River of Eden (2 page)

As she watched him dance, her mouth curved into a rueful grin. What a waste, she thought, and what a great opportunity for her. With William Travers out of the running, a place in the history books was up for grabs, and she was going to take it. Still, she would have loved to have met him in his prime and given him a run for his money, before he'd gone to seed—and like everyone else in the Amazon and academia, she couldn't help but wonder what in the hell had happened to him. He'd been on top of the world before he'd gone off and gotten himself lost.

The music changed again, and Travers grasped his partner's waist with both hands. The woman went willingly into his embrace, the two of them slithering together in a serpentine mating dance.

“Damn,” she muttered. They really were going to do the deed right there on the dance floor, as if she didn't already have enough problems.

Johnny Chang, the two-bit felon she'd been dealing with all week, had warned her to leave Manaus once their business was done, and God knew she'd tried, but the boat she'd been counting on had gone belly-up and
left her dry-docked. She couldn't afford any more delays. She had to be out of the city by morning.

She glanced out the door. The rain looked as if it would go on forever.

The radio sputtered to a stop behind her, and the sudden quiet drew her attention back to the bar and a bit of good news: Travers still had his pants on.

Thank God for little favors, she thought and moved forward. She needed to cut her deal while she still had the chance.

“Dr. Travers,” she said, pitching her voice to carry above the racket of the rain on the roof.

The man she'd been tracking all over the waterfront turned, weaving slightly with the woman still in his arms, and Annie had to fight back a pang of irritation. Drunk before three o'clock, he was in worse shape than she'd expected, and she hadn't expected much. On the other hand, with him two sheets to the wind, talking herself onto his boat ought to be a piece of cake.

“Dr. Travers,” she repeated, approaching him with a smile firmly in place. She'd never been much in the bees-and-honey department, but she knew enough to make nice when she wanted something.

“Will,” he said, smiling back, his dark-eyed gaze slightly confused as he studied her face. He had a day's growth of stubble along his jaw, macaw feathers tied into his hair behind his left ear, and possibly the longest, thickest eyelashes she'd ever seen on a grown man. “Just Will.” With a glance over his shoulder and a gesture, he ordered a beer. The woman was plastered to him.

Probably holding him up, Annie thought, exasperated with herself for needing him. He and the woman leaned a bit too far, having to take a half-step to stay upright, and
Annie couldn't even keep a forced smile on her face. No doubt about it, he'd started his party hours ago and was headed downhill. His hair was wildly disheveled. His shirt was completely unbuttoned, and with his pants low slung and hanging by a thread and the grace of God on his hips, he looked as if he were coming undone, as if his clothes could finish the slow slide off his body at any second.

She had the most ridiculous urge to straighten him up a bit, pull him together and tell him to get a hold of himself.

Instead, she offered her hand and introduced herself.

“Annie Parrish,” she said, noticing the
genipa
dye trailing in a thin line around the base of his throat like a serpentine necklace. A chunk of quartzite strung on a knotted palm-fiber cord, a shaman's crystal, hung around his neck. The biggest jaguar teeth she'd ever seen flanked the stone, two wickedly curved fangs telling her the crystal was meant to be a thing of great power. She wondered where Will Travers had gotten it, and if he had a clue as to what it was.

Glancing up, she met his thick-lashed gaze and lazy grin, and somehow didn't have a doubt.

He knew, and probably thought he was really onto something.

Her opinion of him dipped even lower. He was a scientist, one of Harvard's finest, for crying out loud, or had been. He should know better than to believe in magic crystals and jaguar teeth. At one time, before he'd gone and gotten himself lost, he probably had known better.

Heatstroke, some people said. That's what had happened to him, massive heatstroke leading to temporary derangement, though there were differing opinions on
how “temporary” the derangement might be. He'd been back for two years and still looked plenty over the edge to her.

“Annie Parrish,” he repeated. “Dr. Annie Parrish?” He took her hand, his expression turning curious—a common enough reaction. Like him, she'd had her moment of notoriety in the past. Unlike him, she hadn't made a lifetime commitment to scandal, not yet anyway.

