Jinxie's Orchids Read online

  Through it all, Montague and Thiago stood on the deck of the Frenchman’s boat, their expressions grim as they alternately searched the water and the surrounding banks for hints of them.

  Beneath him, Levina whispered, “Are they still there?”

  “Yes. Now hush.” He covered her mouth with his hand. He hadn’t known her for very long, but clearly she was someone unfamiliar with the concept of following directions.

  Thiago pointed down at the caimans in the water. Montague didn’t say anything. He simply skimmed the river bank with his eyes, looking for clues to their escape.

  Swearing under his breath, Takura looked back the way they’d come. The largest of the reptiles had followed them up onto the bank. It was now lying on the slide, watching Takura and inching cautiously forward.

  Squirming under him, Levina rose up just enough to see what he was staring at. When she saw the massive caiman, for the first time recognizing the scaly predator for what it truly was, she squeaked. She also clamped her mouth shut under his muffling hand and her eyes grew even wider.

  After several long minutes, Montague ordered Thiago to the wheelhouse. Finally, they moved one. Montague paced restlessly all around his desk, his blue eyes sweeping the jungle, constantly searching for signs of where they’d gone. Only when the tug finally disappeared around the next bend did Takura halfway relax. Levina squeaked again, but it was several minutes longer before he took his hand from her mouth.

  “Be quiet,” he told her when her mouth immediately snapped open. She closed it again, so hard and fast that her teeth clattered. Tapping him on the shoulder to get his attention, she pointed instead. Glancing back, Takura saw a small caiman creeping up on his boot. Drawing his knee up, he rose far enough to grab a thick chunk of rotting tree branch.

  Her hands clutched at him. “Please don’t leave!”

  “Relax.” He threw the chunk and the smaller caiman jumped back. Deciding Takura was bigger than it wanted to deal with, it scrambled down the muddy slide, quickly changing directions when the larger caiman waiting there opened its mouth in a toothy display, and leapt into the water with a splash. “We’re fine,” Takura said, eyeing the remaining predator cautiously.

  “Fine?” she echoed, high-pitched and incredulous. “Fine?! How can this be fine? I don’t see this as fine. I don’t see how any of this could ever be fine again! In fact, I can’t see how this could possibly get any worse!”

  A long, low growl rolled down on them from somewhere directly overhead. Tipping back his head, Takura looked up into the cold, round yellow eyes of the black jaguar perched not three branches directly above him. Its ears had flattened back against its head, and its mouth gaped, flashing its sharp, ghostly white teeth in a savage, snarling hiss.

  “I was wrong,” Levina whispered, cringing beneath him. “Now it can’t possibly get any worse.”

  A tiny black shadow in the absolute apex of the roots just above Levina’s head moved, and mewed. The shadow grew definition when Takura focused on it. Two tiny little black panther kittens huddled against the trunk just inches from the top of Levina’s head and stared back at them.

  “Wrong again,” Levina mewed. “Now—”

  “You say that one more time,” Takura growled, “and I swear to God, I’m going to blister your ass.”

  “I think I’m going to faint,” she said instead.

  “Great. You can get eaten; I’ll get away.”

  The mother panther growled, low and ominous, ending her threat in a lurch when she slapped the trunk with one giant, raking claw. She hissed even louder, quickly coming to the end of her patience.

  “Don’t move,” Takura said, crawling slowly down her body.

  “The log is coming this way,” she said meekly, but she obeyed, holding herself perfectly still. Only her head moved, her eyes darting nervously from caiman to panther.

  One of the kittens nerved itself up to whack her on the forehead as Takura took hold of her waist and slowly pulled her back along the ground, threading her down between his legs and away from the cubs. Every few inches, he stopped to crawl down her body and then did it again.

  The mother panther descended a branch, the unblinking yellow orbs of her eyes never once leaving him. At least, not until the caiman hissed. And then her attention became abruptly redirected.

