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As soon as he was moving, he regretted that he’d ever answered his phone. Leaving Esperanza in his warm bed was tantamount to torture. He actually felt like he was being pulled apart the further he got from her. He was never this soft over a girl. It had to be the wedding. Or the champagne. Or the rainforest. Something was affecting his brain, because he never gave a second thought to a woman after he left her bed. He’d made a fine art out of being carefree when it came to sex.
Why then couldn’t he get the sight of her dark eyes watching him leave out of his mind? Why was he thinking about Esperanza when he should have been focused on their missing teammates? Bloody Peru. He hated the country. Every damn time they were in it, things went balls up. And now, instead of enjoying the woman in his bed, he was running off to deal with another South American crisis. He should have stayed in England.
Chapter 5
Belinda felt sorry for John. The stress of the situation had to be hard to deal with if you believed it was real. And she was sure it wasn’t. What else could it be other than the fake kidnapping her brother had threatened her with? There was just too much evidence against it being real. Although she would have been a tad more confident if the kidnapping guy had broken character for a couple of minutes to reassure her things were fake.
“Don’t worry, John, everything is going to be fine,” she said to the man who was glaring at her.
“Don’t call me John.”
She blinked several times. That was not what she was expecting him to say. “Why shouldn’t I call you John? It’s your name. Did the drugs they gave us affect your memory? Have you forgotten your name? How many fingers am I holding up?” She held up two.
He did that annoying growling thing again. “I’m not concussed. I know who I am. What I’m telling you is simple. See if you can follow along. Don’t call me John. Call me Beast. Or nothing at all.”
Belinda gaped at him. “Call you what?”
He held out his bound hands and made a fist with the right one. Sure enough, tattooed on each knuckle were letters that made up Beast.
“B.E.A.S.T. Beast,” he said. “You memorise lines for a living; one word shouldn’t be too hard to remember.”
She opened and closed her mouth a couple of times. “Beast? You want to be called Beast?”
“This isn’t hard, Hollywood. Say it with me—Beast.”
This was just too, too funny. Belinda grinned at him. “This is priceless. My name is Belinda, but people call me Belle…and you’re Beast!”
He stared at her. “Are you one of those actors who takes a pill to get through the day, and another one to get to sleep at night? Did you miss some meds?”
Belinda started to giggle. “Don’t you get it?” She burst into the theme from Beauty and the Beast, which was hard because she was still laughing.
Beast didn’t even crack a smile as Belinda wiped tears from her eyes. This was too good not to share. As soon as she was done being kidnapped, this was going on Instagram.
“Just use the name,” he snapped. “Now, stop laughing and untie me. We need to get out of here.”
She shook her head as she struggled for composure. “We can’t.”
His eye twitched and his jaw clenched and unclenched. “Why not?”
She pointed at the tiny, glassless window. “It’s dark o’clock. Didn’t you hear him? We’re in the middle of the rainforest, and you don’t want to be out in the jungle at night. Especially when you don’t have a clue where you are. Don’t you watch the Natural History channel? Didn’t you see the movie Daniel Radcliffe made? Four men got lost in the jungle; only two of them made it out. Daniel was one of them. That’s how bad it is out there. Everything can kill you in the jungle at night. Everything.”
He gave her a look that made her think he might turn out to be one of the things that could kill her.
“Untie me,” he said very slowly. “I have a plan.”
“Oh.” Her eyes went wide. “I get it. You think we should do what kidnap victims would actually do. I agree. We should definitely escape. We should make this as hard on them as possible.”
“Then untie me.”
She considered him. He was a loose cannon. He could get himself hurt if he freaked out and ran off half-cocked. “Tell me the plan first, and if it makes sense, I’ll untie you.”
Yeah, he was definitely going to kill her. It was there in his eyes.
“Hollywood, you wouldn’t recognise a good plan if it bit you in the ass.”
She shrugged. “Then I guess you stay tied up until someone comes to rescue us.” A rescue had to be part of the package Daniel paid for? Surely, she wasn’t expected to rescue herself? That seemed like way too much work.
They waited in silence. She folded her arms over the silver dress that was little more than a long T-shirt and wished she’d been kidnapped when she’d been wearing jeans and sneakers.
