Raising her hand, Pilar tried to smile at Rane, but didn’t succeed. Turning quickly, she fought back tears and blindly followed Culver’s huge, striding form down the trail. Some of her anguish eased as they left the upper world of sunlight, clouds and villagers and entered the darkened labyrinth of the jungle. The heavy humidity enveloped Pilar, and instantly she began to perspire as she struggled to maintain her balance with the heavy pack jostling against palms, vines and other encroaching plant life. It almost seemed as if the plants were wishing them well, patting them, reaching out in their own way as the two humans trod ever deeper into the jungle. A blessing of sorts for a successful journey, Pilar hoped.
Hurrying to keep up with Culver, Pilar sensed how upset he was. Because of Rane’s unexpected request? Probably. She certainly knew that he didn’t want to be here with her. The trail continued to descend along the slope of the hill, and here and there, Pilar could hear droplets tapping from one leaf to another as the thick fog condensed. Above her, the opaque white mist floated like a billowy canopy over the entire region. But it was usual for fog to embrace the jungle until about ten each morning.
About a mile into the jungle, the trail widened enough to allow two people to walk easily side by side. Culver turned and looked expectantly at Pilar. Her skin had a sheen of moisture on it, and her eyes were dark and focused. He saw the stubborn set to her mouth and instantly wanted to kiss her—kiss her until she melted against him. The errant thought was an unwelcome interruption to his own focused attention, and he scowled as she drew to a halt a few feet from him.
“Are you doing okay?” he asked. The packs they wore would provide everything they needed for the next four days. Ramirez’s jungle fortress was a two-day trek deep into the heart of Amazonia.
She smiled briefly and wiped the perspiration from her brow with a red kerchief she took from around her neck. “Yes.”
“You’re not acclimated to this.”
“Neither of us are,” Pilar said, looking around in admiration at the towering trees, draped everywhere with dark green vines thick as cables. In a way, they reminded her of giant, beautiful spiderwebs. The screeching howls of monkeys preceded them, warnings to friends of human trespassers in their environs. “I’m glad I have Incan blood. I can feel my body shifting, rebalancing to this heat and humidity.”
Culver nodded and placed his hands on his hips. “I hate the jungle.”
“Why?”
“It’s hot and uncomfortable—and I feel like I can’t breathe.”
She smiled softly. “We have always said that the jungle is the womb of Mother Earth. The moist darkness is fertile. Everything lives and grows here, just as a baby grows inside a woman’s body.”
Culver was struck by the symbolic beauty in Pilar’s words. “I’ve never thought of it in those terms.” He wiped the sweat from his face with the back of his hand. On his hip, he wore a holster and the black Beretta he’d cleaned yesterday. Pilar wore no obvious weapons. Her cover, after all, was that of a shamanka guide for a U.S. botanist. Her hair, pulled back into a single, thick braid that curved across her shoulder, was wavier than usual from the jungle’s moisture. How clean and clear her golden skin looked, Culver thought. How shining her eyes, with their hints of an inner, secret joy.
“What are you so happy about?” he demanded abruptly as he gazed around them.
“I had forgotten how much I love the jungle.” Pilar gestured overhead to an old, thick rubber tree. In its distorted, twisted limbs hung a huge purple-and-white orchid. “Look above you, Culver.”
He twisted to look in the direction she indicated. The orchid, one of a string of blooms, hung within his reach. Lifting his hand he gently broke the stem and captured seven blossoms at once. Lifting them, he inhaled their heady fragrance.
“Here,” he muttered, handing them to her. “A string of jungle pearls for your neck.”
Shocked at his unexpected gift, Pilar reached out and took the slender, bending stem, heavy with flowers. She saw the burning look in Culver’s eyes and felt as if he’d reached out and touched her. Cradling the orchids in her hands, she stared up at him. “Thank you… .”
Culver gave her a cutting smile. “You always reminded me of an orchid,” he grudgingly admitted.
Open, vulnerable, giving and feminine. “Wear them. You can really play the part of guide to this ignorant Norte Americano plant specialist.” Turning on his heel, he continued along the now-level floor of the jungle.
