Snakes. God. Her nemeses. No artisan had put the paint beneath his skin. The serpents were crudely drawn, yet there was power in the simple, bold lines crossing and recrossing each other down his back.
Eaten by an anaconda, so the rumor went, and so it might have been, she thought, her gaze drifting down the long, intertwined curves, his former life devoured by what had happened to him.
Travers shrugged into a shirt he'd picked up out of the canoe and turned toward the cabin. For a moment, he stood still, looking off into the mist-bound forest, and her gaze went to the chunk of rock crystal and the jaguar teeth hanging from the cord around his neck—a shaman's crystal.
Another uneasy sensation coursed a path up her spine. This was him, she realized, not the reprobate of the rumors. He was no waterfront tramp, no drunk, no matter how drunk he'd gotten with Fat Eddie. He was something altogether different, and this was his place—the wild river and the rain forest.
In Pancha's she'd wondered if he knew how to use the crystal. It was considered a powerful talisman, both a protection from one's enemies in the Otherworld, and a way of seeing beyond the boundaries of this world. In Pancha's she'd wondered just how far over the edge he'd gone.
Far enough and then some, she decided… and then some more. She glanced down at the book in her hands. She doubted if Gabriela had underestimated him, but she knew Fat Eddie had, and so had she. Before his disappearance, he'd been a lauded naturalist, a scientific adventurer who had built a reputation for going beyond the proscribed boundaries of conventional wisdom, geographically and academically.
She would put a dollar to anyone's dime that he hadn't changed in that respect, that he was still going beyond the proscribed boundaries, maybe even into the shaman's realm—or so he might believe. She lifted her gaze from the writhing snakes drawn in his log. She wasn't sure what she believed about him, but there he stood, the most brilliantly infamous Harvard ethnobotanist to ever come out of the Ivy League, with row upon red row of shoroshoro beads wrapped around his ankle, barefoot and more than half naked on the deck of an Amazon riverboat with feathers tied in his hair.
And that tattoo, the shamanic abstraction of a man's cerebral fissure if she'd ever seen one, and she'd seen plenty up on the Vaupes.
His existence didn't revolve around something as simple as taking passengers up and down the river or being the fat man's pawn, quite the contrary. The edge he'd gone over was the border onto an abyss—and there the hell she was, trapped with him on a boat named Sucuri.
CHAPTER 10
Releasing a deep breath, will glanced over his shoulder toward the cabin where he'd left her sleeping. She'd ruined him. One little blond-haired, too-smart-for-her-own-good woman with two crates of illegal guns had gotten on his boat and ruined him. It seemed almost impossible.
He'd spent two years working the river, getting to know every caboclo settlement and tributary on both shores, and doing a lot of chasing of his own tail, and the same trip that had finally nabbed him Corisco Vargas had also saddled him with Annie Parrish—the one-woman riot squad.
Good God. His life was on the line, and she was gnawing at the rope.
The signal he'd been waiting for sounded through the trees, a pounding rhythm of manguare drumbeats that would be picked up and repeated the length of the river north, and those who understood the message would be warned to beware and to watch for the Sucuri.
“Watch her sink like a stone or go up in flames,” he muttered, heading toward the main cabin. Fat Eddie was out for blood, more than blood, if he could get it.
While Will would be the last person to certify his waterfront amigos as reliable, they all knew chaos when they saw it, and when he'd finally raised Diego Martinelli in Santo Antonio on the radio just before dawn, the old sot had confirmed that chaos had arrived with hellfire and a torch.
Stepping inside the cabin door, he was surprised to see his own personal bête noire awake and stirring. She looked slightly rumpled, but no worse the wear for their long night.
Good, he thought, she's going to need her strength— just as he was going to need his to keep from shaking her, or doing something really stupid, like making a pass. Anything between them had nowhere to go. He wasn't crazy enough to let it go anywhere. But rumpled, like everything else, looked good on Annie Parrish. Damn good. In that respect, she was the most amazing creature. Wet, muddy, scraped up, and wild haired—she managed to look good through it all, fresh faced and soft skinned, her small body lithely curved, her eyes bright and curiously aware behind her gold-rimmed glasses.
