River of Eden

by Tara Janzen

  Damn, she told herself when his hand brushed the underside of her breast and she felt everything inside her melt and slowly curl into a pool of desire centered between her legs. Damn. Damn. Damn.

  One more minute and there wouldn’t be any accounting for what might happen.

  Will was lost, in over his head—way over, his senses reeling. She was ready to come apart for him. He felt it in the soft giving way of her body, in the way she was touching him, and he was tempted, so tempted to take her. The only thing that kept him from pushing her shirt up and her pants down was the plane in Santa Maria. It wouldn’t do him a damn bit of good to make love to her and then not be able to save her. In fact, he couldn’t think of anything that would make him feel worse.

  “Annie,” he murmured, sliding his mouth off hers and kissing her cheek, forcing himself to slow everything down. “Annie, I have to leave, or we’re going to be here all night long, and you’re going to miss that plane.”

  “The plane,” she whispered, her eyes still closed, her breath coming in soft gasps that made him even harder than he’d already been.

  He kissed her mouth again. “The plane. I’ll be back around sunset.”

  “No.” Her eyes drifted open and slowly refocused. “No, I’ve... uh... reconsidered. I think I better stay.” She retreated an inch, just enough to break contact, her fingers sliding out of his hair, her breasts no longer pressed up against his chest.

  Somehow, as much as he would have liked to tell himself otherwise, Will didn’t think it was his kiss that had changed her mind. It should have been. The kiss was changing his mind about a lot of things. But a sneaking suspicion told him she had something else in mind.

  “Is it the orchid?” he asked straight-out, knowing her too well to fool himself or sop his ego. “Or Vargas?”

  She at least had the courtesy to look embarrassed. “I like you, Will, maybe too much. But I haven’t made it a habit to organize my life around a man, or to take orders from one.”

  She liked him.

  Will actually felt his jaw clench, and he had to work damn hard not to take her words as a challenge. She liked him. After that kiss, she had the audacity to say she liked him?

  “Well, Annie,” he said, carefully controlling his voice to keep from sounding as if he were biting off bullets. “I like you, too. Way too damn much. But you’re still getting on that plane, if I can get you a seat on it, and with over a hundred rough-cut diamonds and emeralds in my pocket, I can pretty much buy everything in Santa Maria, including whoever is piloting that plane. So get your bags packed. I’ll be back in about an hour.”

  His point made, he turned on his heel and walked out of the cabin. Amazon Annie be damned. She could do whatever the hell she wanted in Wyoming, but tonight, on the Rio Negro, she was his to do with as he pleased, and he was pleased to put her on that damned plane and get her off his damned river.

  CHAPTER ~ 17

  Annie waited until he’d pushed off in his canoe, before she dared admit anything, even to herself. She’d had a moment of insanity, that was all, just a moment when he’d had her running scared, but his kiss had kicked in her natural instincts—not just her little-used, rusty ones, but her good, old, reliable natural ones, which were to win, to win that damned orchid and drag it out of the deep, dark forest into the light of day and make its mysteries hers.

  Months ago in Laramie, she’d known the dangers she would face, and nothing had changed. Not even the addition of Fat Eddie was enough to skew her odds of survival. They had always been slim, but she’d been living on slim odds since the day she’d first stepped foot in the Rio Vaupes, and living on the edge of those odds is what had brought her everything she’d ever dreamed of in botany—an enviable reputation as one of the best, one of the very best, naturalists in South America, and a discovery to cement her place in history.

  It was the kissing that messed her up, and where all that kissing was bound to lead. Sex was a sure trip to trouble. Three days spent chained to a jail cell wall in Yavareté, the last one stark naked, had more than proved that to her.

  Vargas was a whacko son of a bitch, and though he hadn’t raped her, he’d given her plenty to think about.

  Plenty she kept forgetting every time Will Travers kissed her. She didn’t remember ever being kissed the way he kissed her, ever reacting to a man the way she reacted to him. She was beginning to think the reason she’d been so successful in not getting too tangled up with a man for so long had more to do with never having met the right one than it did with her lofty goals.

