Coming up off the trail, Will stopped in front of her, his body sheened with morning mist.
“Good morning,” he said. “Tudo bem?”
“Vou bem.” With him standing close, she was fine.
She had an intellectual passion for his mind, too, and had for years, ever since she'd first read his Medicines of the Milk River and the Healing Forest, long before they'd started putting his photograph on his book jackets. But it wasn't the thought of having intellectual discourse with him that was making her heart race. It was the way he smelled—very warm and masculine, very different from her, like genipa and earth with traces of smoke from the morning fires. It was his hands and the tendons that ran down his forearms and met like the confluence of a river at his wrist. All she had to do was look at the taut plane of his abdomen and the arrow of dark hair that started at his navel and disappeared beneath his loincloth, and her mouth went dry.
There were probably dozens of scientifically biological reasons for what she was feeling. She'd read some of the published material on the genetic forces at work in mate selection, the literal chemistry of sexual attraction— and at the moment couldn't have cared less.
“Come with me,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
Annie followed him up the path beside the waterfall to the calmer water upriver, intensely aware of his nakedness as she walked along behind him. He was a six-foot-tall gringo, a white man burned brown by the equatorial sun, his hair bleached to near whiteness in a wild disarray of streaks, his muscles long, and lean, and powerful. The loincloth barely covered him in front and wasn't even meant to cover him in back. Every step he took was a study in grace, long flanks of smoothly flexing muscle moving under his skin. She remembered how it had felt to have him hot and hard inside her, the pulsing beauty of his release—and she wanted to feel it all again.
He glanced back over his shoulder, offering her his hand. When their eyes met, she blushed, and he smiled, slow and easy, like a promise—and Annie suddenly understood that whatever he wanted to show her was only part of the reason they were walking away from the camp.
Anticipation washed through her in a lush wave, heightening her senses, making them hum with awareness. Her hand was small in his, his palm rough against hers, his fingers longer and bluntly squared. The strength of his whole arm was in his light grasp, and she felt that as a promise, too. His strength was hers. It was something she'd never had on her side, a man's strength, something she'd never truly understood.
She understood it now, her gaze drifting over Will's broad shoulders. She understood it even better when she followed the trail of his tattoo. Black snake, white snake, twined in a serpentine spiral down the length of his back. The old shaman had marked him for life, using palm spines and black dye. She saw the scene in her mind's eye:
the dark of a rain-forest night, Will lying on the forest floor, the snake's blood and his own running down his body, and Tutanji chanting hour after dark hour until dawn, his old hands guided by a caapi vision through wreaths of smoke.
Knowledge, he'd told her, had been the shaman's promise. For three years of his life and the destruction of Corisco Vargas, he would be given shamanistic knowledge. He was a smart man, brilliant, and for the sacrifices he'd made, Tutanji must have made a damned convincing case.
“What exactly is the old man going to give you, if you overcome Vargas?” More than curiosity prompted the question. She wanted to know everything about him, especially what had changed him.
“A map,” he said, stopping and looking back at her. “A map to an ancient, sacred place somewhere north of where we are now.”
“The lost city of gold everybody mentions whenever your name comes up?” The rumors about him were near legend in themselves, and the lost city of gold was the most persistent.
“No. Not gold, Annie. A place of plants, ancient plants, something from the fossil record that hasn't been seen alive and growing for millions of years. Maybe a lot of ancient plants.” He started walking again, her hand still in his. “To be honest, the night I saw your orchid, I thought it might be part of Tutanji's promise.”
She shook her head. “There aren't any orchids in the fossil record. You know that as well as I do.”
“Yes, but your orchid is no regular flower. Something unusual is happening with its bioluminescence. Something I would love to research in a lab.”
So would she, so help her God. So would she. “We're going to need fresh material to get anything. I did a lot of tests on the flower while I was in Wyoming and didn't find anything that hadn't been found in other biologically luminescent specimens. Yet it is different. I can see that it's different, and sometimes… sometimes—” Her voice trailed off.
“Sometimes what?”
She let out a short laugh. “Sometimes I think it's trying to tell me something. That the light waves are some sort of Morse Code.”
To her surprise, he agreed. “Yeah, I thought the same thing after spending a couple of hours looking at it.”
A slow smile curved her mouth. “It is amazing, isn't it.”
“Yes,” he agreed again, his mouth curving into another smile.
“Like your tattoo?” She had to know what it meant, or even if it meant more than what Gerhardt had once told her about the design up on the Rio Vaupes.
A look of resignation came over his face, and his smile turned decidedly humorless. “The tattoo… what's amazing about my tattoo is that I didn't die getting it or from some horrific infection afterward. The rest is all Tutanji's game. Basically, it represents the cerebral fissure of a man's brain, like you said that night in Barcelos, but the way Tutanji did it, the drawing also represents the creation of man's cerebral fissure by the cosmic anaconda, in essence, the awakening of man's consciousness, the beginning of human existence, the whole Garden of Eden story from an Amazonian Indian point of view, which ties in with the sacred place from the beginning of time.”
