her direction was a step out of a dream — the one where she called to say she’d made a terrible mistake and begged him to come back.
Cara. The first person he’d ever met who made him want to do everything right instead of proving everything he could do wrong. The last woman he’d ever promised anything to. The only woman who made him want tomorrow as much as today.
“How’d you get here?” she hissed.
He shrugged. “The international language of brothership. Sports. Soccer.” One minute they were aiming blowguns at him; the next, they were slapping his back and cheering. Crazy place, Panama.
“But what about the bridge?”
“What about it?”
“How did you get across the bridge?”
“Um…” He hesitated. It didn’t seem like the best time to elaborate. “The usual way?”
He looked around. The guys down at the bridge had walkie-talkies and machine guns. Up here they were small, bare-chested guys with loincloths and blow darts. Climbing that mountain trail seemed to have stripped centuries away.
But time didn’t matter, not when it came to him and Cara.
“Husband, huh?” he managed once the roar in his ears settled down.
“Run with it, hotshot,” she grunted in his ear.
His lips curled into a grin so wide, it hurt. She’d called him that on their very first night together, which came a couple of hours after they’d met for the very first time. Him, the ski instructor, thinking it was just going to be another frigid day in Vermont; her, the client, on a pair of skis for the very first time.
That day had been a dream, and that night… Wow. A prelude to what he was sure was destiny. The best thing that had ever happened to him: having her in his life. Preferably, forever.
She wanted him to run with the husband thing? He’d run with it, all right.
He closed his teeth over her right ear and gave it a tiny nip, just the way she loved. “Missed you, honey.”
Which wasn’t a lie. Not in the least.
Cara let out a tiny hint of a moan that put his cock on high alert, then and there. She shoved him away with a glare.
She was beautiful as ever, of course, with long black curls straight out of a portrait of an Italian princess, locked in a tower high on a hill. Coal-black eyes that glittered and shone, even in the slanting light of this mountaintop. Thirty years looked even better on her than twenty-four, and he couldn’t keep from snuggling closer to her neck.
She stiffened. “Don’t overdo it.”
“It’s true! I did miss you.” Every day. Every night. He hid his nose in her hair for a minute, not to play the image up, but to hide. Because crap, it was totally true, and the truth made his eyes sting. It took a good dozen hard blinks before he could come up for fresh air.
She shot him a look before taking his hand and leading him away from the crowd. “I’ll just show my husband where we’re staying.”
“Staying?” he whispered, making sure his lips got a good taste of her ear. “I thought you wanted to get out of here.”
She looked at him, doe-eyed in wonder. “Is that why you’re here? To help me?”
He picked his words carefully, because Cara didn’t like to need help. “Meredith told me you were stuck out here. And so I came.”
“From where?”
He wished he could say he’d dropped everything at his high-powered corporate job to jet down to Central America just for her, but hell, driving fifteen hours across the length of Panama had to be worth something, too. “Santa Catalina,” he said. “On the Pacific coast.”
“Catalina?” She gaped. “What were you doing there?”
“The question is, what are you doing here?”
Here
being a twelve-by-twelve hut on the edge of the clearing in what looked to be a cluster of guest cabins set apart from the village.
“Hey! Wait a minute!” A wiry young man trotted up and stuck an accusatory finger at his chest. The man’s eyes screamed jungle warrior; the black lines painted on his face angled with the frown he