River of Eden

by Tara Janzen

  But he took what he could, sliding his hand under her T-shirt, marveling at the sleek strength of her back. She wasn’t very big, but she was solid. She didn’t feel fragile in his arms. She felt like the woman who had walked the Vaupes—and far more startlingly, she felt like his.

  It didn’t make sense. He didn’t have a place for any woman in his life, let alone a wild card like Annie Parrish. She was trouble, nothing but trouble, an actual danger to life and limb, but the longer he kissed her, the more fascinated he became. The tomboy of the Amazon was intrinsically, delightfully, mysteriously female, and everything male inside him wanted her, all of her, for as long as he could keep her—which, given his current life expectancy, he estimated would be all of two weeks. Which, he admitted, could be why he was even thinking in such terms. Two weeks of “till death do us part” really wasn’t that big of a stretch, but it wasn’t going to happen, so he kissed her. He kissed her until he was hot everywhere, and she was making little sounds in the back of her throat that told him she’d passed the same barrier of common sense he had and was only seconds away from doing something totally crazy and totally wonderful, like sliding her hand down the front of his pants.

  God, just the thought made him hard. He wanted her to hold him. He was ready to be teased into an oblivion of sexual languor. He was ready to rent a room with a bed and say to hell with the plane.

  “Senhor Travers?”

  Will was aware of the voice, but it took hearing his name two more times before the reality registered enough for him to lift his head. Yet even when he did, he stayed focused on her. Her eyes were closed, her glasses skewed, her head back, revealing the satiny column of her throat. Her lips were still parted, wet, and he could think of a thousand truly magical things he’d like her to do with her mouth.

  “Senhor Travers?” The voice intruded again.

  Her eyes came open slowly, a deep, gray-rimmed green, fringed in thick, golden lashes.

  “I’m going to hold this against you for a long, long time,” she whispered.

  “Yeah. I’m not going to forget you, either,” he promised, removing his hand from beneath her shirt, though he lingered for a few seconds at her waist, molding his palm to the warm curve, as if with the light gesture he could hold on to her.

  “The plane is here, Senhor Travers. Tied up by the boat. With the moon full and the river to follow, the pilot, he wants to leave again.”

  “Yeah. Right, but we may be talking a change in itinerary.” He turned to the man behind him and instantly froze. “Juanio.” It was one of Fat Eddie’s henchmen from Pancha’s. Short and round, with a mop of black hair, the young man had a nervous twitch in one eye, a cigarette stuck behind his ear, and a Colt revolver in his hand.

  Another man came out of the shadows, the one called Luiz, and Will’s alarm heightened. Leaner and meaner, taller and more muscular, with buzz-cut hair, a cold, black-eyed gaze, and a big bush knife on his hip, he was by far the more dangerous of the two. Both of them were armed. Both of them were pointing their guns at him and Annie.

  He swore silently to himself. He’d known kissing her would be dangerous. He just hadn’t realized how dangerous.

  “Uma pistola, garota?” Luiz gestured with his gun at the protrusion on Annie’s hip, and Juanio stepped forward to disarm her. To Will’s relief and her credit, she didn’t offer any resistance, just raised her arms and let him take her gun. Drawing against two-to-one odds when the other team was already cocked and loaded was bound to bring things to a quick end, especially when Fat Eddie would just as soon have her dead as alive.

  “We don’t want any trouble from you, Senhor Travers,” Juanio said. “No trouble from you, no trouble from us. Compreende?”

  “Compreendo,” he said. I understand. Though he didn’t really know how they were going to keep from having trouble, if they tried to take Annie. He had to get her back on the boat. “How did you find us?”

  “El rádio.” Juanio grinned, revealing a curve of stained, yellow teeth. “We been waiting upriver for you, two days now, senhor, two steaming, stinking days in the plane, but when you call for help, Juanio and Luiz bring help, though the woman, she don’t look too sick to me. But we help you; you help us. No?”

  Waiting upriver? Now why in the hell had they been doing that? he wondered. “Help you how?”

  Juanio’s grin broadened, and he brought his free hand up, rubbing the tips of his fingers together. “Esmeraldas. Diamantes.”

  Will’s gaze shot to the other man, who snarled at Juanio.

  “Silence! Idiota.”