  Takura stood up then, pulling Levina up after him. “Don’t run,” he warned, the panther instantly fixing on them again.

  Levina slipped behind him when he nudged her to, and he could feel her hands fisting nervously in the wet back of his shirt.

  Not having noticed the cubs yet, the caiman inched another step towards them, and then lay down on its belly, pretending to be an unassuming log. No one was fooled, particularly not the panther, who chuffed to her cubs, both of which scrambled up the tree, disappearing into the densely-leafed branches.

  Grabbing her arm, Takura yanked Levina into the underbrush as, suddenly spotting the easier meal, the large caiman lurched towards the tree. It moved surprisingly fast, following the cubs halfway up the trunk, but stopped when the mother panther raked a vicious clawing attack across its snout. She nimbly followed her cubs into higher branches, and Takura and Levina ducked through the trees, making good use of the distraction to get away.

  Takura didn’t stop moving until he’d left both panther and caiman well behind them. This was deep jungle. There were no roads here. No habitation. No friendly tribes that he knew of on this stretch of river, although there was a small village of folks he knew about two miles further downstream. After waging a brief mental battle about which he’d rather do—hike two miles further out of town or swim all the way back to Manaus—he braced himself for a long and exhausting hike.

  “What are we going to do?” Levina asked, wringing her fingers as she glanced around them.

  “Expedition over, princess.” He patted himself down, trying to inventory what they had. His boot knife was somewhere in the river, probably not far from her discarded dress. He had no idea where he’d dropped his gun. He came up with a few coins in one pocket, enough to buy a cold beer once he got back to town, and a very wet and ruined cigar. Damn. He tossed that into the bush beside him. “I know some people at the next village. They’ll help us get back to Manaus.”

  “Oh no, please!” Levina rounded on him in dismay. “We can’t go back yet. I haven’t found my orchid!”

  “Good luck finding it,” he bit out. “My part in this mess is done.”

  “I paid you—”

  Now it was his turn to snap around as he faced her, his expression so furiously dark that she actually stumbled backwards to get distance between them. Her retreat was prematurely halted by the unyielding trunk of another tree.

  “We have no transportation.” He gestured wildly, one arm flying back to point the way they’d come. “My boat—my home—is lying on the bottom of the Amazon. We have no gear, no gun, no nothing. Everything I own is under water. Yeah, you paid me. That too is on the bottom of the river, next to my boat.”

  “My dress,” she said. “I’ve money in my dress.” He looked pointedly at her underclothes, and in a small voice she finished with him, “On the bottom of the Amazon.”

  She bit her bottom lip. He thought it might have trembled, but he wasn’t about to be swayed by the great manipulator known as feminine tears.

  “Have a good time swimming with the caimans and piranha,” he said. “I’m done. You want to stay here, fine, that’s your life and your decision. If you want to live, then you’ve got exactly two seconds to move your ass because I’m leaving. Right now.”

  He started walking, pushing through the vines and brush, intent on circling around however many trees stood between them and the river that would guide them back to civilization. Levina did not fall instantly into step behind him and his conscience was beginning to make noises about leaving a woman, stripped to her underwear, in the middle of the jungle. Then he heard the first telltale rustle of the vegetation as she hurried to catch
up with him.

  “Wait, please,” she cried, but Takura wasn’t about to be swayed to what he knew was madness. Not for anybody. Not even a half-naked woman, and particularly not for the half-naked woman who’d just cost him his home and his livelihood.

  “I’ll buy you a new boat!” she called desperately.

  Crap.

  Heaving a long-suffering sigh, Takura stopped walking. He stared straight ahead, one hand gripping the thin branch he’d been about to shove out of his way. Turning slowly, he faced her again. “Don’t you lie to me, princess. Are you serious? You’ve got that kind of money?”

  She looked down at herself, then quickly folded her arms across her breasts, trying to hide the fact that the mud and wetness had turned her under shift into a second skin. One that was currently determined to reveal every dip and curve of her body to its absolute best advantage. And hers was definitely a body with many advantages.

