“Yavareté has nothing to do with you.”
“Maybe not,” he agreed easily enough, “but when Fat Eddie gets to Santo Antonio, he's going to know I lied about you, and then he's going to want three heads to hang in the Praça de Matriz.”
As an accusation, it beat hers hands down—and she knew it. Her gaze shifted away from him with a long sweep of lashes, an action so purely feminine it nearly halted his breath—and he suddenly had a gut-awful feeling that he knew exactly where his sense of responsibility for her was coming from.
His problem wasn't lust. Not just any woman would do. He wanted her—man to woman, me Tarzan, you Jane. It didn't make sense, but it didn't have to make sense. She was just there, a usually sopping-wet little grab bag of a renegade botanist with misbehaving hair, perfect legs, and a backbone of pure steel, and he wanted her—jaguar bait.
He wanted to groan. God, his life was already hanging by a thread. He did not need the trouble she stirred up, literally, by the boatload. What he needed was to get rid of her, and the farther away he could send her, the better.
Amazon Annie, he thought with a stifled curse. With the evidence standing in front of him, it was hard to believe she was the one he'd heard all the stories about. Amazon Annie had bushwacked her way across the watershed of the Vaupes River in eastern Colombia and confirmed half a dozen viable populations of Griffinia concinna, the long-endangered elegant blue amaryllis, a species devastated by the felling of rain-forest habitat from Panama to Brazil. Thanks to her, the botanical garden in St. Louis was cultivating a scientifically viable population of its own. Her published dissertation on the family Bromeliaceae was backed up by years of fieldwork and countless hard-won miles trekking through the tropical forests of South America, and like all the naturalists who had gone before her, every mile had yielded a story of hardship and close calls. Some of her stories had become legend on the Amazon, until the last legend, the Woolly Monky Incident, had ruined her.
Rallying, she lifted her chin and met his gaze square on. “I owe you for that,” she admitted. “But it's going to be a hard debt to repay.”
Will appreciated her concession, but in truth, it was an impossible debt to repay.
“I heard you shot your lover.” If she wanted a chance to even the score, he'd just given her one, and by the subtle tightening of her mouth, he knew she understood exactly what he wanted.
“He wasn't my lover.”
When she didn't offer anything more than what Gabriela had already told him, Will arched his brow, encouraging her to go on.
“He was a garimpeiro, a gold miner,” she responded defensively. “I didn't know they were in the area where I was doing my fieldwork, and they sure as hell didn't expect to find me within a few miles of their camp. It was… uh, a clash of culture thing.”
“Clash of culture?” The look he gave her was purely skeptical. Researchers of her caliber didn't make their reputations by clashing with indigenous cultures. “And the monkey?”
“A couple of the miners saw fresh meat in the canopy and shot it. I was on the forest floor and ended up with an armful of terrified, bloody woolly monkey. By the time I'd finished it off, the garimpeiros had shown up and were accusing me of trying to steal their game. Things got a little ugly after that.”
Will could imagine.
“So you pulled your gun and shot one of them?”
“No… not quite,” she equivocated. “Back then, I didn't carry a gun, but one of the miners had one, and there was a bit of a scuffle.”
It was remarkable, he thought, how little information she managed to cram into an answer. He tried to imagine her standing out in the rain forest, covered in monkey blood and “finishing off” the wounded animal with her knife, he supposed, though God knew she could have just wrung its neck with her bare hands. Nothing seemed beyond her. Even so, his imagination hit a brick wall when he came to the part about her coming out one gun ahead in a scuffle with a couple of garimpeiros.
“And from there to Yavareté?” he asked, accepting her condensed version of events for now, taking what she offered without giving her any grief. If she followed his advice and left for Bogotá, she never had to tell him another damn thing for the rest of her life—a depressing thought. If she didn't leave, he was going to stop being nice.
She mused over his question for a good long while, before she deigned to answer.