Quickly stringing the orchids around her neck, where they rested between her pack’s straps and her chin, Pilar inhaled their aromatic fragrance. Dizzied by this surprising gift, she hurried to catch up. For every stride Culver took, Pilar had to take two. But she managed to move to his side. She felt him look down at her, felt his scowl. Too bad if he didn’t want her at his shoulder. Still, she noticed he checked his stride slightly for her sake. Puffing a little, she twisted to look up at him.
“In my next lifetime, I’m going to be born tall, with long legs like yours,” she teased.
Culver gave a slight smile. Glancing over, he saw that the color of her eyes had lightened. Pilar was happy. The realization struck directly at the heart he was so desperately trying to protect from her dazzling smile, soft voice and tender looks. “Short people do have their problems,” he admitted. Right now, they should be safely out of range, for the most part, of Ramirez’s men. Because the fortress was hidden so deeply in the jungle, Culver knew from experience that Ramirez didn’t post many guards. But several hit men frequently took on the guise of villagers from the small settlements that ringed the fortress. He and Pilar couldn’t know for certain if a villager was friend or foe. He did know that it was safer to speak in English, because many of the Indians and some of Ramirez’s men didn’t know the language.
Chuckling, Pilar nodded. “Small but mighty. Look at Grandmother Aurelia. She is barely five feet tall, yet she’s one of Peru’s most powerful shamankas.”
“Speaking of that, how did the ceremony go last night?” He eyed Pilar and saw her face suddenly close up. Her lips, once parted, became compressed, and Culver sensed a dread in her. In spite of himself, he worried about the vision of the future she might have received and its potential accuracy. He watched as she pushed hair from her forehead—another sign of nervousness.
“It will be,” she said carefully, “a difficult mission.”
“Difficult being another word for disastrous?”
Pilar opened her hands. “My death is near.”
Culver jerked to a halt. He stared down at her. “Death?” His voice came out strangulated, filled with disbelief. How could Pilar stand there, calmly accepting such a thing? Then he remembered how shamans had to traverse between life and death for their patients in order to heal them. Death for them was not the fearful experience that the Western World saw.
Combatting tears, Pilar smiled brokenly at Culver. Gone was the flinty look in his eyes. She saw his sudden anguish on her behalf. “I feel that is why Rane was so upset this morning. Even though she wasn’t at the ceremony, she knows… .” With a sigh, Pilar whispered, “I don’t want to leave Rane, Culver. My parents died early, and I know the pain of it. I don’t want Rane to experience that.” She shrugged out of her pack and laid it aside. As she rubbed her shoulders, she said, “After the ceremony, early this morning, I talked with my grandparents about my vision. They agree that I could die a physical death. It’s part of my final test to take on the spirit of the jaguar. Anyone who is invited to the jaguar medicine must have a near-death experience. Whether I survive depends on many things, some of them outside of myself.”
Cursing softly, Culver lowered his pack to the ground in turn and sat next to Pilar on a damp log near the trail. She was only inches away. It was inconceivable to him that she could die, yet he knew that going up against Ramirez could easily guarantee both their deaths. Was he prepared to die also? Staring at Pilar’s serene face, Culver knew the answer was a defiant no. Maybe she was already lost
to him in some ways, and they could never recapture what they’d had, but he couldn’t stick his head in the sand about the lethal possibilities of this mission. As angry and hurt as he was by Pilar’s actions in the past, he emphatically didn’t want her to die. The admission softened his attitude toward her.
“I know enough about the vision-vine ceremony,” he began stiltedly, “to know it’s not just a bunch of hallucinations.”
Pilar nodded and sighed. “That’s why I undertook the ceremony.” She clasped her sweaty hands together. “When you nearly kissed me the other morning, I thought I was dreaming,” she continued softly, unable to look at him. “I wanted you to kiss me. I felt like a parched plant on the high desert plateau of the Andes, with your kiss like life-giving moisture.” She felt a flush rise from her neck into her face at the admission. Culver’s intense inspection felt like the heat of a fire upon her.
“Last night, I saw so very much. I saw Morgan… .” She lifted her head and gazed at him. “Ramirez has been torturing him brutally. They have given him drugs to drain information from him. He is like a robot, from what I can see. He is alive, but not in his body. Do you know what I mean?”
