by Maren Smith
Levina grinned, lifting her chin proudly. “Never be captured by headhunters, Mr. Takol, unless you can be captured alongside one of the best amateur botonists that the Ellery Horticultural Museum of Archeology and Ethnology has to offer!”
Angling over him in the shadowy darkness, Levina fumbled to find the ropes that bound his wrists. Or at least, that were supposed to have bound him. He must have been rubbing them against the pole for hours. His wrists were bloody and raw, but the jungle cord was also frayed almost to the point of snapping.
“Oh,” she said, disappointed. “I wanted to save you, but here you’ve gone and almost saved yourself.”
“By all means, save the hell out of me.” Takura glanced nervously over his shoulders to the Jivaro around the not-so-distant fire. “Hurry up, before we get caught.”
Levina sawed through what was left of the ropes and then cut up through the layers that bound him to the pole. He was thrashing almost before she sawed through the final two, quickly jerking himself free before grabbing the knife from her hand and cutting fast through the bonds at his ankles.
He grabbed her head, yanking her in to kiss her fiercely—hard and fast kisses that felt wonderful and possessive and bruising all at the same time. It made her head spin…or was that the Banisteriopsis?
Takura pulled back, licking his lips with a puzzled look and then kissed her fiercely once more. He glared at her. “Dammit, princess, how many times do I have to tell you: lay off the damn drink!”
“I didn’t have a choice,” she whispered in protest, scrambling to get up when he did. She wasn’t sure what she was having trouble with more: finding her feet, or finding the ground. At the moment, both were feeling equally intangible. “Besides, you also told me to do what they—”
He clapped a hand over her mouth, pulling her body up against his and ducking with her around the back of the hut into the darkest of shadows. He pressed her up against the knobby sticks and palm fronds, and looking back around the corner to see if they’d been seen.
There were mist people floating behind them, urging them into the jungle.
“We have to run now,” Levina said sagely. Her head was swimming and her mouth was starting to feel really rather dry.
“I couldn’t agree more.” Takura looked all around them, at the trees, the sky, the few surrounding huts. “Stay close to me and be quiet. Can you do that?”
Levina opened her mouth, thought better of it, and nodded instead, which turned out to be a mistake because it only made her head spin all the faster. Her stomach turned over queasily. She swallowed, hoping to calm it, and held onto Takura’s hand when he grabbed for hers. Falling into step at his heels, she followed as quick and as quiet as she could be while he circled back along the huts in search of a well-laid path that could take them silently back into the cover of the jungle.
A sudden shout from behind them changed everything. Levina didn’t know if they’d been spotted or if someone had simply noticed that Takura was no longer tied where he should have been. What she did know was that it took everything she had just to keep up with Takura. No longer looking for an easy, quiet path, he simply plowed into the vines and brush.
“Run!”
She did. Small sticks and branches that he shoved through whipped and snapped back to hit her legs and arms as she trailed behind him, but Levina didn’t let it slow her. Behind them, Jivaro shouts were gaining in volume and aggression, and there was a mist person waiting just up ahead, urgently beckoning for them to hurry.
Because they ran right toward it, it never occurred to Levina that Takura might not be able to see the apparition until that very last second when he suddenly veered off onto a narrow trail and ran the other way.
“Oh!” If he weren’t clutching her arm so tightly, Levina might have stopped. “B-but…”
“Move!” He picked up speed, and when she looked back over her shoulder and saw dark shapes moving fast through the brush behind them, so did she.
The mist people were swirling through the Jivaro, a confusion of bright streaks in the darkness and maybe it wasn’t just her they were trying to confuse. For a moment, the Jivaro seemed to change direction, giving Takura and Levina the chance they needed to gain ground.
Veering off the path, Takura plowed into the jungle again. His hand remained locked on her, letting go only when they charged up a sudden hillside so steep that they were soon crawling to reach the top on all fours. Takura found it first. He grabbed her arm again, pulling her the rest of the way up and shoving her out ahead of him.
