River of Eden by Tara Janzen

Author:Tara Janzen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Amazon, Giant Anaconda, Contemporary Romance, Rainforest Biology
ISBN: 055358393X
Publisher: Tara Janzen
Published: 2002-01-01T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ~ 17

Annie waited until he’d pushed off in his canoe, before she dared admit anything, even to herself. She’d had a moment of insanity, that was all, just a moment when he’d had her running scared, but his kiss had kicked in her natural instincts—not just her little-used, rusty ones, but her good, old, reliable natural ones, which were to win, to win that damned orchid and drag it out of the deep, dark forest into the light of day and make its mysteries hers.

Months ago in Laramie, she’d known the dangers she would face, and nothing had changed. Not even the addition of Fat Eddie was enough to skew her odds of survival. They had always been slim, but she’d been living on slim odds since the day she’d first stepped foot in the Rio Vaupes, and living on the edge of those odds is what had brought her everything she’d ever dreamed of in botany—an enviable reputation as one of the best, one of the very best, naturalists in South America, and a discovery to cement her place in history.

It was the kissing that messed her up, and where all that kissing was bound to lead. Sex was a sure trip to trouble. Three days spent chained to a jail cell wall in Yavareté, the last one stark naked, had more than proved that to her.

Vargas was a whacko son of a bitch, and though he hadn’t raped her, he’d given her plenty to think about.

Plenty she kept forgetting every time Will Travers kissed her. She didn’t remember ever being kissed the way he kissed her, ever reacting to a man the way she reacted to him. She was beginning to think the reason she’d been so successful in not getting too tangled up with a man for so long had more to do with never having met the right one than it did with her lofty goals.

Guns—that’s what she really needed, not a man, and guns were what she’d brought with her up the river.

Fortified with a reality she could handle, she picked up her coffee and headed outside. It might be dark before he returned. She would have to set out a lantern for him to find his way back.

Or not, she thought, taking a sip of coffee. She looked downriver, toward Santa Maria. The water was full of caimans, more than she was used to seeing this close to the mission, their knobby hides just breaking the surface. Maybe the stories about the monster jacarés were true. She’d never been to the headwaters of the Marauiá, but the caimans down near the mouth of the river tonight actually did look bigger than the ones she’d seen elsewhere in the Amazon.

A splash behind her had her whipping around, just in time to see what looked like a tree trunk submerge beneath the river. An uneasy feeling coursed a path down her spine.

“Great,” she muttered. Now was not a good time for her to suddenly get spooky about the animal life of the Amazon.

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