Dangerous Pursuit (The Protectors) Read Free

returned to plague her in Rio as she waited while her brother’s neighbor, whom Mark had said always had his spare key, let her into Mark’s place. Before her lay the wreckage of a once presentable bachelor’s apartment.
    Everything was torn or shattered, nothing left untouched. Someone had searched this place very thoroughly, and she knew it was connected with Mark’s mysterious phone call the week before.
    Samantha moved slowly into her brother’s apartment. Suddenly she knew the fear Diana felt looking down at the rushing river. And Samantha knew what she had to do next: go to the Amazon to Manaus.

CHAPTER TWO
     
    Brock Slader watched the dark Latin man sitting across the table. He had dreaded this meeting, and now Brock paused to sip his thick Brazilian coffee and try to gain some control of himself, of the situation. The conversation was not going the way he had hoped.
    Brock welcomed the stirring of the air from the overhead fan as his gray eyes met the man’s black ones. Each appraised the other. Brock concluded that the Latin meant every word of his threat.
    Brock set his cup down and stared into the man’s dark eyes. “Okay,” he replied, “I’ll do it. It seems I don’t have any other choice.”
    “No, my friend, you don’t.” The Latin stood, shook his hand, and left.
    Disgusted, Brock tossed a few bills onto the table and started for the lobby of the hotel where he had to wait. He found a lumpy chair that had a clear view of the front door and sat down.
     
     * * *
     
    Samantha entered the lobby of the Grand Hotel and instantly understood why Mark had said the hotel didn’t live up to its name. The furniture with its faded material and scratched wood had seen better days. The tiles were worn and several ceiling fans were the only means of cooling the room. The humidity of the jungle city at the “wedding” of two mighty rivers, the Amazon and the Rio Negro, was stifling.
    But at the moment Samantha didn’t care about those things. She only wanted to locate her brother, and this was the last place he had been heard from. Mark hadn’t returned to Rio as she had hoped; no one there had seen him in weeks.
    She squared her shoulders and walked up to the reception desk, setting her suitcase on the floor beside her, then rummaging through her purse until she found the pamphlet she had been looking for. Spanish for the Traveler was the only thing she had had in her store, and though she had known Spanish wasn’t the official language of Brazil, she had grabbed it as she had left her store.  
    She flipped through the pamphlet until she came to the phrase she wanted, praying her high school Spanish would be enough in a country that spoke Portuguese. Why hadn’t she stocked up on some phrase books in Portuguese?
    “Do you speak English?” Samantha winced at her awful imitation of Spanish. She had barely made passing grades in the subject in high school.
    The young man behind the desk frowned and looked at her questioningly.
    “Uhh…” Samantha scanned her phrase book. Weren’t the Portuguese and Spanish languages alike, at least enough for her to be understood? She tried again in her stilted Spanish, “Do you speak Spanish?”
    The clerk began to speak rapidly, but not in Spanish or English. Samantha didn’t understand a word he said. Why did Brazil have to be the only country in South America that didn’t speak Spanish? Then she would at least have a fighting chance—well, maybe a fighting chance to be understood.
    Samantha held up her hand to stop his flow of words, but it seemed he didn’t even understand sign language. She glanced about frantically, and her gaze collided with a man’s across the lobby. Amusement brightened his gray eyes. He rose to his feet and strode toward her in one fluid motion.
    “May I help?” he asked in flawless English with a slight Texan drawl.
    “You’re American!” Relief fluttered through her, and she smiled.
    “I couldn’t help overhearing your