He took her slowly, lingering in his pleasure, licking her like a cat, a big cat, a jaguar who teased with his tongue, who knew when to push her harder and when to gentle her with long, soft strokes. Above them, hyacinth macaws broke free of the trees with raucous cries. In the distant canopy, howler monkeys could be heard making their guttural calls, but within their bower, all was the rhythm of love, hot skin slickened by desire, breathing heightened to a rapid cadence, and Will, taming her with the patience of the ages, until she didn't think she could bear any more.
“Will, please…” She groaned his name, and he moved up her body, taking her mouth deep as he pressed into her below, inch by inch, claiming her, his senses primed by her response.
When she gasped, pleasure skittered down the base of his spine, adding urgency to his thrusting. She was his to love, the soft, female place between her legs his to quicken and please. Lust powered the act, pure and bewitching. His hips met hers on every stroke, pushing her higher, their bodies united by a fever pitch of friction and tension and his bone-deep need to take everything she had to give.
He pushed inside her again, pleasured as he'd never been before, tantalized by the sliding of her foot down the back of his leg, the thrust of her pelvis forward to seat him more deeply between her thighs. She was so wet and hot, and when her climax came, he was with her, consuming her and being consumed, his cry echoing in her mouth, his seed spilling into her.
Annie hung suspended with him in the long, pulsing moments of physical release, her senses drenched with the pleasure emanating from where their bodies joined, with him so deep inside her. The heat and wonder of him filled her completely, and when she fell back to earth, she knew irrevocably that she'd fallen in love.
CHAPTER 23
RIo Cauaburi Fat Eddie Was Furious. “Ten Thousand reais!” he screamed into the shortwave radio on his boat. “She is worth more than your life, Marcos!”
“Sim, senhor,” the man answered from somewhere deep in the jungle between the Marauiá and the Cauaburi Rivers, where he was failing miserably to track down Annie Parrish and Guillermo Travers.
But Fat Eddie didn't want agreement, he wanted the damned little cat. He wanted the gold Corisco Vargas would pay for her. He'd sent Johnny Chang's head to Leticia, and was expecting a perfectly gruesome shrunken head, a tsantsa, from his Shuar Jivaro friend. He wanted Annie Parrish's to complete the pair.
That Marcos had been unable to catch Travers, Fat Eddie could understand, but the woman should have been captured days ago. She was a woman. How fast could she run in the forest?
Fast enough and then some, according to Marcos. But Fat Eddie wasn't interested in excuses. He didn't pay people to give him excuses.
Merda. There was nothing upstream in the direction they were heading except for Reino Novo, and having Annie Parrish walk right into Vargas's hands was a disaster so profitless, Fat Eddie couldn't bear to imagine it. If she was going to end up dead on the jungle altar Vargas so ridiculously revered as El Mestre, why couldn't she do it after Fat Eddie had squeezed his money's worth out of her?
Ignoring the sputtering radio and a sputtering Marcos, he yelled out over the water to the dozens of other boats now with him on the river. “Turn around! Turn around! We go north again, back up the Cauaburi!”
Why in the name of God Travers and the woman were going to the gold mines was a mystery—with plenty of profit in it somewhere, he was sure. People didn't risk their lives without the promise of some kind of profit. If he had to, he'd catch the little cat on her way up the riverbank itself in order to be the one to turn her in, and he would squeeze her skinny little arms all the way to Vargas's office to get her to tell him what she was after.
Women were the most vengeful creatures God had ever put on Earth, but something told Fat Eddie that a smart woman like Doutora Parrish would figure some profit into her vengeance. Murder alone wasn't enough to get her to walk into the jaguar's jaws.
She was after something.
“Senhor! Senhor!” Marcos's voice came crackling through the radio. “We've found them, senhor! We're closing in now!”
It was about fucking time, Eddie thought.
“Chocante, Marcos! Chocante! A thousand reais for you, my friend,” he yelled into the radio, lying. His captain had done a piss-poor job of finding the woman, and he would pay for his incompetence once the whole mess was over and they were back in Manaus. And if by some unlucky twist of fate, Marcos lost the doutora before Eddie could get his hands around her throat, the captain was a dead man. Eddie had run out of patience.
