She nodded and tried to fix the hem as best as she could. “You said we need to get gone, but to where? Were Diego’s men kind enough to draw you a map with a big you-are-here X?”
“No such luck, but Diego confirmed he used local villagers for Freedom’s testing. He wouldn’t want something like that done in his own backyard, but he also wouldn’t want to go too far from outside his reach either. And you said Rachel mentioned him dropping into her village often, right?”
“Often enough to raise her alarms.” Penny grabbed the emergency clutch from her wet shorts and stuffed it into one of her now many pants pockets.
“Then we can bet we’ll run into a village sooner or later.”
Rafe rechecked the magazines on the confiscated guns before turning around.
She could have stood in the middle of a war zone, surrounded by the stench of smoke and death, and one look from Rafe would make her feel as though she were draped in silk and lying seductively on a mound of rose petals.
This moment was no exception. The longer his gaze lingered on her, the more the soft flutter of stomach butterflies transformed to pterodactyls. She cleared her throat and tried to direct her attention to their situation rather than the stir of awareness. “So, how do we find a village?”
“One thing you can rely on no matter the continent or country is that the people will be where the water is.”
“Well, we obviously found that.” She felt her lips pull up into a faint smirk and was rewarded with a chuckle from Rafe.
“We can’t stay too close. The area around the river is going to be the first route Fuentes’s men search, but since this one flows north”—he nudged his eyes up to the brightly glowing stars beyond the canopy of trees—“I’m almost one hundred percent certain that this is the Río Patuca. It arches up until it reaches the coast—and, most importantly, reaches civilization. Wherever there are villages, there’s food and supplies. We can barter for what we need to get us to the nearest established town, and from there, get in touch with Stone and the others. Fuentes may have an inside man in the DEA, and the sooner we get that info to the team, the sooner this’ll end.”
Temporarily distracted by his use of the word we again, Penny took a moment to realize what he’d said. “Wait. What? Who? Why?”
Rafe shrugged. “The who is what I don’t know. But he made it clear his connections make his job a hell of a lot easier, and we’ve been after him too damn long for it not to be a possibility.”
“Why would anyone want to help a monster like him?”
“Money. Power. Greed—in all its forms—is a powerful motivator. We’ll find a village, get someplace where we can contact Sean and the team, and then we’ll work on flushing out the turncoat. Right now, we need to create some distance. Once daylight hits, we’ll start cycling in sleep. We’ll be less easily tracked if we move at night and sleep during the day.”
Trekking through the dark jungle turned out to be a lot less precarious when not hurdling sprawling shadows, but it wasn’t a cakewalk either. Especially at the insane pace Rafe set. By the time daylight peeked through the treetops, hours had felt like weeks.
There was nothing special about the place where they finally stopped—no holes in the ground, no caverns. She watched as he circled the base of a particularly high tree as if he were a lumberjack estimating a trajectory.
“We’re stopping here?” she asked curiously.
“To rest and recharge. Once the sun sets, we’ll get on the move again.”
“Do you have a tent in your little bag of tricks?”
“Unfortunately, Diego’s man didn’t pack a tent…but we do have this.” From his procured bag, Rafe pulled out a long segment of climbing rope—and shot her a boyish smirk. “Ever sleep in a tree?”
Penny blinked. Nope, the mischievous grin still twisted up his lips. “Are you kidding me right now?”
Not even Rafe’s smile was enough to erase the dread that made her eyes scan up the length of the tall, tall tree. Her gazed swayed from Rafe to the tree, and back again. He wasn’t joking.
Feet sore. Leg throbbing. She did the only thing that would get her closer to sleep. She took the rope from his hand. “Give a girl a boost, will ya?”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Waking up perched in a tree shouldn’t have led to the morning wood from hell, but with Penny tucked firmly between Rafe’s outspread thighs, his dick had long since turned from wood to granite. One little shift, a slight nudge, and he’d come in his pants like a randy teenager. They needed to find civilization before he started envisioning ways to use the damn rope that didn’t involve tying his ass up in a tree.