River of Eden (11 page)

As an accusation, it beat hers hands down—and she knew it. Her gaze shifted away from him with a long sweep of lashes, an action so purely feminine it nearly halted his breath—and he suddenly had a gut-awful feeling that he knew exactly where his sense of responsibility for her was coming from.

His problem wasn't lust. Not just any woman would do. He wanted
her
—man to woman, me Tarzan, you Jane. It didn't make sense, but it didn't have to make sense. She was just there, a usually sopping-wet little grab bag of a renegade botanist with misbehaving hair, perfect legs, and a backbone of pure steel, and he wanted her—jaguar bait.

He wanted to groan. God, his life was already hanging
by a thread. He did not need the trouble she stirred up, literally, by the boatload. What he needed was to get rid of her, and the farther away he could send her, the better.

Amazon Annie, he thought with a stifled curse. With the evidence standing in front of him, it was hard to believe she was the one he'd heard all the stories about. Amazon Annie had bushwacked her way across the watershed of the Vaupes River in eastern Colombia and confirmed half a dozen viable populations of
Griffinia concinna
, the long-endangered elegant blue amaryllis, a species devastated by the felling of rain-forest habitat from Panama to Brazil. Thanks to her, the botanical garden in St. Louis was cultivating a scientifically viable population of its own. Her published dissertation on the family Bromeliaceae was backed up by years of fieldwork and countless hard-won miles trekking through the tropical forests of South America, and like all the naturalists who had gone before her, every mile had yielded a story of hardship and close calls. Some of her stories had become legend on the Amazon, until the last legend, the Woolly Monky Incident, had ruined her.

Rallying, she lifted her chin and met his gaze square on. “I owe you for that,” she admitted. “But it's going to be a hard debt to repay.”

Will appreciated her concession, but in truth, it was an impossible debt to repay.

“I heard you shot your lover.” If she wanted a chance to even the score, he'd just given her one, and by the subtle tightening of her mouth, he knew she understood exactly what he wanted.

“He wasn't my lover.”

When she didn't offer anything more than what
Gabriela had already told him, Will arched his brow, encouraging her to go on.

“He was a
garimpeiro
, a gold miner,” she responded defensively. “I didn't know they were in the area where I was doing my fieldwork, and they sure as hell didn't expect to find me within a few miles of their camp. It was… uh, a clash of culture thing.”

“Clash of culture?” The look he gave her was purely skeptical. Researchers of her caliber didn't make their reputations by clashing with indigenous cultures. “And the monkey?”

“A couple of the miners saw fresh meat in the canopy and shot it. I was on the forest floor and ended up with an armful of terrified, bloody woolly monkey. By the time I'd finished it off, the
garimpeiros
had shown up and were accusing me of trying to steal their game. Things got a little ugly after that.”

Will could imagine.

“So you pulled your gun and shot one of them?”

“No… not quite,” she equivocated. “Back then, I didn't carry a gun, but one of the miners had one, and there was a bit of a scuffle.”

It was remarkable, he thought, how little information she managed to cram into an answer. He tried to imagine her standing out in the rain forest, covered in monkey blood and “finishing off” the wounded animal with her knife, he supposed, though God knew she could have just wrung its neck with her bare hands. Nothing seemed beyond her. Even so, his imagination hit a brick wall when he came to the part about her coming out one gun ahead in a scuffle with a couple of
garimpeiros.

“And from there to Yavareté?” he asked, accepting
her condensed version of events for now, taking what she offered without giving her any grief. If she followed his advice and left for Bogotá, she never had to tell him another damn thing for the rest of her life—a depressing thought. If she didn't leave, he was going to stop being nice.

She mused over his question for a good long while, before she deigned to answer.

“Well,” she started slowly. “The gun aside, I ended up in their camp, an illegal mining operation with the biggest mother lode I've seen anywhere in the Amazon. The mine boss wasn't too happy to see me, but he didn't want the responsibility of killing a
norte-americana
scientist outright. So he called in a Cessna and sent me to Yavareté, where his boss could decide what to do with me.”

