River of Eden

by Glenna Mcreynolds

Typically, he made it damn hard to hold his gaze, and she looked away.

  “Okay,” she reluctantly conceded. “If you can buy me a place on that plane, I'll go. You can have the guns to give back to Fat Eddie, maybe get him off your back.”

  The minute the words were out of her mouth, a knot formed in the pit of her stomach, as if she'd just made a huge mistake.

  “Wait,” she said quickly. “Wait just a minute. Don't… don't give Fat Eddie both Galils. Keep one for yourself. Tell him I sold it in Barcelos or something.” That's what she needed to say—protect yourself.

  “You want me to keep one of the Israeli rifles?” The look he gave her was slightly confused.

  “Yes.” She was adamant now. “They're the best money can buy. Accurate, reliable. If you want, we can get one down, and I'll show you how it works. You'll want to keep at least fifty rounds of ammo, and maybe a couple of grenades, and—”

  Will let a grin slowly spread across his face as he settled back against the counter and let her ramble on, extolling the virtues of her arsenal and how he could use it to save his ass. She was amazing.

  “Everybody worth their salt in Colombia is using the Galil now. You won't have any trouble getting more ammunition. The dynamite is fairly lightweight for the amount of punch you get, and it's easy to fit a stick or two in a pack. You might—”

  “Annie,” he finally interrupted her, setting his coffee aside and pushing off the counter. “That's about the sweetest thing anybody has ever said to me.”

  “Sweet?” Now she was the one who looked confused. “We're talking ordnance.”

  “You don't have to worry. I can take care of myself.”

  “Bullshit, Will,” she was quick to protest, her brow furrowing and her hands going to her hips. “I put you down with a move you've never even heard of. I don't care how long you were out there in the jungle chasing down jaguars and anacondas with your bush knife; these are men you're going up against now. Bad men. Very bad men, and you… you're a botanist, a plant guy with a snake tattoo and a magic necklace, and they are all going to have guns and—”

  “Annie, Annie.” He moved in closer, his hand coming up to capture her chin. She went perfectly still, though her expression remained mutinous. “I've been running contraband for Fat Eddie for over a year now. Believe me, I know these guys a hell of a lot better than I ever wanted to know them.”

  “But you haven't met Vargas, have you?” Her voice was soft, intent, and edged with a type of fear she hadn't shown even with the snake.

  “No. That's what this trip is all about. Fat Eddie finally trusting me enough to deliver straight to Vargas.” She was a mess, her hair flying every which direction from a night in his hammock, her clothes so rumpled she looked like a walking laundry bag, but her skin was soft and flushed from sleep, and her eyes were flashing with sparks of green and gold, and he wanted to kiss her more than anything else in the world.

  “Do you know what the gems are for?” she demanded.

  “I think so, yes.”

  “I think I do, too, and I think you should tell this Tutanji that you've changed your mind about working for him.”

  He could have told her he'd tried doing that about a thousand times those first few weeks with the Dakú. It hadn't worked then, and it sure as hell wasn't going to work now. He was in too deep.

  “I don't exactly work for him, Annie,” he said, releasing her chin with a reluctant shrug. “I belong to him. I'm his apprentice.”

  She looked perfectly nonplussed. “A shaman's apprentice? Like the sorcerer's apprentice in the Disney movie?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “More like Faust.”

  Her face fell. “The guy who sold his soul to the devil for knowledge,” she said flatly, pretty much summing up the bargain he'd made with the Dakú medicine man.

  “Yeah. That guy.”

  She stared at him for a moment, then made a strangled sound and buried her face in her hands. At first he thought she was stifling sobs, but when he listened, he heard differently. She was swearing a blue streak in two languages, cussing him out and calling him every name in the book.

  He didn't blame her. From her perspective, the price he was paying must look kind of high.

  “So what do you think the gems are for?” he asked during the first lull in her sotto voce diatribe.

  She looked up and her glasses were skewed, the lenses so spotted with fingerprints, he doubted if she could see much past her nose. Without asking, he slipped them off her face and started polishing them, blowing on the lenses and rubbing the glass with his shirttail.

  “All I think is that you are crazy, really crazy. You've convinced me. Congratulations.”

