbled, but she didn’t try to pull away from him again.

His heart clenched at her protest. His life hadn’t exactly been overflowing with people looking out for him.

“We’ll both go to sleep,” he said through a throat that felt tight.

As he felt her muscles relax and sleep take her over, Beast smiled into the darkness.