  Guns—that’s what she really needed, not a man, and guns were what she’d brought with her up the river.

  Fortified with a reality she could handle, she picked up her coffee and headed outside. It might be dark before he returned. She would have to set out a lantern for him to find his way back.

  Or not, she thought, taking a sip of coffee. She looked downriver, toward Santa Maria. The water was full of caimans, more than she was used to seeing this close to the mission, their knobby hides just breaking the surface. Maybe the stories about the monster jacarés were true. She’d never been to the headwaters of the Marauiá, but the caimans down near the mouth of the river tonight actually did look bigger than the ones she’d seen elsewhere in the Amazon.

  A splash behind her had her whipping around, just in time to see what looked like a tree trunk submerge beneath the river. An uneasy feeling coursed a path down her spine.

  “Great,” she muttered. Now was not a good time for her to suddenly get spooky about the animal life of the Amazon. Hell, she hadn’t trekked across half of northeastern Colombia without seeing a few caimans. She had real problems tonight, like what was she going to do about Will Travers. He could probably find his way in the dark, but if she and her orchid were still on the Sucuri when he returned, there was bound to be an argument about the plane at the mission.

  So maybe she shouldn’t be on the boat when he returned.

  It was a thought.

  A good thought.

  Santa Maria was just down around the bend, and her canoe and her supplies were waiting for her there. All she had to do was go get them, come back for her guns, and be on her way without him catching her. He would never find her once she was on the river by herself.

  But he would still find Vargas, and he’d be alone when he did.

  Hell.

  She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t leave him. She didn’t care how long he’d been hauling contraband for Fat Eddie, he didn’t know Vargas the way she did, and even without figuring in his kisses, she liked him too damn much to leave him to face a maniacal despot alone.

  “Merda,” she swore again, under her breath. Nothing was working out the way she had planned, absolutely nothing. Would she be crazy to throw in with him? Or was it crazy to think she could go into Reino Novo alone to find her orchids and get back out without being part of what he was up against?

  It all boiled down to Vargas, and his Night of the Devil, and whatever it was she’d seen in the jungle near Reino Novo. Maybe it was a sacrificial altar for virgins. That was the story whispered around the waterfront in Manaus. She wouldn’t put anything past old Corisco, certainly not a little blood sacrifice, or even a great big blood sacrifice. The major showed a marked predilection for the substance and some godawful, unsavory methods of indulging his interest.

  Unbidden, an image came to mind, and she lifted a hand to her brow, rubbing her temple, her lips pursed in consternation. Now that was a memory she’d tried damned hard to suppress, she thought, and she could have happily gone a whole lot longer without dragging it up.

  Maybe a cigarette was in order. Will had all the makings—and a cigarette, and her coffee, and a little time spent on the top deck with her crates would be just the thing to settle her down.

  Minutes later, she had a hand-rolled cigarette dangling from between her lips and a crowbar in her hands, prying open the lid on one of her crates. It was time to break out the firepower, probably past time
. She wanted a fully loaded Galil close at hand from here on out, and she was going to snap a couple of grenades to her belt next to her 9 mm. There was no sense in being underprepared at this stage in the game.

  The lid gave way, and she set the crowbar aside for a moment to take a long drag off the cigarette, managing the feat without actually inhaling too much of the smoke. It was the essence of it she was interested in, the taste of it rolling across her tongue, the comfort of having it wreathe her face. Exhaling, she put the glowing stub on the base of the lantern and bent over the open crate—and instantly, quite suddenly, knew she wasn’t alone. Her first thought was that the sucuri had returned and was lurking in the cabin beneath her, but when she looked up, what she saw was a man, a wizened old man with weathered brown skin and feathers stuck through his nose and tied into the long, lanky black hair trailing down across his bare shoulders and chest nearly to his waist, a wizened old man who had boarded the boat and climbed up on the top deck to stand in front of her without making a single sound.