“Drugs disconnect you, Pilar,” Culver agreed harshly. “Damn. I knew Ramirez would do that to him. But you say he’s alive?”
“Yes, I saw in my vision where he is. They no longer guard him within the compound. Morgan sits on a small bunk in a tiny room on the second floor of the casa. He sits staring into space, unmoving. I saw his shadow—the part that is invisible yet gives us life in this physical body—lying beside him on the floor.”
“What does that mean?”
“That he is slowly dying.”
“He’s probably been drugged so many times that he’s toxic,” Culver muttered. “That son of a bitch!” He tightened his hands into fists as he referred to Ramirez.
Sadly, Pilar touched her necklace of orchids. “He may not survive, either. My vision—” she waved her hand in the air “—became murky, and I saw us dead. In another phase of it, I saw Morgan alive, but I was dead. In another, we both barely survived the mission.”
“How do you interpret that?” Culver knew that shamans under the influence of an altered state created by the vision vine often saw the future broken down into different paths a person could take. One thing he’d learned from shamans in Peru—alternate realities represented choices. What the person chose would manifest physically. Desperately he wondered which choice Pilar would opt for. In his heart, he knew she would struggle toward life, for Rane. But bullets didn’t choose who they would kill, and Ramirez would murder them without a second thought.
“Choices,” she whispered brokenly. “I’ll have the choice to live or die.” Rubbing her hands on the thighs of her jeans, she said, “I want to live, but I don’t know if that’s enough to ensure it.”
“What can make the difference between you living and dying?”
Pilar held his agitated stare. “Love.”
Her reply haunted Culver. He twisted around on the log, placing his long legs on either side of Pilar, unable to stand the suffering in her face any longer. Driven by hunger and need, he raised his hands and framed her face. How soft and pliant her skin was. Looking deeply into her now-golden eyes, he saw her lips part. The invitation was there. He felt her suddenly tense, and with his thumbs, he caressed her high cheekbones.
“Mi querida,” he whispered thickly as he leaned down. For an instant, Pilar tried to pull from his grasp, but then, miraculously, he felt her surrender to him. His heart soared with that knowledge as he closed his eyes just as their mouths touched. How long he had been without her! The tentative grazing of her lips sent a sheet of fire raging through him, from his heart downward. He tasted the saltiness of her lips, and then she opened to him, like the fragrant orchids grazing his cheek as he took her mouth more deeply.
The jungle’s humid heat swirled around him as he tasted the nectar of Pilar’s lips. When she fearlessly returned his searching, tentative kiss, fire jagged through him, and he felt rather than heard her moan of surrender as she leaned forward, her breasts brushing against his chest. Her arms lifted and moved across his shoulders, and her fingers slid up his neck into his hair. Her touch was as fiery and beautiful as he remembered.
Hungrily, he slid his mouth against her wet, full lips. She was a thick, waxy orchid, opening to him, presenting him her natural, heady fragrance and offering him her nectar as a woman. Her ragged breath fanned his cheek. Her mouth was pliant even as it plundered his own questing lips. He couldn’t get enough of her, and his fingers tightened on her face, drawing her more deeply against him. The feel of her breasts was enticing as her fingers ranged over his head, then slid across his face, as if rememorizing every detail.
Culver wanted more. Much more. Tilting her head, he dove his tongue deeply into her mouth, where it tangled with hers in a sliding, molten heat, spiraling crazily toward that door deep within him that he’d kept carefully barred and locked ever since that day Pilar had left him so abruptly. Her moan was like a jaguar’s purr, and his pleasure at the sound thrummed through him as if he were a drum being played by her honest need. Her fingers explored his craggy features, outlining his thick eyebrows, caressing his eyelids as softly as butterflies, then moving tenderly down his cheekbones to stroke the hard granite of his jaw.