“Go, go, go!” He smacked her ass, but she didn’t need any added encouragement to run. She could hear the Jivaro not far behind them, and she could see the ghostly mist of white fleeing through the trees to lead the way. She followed with Takura fast at her heels and a dull roar growing in her ears.
Running water, she realized. Lots of it. The mist was taking them back to the river.
Except that when the trees suddenly gave way before them, it wasn’t onto the sloping banks of a river that she found herself running. Dark as it was, she never saw where the ground ended and the water began, and she simply could not stop running fast enough to prevent her own face-first splash into the knee-deep stream.
The fast-running water caught her, and so did Takura. Between her weight and the force of the water, Takura was yanked right off his feet. But in the end, his strong grip was the only thing that that kept them both from being swept right over the top of the rocky fall all that water was racing toward.
“Shit!” Water slammed against their backs as his scrambling feet hit something big and sturdy enough to hold them both. He pulled her in close to his side, helping her get her head up above the water far enough so she could breathe, and only then did she realize the hard, immobile object he’d bumped her up against was a large, flat-topped boulder situated right at the edge of the waterfall. She could have stretched out her legs and perhaps felt the weight of the water spilling out into empty air.
She didn’t. She yanked her knees up to her chest, fumbling in the fast but shallow stream for something—anything—to brace herself against, and latched onto both Takura and that sturdy flat-topped rock. It bisected the stream, large enough to hold them, although not quite large enough for both to crawl out of the water and stand on, and it was situated a good ten feet from either bank.
“Shit,” Takura said again, softer this time.
Levina was too busy trying to find something secure to hold onto to say anything. At the moment, it was all she could do just to keep the water out of each gasping breath.
The jungle flanked them. The muddy river of the Rio Negro flowed some forty feet below. There was an entire cliff full of wet, jutting rocks between them and the bottom, and the Jivaro were closing the distance.
Shaking his head once, Takura looked from bank to bank, then at the boulder, and then at the spray of the descending water just feet away. “This isn’t good.”
“Could be worse,” Levina offered, trying to smile. At least there were no caimans.
Before she could point that out, however, a low voice drawled, “And here I thought my pretty lady of the flowers was lost to me forever.”
Levina startled and almost lost her precarious grip on the boulder. Takura’s arm tightened around her, pulling her in hard and close. She twisted, trying to find Montague among the shadows on the far bank.
The white of his shirt made him look like another ghostly mist as he separated from the water’s edge where he’d been washing his hands and stood up. Shaking off the excess water, he shrugged the rifle strap off his shoulder. He came down the side of the bank to get a better look at them. Quiet as a shadow, Thiago melted out of the trees just behind him, his rifle already in his hands.
Montague angled his head, white teeth flashing in the dark as he grinned. “Ah, Querida, how ravishing you look tonight. So native. So appealing. I am thinking maybe I keep you awhile, at least until I am not so very angry for all the trouble you have
put me through. Putain de Neuvo, they stole my boat, you see. But you—” Montague gestured at them with his rifle. “You, my pretty lady, are going to get me a new one, oui? Thiago, s'il vous plaît.”
Setting his rifle down on the bank, the native waded cautiously into the water. Unable to get too close, he held out his hand and beckoned for her to reach out.
Takura’s arm around her tightened again. “Stupid question, I know. But, what about me?”
Another flash of teeth in the darkness.
“Oh, mon ami.” Montague tsked. “Sadly, you are looking very dead to me right now.”
Somewhere on the opposite bank, a stick snapped. Smile vanishing, both Montague and Thiago turned toward the sound.
Takura tsked now, too. “Sadly, you’re looking a little dead to me, as well. Montague, I’d like you to meet the Jivaro.”
The boulder blocked Levina’s view when the angry natives came spilling out of the jungle onto the opposite bank. What she could see, however, was the look on Thiago’s face just before he dove for his gun.
Montague redirected his aim, jerking his rifle up to his shoulder and nearly falling over his own scrambling feet as he dove for the unlikely cover of the jungle behind him. Levina felt the tightening of Takura’s one-armed embrace a half-second before he let go of the boulder. She grabbed convulsively, clinging to Takura’s shoulders as the water swept them right over the cliff.