  Or maybe he’d floated down from the sky. Nothing could have surprised her more than his sudden, soundless appearance, no matter how he’d arrived. He was dressed in a scrap of a loincloth and had rows of red shoroshoro seeds wrapped tightly around the leanly muscled biceps of both his arms. His stern, silent face was deeply lined with age, but his eyes were bright, black as night, and shining with an inner fire.

  He didn’t look particularly threatening, but when he spoke—a sharp, guttural command—she heard movement behind her. She whirled around, lunging to her feet, but was captured before she could grab her gun, one Indian hauling her up against his chest, while another snaked a rope around her legs.

  ~ * ~

  She liked him.

  Even as Santa Maria came into sight, Will was still seething. For the first time in years, his focus had been jerked out from under him, and Annie Parrish had been the one to do it. Gabriela had been wrong. He wasn’t nearing the end of anything, because when he was finished with Vargas, he was heading north to Laramie, Wyoming, and a little blond-haired, wild woman who liked him—liked him so much she’d nearly sucked his tongue down her throat, liked him so much she’d had her hand halfway down his pants. Another inch, and he would have been on top of her.

  He was still suffering, his loins still aching, and all he could do was let out a soft groan and try not to laugh. It was ridiculous, the way she got to him. Good God, he’d probably be dead inside of a week, and all he could think about was her.

  He hoped to hell she didn’t like Jackson Reid the way she liked him.

  Merda. He didn’t want to think about it.

  Keeping close to shore, he took a good look around the dock. The one boat tied up was Father Aldo’s ancient batalone, a huge dugout with built-up sides for carrying cargo. The canoe Annie was expecting was nowhere in sight, but it wouldn’t have been unusual for the priest to have loaned it out until she arrived. On the Amazon, everything got used.

  He’d stopped at Santa Maria hundreds of times in the last two years, and as far as he could tell, no more than usual was going on, which meant absolutely nothing was going on. The pilot would be at Father Aldo’s, and after tying up the canoe, Will headed in that direction.

  The mission was little more than a runway bordered by half a dozen buildings. One was Father Aldo’s, the others the mission school, which doubled as the church, a storehouse, and the rest homes, one of them maintained by RBC for their researchers. A stack of crates and boxes next to the last house in the row looked as if they could be Annie’s supplies. More supplies were stacked up next to Father Aldo’s house, the cargo probably delivered by the plane at the end of the runway. The place was quiet, with a few lanterns on inside the houses, the forest all around humming with the sound of cicadas. If Fat Eddie had figured out Annie was on her way to Santa Maria, he hadn’t gotten here yet.

  “Guillermo!” a voice called out, followed by the sound of several guns being cocked in the dark.

  Will froze where he stood, mentally retracting his last thought and calling himself the world’s biggest fool.

  “Where’s the woman, Guillermo? The little cat? And my guns?”

  It was Fat Eddie all right, and how in the hell had he been stupid enough to walk into the fat man’s trap? There were no other boats tied up at the dock, but he should have realized that Fat Eddie could have half a dozen moored just out of sight.

  And he obviously did.

  The plane wasn’t Eddie Mano’s, though, and it wasn’t Vargas’s. Will could see the markings of a service that flew out of São Gabriel. It would have been perfect for getting Annie into Colombia. São Gabriel was only two hours from the border by plane.

  “I still have her, senhor,” he called out, trying to locate everyone in the dark. Fat Eddie had to be behind the cargo crates next to Father Aldo’s. Nothing else was big enough to hide him. On the other side of the street, the end of a rifle barrel could just be seen poking out from behind the mission school. “I’m keeping her for myself.”

  “ ’Ta louco, Guillermo. You are very, very crazy, yes. This woman has brought you nothing but trouble, and will only bring you more.”

  An understatement, if Will had ever heard one, but Fat Eddie would never hear it from him.