How much he’d missed all of this. As he dragged Pilar into his arms, Culver pressed her tightly against him, one large hand cradling her back, holding her as close as he could without actually entering her. Volcanic heat exploded through him as her small hand moved downward, sliding beneath his shirt and over his collarbone. As their hurried breathing mingled, Culver’s heart thudded without relief. He tunneled his fingers urgently through her bound hair, rewarded by the feel of it loosening beneath his insistence. The ribbon holding the thick, luxurious mass eased, and the strands came cascading down over his hand and arm. The orchids’ fragrance combined with her natural, earthy scent. Culver had never felt more alive than when she was in his arms, making exquisite love to her. He’d never felt the devastating, numbing—death of the soul as he had when she’d left him.
In some dim corner of his now barely functioning mind, he began to understand on a new level the concept of the worlds a shaman traverses in his or her inner journeys. Pilar was his life and death. As her mouth crushed against his and they clung wildly to each other, he felt reborn, as if all his dying grief had been transformed in that instant when she had surrendered willingly to him once again. He cared about nothing at this point except Pilar, and the dreaded possibility that she might be torn from him again—this time, by one of Ramirez’s bullets.
The jungle’s heat, the slickness of their caressing hands reminded him of the giving of life. Pilar had been right—the jungle was the womb of Mother Earth. And Pilar was his life. His destiny. Culver realized he had known it on some inner level all along, but had been too bitterly afraid to admit it even to himself. Now she was here in his arms, exchanging intimacies he had only dreamed of.
Thunder rumbled warningly overhead. Vaguely, Culver acknowledged it and knew that pouring rain soon would strike the jungle canopy with fury. Tearing his mouth from Pilar’s, he stared down into her golden eyes. His fingers trembled as they tunneled into her hair on either side of her precious face. The words, I love you, nearly burst from him, but Culver stopped himself. He knew the folly of opening the depths of his emotions to Pilar. Last time, she’d abandoned him at his darkest hour of need.
Wrestling to contain the feelings rumbling through him like the approaching thunderstorm, Culver gripped Pilar’s shoulders and rested his brow against hers. He felt her hands flatten against his chest, felt their burning warmth seem to sear through the damp cotton of his shirt. Though aching as never before to love her fully, completely, he forced himself to release her—and saw a matching desire for him in her eyes.
Pilar’s long-ago rejection had left him believing she would never want him again. The discovery tha
t she did was bittersweet. Nothing could come of him giving her his heart again. He simply wasn’t willing to risk it. The pain was too great for him to endure a second time. It would kill him.
“It’s going to rain,” Culver muttered thickly, pushing himself to his feet. Stumbling like a drunken man toward his pack, he absorbed all of his reeling emotions. He felt as if he’d consumed the fury of the coming storm: an incredible tension raged between the longing to lose his soul to Pilar again and the need to prevent that very tragedy. Thunder rumbled again. The storm was within three miles, the rain less than fifteen minutes away.
As they resettled their packs on their shoulders and headed more deeply into the jungle, Pilar struggled with the gamut of emotions Culver had released with his powerful, unexpected kisses. Though sunlight overhead was dispersed by the canopy of trees, occasionally an actual beam of light would find its way to the damp, leaf-strewn jungle floor. Most of the time, the light was dappled and in constant motion, like the patterns of light reflected off a mirrored ball hanging above a dance floor. Clouds were moving in, though, and Pilar watched as shadows began to encroach on the sun-speckled jungle. The storm was approaching, but it was nothing to match the storm she was experiencing within her. Her lower body ached with a burning memory she couldn’t seem to banish, of Culver, deep inside her, moving with her, showering life into her just as the rain sated the thirsty jungle.
Pilar walked silently at his shoulder, and a rush of relief flowed through her. Thank God Culver had broken their kiss. He had more sense than her errant body did. She knew all too well the supreme danger of giving herself to him. At this point, without an exploration of the full truth of what had happened, it could only cause him pain.
No, Pilar told herself, shaken by the thought, she wasn’t willing to risk the possible consequences of opening herself up to him and telling him everything. She just couldn’t. She had too much to lose.
“It’s funny,” Culver muttered eventually, the sound of his voice instantly deadened by the thick vegetation around them, “I thought I knew what dying was all about when you left me. I grieved as if you were dead. Now you tell me you might die, and I’m feeling it all over again, only worse.”
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