  “You want Senhor Eduardo’s gems?” Will asked disbelievingly, wondering just how many rats were fleeing Fat Eddie’s ship and why. First, Johnny Chang had stolen the fat man’s guns, and now the second-string jagunços were trying to make off with his gemstones—but they didn’t want Annie, and they hadn’t mentioned her guns.

  Things were looking up—way up, if all the two bandidos wanted was the gems.

  “We know you have them, senhor,” Luiz warned. “We were there in Pancha’s when the fat one gave them to you.”

  “Yes. I have them. They’re on the Sucuri.”

  A look passed between the two men, as well it might. Fat Eddie Mano hadn’t chosen Will as his courier simply because of his less-than-sterling reputation. The Sucuri had a reputation that easily equaled his, a reputation forged in the very murky waters of the upper Amazon Basin. People didn’t board the boat uninvited for a reason. A reason Juanio and Luiz were obviously well aware of, or they would have simply scared off the kids and tried to take what they wanted.

  Luiz jerked his head toward the docks in an unspoken command, and Will reached for Annie’s hand. The look she cast him was very steady, coolly controlled, easing a good deal of his worries. If he was going to be shanghaied on the Barcelos waterfront, he could do far worse than to have Annie Parrish by his side—and he probably couldn’t do better.

  At the Sucuri, Luiz gave a curt command. “Get rid of your filhotes, your puppies.” He’d concealed his gun by holding it under his greasy leather vest, but once near the boat, he’d gotten close enough to jab Will in the back with it. Juanio had simply draped the tail of his shirt over his hand. In the dark, it was enough to keep other people from noticing.

  “Embora!” Will said, approaching the group of ragtag children. “Agora mesmo!”

  Used to quick shifts of fortune, the children didn’t hesitate to run off.

  A light was on in the dry-rot hulk floating next to the Sucuri, but the barge still had only the dogs and sleeping old man on board. The Cessna had been moored at the end of the dock, next to the hulk. A party was getting going farther up the waterfront, and the sounds of music and laughter drifted across the haphazard jumble of canoes, skiffs, barges, batalones, and riverboats at ever-increasing decibel levels.

  “Fat Eddie isn’t going to like this,” Will said.

  “Well, we don’t like stinking Fat Eddie,” Juanio proclaimed with a sneer.

  “Corisco Vargas isn’t going to like it, either.” Will voiced a deeper warning with a noticeable effect.

  Juanio crossed himself and looked to his partner, a nervous shift of his gaze Luiz refused to acknowledge.

  “Fat Eddie doesn’t own this river anymore,” the bigger man said.

  “And Vargas?” Out of the corner of his eye, Will saw Juanio cross himself again.

  “I spit on Corisco Vargas,” Luiz declared, then spit on the dock instead and stamped on the wet spot with his boot, rubbing the smear into the wood.

  Will glanced up and saw a weak smile cross Juanio’s face as the younger man watched the macho display and took heart in Luiz’s bravery against a wad of spit.

  Will gave them a week on the outside, before their bodies were hanging, gutted and skinned, from some tree in the rain forest, monkey meat for whatever passed by.

  “You won’t be safe anywhere in Brazil, if you steal those stones,” he said.

  “But we’ll be safe in Miami!�
� Juanio offered with a shaky laugh, as if affirming it out loud would help make it so.

  Luiz thought differently and wapped Juanio up the side of the head, shutting him up. “’Ta louco? Take the woman and get the jewels.”

  Juanio winced and grabbed his right ear, protecting it from another blow. “You go,” he grouched, slanting his partner a mutinous look. “I’ll watch the senhor.”

  “Go,” Luiz growled. “Or I’ll shoot off your balls.” Will just wanted Annie on the Sucuri, and he didn’t much care who else was on the boat with her.

  Juanio cared, though. He cared a lot.

  “Make her go alone,” he insisted. “If she doesn’t bring us the stones, we’ll kill him.”

  “And then he’s dead, and she takes off in the boat, and we have no jewels?” Luiz laid it all out in rising tones of disgust. “Move!” he ordered. “And don’t come back without the gems.”

  Juanio held firm, his mouth tightening in a stubborn line. “You never said I would have to get on the devil boat.”