“Well,” she started slowly. “The gun aside, I ended up in their camp, an illegal mining operation with the biggest mother lode I've seen anywhere in the Amazon. The mine boss wasn't too happy to see me, but he didn't want the responsibility of killing a norte-americana scientist outright. So he called in a Cessna and sent me to Yavareté, where his boss could decide what to do with me.”
“Corisco Vargas.”
“Right.” She nodded, a subtle look of relief passing over her face, as if she'd managed to satisfy his questions without incriminating herself in any more crimes.
Well, he was far from being satisfied with her whitewash.
“And Vargas didn't want to kill you, either.” He made it a statement, since the truth was obvious.
“No,” she said, again without any elaboration. “Three days later, Gabriela came and the next thing I knew, I was deported.”
She made it all sound so straightforward, so simple. A little tussle in the jungle with a dying monkey and a few garimpeiros, then three days in Yavareté with Corisco Vargas.
Will wanted to shake her—shake some sense into her. He wanted to drag Johnny Chang's head back out of the water and scare the shit out of her. How in the hell, he wanted to ask her, have you kept yourself alive this long?
And that was not a friggin' rhetorical question. Nobody could skate on that much luck.
Will glanced out the windows fronting the helm. They had to leave, find a new mooring miles from where Fat Eddie had found them.
He angled his gaze back to her. Take a woman up the river for me, William, a botanist working out of Santa Maria… Gabriela had lied to him. Annie Parrish wasn't just a botanist. At her heart she was something else, something more, and that something more was dangerous. Will had hauled any number of scientific researchers up and down the Rio Negro for RBC, some women, some men. Most had lasted the full term of their grants, a few of them hadn't.
They had all been fine people, academics with a sense of adventure. He'd never met a one besides himself who could have managed an illegal arms deal on the Manaus waterfront, until he'd met Dr. Parrish, and he sure as hell hadn't been attracted to any of them—until Annie Parrish.
His gaze skimmed over her. She was still wet, her shirt clinging to the small curves of her breasts, an intrigingly erotic detail of the type he hadn't noticed in too long to remember.
He sighed, then rubbed his hand across the back of his neck and gave her a sideways look.
You're both among the very best, and you're both hell-bent on something up the Rio Negro… Gabriela hadn't lied about that. He and Dr. Parrish were both hellbent on something. Tutanji had set his course, but Annie Parrish was all on her own, and by his estimation was sinking fast. He didn't know how many pieces Fat Eddie was going to leave her in if she refused to leave the country, but he knew for damn sure he didn't want to find out.
“Cast off,” he said, turning back to the wheel. “We've got a long night ahead of us.”
CHAPTER 9
Annie woke with a start, on the verge of a scream. She couldn't breathe. Her lungs felt crushed, her rib cage cracking, her legs tangled up with a moving, surging force she couldn't break. She gasped in a breath, opening her eyes wide, ready to fight—but there was nothing, no giant snake squeezing her, no anaconda wrapping her tighter and tighter, using her own exhalations to crush the breath from her body and snap her bones. There was nothing, only the nightmare of being wrapped in coils.
She took another breath and pushed her hair back off her face. It was morning, the boat gently rocking beneath her, the sound of waves lapping up against the hull. A pale light s
hone through the port window of the Sucuri's small aft cabin. She twisted in her hammock to look out the other window. Leaves, green and dripping, were pressed up against the glass.
She let out a soft curse and dragged her hand back through her hair again. The storm had returned and lasted most of the night, the rain beating at them as they'd slowly chugged up the river. More than once, water had come pouring over the decks, breaching the bow as they had bucked the waves. Just after midnight, Travers had changed course, leaving the main river and once again heading into the igapó. By the time he'd found a suitable mooring, the rain had diminished into a pattering of drops on the roof. Annie had fallen asleep to the soft sound, exhausted from the day's trials.
Travers had slept in the forward cabin, rehanging his hammock by the helm. The boat was very quiet, and she wondered if he was awake. She didn't hear anyone moving around, only the scratch of tree limbs scraping against the starboard side and the creak of the hull in the water. Off the boat, the forest was alive with morning. Howler monkeys croaked and roared in the distance, their calls sounding like a herd of prehistoric beasts. Closer to the boat, she heard the squawks and cries of birds rousing from their roosts—comfortingly familiar sounds. With a cup of coffee, strong, black, and Brazilian sweet, she figured she could face the day.