  “Come on, Annie,” he chided her. “Give.”

  After a moment in which she practically seethed with silent exasperation, hopefully getting it out of her system, she told him what he wanted to know.

  “Vargas is building something in the jungle west of Reino Novo.”

  “Something?”

  “I don't know what. I just caught a glimpse of it before the monkey fell on me, but it made me think those virgin-altar stories might not be all hearsay. There was gold on it, whatever it was, lots of gold. I could see it glinting in the sunlight, and I figure anybody who's willing to squander that much gold on some edifice in the middle of nowhere might also want diamonds and emeralds on it, but I'll be damned if I can figure out what in the hell you're doing going in there after him.” Her voice started rising on the last few words and kept going up. “I'll be damned if I can figure out what this shaman Tutanji could know that's worth your life, and I'll be damned if—”

  “No.” He stopped her with the simple expediency of capturing her face in both his hands, letting her glasses dangle from between his fingers. “No, Annie,” he said, adamant himself now. “You won't be damned. That's the whole point of the plane.”

  “If it's not Vargas's,” she grouched, still trying to make her point. “And if you can buy the pilot off. And if—”

  “Sempre tern jeito,” he insisted, interrupting her tirade. There's always a way. It was the national mantra of Brazil.

  “Ta louco,” she told him. You're crazy.

  “Maybe, but I'm going to get you on that plane, and you're going home to Wyoming, and when I'm finished with Vargas—”

  “What if Vargas finishes with you first?” she demanded to know.

  It was a legitimate question with a lot of unpleasant answers—none of which he wanted to dwell on.

  “Then I'm going to wish I'd had time to make love with you.” And that was the truth, a truth she apparently wasn't ready to handle.

  Color washed into her cheeks—and there he was, holding a blushing Amazon Annie and wanting nothing more than to kiss her senseless.

  “Time has nothing to do with it,” she said. “I don't… I just don't.”

  Given how she'd kissed him, that was one of her more interesting statements.

  “You will.” He didn't have a doubt. “With me.” If he lived past Reino Novo.

  “You're awfully sure of yourself,” she reproached him, an accusation ameliorated by her downcast gaze and her all too obvious doubts.

  “No. I'm sure of you,” he said, sliding his thumb across her mouth, loving its silky delicacy, the petal softness of her lips.

  “Will,” she said, her gaze finally rising, her voice softly vexed. “This solves nothing. You… I… we can't…”

  “We can,” he whispered, then lowered his mouth to hers. Her response was instant, and instantly gratifying, proving him right. Her lips parted on a soft groan, her hands coming up to his waist and bunching up his shirt before slipping underneath and sliding across his skin. It was heaven, having her hands on him, having her mouth hot and sweet beneath his. There was no resistance in her, only a wondrous giving way.

  He opened his mouth wider, capturing her deeper and pressing himself against her. She was so unexpectedly, so damnably alluring, and he wanted to kiss her endlessly.<
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  Annie arched up on tiptoe, irresistibly drawn by the lazy, pleasure-inducing forays of his tongue into her mouth. He tasted so good, his kiss as boldly lewd as his dancing in Pancha's. Again and again, he filled her, slowly, deliberately, making an aching heat rise in her belly, the same heat she felt hardening his body. He was aroused, his kiss meant to entice and please and arouse her, and the knowledge acted like a drug on her common sense. Smoothing her hand all the way up his chest, she tunneled it into his hair, feeling the long, silky strands slide through her fingers, feeling the soft edges of feathers drift across her skin. He was seduction incarnate, the taste and feel of him, all sleek muscle and leashed power where her other hand lay low on his abdomen, and despite what she'd said, she wanted to be closer, so much closer—and that was the danger.

  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 four hours.”

  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 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 ignoring men for so long had more to do with her never having met the right one than it did with her lofty goals. Plants now, men later, had always been her motto, and except for a couple of diversions—the first the result of teenage hormones and curiosity with a wrangler on the next ranch over, and the second with a professor she should have been smarter than to believe— she'd pretty much kept to her plan, especially these last few years, when her work had begun to consume her.

  Guns—that's what she 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 would 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 Santa Maria, 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 prediliction 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-millimeter Taurus. 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.