DEEP IN THE RAIN FOREST on the edge of a clearing, Marcos understood his position—perfectly. He'd worked for Fat Eddie too long to overestimate the fat man's generosity or his magnanimity, and although what he'd told the man wasn't exactly a lie, it was definitely a stretch of the truth. They'd found something, a camp, which was more than nothing, and that was good enough for Marcos. At this point he was willing to take chances. He'd been slogging through the river drainage for three days in search of the little doutora, fighting flies and mosquitoes and heat and mud, and his own gnawing fear, and he was sick and tired of having big Fat Eddie Mano ragging on his butt.
He cocked his pistol, scanning the abandoned campsite for stragglers. His man Rubio kneeled over the remains of a campfire and signaled that it was still warm. Jorge and Daniel searched through the palm-thatched lean-tos, in case anything useful had been forgotten— an unlikely turn of events. Marcos knew the Dakú, and they traveled too damn light to be able to forget anything. The big question in his mind was whether or not Guillermo Travers had caught up to them.
Over the radio, Marcos heard Fat Eddie yelling for everyone to follow him.
The best-case scenario would be if Travers was lying dead in the rain forest somewhere. He'd had a lot of bolas jumping off the boat with a giant caiman in the water, and his escape had made Marcos look bad, real bad—the ruim gringo.
“What's your location?” the fat man demanded through the receiver. “I want to pick her up, before she can escape me again.”
“We're on a tributary of the Marauiá, heading toward the Cauaburi.” Marcos gave him their position, wishing he was anyplace else. He'd heard about the noite do diabo, and he'd planned on being back in Manaus long before the damn thing was supposed to occur. But hell, no. There he was, smack-dab in the middle of the area the damned devil was supposed to come ripping through, with enough sins on his head to make him a target, and his estúpido boss didn't have enough sense but to keep him chasing after a skinny little white woman.
Hell, all he wanted was to go back to Manaus.
He was about ready to do it, whether he found Annie Parrish or not, whether Fat Eddie liked it or not.
“Sim, senhor,” Marcos replied to Fat Eddie's continued instructions.
His man Lopes came jogging back into the camp from where he'd followed some tracks up the trail, and Marcos mouthed the word “woman” to him. Lopes replied with a wide smile, and Marcos heaved a silent sigh of relief.
Then Lopes held up eight fingers.
Marcos wanted to hit something. He didn't give a damn about how many women total were with the Dakú. He only gave a damn about one woman.
“Sim, senhor.” He humored Fat Eddie again, then mouthed the words “white woman” to Lopes, who answered with a shrug and a negative shake of his head.
That was it for Marcos, the straw that broke the camel's back. They'd caught up with the Indians they'd been tracking, and Annie Parrish wasn't with them.
Findado. He was done. He was heading back to Manaus, and letting the devil have Annie Parrish and Guillermo Travers and anybody else who wasn't smart enough to get out of the northwest before the noite do diabo.
As a matter of fact, Marcos thought, maybe it would be best all around if the devil got Fat Eddie, too.
“Sim, senhor,” he said again. “Yes, yes. We have her and are heading for the Rio Cauaburi on a course for Reino Novo.” The place where the devil was suppos
ed to begin his course of destruction. “Yes, senhor. We should be there by tomorrow night. Yes, senhor. I'll have her in chains. She will not escape. Do not worry… wait…” He made a strangled noise into the receiver, then made a few more. His mind was made up. “The static, senhor. I'm losing you, no?”
No, he answered his own question and flipped off the radio. He was done listening to Fat Eddie. By tomorrow night he'd be in Manaus, safe, while the fat man would be in Reino Novo, fighting it out with Vargas and whatever devil beast appeared. All Marcos had to do was get around the group of Vargas regulars behind him in the forest and make a break for the river.
Fat Eddie could go to hell, he thought, then grinned at his own cleverness, because, of course, hell was exactly where Fat Eddie was going.