“Damned dream,” she muttered, sinking back into her hammock and rubbing the bridge of her nose. She'd not had it in Manaus, nor during her year stuck in Wyoming, nor in Ecuador or Peru. It was strictly a Black River nightmare, coming to her the first time years ago up on the Vaupes, one of the Rio Negro's biggest tributaries—and her first night back on the river, it had returned in full force.
She swore again, tying not to let the fact of the dream's geographical boundaries freak her out any more than usual, just because she was on a boat with the unbelievable name Sucuri. It wasn't the first time she'd come back to the river and suffered the snake nightmare. It probably wouldn't be the last.
Rousing herself, she slipped out of the hammock. Her glasses were close at hand on a small shelf, so was the gun she'd taken out of one of her crates while Travers had tied up the boat, a 9-millimeter semiautomatic Taurus. She buckled the holster around her waist and put an extra clip in her fanny pack.
Outside the cabin, the world was cool and serene, blanketed in a heavy layer of mist rising off the water. Trees loomed in the white drifts of vapor. Somewhere, something splashed in the river. It was Annie's favorite time of day, before the sun burned a blazing path along the equator and turned the forest into a sauna.
Stepping over to the port side, she noticed the Sucuri's canoe was missing. Travers wasn't asleep, she realized. He was gone. The information settled in without too much alarm. Even if he'd wanted to abandon her— which he probably did after the Fat Eddie fiasco—she was nearly one hundred percent sure he wouldn't abandon his boat.
Nearly.
She glanced over her shoulder at the jungle of trees and lianas rising from the flooded forest and the long greenish and white aerial roots of the aroids going down. If she had to, she could find her way out and back to the main flow of the Rio Negro.
Her gaze slid over the trees and epiphytes sheltering the boat. Every species was familiar to an eye trained to find the unfamiliar. The river was not at full height, and with the morning mist draping around every branch and limb, much of the canopy was still out of sight. But there were orchids up there somewhere, and the rainy season was a good time of year to find many in flower.
Annie, though, had honed her interest down to just one species of orchid, Epidendrum luminosa or Epidendrum parrishi. Her hand absently went to the fanny pack belted around her waist. She hadn't decided yet what to name the exquisite anomaly she'd discovered on the Cauaburi. Certainly the latter classification would assure her renown throughout the remaining history of the world, another comforting thought on a cool Amazonian morning when she found herself alone, as usual, and somewhat lost, which was not exactly unusual. The rain forest was a big place, and she'd wandered too far from home on more than one occasion.
A bright spot of red on the water caught her eye, a ceiba flower, and she bent down to scoop it up as it floated by. With her fingers just breaking the surface, a dark, sinuous form streaked away from beneath the boat and disappeared into the watery shadows below the trees.
She jerked back, the flower forgotten, her pulse racing.
Sucuri, the image flashed through her mind.
Peering into the dark water, she strained to see what was undoubtably already gone. After a minute of fruitless searching, she told herself the animal had probably been a caiman, or one of a hundred large species of fish that inhabited the rivers of the Amazon, but least likely an anaconda. Contrary to her nightmare, giant snakes were not lurking in every pool.
Curious, though, she leaned over the side of the deck and let her gaze run over the hull, looking for the damn letters she might have seen yesterday morning, if the paint had been in better shape. As it was, she could just make out a blue CUR above the waterline. The SU at the beginning of the word was hopelessly chipped. The I at the end was no more than a faint bluish-gray shadow blending into the weathered plank it was painted on, but it was there, SUCURI.
“Merda,” she swore under her breath. She rose to her feet and wiped a hand across her damp brow. Johnny was dead, murdered by Fat Eddie Mano, his head severed and waiting to be shrunk by a Jivaro tribesman, his body dumped in the river for fish food.