And the little white T-shirt she'd put on that morning looked especially good.
It fit.
It more than fit, and all he could think was that she'd picked a damn poor time to run out of baggy shirts. God help him if it rained and she got wet.
“Good morning,” she said, her expression oddly subdued, wary even.
Justifiably wary, in his opinion.
“Not exactly,” he said, not even attempting to lie. It was a hell of a morning, no matter how he looked at it. He had to get rid of her, the quicker the better, and he'd be damned if he knew how to do it.
She accepted his curmudgeonly greeting with an equanimous nod and a question. “The manguares. What are they saying?”
“It's a warning to stay off the main river. Fat Eddie torched Santo Antonio about ten o'clock last night,” he said, reaching past her and pouring himself a cup of coffee. “They're still fighting the flames.”
He sipped the hot brew, strong and black, and had to admit she made good coffee. The prato feito she'd made for dinner had been good, too, even if he had eaten it hours later.
“Fat Eddie set the town on fire?” A note of guilt crept into her voice. Also justifiable in his opinion.
“Actually, just the dock, but then somebody's fishing shack caught on fire, and it was all downhill after that.” He took another sip, looking at her over the rim of his cup. She'd done a good job of making herself at home in his galley, such as it was, but he didn't recall culinary skills as being at the top of his list of desirable traits in a woman. As he recalled, he'd usually just stopped at desire, his and the woman's, and called it good.
“Was anybody hurt?”
“Not when I talked to my friend on the radio this morning, but I thought it best to send out a warning. There's a rubber-tappers settlement not too far from here, and an Indian village a few miles beyond that.”
She glanced away at his answer, doing that slow sweep of the eyelashes thing that he swore to God he'd never noticed on another human being. But he noticed it on her. He noticed how long her eyelashes were, their color a golden brown to match her eyebrows. He noticed the softness of her cheeks… her mouth.
His gaze drifted farther, down the front of her T-shirt, over her shorts and down the length of her legs, before settling on her bare feet. He'd like to call it good with her—but the last time he'd checked, and appearances aside, he didn't have a death wish.
He sighed and lifted his gaze back to her face. He was glad to see she was wearing a gun. He was afraid she was going to need it. He didn't know what was in her little black pack, but when he'd left her shortly after dawn, she'd had it buckled around her waist, and she'd worn it all the previous day. It was the only thing she owned that he hadn't gone through with a fine-tooth comb—and what an amazingly deadly cache of treasures she had hauled on board his boat. If he'd been a policeman, he would have arrested her himself.
But she'd looked damned sweet asleep—damned sweet and perfectly, metaphorically edible—her body limply relaxed in her hammock, her lips partly open. He'd wanted to kiss her, press his mouth to hers and slip his tongue inside, taste her. He'd wanted to feel her come awake in his arms, rise against him and return his kiss. Instead, he'd checked to make sure her pistol was loaded and closed the door behind him.
“São Gabriel is out, but I think we can make it to the Salesians at Barcelos tonight,” he told her. “If we can get Gabriela to call in a plane,
Bogotá is still your best bet for an international flight, but Venezuela is closer, and anywhere out of Brazil will be enough to throw Fat Eddie off your trail.” It wasn't that he didn't have a plan. He just didn't have a way of forcing her to buy into it—other than force itself. He hoped it wouldn't come to that, but he certainly wasn't above it. Not by a long shot.
“And your trail?” she asked, surprising him by meeting his gaze directly, a flash upward of hazel eyes shot through with green and gold.
She was a cat. Fat Eddie had gotten that much right.
“I can handle Fat Eddie.”
“So can I.” She leaned back against the counter and crossed her arms over her chest. She was still wary, still looking guilty as hell, but there wasn't any hesitation in her statement. She could handle Fat Eddie.