As loud as that was, with falling water slapping against the rocks all the way down into the Rio Negro, the sound wasn’t quite loud enough to cover the hooting shouts as the Jivaro charged, or the sharp burst of gunfire that stopped far too soon.
How they missed all the rocks, Levina didn’t know. Her scream was as involuntary as the sharp gasp she managed just before they hit the pool below. It was like hitting a wall. Excruciating pain locked her limbs, immobilizing her even as the impact knocked every precious gasp of air from her lungs. Takura dragged her in close and his mouth suddenly locking over hers was the only reason she did not suck the river into her.
Her whole body stung. She couldn’t feel her limbs, and yet somehow they broke the water’s surface, spat up out of the churning whirlpool that had tried to claim them and into the calmer water of the jet black river just as she and Takura both began to cough.
The night was full of screaming. It wasn’t until Takura locked his arms around her, rolling them both onto their backs, that Levina realized those sounds weren’t coming from her. He tried to cover her ears, holding her fast against him when she shuddered and struggling to swim with her to shore. It wasn’t until those warbling cries cut into ominous silence that Levina realized what they must have been.
Takura got them to the shore, but they didn’t climb out right away. Levina felt the bump and tangle of thick clusters of mangrove roots as he pulled her into a cover of them, and there they stayed. Takura held her close, listening for hours for sounds that might mean the Jivaro were hunting for them. Levina never heard anything, but three times during the night, he slipped with her back out of the mangrove roots and—heedless of caiman, piranha or electric eels—he let the Rio Negro move them downstream.
From one shelter of mangrove roots into the next, they passed the night. Eventually, the sky began to lighten, turning the world around her a dingy shade of gray. The trees regained their visual shapes, and then so too did the other plants. With her head resting on Takura’s shoulder, Levina was just beginning to wonder if she was in a state of shock when, her eyes focusing a little more with every blink, she fixed her stare on a splash of red growing up out of a pocket of soil trapped in a net of roots just above the water.
It was an orchid.
It was her orchid.
When Levina lifted her head off his arm, Takura startled awake. He rose slightly, listening intently to the surrounding jungle, trying to hear anything at all above the morning whoop-and-howl of the black monkeys moving through upper tree branches. Birds were waking, adding their own distinct wake-up cries to the jungle cacophony, and still all Levina could hear was the pounding of her own heart as she stared incredulously up at the familiar petals and penile shape of the orchid’s fused stamen and carpel.
“We did it,” she whispered. “We found it.”
“Shh.” Takura twisted in the water, trying to see up over the nest of roots that hid them to the heavily vegetated bank above. “Something’s moving…”
Afraid she might never see another if he moved them again, Levina reached for the bright red orchid. Her fingers collided with the darker fingers of another hand, reaching for the same flower from around the opposite side of the tree growing up between them.
Both Takura and the brown hand jerked violently in opposite directions; Levina grabbed, snatching the orchid from its dirt pocket even as Takura yanked her back out into the river. Levina was dunked, her head briefly disappearing under the black water, but she clung to that flower, adding her own frantic kicks to Takura’s and trying not to panic until she felt his strong arm wrap her waist, hauling her roughly back up to where there was air.
“Jinxie?”
That one startled word stopped everything.
Flower clutched to her beaded chest, Levina opened her eyes. She couldn’t see anything but river water and trees until Takura, tense but no longer fighting to swim with her to the opposite bank, turned around.
That brown hand was attached to a very surprised native porter. He was squatting over the water, braced up against the tree on roots thick enough to hold him. He was fully dressed, his tan trousers and beige shirt dirty and rumpled, but in every bit as good repair as his employer’s.
Standing safely on the shore, Parnell gaped at her. With every passing second, his eyes grew wider, causing the sudden knot in her stomach to tighten. When his face began to darken, she stopped being able to breathe. She cringed against Takura, almost crushing that flower in both hands as shock and anger collided within Parnell and both came spilling out in a roar that even the howler monkeys fell silent for.