“Sucuri, hell,” she muttered, turning toward the cabin. She needed a cup of coffee.
Inside, a fresh stalk of bananas hung from a hook in the ceiling. Papayas and guavas were piled in a basket on the counter. She set a pot of coffee to start on the kerosene stove and opened a cupboard, looking for sugar. On her fourth door, she came to a sudden halt, her search forgotten.
Books. Dozens of them.
Lifting her hand, she ran her fingers across the spines, encountering a veritable cornucopia of classic Amazonia, books on botany, plant structure and classification, books written by the great nineteenth- and twentieth-century botanists who had explored the Amazon and the Andes, discovering thousands of new plants for western science. She owned them all and had been deeply influenced by most of them, especially the works of Spruce and Schultes, and the adventures of Humboldt and Waterton. Their true-life stories in the tropics had become the stuff of dreams for a girl living on the dry, western plains of North America.
And Travers had them all, including his own, hardly the library of a man who'd completely abandoned botany for criminal vice. She could only conclude that on some level, he was still in the game.
A small smile curled her mouth. The Dr. William Sanchez Travers whose name was on the books would have been damned impressed by what she'd found up on the Cauaburi.
The last book in the row didn't have a title on the spine, and when she pulled it down, she saw only one word on its cover: TRAVERS.
An excited thrill went through her. His logbook.
A thousand rumors had gone around about him, one for every day since he'd disappeared—and she was holding the answers to them all. Heady stuff for someone who needed a little leverage after Fat Eddie had all but pronounced her dead.
With only the faintest twinge of guilt, she opened to the first page—and frowned. Her brow furrowed, and she pushed her glasses a little higher on her nose.
“I'll be damned,” she muttered, flipping through the pages one by one. The dates were there, starting well before his disappearance, along with line after line of daily entries—every one of them written in a language she didn't even recognize, let alone understand.
But the details—her gaze skimmed another dozen pages, all of them covered with a distinctively illegible script and spare, concise drawings, both botanical and geographical.
Forget the rumors, she thought. He hadn't been lost for a moment, let alone a whole year. He knew exactly where he'd been every minute of every day, but without a latitude and longitude or a trans
lation, he was the only one who knew.
So what had he been doing? she wondered, paging forward through more of the log.
And what was he hiding?
A splash outside brought her head up and her hand to her gun. Her heart pounded in her chest. If it was Fat Eddie and his goons, this could prove to be a pretty short trip for somebody.
Leaning forward, she peeked through the window and saw Travers pulling up in his canoe. He was naked from the waist up, propelling the boat through the water and leaving a swirling trail of mist in his wake.
She unconsciously relaxed her grip on the pistol, her sense of danger forgotten as she watched him—lithe and powerful, the muscles in his chest and arms bunching with each paddle stroke. With his hair damp and his skin sheened silver with morning dew, he was the river creature again, a picture of primitive grace and near preternatural beauty.
Her mouth thinned into a tight line. It was the last thing she wanted to admit, the absolute last—that he was beautiful.
With an annoyed admonition at herself to stop staring, she started to turn her attention elsewhere, but got sidetracked by two white scars marking his chest above his heart, just under the curve of his shoulder, an interesting detail she tucked away. Anything could have happened to him. She had a few scars herself and wouldn't have given his a second thought, until he glided by her down the side of the boat, and she saw his back. Startled, she could only stare, her breath caught in her throat.
He'd been tattooed, thoroughly, disconcertingly, the images running in a line down his spine from the base of his neck to below the waistband of his shorts, their crude precision far beyond what could be achieved with genipa or rocou body paint. She'd seen the design before, two snakes intertwined, one dark, one light. It was common up on the Vaupes River in Desana territory.
He'd been changed by it—the truth came to her with chilling clarity. Whoever had marked him, had changed him. Without knowing when, where, or why he'd been tattooed, she knew she was looking at the moment when he'd ceased being Dr. William Sanchez Travers, world-renowned botanist with the Harvard pedigree, and become what he was today… a mystery.
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