“Is it the map itself?”
“No,” he said. “It's more of a charm. I won't get the map until after Reino Novo.”
If there was an “after” after Reino Novo. Annie didn't want to think about it, but the grimness of the possibilities was impossible to ignore.
Growing quiet, they walked on through trees drenched by mist, wading through shallow streams and ducking under overhanging vines. It was what she'd always done—walked through the rain forest, looking for plants, following little-used paths that only the most discerning eye would even have noticed. For all her fear of snakes, she'd actually seldom seen one in the wild. She'd been in certain regions of the tropics where iguanas dripped from the trees, and in the Brazilian Patanal where caimans crowded every beach, but her days in the lowland rain forests had been relatively free of snakes, and lately, so had her nights. She hadn't dreamed about the anaconda since putting on Will's necklace. Whatever power he'd brought to himself by killing the big cat, the jaguar teeth worked.
And there went another of her most dearly held scientific principles—straight out the window. She was wearing a charm she believed in, a charm whose power had been taken from a jaguar by Will's strength and cunning.
It was the strength that would protect him in Reino Novo. It was the strength that would protect her.
Farther down the trail, they crossed another shallow stream, the muddy water lapping at their ankles, and scared up a flotilla of Morpho butterflies. Blue wings like unreefed sails caught the light drifting down through the shadows of the trees.
Annie held her breath watching them flutter above the water with a delicacy reserved for forest sprites and spirit beings. She'd seen Morpho butterflies before, but never so many. The imperceptibly tiny scales on their large wings shone with saturated iridescence, more blue than the sky.
The forest was full of riches. It always had been, and as they walked, she fell into the once familiar rhythm of her days, before the woolly monkey had changed her life, days spent walking through the jungle forests of the equator, always s
earching for plants.
At a deep pool of water below another waterfall, Will gestured to a trail leading beneath a rocky ledge. Annie followed him along its edge, getting soaked by the cool water pouring down from the river above. They had to swim the last few feet to the far shore.
Coming up by his side, she slicked her hair back off her face and took a deep breath. The sound of the water rushing and tumbling over the falls set them apart from the rest of the forest, encasing them in a world of their own made up of the blue sky above and a rich carpet of ferns below. Annie kicked off her shoes and sank her toes into the soft greenery, all the while looking around at the magical glade.
Tsunki, Will thought, mesmerized by the sight of her wet with her clothes clinging to her body. Tsunki, a river spirit known to lure men with the promise of sexual favors. According to Tutanji, it happened all the time. A man would come down to the river to bathe or fish, and there would be an erotic incarnation of all his human desires, a spirit woman in flesh-and-blood form who would bind the man to her with an enchanted seduction. Tutanji had experienced two such sexual encounters in his youth, he'd once told Will, the second of which had conferred shamanistic powers upon him.
His gaze swept over her again and he felt the first slow flames of desire lick into life. Annie Parrish, tsunki of the Amazon. He was definitely enchanted, and more than half seduced.
Last night aside, it had been a long time since he'd been with a woman, and there were a few things he'd almost forgotten, especially that a woman had to be won, every time, and that no matter how many times a woman had walked the Rio Vaupes, a man's power, sexual and physical, could overwhelm her in an instant.
Annie knew that better than most.
She glanced over her shoulder at him, and with a gesture, he directed her gaze to the shore, to the broken limb of a tree near the water, and watched in satisfaction as her eyes widened. It was his gift to her.
“I found them this morning, right where you'd said they would be.”
“My God,” she murmured, stepping nearer the log and reaching up to touch the flowers blooming in such rare profusion.
“Look up,” he told her, following close behind. “Into the trees.” And when she did, he saw her wonder turn into amazement.
There were hundreds of blue orchids in full bloom, enough to make it seem as if there were two skies, the one above the canopy, and another in the understory.
It was a living miracle, and Will knew she understood that as well as he did.
“Aganisia cyanea,” she crooned, caressing another delicate blue petal.
“I lost count earlier, but from what I can tell, there's a few hundred flowers blooming here, a world record. If you can verify, Dr. Parrish, we can at least submit the find for posterity.”
She laughed at that, her eyes brightening. “And can you imagine them wondering how Dr. William Sanchez Travers and Dr. Anne Parrish just happened to end up in the same middle of nowhere at the same time to verify each other's count of an unprecedented number of blooming Aganisia cyanea somewhere in northwestern Brazil.”
He smiled along with her. “They would never believe the truth.”
She laughed again, a sound that rippled along his senses with near physical pleasure. He liked making her laugh. He liked seeing the weight of seriousness lifted from her shoulders, even if only for a short while.
He liked her—more than liked her. Tutanji could have all the other tsunkis, Annie was the embodiment of his sexual desire, silken skinned and gently curved—and sweet. It had been so sweet to sink into her liquid heat and lose himself in the sensual wonder between her legs, to spiral out of control with her, with his mouth on hers and her body pulling him deeper and deeper under her spell, until he'd come, his body buried in hers to the hilt and her sweet gasps of pleasure burning her into his soul.