  “The boat’s devil is here,” Luiz assured him, giving Will a poke with his gun. “Without him, the boat is just a boat, a simple boat, you fool.”

  “That’s not what they said in Manaus. In Manaus, they said the sucuri is real, that it lies in wait on the boat to devour the senhor’s enemies.”

  “And isn’t Manaus full of fools? A bunch of fools who work for Fat Eddie and don’t know shit about what’s going to—” Luiz stopped suddenly and changed tactics. “Juanio. Didn’t we work our way out of the mines because we were smarter than the others?”

  “Yes,” Juanio reluctantly agreed.

  “And haven’t we both seen the true devil?” Luiz’s voice lowered to a rough whisper. “You don’t want to see him again, do you?”

  Juanio vehemently shook his head no, turning pale in the moonlight, his right hand racing once more through the stations of the cross.

  “Think Miami, Juanio. We’ll be safe in Miami. Nothing bad ever happens in os Estados Unidos. But we need the emeralds to get there, Juanio. We need the diamonds to pay to get in. They don’t want our stinking reais in os Estados Unidos. We’re going to have to pay the border guards in diamantes. The diamantes on that boat.” He pointed to the Sucuri.

  Juanio struggled with indecision for a moment or two longer, but in the end, Luiz’s threats and promises proved harder to ignore than the superstition and rumors about the Sucuri. Muttering under his breath, Juanio took hold of Annie’s arm and shoved her forward, toward the boat.

  She didn’t hesitate, only glanced back at Will once, before stepping onto the deck, and he would have given every emerald and diamond Fat Eddie owned to know what she was thinking.

  Annie was thinking she’d been crazy to let Travers kiss her. Her senses were still reeling from those long, glorious minutes when she’d been consumed by the taste and feel and the utter seductiveness of William Sanchez Travers’s mouth. Truly, she would never forgive him for the experience.

  She was also thinking she was in more trouble than she’d thought, if Travers was invoking Corisco Vargas’s name to scare off Luiz and Juanio, and she was thinking about how dangerous stupid people could be, stupid people like Juanio. So she didn’t waste any time once she was on board.

  Despite his capitulation, the man was far too nervous to be paying close enough attention to her. He was a bundle of sweating nerves just waiting for a giant snake with a heart full of hunger to lunge into view, jaws gaping. For herself, she absolutely refused to entertain any such idea, because if she did, she’d be sweating as much as Juanio—and if for a moment, when she first stepped on board, she did feel a strange, fleeting sense of malevolence, she ignored it, walking boldly to the main cabin’s door, where she was going to cold-cock little old Juanio and get her gun back.

  Confidently, she reminded herself that she’d been on and off Travers’s boat dozens of times in the last two days, and the only snakes she’d seen had been tattooed down his back—until she opened the cabin door and her eyes lit on a coiled shadow of bulky, gargantuan, serpentine proportions looming up out of the darkness.

  Terror shot through her with all the speed and crackle of a lightning bolt, electrifying every cell in her body, and without a thought in her head that wasn’t absolutely petrified with fear, she opened her mouth and let loose a bloodcurdling scream.

  Behind her, Juanio crashed onto the deck in a dead-away faint.

  CHAPTER ~ 13

  In the first split second of the attention-riveting sound of Annie Parrish coming completely unglued, Will raised his arm and smashed his elbow back into Luiz’s face—from the feel of it, breaking the man’s nose. It was quickly downhill after that for the would-be jewel thief. Will grabbed his gun, knocked him out cold where he was bent double over himself, his bleeding face in his hands, and was running for the boat before Luiz even hit the dock.

  Juanio was a limp pile of blubber and bones Will had to fight his way past, before he could get to her, to Annie.

  She was still standing—no fainting dead away for Amazon Annie—and she’d stopped screaming, but she was as white as a sheet, her hand clutching the cabin’s door.

  He swore under his breath and took another step into the cabin.

  “Annie.” He called her name softly, warning her of his presence. She hadn’t felt fragile earlier, but she looked fragile now, like the merest breath of wind would crumble her into dust.

  Without moving so much as an inch, she said rather breathlessly, “I’ve been doing some thinking, and I’ve decided you’re right. It’s best if I go.”

