Free Dark Ransom by Sara Craven Page A

instinctively protective gesture.
    Because, it occurred to her, it was a command that could be all too
    easy—all too dangerously, fatally easy—to obey.
    Oh, dear God, she thought. What's happening to me?

CHAPTER FIVE
    IT RAINED again during the night. Charlie, wakeful and restless,
    could hear the relentless drumming on the roof, and decided that it
    was marginally more of a blessing than a curse.
    At least while the storms persisted they would keep the priest from
    Laragosa at bay, she thought, irritably punching her pillow into
    shape.
    Dinner had been a difficult meal. Her nervousness about the
    confused state of her emotions had imposed constraints upon the
    conversation, and they had eaten mainly in silence. As soon as
    coffee had been drunk, Charlie had used the feeble excuse of a
    headache to slip away to her room.
    Well, Riago da Santana's room, she amended, except that all traces
    of his presence had now been removed with discreet thoroughness.
    But what good did that do, when the bed still remained— a potent
    and forceful reminder of his usage of her?
    Just as she'd been unable, last night, to move away from his
    imprisoning arm, she now found it impossible to escape from her
    memories.
    But she had to do that. She had to close her mind to the past if she
    was ever to have any peace again. Because there could be no future
    for her here in this savage wilderness with a stranger.
    Although she seemed to be learning more about him all the time, she
    admitted unwillingly to herself. She'd managed to discover, for
    instance, why Riago spoke such good English. On leaving school,
    he'd been at university and business school in both Britain and
    America, and he'd spent a year in Malaysia, studying the methods of
    rubber production there.
    'Although the conditions that exist there and here on the Rio Tiajos
    are hardly comparable,' he had supplemented drily. 'It has never
    been possible to plant rubber trees in neat rows in Brazil. Henry
    Ford tried to do this in his model plantation Fordlandia, and failed.
    He did not realise the Amazon imposes its own conditions on those
    who try to tame it. The hevea needs the protection of other trees and
    foliage or it becomes vulnerable to pests and leaf blight.'
    'Can't the pests be eradicated?'
    'I doubt whether we could even identify them all, although some
    progress has been made. But pesticides must be used with care, or
    other parts of the ecology can be damaged, as you know. So I have
    made sure that all the new seedlings I have planted over the past
    eighteen months are well scattered.'
    'But won't that mean, eventually, that collecting the rubber will take
    more time?' Charlie had wrinkled her nose.
    'Yes,' he'd said. 'But time is something we have in abundance in the
    rain forest.'
    Well, Charlie thought, staring into the darkness, that might be true
    for him, but not for her. She couldn't wait to get out of here, and
    back to reality. All she had to do was find a way.
    One idea that presented itself was to persuade him to take her with
    him to the rubber plantation and the collective processing plant, and
    that was why she'd tried to evince an intelligent interest in what he'd
    been telling her.
    And it was quite fascinating, she was forced to admit, although he
    undoubtedly had an uphill struggle on his hands. It was also
    gratifying that he seemed to possess such sympathy and concern for
    the environment. He was clearly a more complex personality than
    she'd first imagined, and would not be too easy to forget.
    Determinedly she wrenched her mind back to her plan. She would
    have to get him to trust her sufficiently to allow her to come and go
    relatively unsupervised. And that would be a problem because
    Riago da Santana was no one's fool. He wouldn't be convinced by a
    sudden pretence of submission.
    But she still had her money, after all, intact in her bag, and once
    she'd established herself as a regular visitor to the plantation maybe
    it would be possible to