  Takura did his best not to look. He stared straight into her eyes and waited.

  “Not on me,” she admitted, squirming slightly. “B-but if you take me to the Basin and help me find my orchid, when we get back to Manaus, I’ll stop at the first bank I come to and arrange for the money to be wired to you. However much it takes to replace your boat with…” She hesitated, obviously thinking about the condition of his lost boat. “…with something comparable to the one you already have.” She blinked twice. “Had.” She blinked again. “Only without all the holes and still floating.”

  “How very generous,” he said flatly, his eyes narrowing as he studied her. His mouth tightened into another frown, but his list of options was incredibly short. “I won’t carry you. And I’ll warn you right now, it’s going to be a hard hike. When I tell you to stop, I expect you to do it. When I tell you to be quiet, you freeze and you keep your mouth shut. And when I say get down, you damn well better kiss the ground and stay there until I say differently.”

  “I can do that,” she promised, looking relieved. “I won’t slow you down, I swear.”

  “Ha!” He already had his doubts about that.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Levina slapped her arms, dislodging two mosquitoes only to see four more take their place. She slapped her neck, then scratched her leg and crashed into the branch Takura had held for her for all of three seconds before letting fly. He hadn’t meant to hit her. He hadn’t even looked back, and although she was getting really very tired, she picked up the pace to catch the next one and promptly tripped on a vine and crashed to her knees. It would have been a soft landing except that her shin hit an exposed tree root.

  “Ow,” she whispered, wincing and picking herself up enough to rub. She wanted to yell, but she was determined not to make any kind of sound that might make Takura regret his decision to continue the expedition. After all, he’d lost his boat. What was a bruise or a few bug bites compared to that?

  “Move it, princess!” Takura called back to her, and Levina picked herself up and started walking again.

  Her legs hurt, especially her calves. She really wanted to sit down and rest awhile, but ever since running into those natives an hour or so back, Takura had been relentless, pushing deeper and deeper into the jungle. They’d left the riverside but were still following it, albeit just out of sight of the water. And of Montague, who (as the natives had informed Takura) was patrolling up and down the waterway, asking anyone he ran into whether they’d seen Takura in the jungle with a woman. Thiago had been left to wait in that village, so Takura had taken Levina the long way around through the jungle. He stopped once and only long enough to talk to the local man they happened upon and who apparently liked Takura more than either of the slavers, reward or no reward.

  “What reward?” Takura had asked.

  “Two guns,” the native man replied, leaning lightly on a length of bamboo as he looked between Takura and Levina. He was short, almost a full head shorter than Levina, with straight black hair and dark, earth-brown skin. He was also naked, wearing only a dead monkey slung over one shoulder and a piece of string around his waist from which the foreskin of his penis was tied into a wholly masculine, perpetually upright position.

  Her face a bright and burning red, Levina forced her eyes to stay above the native’s waist, which left her fixedly staring at the twin lengths of thin bone that pierced his cheeks to either side of his mouth and his monstrously stretched out earlobes. Staring was rude, as her mother sometimes still told her, but just couldn’t help herself. And maybe staring wasn’t considered as rude in the jungle as it was to the rest of the world, because not only did the man not seem offended, but his black eyes were roaming her with equal curiosity.

  Gesturing at her with the tail of the dead monkey, he finally turned an equally curious eye back on Takura. “Say you take his woman.”

  “You know better.”

  “Ya, we know.” He looked at her again, from her tangled mess of copper hair, which she’d tried to braid back out of her way, to her mud-caked underclothes. It had been hours, but she was still wet. Nothing was drying well in the sweltering heat of the rainforest, and she was very conscientious of how closely the cloth was hugging her skin. She needn’t have been concerned about any lascivious advances on the native’s part. He sidled closer to Takura and, with a subtle gesture in her direction, in his heavily accented English asked, “Why you steal this one, eh? Take one mine. This one too big. Too much food, you hunt all day!”

