River of Eden Read Free Page A

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 liquorand 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.
    But damn, he did have a boat, and she had a place on it at dawn, which was more than she'd walked into Pancha's with, and which still made him her best bet for getting out of Manaus—and above all else,
garimpeiros
or not, she needed to get the hell out of Manaus.
    F ROM WHERE HE STOOD in the cantina's doorway, Will watched Annie Parrish make her way down the street. He'd given her a minute before coming back to check on her, and he was glad to see she'd left. He had some business on its way to the cantina, the kind of business best transacted without witnesses. Will had sent a message two hours ago to let Fat Eddie Mano know he was in town. Juanio, Luiz, Cara, and a few others had arrived shortly afterward to empty out Pancha's and keep him in place. Fat Eddie was due any minute.
    A grin curved his mouth, and he lifted his bottle of beer to take a drink—Annie Parrish, the infamous Annie Parrish. When Gabriela had mentioned a woman, she was the last one he would have expected. He hadn't even known they'd let her back into the country. Gabriela must have really pulled some strings. She'd definitely laid her reputation on the line to be working with Annie Parrish, and the reason old Dr. Oliveira might have for doing that intrigued Will almost as much as Annie herself—almost, but not quite.
    Given her reputation, he'd expected her to be bigger,rougher around the edges, more imposing, but she'd barely reached his chin, and the word “rough” was the last one he'd thought when he'd turned around and seen her standing behind him. “Soft” had come to mind, silky soft and golden skinned despite her scraped-up knee and the calluses he'd felt on her palm, and despite the strength of her grip when they'd shaken hands. She'd looked like a wet kitten, with her cropped blond hair sticking out all over and her gaze scrutinizing him from behind her rain-spotted, wire-rimmed glasses. Amazon Annie, he'd heard her called before the unfortunate Woolly Monkey Incident, as the case came to be known. Afterward, she'd only been called persona non grata.
    He'd been way upriver at the time, but he'd heard the stories when he'd returned to Manaus. She'd been kicked out of Brazil by then, but now she was back, her pale hair framing an urchin's face with a freckled nose and cat's eyes—hazel-green—none of which had been mentioned in the stories he'd been told. In them, fact and fiction had melded together to make her sound like one of the original Amazon warrior queens, not the small, intently serious woman who'd been staring up at him from where she'd stood in a puddle of mud with one of her shoes untied. She'd looked a bit scatterbrained, with pencils and a wet notepad sticking out of one of her pockets, soggy papers fanning out of