“Corisco Vargas.”

“Right.” She nodded, a subtle look of relief passing over her face, as if she'd managed to satisfy his questions without incriminating herself in any more crimes.

Well, he was far from being satisfied with her whitewash.

“And Vargas didn't want to kill you, either.” He made it a statement, since the truth was obvious.

“No,” she said, again without any elaboration. “Three days later, Gabriela came and the next thing I knew, I was deported.”

She made it all sound so straightforward, so simple. A little tussle in the jungle with a dying monkey and a few
garimpeiros
, then three days in Yavareté with Corisco Vargas.

Will wanted to shake her—shake some sense into her. He wanted to drag Johnny Chang's head back out of the water and scare the shit out of her. How in the hell,
he wanted to ask her, have you kept yourself alive this long?

And that was not a friggin' rhetorical question. Nobody could skate on that much luck.

Will glanced out the windows fronting the helm. They had to leave, find a new mooring miles from where Fat Eddie had found them.

He angled his gaze back to her.
Take a woman up the river for me, William, a botanist working out of Santa Maria…
Gabriela had lied to him. Annie Parrish wasn't just a botanist. At her heart she was something else, something more, and that something more was dangerous. Will had hauled any number of scientific researchers up and down the Rio Negro for RBC, some women, some men. Most had lasted the full term of their grants, a few of them hadn't.

They had all been fine people, academics with a sense of adventure. He'd never met a one besides himself who could have managed an illegal arms deal on the Manaus waterfront, until he'd met Dr. Parrish, and he sure as hell hadn't been attracted to any of them—until Annie Parrish.

His gaze skimmed over her. She was still wet, her shirt clinging to the small curves of her breasts, an intrigingly erotic detail of the type he hadn't noticed in too long to remember.

He sighed, then rubbed his hand across the back of his neck and gave her a sideways look.

You're both among the very best, and you're both hell-bent on something up the Rio Negro…
Gabriela hadn't lied about that. He and Dr. Parrish were both hellbent on something. Tutanji had set his course, but Annie Parrish was all on her own, and by his estimation was
sinking fast. He didn't know how many pieces Fat Eddie was going to leave her in if she refused to leave the country, but he knew for damn sure he didn't want to find out.

“Cast off,” he said, turning back to the wheel. “We've got a long night ahead of us.”

CHAPTER 9

A
nnie woke with a start, on the
verge of a scream. She couldn't breathe. Her lungs felt crushed, her rib cage cracking, her legs tangled up with a moving, surging force she couldn't break. She gasped in a breath, opening her eyes wide, ready to fight—but there was nothing, no giant snake squeezing her, no anaconda wrapping her tighter and tighter, using her own exhalations to crush the breath from her body and snap her bones. There was nothing, only the nightmare of being wrapped in coils.

She took another breath and pushed her hair back off her face. It was morning, the boat gently rocking beneath her, the sound of waves lapping up against the hull. A pale light shone through the port window of the
Sucuri
's small aft cabin. She twisted in her hammock to look out the other window. Leaves, green and dripping, were pressed up against the glass.

She let out a soft curse and dragged her hand back through her hair again. The storm had returned and lasted
most of the night, the rain beating at them as they'd slowly chugged up the river. More than once, water had come pouring over the decks, breaching the bow as they had bucked the waves. Just after midnight, Travers had changed course, leaving the main river and once again heading into the
igapó.
By the time he'd found a suitable mooring, the rain had diminished into a pattering of drops on the roof. Annie had fallen asleep to the soft sound, exhausted from the day's trials.