The memory washed through him, making him hard beneath the scrap of cloth he wore. She knew why they'd come away from the camp. He'd seen the knowledge in her blush.
She'd returned her attention to the closest flower and was touching it gently, her fingers moving over the petals, exploring the secrets of its inflorescence exactly the way he wanted to explore her. He wanted to kiss her, make love to her, devour her with lust and passion and love. He wanted her to be his.
His gaze strayed to the necklace around her throat. The cat had been tawny and green-eyed like her, sleek and beautiful, but without the creamy curves of her shoulders and breasts, without her soft mouth.
He moved closer to her, close enough to kiss, and reached out and took one of the jaguar fangs in his fingers. Her gaze locked onto his, and the slow, burning heat in his veins became a fire.
“Tutanji says you are wild and need to be tamed,” he told her. He'd brought her here to make love to her, because he might not ever get another chance, and he wanted it badly enough to steal time. They should be on the trail, but he had to have her again.
“Tamed?”
“Yes.” His fingers slowly moved up the necklace, caressing the skin of her collarbone beneath. She knew what he wanted, and she wasn't backing away. “He said you need to have my seed inside you to make you content, and that if you are reluctant, I should suck on you with my mouth until you are ready to accept me. He says even the wildest woman will take a man, if she is first worked on in this manner.”
Another blush washed over her face and down her throat, reminding him of how easily she'd been aroused in the hammock, of how she'd responded to his touch.
“We made love last night, Annie.” His voice grew husky as he smoothed his fingers up the side of her throat, tracing the line of her jaw with his thumb.
Golden lashes swept down over her eyes, resting in half-circles on her cheeks. “I know. I remembered this morning.”
“I wondered if you would. You were mostly asleep.”
“Not nearly as asleep as I might have seemed,” she whispered, slowly lifting her gaze to meet his again. Her eyes were green streaked through with gold, her hair gold streaked through with silver—the little cat—her mouth softly pink and beckoning.
Watching her, holding her gaze, his heart beat heavier in his chest. He could smell her, the warm animal scent of her skin, so alive, the scent of her growing arousal. He remembered how she had tasted in the night, her tongue teasing his, her lips parting on a gasped breath—and everything inside him wanted her.
He'd watched her bathe in the pool with the other women, seen her naked in the river, cloaked only in the rising mists of morning, and he wanted to see her naked again. He wanted to feel her against him, the length of her body pressed against him, her skin hot from his touch.
“Annie,” he murmured, lowering his mouth and brushing his lips across hers. “I want to tame you with my mouth, to suck on you here, querida,”—he slid his hand down the front of her shorts and cupped her with his palm—“until you are wild with wanting me inside you again.”
Her response was immediate, the tension of desire tautening her body, her mouth opening beneath his. She moved against his hand, her pelvis rocking against him as her tongue slid across his lips, and Will groaned, wondering who was seducing whom.
He opened his mouth wider, hungry for her kiss, one hand holding her to him while the other undid the buttons on her shirt, before moving lower and releasing the snap and opening the zipper on her shorts. He worried that he was rushing her, but the time they had was short and he wanted to spend it all on top of her, losing himself inside her. She made a soft sound as he eased his hand into her shorts, his fingers slipping beneath her panties and sliding into her soft curls, and then sliding deeper into an even softer place.
She was slick, already wet, and they'd barely begun. Aroused and aching down to the core of his being, every muscle in his body, every breath became focused on one thing—to make her his, completely.
Dragging his mouth from hers, he reached up and picked one of the blue orchids, then pulled her down beside him on the forest floor, sinking with her onto the green ea
rth.
He would have her the way he wanted, all of her.
Annie felt as if she'd slipped back into a dream. Within the shadows of the forest, he was seducing her, his body hot and hard along the length of hers, his thigh capturing her between him and the ground, holding her in place while his mouth teased and made promises she knew he could keep. With his hand, he pushed her shirt open and followed the path with his tongue, licking a trail of fire to her breast. When he took her in his mouth, she melted and knew this was the beginning of heaven on earth, with the forest all around and Will above her, his body turning her wanton with need—and the orchid. He trailed it over her other breast in a delicately soft path.
“Will.” She gasped his name, and he switched his mouth to her other nipple, nuzzling her, soothing the ache he'd started.
The silken fall of his hair draped over her skin in a lazy, sweeping motion that followed the movement of his head. She buried her hands in it, running her fingers through the multicolored strands and along his scalp, holding her to him. Using the flower, he continued the path of petals down her belly and farther down between her thighs.
She sighed and moved restlessly, parting her legs, and Will let go of the flower to touch her with his fingers. Lifting his head, he held her gaze with his own, his eyes darkly slumberous as he spoke to her in soft Portuguese, telling her how beautiful her body was, how soft and wet she was and how her readiness made him hard for her, how he wanted to taste her. Then he kissed her, deep and wet, and began following the flower's path with his mouth, laving a trail of heated desire across her breasts and down to her navel, until he was there, his hands pulling her shorts down over her hips and off her legs, his tongue hot and sweet on her most secret place.
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