He didn't doubt that she would try. She'd made her claim to fame long before the Woolly Monkey Incident. What he couldn't figure out was why she would still want to “handle” the fat man. Merda, she'd seen Johnny Chang's head.
“There's a point where ambition crosses the line into foolishness.” And she was skirting the edge.
“If I get there, I'll send you a postcard,” she said coolly, too coolly to suit him.
“It's not just Fat Eddie Mano,” he said, though he knew damn well that she knew the facts as well as he did. “He's got a hundred jagunços working for him and access to hundreds more.”
“You're not working for him. Wherever you're taking his gemstones, it's no favor to him,” she said, surprising him again.
Okay, he thought, she's shrewd, just one more reason to get rid of her.
“Let's say it's mutually beneficial,” he conceded, and so help him God, she smirked, twisted her lips up into a wry little curve that all but called him a liar.
He let out a short laugh in disbelief and set his coffee aside.
“Can you explain to me just exactly what it does take to scare you?” He really wanted to know. Hell, he was scared for her. He'd been scared for her since Eddie had dragged that damned head out of the water.
“Fat Eddie scares me,” she admitted—much to his relief. He didn't like to think she was crazy. “Just not enough to turn me around and send me packing.”
Of course not.
“Nobody needs the kind of firepower you have up on my deck to research peach palms. Israeli Galil rifles? With two hundred rounds of ammo? Hell, you're better armed than half the Brazilian army. Why?” He arched his brow, demanding an explanation, which—from the look on her face—he wasn't going to get.
“You opened my crates?”
“Opened, inventoried, and catalogued, and I have to tell you that, including the piece you're wearing on your hip, you've got one hell of an arsenal working for you. I mean, what are you planning on doing with two dozen grenades?”
Her gaze narrowing, she pursed her lips and told him exactly nothing.
“And the dynamite, for God's sake?”
Still nothing.
“Who is Jackson Reid?” he asked, changing tactics, and because he was damned curious about the man whose name had shown up three different times in her supplies— once on a duffel bag address tag, once in indelible marker on a flashlight, and once on a very expensive camera.
“A friend,” she said after a considerable pause, giving him plenty of reason to doubt her answer, but he'd be damned if he would sink so low as to grill her about the men in her life.
“Well, how about telling me where you got this.” He took two steps across the cabin and reached behind the wheel, pulling out a blowgun dart. He'd found it in one of her packs with a piece of crumpled paper shoved in next to it. “‘Leave Manaus,'” he quoted the message. “That's a little too anonymous for Fat Eddie, so I'm guessing Johnny Chang sent this to you?”
“Is there anything I own that you haven't been through?” she asked peevishly.
“Other than the pockets on the shorts you're wearing and your little black pack, nothing.”
The startled look she gave him quickly transformed into one of galled sensibilities, as if he were the real piece of work on the Sucuri.
He wanted to kiss it off her face.
“The dart was stuck in your boat, Dr. Travers,” she said, commandeering the high ground, such as it was. “Certainly, I considered showing it to you, and if you'd been sober yesterday morning I might have remembered to drag it out.”
“Considered?”
“In case it was meant for you.”
“No.” He shook his head, not buying her theory. “Nobody would threaten me with something like this. It's too simple, a cheap jungle trick meant to scare a—” He stopped suddenly, recognizing his error.
“A woman?” she finished, her eyebrows rising above the rims of her glasses.
“A turista,” he filled in, a concession she seemed to accept, though she was the only woman he would have conceded the point to, her and Gabriela.
“Okay. Let's cut to the chase. I can pay you a lot more than I already have to get me to Santa Maria. A lot more,” she said, proving that she at least understood that he was holding most of the cards.
But the offer was ridiculous.
With a flick of his wrist, he impaled the dart into the wooden cowling above the helm's windows. “You're working on a grant. You don't even have gas money, unless Gabriela doles it out. So what are you going to pay me with?”
“Guns.”
He added resourcefulness to her list, but shook his head.
