River of Eden

by Glenna Mcreynolds

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.

  “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.

  The emeralds and diamonds were another story altogether. Will wasn't just hauling them someplace for Fat Eddie. He was taking them to Corisco Vargas, according to what he'd told Luiz and Juanio, which meant she and Will were more than heading in the same direction. They were headed for the same damned place, and the man she was trying to avoid was the one he was intending to find.

  When she'd stumbled onto Corisco's Cauaburi operation a year ago, she'd been so far out in the boondocks, there wasn't a place she'd stepped that had been on any map. But Will must have a map, and even though at this point in time, he thought the only treasure to be found at the end of it were the gems he was taking there, the man wasn't an average type of guy. No matter how far he'd fallen off the botanical research bandwagon, he would always look at the forest as a botanist, a brilliant, highly skilled botanist with an eye for plants, which meant he'd become just one more big problem she had to contain. He could have all the Aganisia cyanea he could find, but she doubted if he would find very much. No one had ever found more than a single flower on the Marauiá or anywhere else. Her concern was Epidendrum luminosa, and it was all hers, every last luminous petal and sepal, every glowing calyx and corolla.

  Perched on the galley countertop, her head already in her hands, she let out an exasperated sigh. She was beginning to feel decidedly star-crossed.

  And the damned snake. She'd recognized the sucuri looming up out of the dark, known the serpent for what it was, and would never forget it, whether it had been real or her imagination.

  It sure as hell had looked real, but either way left her on shaky ground and with the uncomfortable conviction that Will Travers was a man privy to more freaky supernatural hoodoo than a person could beat with a stick, the kind of stuff she'd made a career out of avoiding.

  Beneath her, she felt the low throb of the engine slowing to a halt, and she looked up to see Will throttling down.

  “I'll tie up,” he said, latching the wheel. “There's some tobacco in that last drawer over there. Blow a little smoke on Juanio. See if you can get him to come around.”

  Tobacco was a cure-all in the Amazon. Nicotiana tabacum was smoked, chewed, made into a syrup, and ingested, all with amazing results. More often than not, it was a shaman's first line of defense, and that Travers's first thought was to blow a little smoke on Juanio only proved her point about his experience.

  “Blow a little smoke,” she muttered, rummaging through the drawer. It was full of all kinds of leaves and stems, flowers and buds, some bagged, some not, some labeled, most not. He had at least two dozen small jars holding plant material, a lime gourd, and about a pound of Erythroxylum novogranatense leaves, coca. She finally came up with a cotton bag of tobacco, some whole leaves, some cut, and a packet of papers. Taking the civilized route, she used the papers, rolling a cigarette and licking it closed.

  By the time Travers returned, she was sitting on the floor next to Juanio, blowing smoke rings around the chubby guy.

  “You want some coffee?” he asked, offering the other Brazilian cure-all.

  “Por favor.”

  In a few minutes, he sat down next to her and handed her a steaming hot, sugary sweet cafezinho.

  “Thanks.”

  He took the cigarette from her hand, and she watched as he took a long draw and blew the smoke out, wreathing the Brazilian bandit. “Come on, Juanio, acorda. Wake up.”

  Annie took a sip of coffee, inhaling the fragrant smoke and thinking how cozy it all would be, if it wasn't ninety-eight degrees with ninety-nine percent humidity, and he wasn't the single most disturbing man she'd ever met.

  Half the problem, she decided, was the way he looked, a little too wild, a little too far over the edge, a little too beautiful to be the derelict she'd thought he was in Pancha's. Of course, the bigger half was about Vargas and the gems, and the snake thing, and that he hadn't denied a word of what she'd said about a shaman getting hold of him.

  “Juanio,” he said softly, coaxingly. “Come back so we can talk, amigo.”

  The half about him kissing her hardly bore thinking about. She'd been kissed, if not by a lot of people, at least enough to know Will Travers did it with skilled concentration and an intensity that could completely undermine a woman's moral fabric. She'd definitely been left a little frayed around the edges by the experience.

  Frayed and curious. If that's what his kiss did to her, she wondered, letting her gaze drift to his mouth—what would the rest of it be like?

  She remembered how he'd danced in Pancha's, and she remembered how it had felt to have his lips moving over hers, his mouth open, the taste of him, the gentle aggression that had kept asking for more, and delivering more every time she gave in. It had felt like sex, at least the sex of her fantasies, the sex no one ever seemed to have in real life.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked, and her head jerked up, a blush streaking across her cheeks.

  “Um… fine.” She could hardly tell him the truth, that he'd short-circuited her common sense, and she'd be damned if she didn't wonder if he could do it again.

  “You've got a little color back,” he said.

  Right, she thought, feeling the warmth in her cheeks.

  “So what's this with Vargas and the gems?” she asked. She didn't want to think about his mouth, or his kiss. For that matter, she didn't want to think about Vargas, either, but she'd better.

  “A little business.”

  “What kind of business?”

  He shrugged and took another long drag off the cigarette.

  “I meant what I said back at the cantina, about Vargas being worse than Fat Eddie.”

  He blew the smoke out. “What makes you think so?”

  “Fat Eddie likes being a honcho in Manaus. He likes pushing people around with his money. Even the head-shrinking thing is to make a big mach
o statement about what a tough character he is, about how people better not mess with him. But Vargas…” Her voice trailed off.

  Talking about Vargas was dangerous. She didn't want to stir up too much of what she'd put behind her.

  “Vargas is what?” he asked, watching her more carefully than she liked.

  “Unpredictable. You can't count on him going for the money. His idea of power is far more refined than Fat Eddie's. He likes mind games, and he's very good at them.”

  “Are you afraid of him?”

  “I'd be a fool not to be, and so would you.”

  “Are you afraid of me?”

  She should have seen that one coming, but she hadn't.

  “No,” she said after a moment's hesitation, giving him that much even if it was half a lie. “I'm not afraid of you. I figure we have at least one more day together on this damn boat, probably more, unless my luck takes a big swing to the good, and I would like to forge some kind of working relationship. You are Dr. William Sanchez Travers. Or were. I've read all your books, and we haven't shared so much as a single insight on Amazonian botany. All we seem to do is—”

  “Run for our lives,” he filled in for her, then took another drag off the cigarette and blew it over Juanio. “I've read your work, too. You were last published in the Journal of Ethnobotany two years ago.”

  Annie couldn't help herself, she was ridiculously pleased. “The article on beekeeping by the Barasana?”

  He nodded, squinting at her through the smoke. “I had an entomologist on board just last week. She'd read it, too.”

  She? “Who?”

  “Dr. Erica Grunstead, brought her down from São Gabriel. Do you know her?”

  Did Annie know the lovely and brilliant Dr. Erica Grunstead?

  “Um, yes. We've met a couple of times at RBC.” A couple of times when Erica had proven over and over again that it was possible to be a Class A scientist, a Grade A field researcher, and a perfect lady at the same time. Annie had been frankly amazed at the woman's sophistication.

  “She's a nice person.”