“Yes. I'm working with the River Basin Coalition, RBC. Dr. Gabriela Oliveira suggested I contact you.”

“Ah, Gabriela,” he said, still holding on to her hand, his mouth curving into another grin. He turned to whisper something to his dance partner.

The woman smiled and pressed herself against him, whispering back, asking him to come with her, a sultry offer on a hot, tropical afternoon, an offer Annie was afraid he wouldn't refuse—and then there she'd be, left standing in Pancha's, while he and the woman finished their dance behind closed doors.

Or maybe he was thinking of taking her with them. He was holding on to her as if he weren't going to let her go.

Well, he could try, she thought, if he was feeling lucky. She had a reputation, well earned, if a little overblown, of protecting herself. If he'd heard about her at all, he must have heard that.

She tried pulling her hand back, and he tightened his grip, showing surprising strength for someone who was having trouble even staying on his feet, and suddenly Annie wondered just how interesting the afternoon might get. Too interesting, she decided, preparing to retrieve her hand, an effort that proved unnecessary when he loosened his grip and slid his hand up her arm, still touching her,
but not holding her, as if he were merely keeping track of her while he murmured a reply to the woman. The dancer pouted through all his softly spoken Portuguese. When he was finished, she brushed her lips across his cheek and whispered,
“Gato,”
before turning to leave. Sexy man, she meant, like a cat.

He was pretty damn big for a cat, Annie thought, but she would admit to a certain suppleness to all that lean muscle—and a damn good bit of pure power. However dissolute his lifestyle, it hadn't taken an obvious physical toll, and possibly just the opposite.

The only photograph she'd seen of him had been on his book jackets, taken long before he'd spent his year lost in the rain forest, and there had been some undeniable changes since then. He was leaner, harder, the lines of his face more stark, his features and his body more carved than molded. From her perspective, eye level with his chest, he seemed to be made up entirely of corded muscle covered with smoothly tanned skin, none of which had shown in the picture of him neatly buttoned and tucked into an oxford shirt with a tie. He obviously hadn't spent all his time drinking in cantinas, and wherever he'd been, he'd covered some ground. She knew the look of long miles and short rations. His body was stripped of any excess. He didn't have an ounce of fat on him.

“So you spoke with Gabriela today?” he asked, his gaze coming back to her after the mulatto woman had finished weaving a drunken path to a bar stool. Watching her, Annie had been forced to revise her opinion about who had been holding up who.

“Yes. She told me you were headed to Santa Maria in the morning.”

“You want to go to Santa Maria?” he asked, one eyebrow lifting in question. Sweat-dampened hair clung to the sides of his face, pale blond strands overlaying dark brown, accentuating his cheekbones and overall vagabond appearance.

“Yes.”

“But not on the RBC launch with Gabriela?” His beer arrived, and he thanked the bartender.
“Obrigado.”

“The engine broke down,” she explained. “The parts are coming up from Santarem. It's going to take at least a week, and I'm in rather a hurry… very, uh… busy.” She carefully chose a word after a slight pause. “Too busy to wait.” She couldn't very well tell him she had to get the hell out of Manaus before her luck ran out. That sort of confession was bound to rouse some questions she had no intention of answering.

His grin broadened again, coming as easy as the rain outside and apparently as often. “Gabriela did mention the possibility of a… busy… woman wanting passage.” With his beer in hand, he slid his other hand low on her back and gave her a little push toward the cantina's front door, moving her along with more purpose than she would have thought he could muster.

“Yes, I'm… uh,” she said, glancing around, wondering if she'd missed something. “I'm doing research on the—” Her voice trailed off when she noticed two men rising from a table near the bar. One was tall with buzz-cut black hair. The other was younger, shorter, and dumpier with a cigarette hanging from between his lips. Both of them were watching Travers with grim expressions on their faces. The glint of a partially sheathed knife flashed on the shorter one's hip.