BLUE ORCHIDS TUMBLED DOWN over three of the tree branches above where Annie was sitting. Two trees over, another group of orchids bloomed in luscious profusion. To her right, a munguba was literally drenched in blooming Aganisia cyanea.
Unbelievable, she thought. She knew botanists who would give a year of their career to see such a sight. And there she sat, no newspapers, no specimen jars, no camera—nothing to record or collect the second most amazing find of her life.
Or rather the third, she admitted, lowering her gaze from the trees to Will. He was so beautiful, sitting next to her in the half-light of the forest floor, his muscles moving in smooth precision as he repacked the arrows in his quiver, his hair falling across the back of his neck, the blond streaks gleaming a dull gold to match the bracelets hanging low on his wrist. He'd melted her down to a sated, wanton lethargy with his lovemaking, making more of a woman out of her than she'd ever been before— and being a woman was still the one thing she couldn't afford.
Hell.
She wanted him, and wanting him wasn't smart, wanting him threw all kinds of monkey wrenches into her plans for the future, if the two of them even had a future, considering the direction they were headed and what he was determined to do and notwithstanding her own commitment to doing whatever it took to get back what was hers—which she was finally ready to admit was a damn sight more than the orchid Vargas had stolen.
Will had been right. She wanted what Corisco had taken from her in Yavareté—a piece of her pride and some indefinable aspect of her sense of security. She'd always taken care of herself and come out in one piece, until the Woolly Monkey Incident, and that friggin' jail cell, and the creepy freaking things that had gone on in there, and the awful Fernando with his damned Instamatic.
Her face paled, and she looked aside—another memory she'd spent the last year avoiding every time it had come to mind.
“Annie?” Will touched her arm, and she let out a beleaguered sigh. She'd lied to him, and a part of her had known it even as she'd been doing it. She'd been lying a lot since she'd come back. She'd lied to Mad Jack before she'd left, telling him she was on her way to Costa Rica to do cloud forest research—and surprisingly enough, she could live with most of those lies.
But she didn't want to have a lie between her and Will. Not him. God, they'd been closer than their skin, and she wanted all of that free of lies.
“You were right in Barcelos. I came back to do some damage.”
“To Vargas?” he asked, sounding like he already knew the answer to the question.
She nodded. “I tried to buy a shoulder-fired, antiaircraft missile and launcher in Manaus, but Johnny Chang absolutely wouldn't sell me one, saying Fat Eddie would have his head if one of his rocket launchers came up missing— but hell, we saw how much good that did him.”
“A rocket launcher?”
She glanced up and caught his gaze, and had to work damned hard not to go all mushy. She had problems, real problems, and she still wanted to kiss him. She wanted to suck on his mouth and crawl on top of him, and she could see where that was going to be a full-time problem from here on out.
Damn.
“Yeah. I bought those guns from Chang thinking I was just going to use them for self-defense, but it was a hell of a lot of guns.”
“A hell of a lot,” he agreed, his eyebrows still arched in surprise.
“Enough to go upriver and blow Corisco's operation sky high,” she confessed, “and I knew it. I could have started in Reino Novo and finished in Yavareté and made the world safe for…” Her voice trailed off, and her hand came up to her brow, rubbing at the sudden ache in her temple. Damn, she thought again, forcing herself to take a breath.
“Safe for what, Annie?”
“Well,” she said, stalling for a second, trying to put a good face on the destruction that somehow had always been at the back of her mind. “I guess I was going to make the world safe for me and figured a whole lot of other people would benefit from it, especially if I blew up the jail in Yavareté.”
“What happened there?” His voice was soft but insistent, telling her he hadn't missed the implications of what she'd said, or of what she hadn't said, and sitting in the orchid-drenched glade, after making incredible love, he wanted to know the terrible things that had happened in Yavareté.
She took another breath to steady herself before she spoke. “Technically speaking, it wasn't rape.” And maybe that's why she'd spent the last year dismissing what had happened, shrugging it off. She hadn't been raped, and she'd healed from the beatings with only one small scar to show for her time in chains, one small scar she could have gotten anywhere.