  “Great,” he lied, alarmed by how she looked, so pale, her hand white-knuckled on the knob. “But we’re going to have to find another plane, someplace else. This one here tonight is no good.”

  “No,” she argued, making a small, fluttering gesture with her free hand. “Everything will be fine. Just fine. I’ll arrange things, transport and all, just grab my stuff and be on my way. You can have the guns.”

  “We can talk about it later,” he said calmly, “but we have to leave now. Together.”

  “We?” Her expression changed to one of blank incredulity as she slanted her eyes in his direction. “Together? Oh, no. No, I’m done.”

  That didn’t sound good.

  “Annie,” he began, but she hushed him with a wave of her hand, her gaze wandering away from him again.

  “You see”—the furrow in her brow deepened—“I—I can’t begin to imagine what you’ve been up to. Or actually, I can... almost. It’s the tattoo. It’s not a simple thing, Will, not like I said. Nobody in the States could have given you an image of a rainbow boa and the ancestral anaconda twined together in man’s cerebral fissure. I mean, you might get some Celtic imagery, or Christian, or Native North American, but no South American stuff, not at that level. That’s pure payé, shamanistic, and all I can think is that some medicine man got a hold of you, a real heavy hitter, and he’s casting spells like a Master of Animals and sending you helpers from the Otherworld. Or at least that’s as close as I can figure, and to get that far I have to concede every one of my most dearly held scientific principles.” Her eyes met his, and though she was frightened, her gaze was crystal clear. “You’re trouble, Will, so much trouble, you make Fat Eddie’s vendetta against me look like a date to the prom.”

  For someone who’d only been back on the boat for two minutes and spent half of that screaming bloody murder, she’d done some pretty fast figuring. Even terrified, her mind had been working like a steel trap, and he wondered why Tutanji couldn’t have sent him somebody like Annie Parrish as a helper, instead of all these damn snakes all the time—because he was sure that’s exactly what had turned her pale with fright. Twice before, someone had tried to board the Sucuri without his permission, and both times, the men had seen a huge snake, an anaconda in the main cabin. The stories of those sightings had spread fast, and far, and wide. Hell, his boat hadn’t even had a name until the first time it had happened.

&nbs
p; “I’ve got a few things going on,” he admitted. “But nothing I can’t handle.”

  For such a small movement, the raising of her eyebrows packed one hell of a punch, casting every ounce of his integrity and judgment into doubt. “The smart thing for me to do is to get as far away from you as I can, and—”

  “Right,” he agreed, interrupting her, not wanting her to say more. “But not in Barcelos, Annie. Not tonight.”

  “You’re dangerous,” she said.

  “Yes,” he admitted. “But so are you, and we seem to get along okay.”

  “I’m afraid of snakes,” she told him unnecessarily.

  “Terrified” would have been his choice of words, based on the look in her eyes when he’d walked into the cabin. He just hoped she wasn’t afraid of him, but that could have been asking a lot at this point.

  “Lots of people are.”

  “I have dreams,” she confessed. “Snake dreams. Nightmares. I wake up sweating, Will. Sweating and strangling.”

  So did he when he dreamed about snakes, but he always dreamed about the same snake, just the one—over and over.

  “We can talk about dreams, if you want,” he promised. “Later after we’re out of here.”

  A groan from Juanio backed up the rightness of that decision.

  “You can’t stay, Annie. Not here.”

  She looked at him for a long moment, before glancing away and rubbing her hand over her face.

  “Meu Deus,” she murmured. My God.

  ~ * ~

  It was an hour before Will guided the Sucuri close in to one of the river islands and found a mooring, an hour that Annie had spent trying to sort things out and calm down. Juanio was still on board and out cold, and she was beginning to wonder if someone could literally scare themselves into a coma. Luiz was behind them, but Will had grounded him with the simple expediency of jimmying the plane door open, cutting the ignition wires, and handing out the Cessna toolkit to every kid who had come running when he’d whistled. Like a chattering, giggling school of piranhas, they’d swarmed over the plane with flying arms and nimble fingers, stripping it down to its bones. The first wing had been disappearing down the dock even as the Sucuri had drifted into the current off the Barcelos waterfront. A pair of urchins clutching Cessna seat cushions to their chests had been following the wing. Luiz would be lucky to have a pontoon strut left by the time he woke up.