  “You were right about the guns, senhor. She did have them on my boat. You can have them back. All I want is the woman.” Will heard a boat engine starting a little ways down the river, to the east; then he heard another and another, and another, until there was no distinguishing one motor from the rest.

  Merda.

  Laughter rang out from behind the crates, good old belly laughter, but Will didn’t like the sound of it.

  “Of course you can have her, my friend. Most of her. I only want the one part.” More laughter filled the air as Eddie’s men joined in on the macabre joke, and Will had to fight to keep his panic at bay. Panic wasn’t going to save her—or him.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of a single boat chugging down from the west.

  “Drop your gun on the ground, my friend, and we can talk.”

  It wasn’t a request, and Will obeyed, slipping his pistol out of his waistband and slowly lowering it to the ground. The instant metal met dirt, Fat Eddie and his men walked out from where they’d been hiding.

  “Guillermo, Guillermo,” Fat Eddie sighed, walking forward with the rolling, side-to-side gait of the dangerously obese. He was still wearing his orange and brown striped shirt and a billowy pair of black pants. After two steps, he began to pant, the effort of ambulating three hundred and twenty pounds proving to be a huge strain. “This is all so very bad for you.”

  It didn’t look too good for Fat Eddie, either. Will watched him come closer and closer, and wondered what the chances were of the man having fatal cardiac arrest in the next ten feet.

  Eddie stopped and snapped his fingers, and Will’s hopes faded. The man knew his limits. Two of his jagunços brought out a big wooden chair on poles for lifting, and the fat man descended with a wheezing groan.

  “Where is she, my friend? Still on your boat, I think?”

  Will shrugged.

  Fat Eddie made a quick gesture with his hand, and two of his men came forward to frisk Will down.

  So much for the gems, he thought, when they got to his front pockets. One of the men pulled out the bag, and with a ragged-toothed grin, took it over to Fat Eddie.

  “Ah, this is good.” The fat man smiled, looking inside and then hefting the bag in his hand. “You are not so far from the Rio Cauaburi, Guillermo, and because I like you, I will think you were still taking these to Corisco Vargas. You will still die, but at least not as a thief.”

  The distinction, which seemed to make a difference to Fat Eddie, was lost on Will.

  “But the guns and the woman, these I still want. These I still need. Where is the Sucuri, my friend?”

  Will only had one answer to that question, and he knew it wasn’t the one Fat Eddie wanted to hear.


  “I want the woman. All of her.” And the importance of that distinction was not lost on him at all.

  “Is she worth your life?”

  “Yes.” As a commodity, his life had been sold any number of times over the last few years. Once more for Annie seemed like the bargain of the century, especially given the way these things had been going for him, because in the end, he was Tutanji’s. No matter what Fat Eddie Mano, or Corisco Vargas, or anybody else came up with to do to him, the bargain he’d made with Tutanji was the one that bound him.

  And it beckoned, that bargain did. He’d been struggling for so long to fulfill his part, he sometimes lost sight of what awaited him, if he ran his quarry to ground and vanquished the shaman’s demon. A glimpse of the beginning of life, Tutanji had promised, a journey to an Amazonian Eden, to the garden where the Dakú had first been born into a lost world, a place untouched by time.

  Knowing Tutanji, the least Will expected to find was a living fossil, a plant previously known only from the fossil record of plants that had died millions of years ago, and if that’s all he found, it would still be the discovery of the century. Or would have been. Annie’s orchid could very well eclipse any discovery of his.

  A wry smile curved his mouth, and he saw Fat Eddie’s brows knit together. The fat man had no idea what was out there in the rain forest, and whatever Vargas was hoping to gain with his Night of the Devil, it wasn’t the true treasure. Annie had found a true treasure. Tutanji had promised another to him. Or maybe they were both one and the same. The thought had crossed his mind more than once since seeing her orchid. Either way, he wasn’t going to be denied, not after three long years of sacrificing everything he’d ever thought he believed in.

  No, he thought. Fat Eddie Mano wasn’t going to be the end of him, not when he was this close.