O-kay
, she thought, remembering a couple of other things she'd heard about the mysterious William Sanchez Travers. One rumor that had picked up some speed was that he'd spent his lost year searching for and finding a city of gold buried in time and lianas in the wilderness of Amazonia. He did have a pair of hefty gold bracelets hanging around his wrist, gleaming dully in the low light of the cantina, and there was nothing like gold to bring out the mercenaries and
bandidos
in backcountry Brazil. Of course, people who had known him before he'd disappeared swore that even if he had found an ancient lost city of gold, the wealth wouldn't have interested him nearly as much as the archaeobotany of the site. But even she could see that he'd changed in some rather dramatic ways from the photograph on his book jacket, maybe more than the people who had known him before realized.

Regardless, he was ushering her out the door, and he had a couple of very
bandido-looking
dudes staring holes in the middle of his back.

“You do know there's a man with a knife watching us. Right?” she asked.

“Think nothing of it,” he replied with a shrug.

“Do you know him?” she asked, taking another quick glance and thinking a lot about it. She'd been on more than a few waterfronts along the Rio Negro, and in more than her share of roughneck bars back home in the States, once or twice in less than ideal situations. In her opinion the only situation less ideal than a grim-faced man with a knife was a grim-faced man with a gun. Whether the men were Wyoming cowboys or Brazilian
caboclos
, the outcome was never good.

“The one with the knife in the orange T-shirt is named Juanio. The man trying to hide a shoulder holster under his vest is called Luiz.”

“Shoulder holster?” That meant a gun. The day was definitely taking a dive.

“Garimpeiros,”
he explained, as if that would be reassuring.

“Gold miners,” she translated aloud, her curiosity and wariness ratcheting up a few dozen notches. Gold miners were the bane of much of the Amazon and a particularly poisonous thorn in her side.

“Don't worry. They're only here to entertain me.”

Annie didn't bother to hide the doubtful arching of her eyebrows. “And are you finding them entertaining?” No one could be that self-assured when he had a man with a knife and another with a gun at his back.

He glanced down at her, and his mouth curved into a mischievous grin. “Very.”

“And the woman?” she asked, wondering how, or if, the dancer was involved.

His grin broadened. “Cara? Part of the package. She dances a few dances. Juanio buys me a few drinks, and Luiz makes sure I don't get distracted by any
garotas
who wander in off the street.”

Annie slanted him a glance, hardly classifying herself as a
garota
, a lovely girl, who had wandered in off the street. She knew what people saw when they looked at her. “Four-eyed academic” and “muddy-kneed botanist” came to mind, and “pint-sized pit bull” had been mentioned more often than she cared to admit, especially by other field researchers, especially if they were in her field. “Lovely girl” would be a stretch on her best day.

In two more steps, he had her back outside, under the
eaves of the cantina's tin roof, the rain pouring down not six inches from where they were standing.

“I'd say Luiz is doing a damn good job.” Drunk or not, and she wasn't at all sure anymore, he'd just given her a first-class bum's rush.

He answered with a negligent shrug and stepped out from under the eaves. The rain sluiced down his body, instantly plastering his clothes to his rangy frame. He tilted his head back and dragged his hands through his hair, letting the water wash over him. For a moment, he looked like a river creature, sleek and wet, all lean muscle and coiled power, half of this world and half of the other, the rain a veil between water and air. Then he stepped back under the eaves, and the moment passed— but not without leaving her oddly disconcerted.

She didn't know what he was, but she was getting the idea that he wasn't just the simple dockside boat tramp she'd set out to find.

“If you want to come as far as Santa Maria, that's fine with me,” he said, wiping a hand across his face, and then wringing out the tail of his shirt. “Fare is a hundred and twenty
reais
with meals. I'm tying up at the RBC dock tonight and leaving at dawn.”

Before she could say anything, he turned back toward the cantina and within a few steps had melted into the darkened interior with his
garimpeiros
and package-deal mulatto woman. A new song started up on the radio.

“Damn,” she swore softly. She'd seen a lot of wild things in the rain forest, but William Sanchez Travers had just shot to the top of her list.

And who in the hell were those gold miners? She knew
what
they were—trouble.
Garimpeiros
were always trouble, especially when you mixed them with liquor
and guns. Whatever deal he was working, Will Travers was sitting on a powder keg doing business with them. She just wondered how much business he was doing, and whether or not she ought to be hightailing it in another direction.