“Jinxie Augusta Wainwright! Where in hell are your clothes?!”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The entire boat ride back up the river to Manaus, Levina sat in a corner of the main deck, every bit as rejected as the orchid Parnell had crushed and mangled and thrown into the river not five minutes after she’d tried to give it to him.
Gone were the wedding beads that had twined her so alluringly. Once more she was dressed, albeit in a pair of man’s brown trousers and a shirt donated by one of the sympathetic porters. And then because Parnell seemed equally outraged by that, despite the sweltering jungle heat, she’d wrapped herself in a blanket, swaddling her curves and manly attire from view. Anger unappeased, stiff-backed and stiff-lipped, Parnell barely looked at her after that. He simply retired to the captain’s cabin and slammed the door—to sulk, Takura assumed—and to punish Levina further.
It took three days to reach Manaus and in all that time, Parnell came out of his self-appointed confinement four times. For each one, he spoke to the captain, yelled at Levina, got fresh supplies of food and water, and then retreated back into the cabin again. Levina flinched every time that door slammed. How a man like that managed to become her fiancé, Takura didn’t know. All he could see was the weight of Parnell’s anger sagging on her shoulders, heavier and heavier with each new scolding and every unforgiving slam of that damn door. It quickly became more than he could tolerate.
Vaulting up from where he’d been sitting at one of the rails, Takura went to her. “Why are you letting him do this to you?”
Levina shifted sideways, almost turning her back to him. “Please, go away,” she whispered. “If he sees you talking to me, it’ll only get worse.”
As if on cue, the captain’s door yanked open and the retreated departed Parnell stepped stiffly back out into the sunlight again. “Mr. Takol, if I might have a word.”
Dark eyes hooded, anger snapping inside him on near-electric currents, Takura let himself be summoned into the cab
in. Hovering by the door, Parnell waited until Levina glanced his way before retreating. When he slammed the door, Takura’s grip on his temper slipped.
“You do that one more time, and you’re going to eat that door one throat-choking splinter at a time.”
Stiff as a plank of wood, Parnell turned that frosty blue stare onto him. His chin lifted, twisting slightly, as if trying to loosen a too-tight collar. Calmly, he said, “Women must be taught, Mr. Takol. Sometimes they must be taught in disagreeable ways.”
“Like your two good licks?”
“How I correct my wife is no concern of yours.”
His hands twitched, clenching into tight fists. Takura barely kept from swinging at him. “She’s not your wife.”
“Nor is she yours, despite your little jungle…misadventure.”
Takura struggled not to hit the man. His jaw clenched, but somehow he managed it.
“Yes.” Parnell offered him a thin smile. “She told me what those painted lines on her face mean. When we return to Manaus, I will wire her parents and apprise them of the situation. I doubt anyone will object when I whisk her into the nearest church and marry her on the spot. Properly, I might add. That I’m still willing to take their savage-sullied daughter to wife should keep her parents enamored of me for the rest of their days. And if all that primitive artwork hasn’t faded by the time we arrive in Boston, well, there are any number of dreadful jungle malaise that would explain why our poor Jinxie must be kept abed and out of the public eye until they do.”
“How are you going to explain me?” Takura was proud of himself. He sounded so calm, so rational, and yet his fists were clenched so tightly that his fingers began to throb.
“What is there to explain?” Again, that thin smile. “No one will ever know anything about you. Perhaps her parents; Jinxie never could keep anything secret from them. But then, yours is hardly a real marriage? Squiggles of paint drawn on two people without a word spoken before a God-fearing man of the cloth? As far as I’m concerned, my sweet Jinxie has fallen victim to a con-artist with designs upon her family’s wealth. Oh, people will no doubt count the days until the birth of our first child, but I’ll see to it there won’t be one for at least a year. My darling fiancé isn’t the only botanist in Boston. While I may not be as skilled as she, the medicinal application of certain plants is not entirely unknown to me. In this case, a simple tincture of blue and black cohosh. That should keep any little brown buds off our family tree.”