He smoothed his hand down her arm, his fingers coming to rest in a firm but gentle grip on her wrist. “Technically speaking, then, what was it?”
She looked up. His eyes were very dark, his face set in tight lines.
“Have you been to Yavareté?”
“Yes.”
“Seen the jail?”
“It's cinderblock,” he told her. “Looks unstable and wet and twenty bucks says it's crawling with cockroaches the size of rats, and rats the size of small dogs. It's close to the river, has no windows, and during the rainy season, another twenty says it floods.”
“Yeah, that's the place.”
“So what happened?” He moved his hand up to cup her chin and leaned in closer. “You never told Gabriela, but you are going to tell me.”
Yes. She figured she was.
“It was very strange.” She glanced away again.
“How strange?”
“A ménage à trois of sorts, I guess”—she shrugged— “where my part was to be manacled naked to the wall, which I really hated, with Vargas tripping out on some strange brew he'd cooked up in a pot, and his oversized guard dog, Fernando, clicking away with his friggin' camera. There was incense and blood, and for three days I pretty much felt like a living sacrifice just waiting to happen. But the worst part”—she paused for a moment, her brows knitting together—“the worst part is I know I got off easy. I wasn't the first woman to hang naked in that jail cell. There were clothes, some of them bloody, and I was just so damned scared that I was going to end up the same way.”
“Was there anybody else? Any witnesses?”
“No.” She shook her head. “People on the river leave Vargas alone. They don't mess with him, and I think because of that he's been getting away with murder. I don't know about the rumors of the virgins on the altar of gold, but I think he's murdered women in that jail cell.” She lifted her gaze to his. “The place reeks of death.”
She felt his hand tighten on her chin, saw the spark of fury light in his eyes.
“Gabriela said he beat you.”
“Yeah, but he never really touched me, not inside, not where it would have counted. I was his prisoner, but not his victim. I never let him have that.”
She never let him have that. Will lowered his head on a deep exhalation, releasing her chin and running his hand back through his hair. He'd wanted to know, and now she'd told him. My God. He'd underestimated her from the very beginning. The stories hadn't been wrong. She was no cat snack. She was Amazon Annie, and not because she'd managed to drag a load of illegal guns up the
Rio Negro, or because she'd walked the Rio Vaupes, or because seeing Johnny Chang's head hadn't scared the holy shit out of her—but because even three days in the hellhole of Yavareté wasn't enough to make her forget who she was. He didn't know many people with that kind of strength.
“Somebody must have loved you very much when you were growing up,” he said, looking up at her from over the top of his hand. “If it wasn't your mother, who was it? Your dad?” Amazing Annie, he wanted to call her, with her wild hair, sweet mouth, and those gold-green eyes.
“Partly,” she said, a small smile curving the corner of her lips. “But I also had Mad Jack, and he told me I was the greatest thing since sliced bread every day of my life after my mom left. For a kid only a couple of years older than me, that was pretty cool.”
“Pretty cool,” Will agreed softly, falling even more in love. He offered her his hand, and when she took it, he rose to his feet, pulling her with him. “We better get going. We have to catch up with Tutanji and the others.”
“Yeah. We wouldn't want to dawdle.” Her smile broadened into a grin. She was so pretty.
“Yes, we would.” He leaned down and kissed her, then kissed her again. “I'd like to stay here with you, in this place, forever, just let time and Vargas and the river pass us by, but today we've got to make tracks.”
“To Reino Novo?”
“For me,” he said. “I want to send you north with the rest of the women.”
“North?” Her eyebrows rose. “Where north?”
He hesitated for a minute, then pulled a roll of paper out of his quiver. “Fat Eddie's men aren't too far behind us, and behind them is another bunch of guys who I think were sent by Vargas.”
“By Vargas? For what?”
In answer, he handed her the paper, and when she unrolled it, she swore.
“Son of a bitch.” It was the wanted poster, and now he knew the picture had been taken in Yavareté. “Where did you get this?”
River of Eden Page 22