Travers had slept in the forward cabin, rehanging his hammock by the helm. The boat was very quiet, and she wondered if he was awake. She didn't hear anyone moving around, only the scratch of tree limbs scraping against the starboard side and the creak of the hull in the water. Off the boat, the forest was alive with morning. Howler monkeys croaked and roared in the distance, their calls sounding like a herd of prehistoric beasts. Closer to the boat, she heard the squawks and cries of birds rousing from their roosts—comfortingly familiar sounds. With a cup of coffee, strong, black, and Brazilian sweet, she figured she could face the day.

“Damned dream,” she muttered, sinking back into her hammock and rubbing the bridge of her nose. She'd not had it in Manaus, nor during her year stuck in Wyoming, nor in Ecuador or Peru. It was strictly a Black River nightmare, coming to her the first time years ago up on the Vaupes, one of the Rio Negro's biggest tributaries—and her first night back on the river, it had returned in full force.

She swore again, tying not to let the fact of the dream's geographical boundaries freak her out any more than usual, just because she was on a boat with the
unbelievable name
Sucuri.
It wasn't the first time she'd come back to the river and suffered the snake nightmare. It probably wouldn't be the last.

Rousing herself, she slipped out of the hammock. Her glasses were close at hand on a small shelf, so was the gun she'd taken out of one of her crates while Travers had tied up the boat, a 9-millimeter semiautomatic Taurus. She buckled the holster around her waist and put an extra clip in her fanny pack.

Outside the cabin, the world was cool and serene, blanketed in a heavy layer of mist rising off the water. Trees loomed in the white drifts of vapor. Somewhere, something splashed in the river. It was Annie's favorite time of day, before the sun burned a blazing path along the equator and turned the forest into a sauna.

Stepping over to the port side, she noticed the
Sucuri
's canoe was missing. Travers wasn't asleep, she realized. He was gone. The information settled in without too much alarm. Even if he'd wanted to abandon her— which he probably did after the Fat Eddie fiasco—she was nearly one hundred percent sure he wouldn't abandon his boat.

Nearly.

She glanced over her shoulder at the jungle of trees and lianas rising from the flooded forest and the long greenish and white aerial roots of the aroids going down. If she had to, she could find her way out and back to the main flow of the Rio Negro.

Her gaze slid over the trees and epiphytes sheltering the boat. Every species was familiar to an eye trained to find the unfamiliar. The river was not at full height, and with the morning mist draping around every branch and
limb, much of the canopy was still out of sight. But there were orchids up there somewhere, and the rainy season was a good time of year to find many in flower.

Annie, though, had honed her interest down to just one species of orchid,
Epidendrum luminosa
or
Epidendrum parrishi.
Her hand absently went to the fanny pack belted around her waist. She hadn't decided yet what to name the exquisite anomaly she'd discovered on the Cauaburi. Certainly the latter classification would assure her renown throughout the remaining history of the world, another comforting thought on a cool Amazonian morning when she found herself alone, as usual, and somewhat lost, which was not exactly unusual. The rain forest was a big place, and she'd wandered too far from home on more than one occasion.

A bright spot of red on the water caught her eye, a ceiba flower, and she bent down to scoop it up as it floated by. With her fingers just breaking the surface, a dark, sinuous form streaked away from beneath the boat and disappeared into the watery shadows below the trees.

She jerked back, the flower forgotten, her pulse racing.

Sucuri
, the image flashed through her mind.

Peering into the dark water, she strained to see what was undoubtably already gone. After a minute of fruitless searching, she told herself the animal had probably been a caiman, or one of a hundred large species of fish that inhabited the rivers of the Amazon, but least likely an anaconda. Contrary to her nightmare, giant snakes were not lurking in every pool.

Curious, though, she leaned over the side of the deck and let her gaze run over the hull, looking for the damn letters she might have seen yesterday morning, if the paint had been in better shape. As it was, she could just
make out a blue
CUR
above the waterline. The
SU
at the beginning of the word was hopelessly chipped. The
I
at the end was no more than a faint bluish-gray shadow blending into the weathered plank it was painted on, but it was there, SUCURI.