“If I can get rid of you, I don't need any guns. I can patch things up with Fat Eddie, tell him I was mulher louco, crazy for a woman, so I lied to keep you with me for the night.” He reached for his coffee. “He'll understand that.” At least Will thought it was worth a shot.
She glanced out the window, and he noticed a trace of color tinging her cheeks. Intrigued, he looked at her more closely, thinking she couldn't possibly be blushing—not Amazon Annie.
“And what are you going to tell him happened to me when he notices I'm not around anymore?”
His mouth curved into a quick grin. “This is Brazil, Dr. Parrish, where the most common postcoital response in a woman is to throw something and walk out.”
“We're in the middle of nowhere,” she objected, tossing a glance in his direction and making an absent gesture toward the forest all around. The color across her face deepened to a rosy hue.
Will paused with his cup halfway to his mouth, going from being mildly intrigued to utterly fascinated, wondering if it was the thought of being in a postcoital situation with him that disconcerted her, or just the thought of sex in general—because she was blushing, definitely blushing.
He took a slow, considering sip of his coffee. He should have asked Gabriela more questions about her, more about Yavareté. The old doctor had always been straight with him. She would have told him anything, if he'd asked.
“Being in the middle of nowhere is no deterrent to a determined woman,” he said, “and you, in particular, have proven to be a very determined woman.”
“Money, then,” she offered, tightening her arms across her chest, a body signal he didn't have any trouble interpreting in and of itself, but when combined with the blush burning up her cheeks, the message got a little more complex. “I will have money, more than grant money, a lot more. You can set your own price, and I'll pay you when I get it.”
He gave his head another slow shake. “You're working way too hard here, Doctor. You only have two things I'm interested in, and money isn't one of them.”
She went very still across from him in the cabin, and he knew beyond doubt that he had her full and undivided attention.
“The first thing is information,” he told her, not waiting for her to ask. “And the second…” He shrugged, letting his voice trail off. He had no intention of telling her the second. Her imagination was doing fine at filling in the blank all on its own. Her eyes widened slightly, before shying away from his. Her blush deepened even more, and he pretty much instantaneously figured
out at least one thing that disconcerted the hell out of her—him and the thought of sex in the same breath.
I'll be damned, he thought. She was tough, all right, but he'd bet his boat and everything in it, including Fat Eddie's emeralds, that whatever Corisco Vargas had done to her, it hadn't included rape. Her reaction to him was too unabashedly coy, not frightened. She hated reacting to him at all. He could tell. But she couldn't control it. She couldn't meet his eyes and think about sex at the same time.
His grin broadened. If she wasn't careful, she was going to charm the pants right off him, and then there would be hell to pay.
“I'm talking a lot of money,” she said, her gaze firmly focused somewhere in the vicinity of her feet.
“And I'm still thinking Barcelos, by nightfall if we're lucky. By this time tomorrow you could be on your way to Miami.”
“So you get the guns either way,” she said, flashing him a mutinous look. It was a flat-out accusation she didn't sound any too happy about.
“Yeah,” he admitted, forcing himself to get back to business. He could fantasize all he wanted, but Annie Parrish was off limits. “I get the guns either way.” And a hell of a lot of use he had for a bunch of guns. Of course, giving them back to Fat Eddie would go a long way toward mending the bridges he'd burned last night.
“I'm not getting on a plane in Barcelos,” she insisted, not surprising him in the least. But as far as he was concerned, it was a done deal. He was going to save her and help himself, whether she liked it or not.
“Well, go ahead and cast off. The idea might look a lot better to you once we get there.” And if it didn't, Will figured that was just too damn bad. One way or the other, he was getting her the hell out of Brazil.
CHAPTER 11
Barcelos came into view shortlybefore nightfall, its riverfront marketplace bustling with people buying up the day's last bargains. Merchants up and down the docks were hawking their wares. Fishermen had their catches laid out on pallets, undercutting each other with cries of “Bar Mo! Bar Mo!”
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