  Takura laughed with him, said something back in the man’s native tongue, and they both laughed even harder.

  She wasn’t big. Hurt but trying to hide it, Levina folded her arms over her stomach, trying to hide behind them. Her cheeks colored when Takura looked back at her, boldly sweeping his black gaze up and down her body before meeting her eyes. She looked away first, and then turned and walked a few feet off on her own to sulk.

  “Hey,” Takura called after her. “Don’t go far. Stay where I can see you.”

  “You should be able to see someone of my incredible size from all the way across the jungle!” Twin spots of color stained her cheeks as a bud of real anger blossomed inside her. With one arm, she swept aside the huge, leafy fronds of a large fern and moved deliberately behind a tree to escape his narrowing gaze.

  It was amazing how fast the jungle closed in behind her, hiding both Takura and the native from view. By the time she reached her second tree, if one discounted the fact that she could still hear the native laughing behind her, she might as well have been in that jungle alone.

  “Hey!” Takura called after her.

  “I’m not here to be the butt of your jokes!” she snapped back at him, or at least back to where she thought he was. All the trees looked the same here; it was hard to keep track of direction.

  She turned in a full circle. Where was she? More importantly, where was the river? As far as she could tell, all they’d done so far was follow it downstream. If she continued on, she could find her flower and then follow it all the way back to Manaus. Who needs a guide? Especially one as disagreeable as Takura!

  That kind of thinking was nothing short of sheer stupidity and she knew it, but she forged on ahead anyway, shoving twin branches out of her way and ducking under a low-hanging vine. She swiped at drips of water that kept dribbling on her from the jungle canopy high above and then slapped at another mosquito as it bit her arm.

  Off to the left somewhere, she heard the native say something and then laugh again.

  “Yeah,” Takura groused, somewhat less than amused. “The big woman has a temper.”

  “Big temper!” The native roared with laughter.

  Levina fumed. Where was the river? She turned around again. She could hear crunching footsteps coming through the undergrowth after her. Takura most likely, coming to apologize. In no mood to be mollified, she walked faster, punching her way through a thick wall of leaves—this was a whole lot easier when she was following behind Takura—and unexpectedly finding the river when she almost fell down the steep embankment that su
ddenly appeared right in front of her. The caiman that had been sunning itself at the muddy bottom splashed into the water and disappeared.

  Her involuntary step back bumped her into Takura. He seized her shoulders, jerking her around and giving her a single, hard shake before pulling her in so close that they were almost chest to heaving chest. “People get lost fast and easy in the jungle! Don’t you ever go more than two steps from my side again!”

  “What’s the matter, Mr. Takol?” she snapped back. “Afraid you won’t be able to track my massive girth through the undergrowth?”

  His eyes narrowed and he shook his head once, trying to make sense of her. “What?”

  “I’m big, remember?”

  “He didn’t mean you’re fat, dammit!” Takura scowled and gestured behind him. “Yaolo is barely five feet tall. Everyone is big to him!”

  She glared at him, not quite placated but feeling down right childish when all she could protest was, “You made fun of me.”

  “What are you, twelve?” He neither softened, nor looked at all apologetic, though he did relax his bruising grip on her arms. “You head off on your own again and I’ll bust your backside.” Stepping aside, he pulled back a waist-high tree branch and gestured for her to precede him back to the still chuckling Yaolo. “Walk.”

  Levina lowered her eyes, locking her mutinous expression on the ground where he couldn’t see it. Not that it seemed to matter. As soon as she moved out ahead of him, he let go of the branch. It snapped across the muddy seat of her chemise, branding a line of stinging fire into her that could have rivaled any cane stroke Parnell had ever delivered. The force of that blow jolted through her hips, knocking her half a set forward.

  “Oh!” She whirled to stare at him, eyes and mouth both round with outrage and her hands flashing back to grab at the throbbing, smarting flesh behind her. She rubbed furiously but the fire refused to be extinguished. “Y-y-you! You did that on purpose!”