Jinxie's Orchids Page 6

  He walked past her, smirking. “Keep walking, princess. It’ll be sundown soon. We need to find somewhere safe to hole up.”

  Yaolo was still waiting for them where they’d left him. He took one look at Levina’s face and started laughing all over again. “Oh no, my friend! You esposa no happy.”

  “She’s not my wife,” Takura assured him. “She’s a client.”

  “You pay?”

  “She pays,” he clarified.

  “Pay you?” Yaolo asked, black eyes sparkling. He turned his grin on her. “One dollar. Too much!”

  Her bottom still smarting, Levina glared at Takura. She was beginning to agree with Yaolo.

  “Har har,” Takura said dryly. “Can I borrow a machete? Mine’s at the bottom of the river.”

  “Ya,” Yaola waved for them to follow him. Leaving the Rio Negro behind, the native led them deeper into the jungle. For a man without shoes, he set a good pace, too.

  “Move it, princess!” Takura snapped back at her, seeming to have no difficulty at all keeping up with their new guide.

  She made a face behind his back. She also quickened her step, and although it made her legs ache, she was determined to keep up. She didn’t want them laughing at her any more than they already were.

  Exactly how far they’d journeyed before she suddenly realized they were on a path, Levina wasn’t sure. But within minutes of that discovery, she heard the first shout as their approach was noticed, and then the first hut-like structure simply melted out of the jungle. She was in a village. An honest to God, native South American village. It looked at once both similar to sketches she had seen in some of the journals gathering dust in the research library back home and yet at the same time nothing like them.

  There were thirteen hut-like structures in all. The walls were made of bamboo sticks tied together and wide, leafy fronds thickly thatched across low rooftops. Takura had to duck through the doorway of the largest building, urged inside by a cluster of laughing, excited children.

  Men, women, children, elders and babies, and not a single one of them wore clothes. Levina didn’t know where to look. So she fixed her gaze on the ground, her face a bright and burning shade of red, and didn’t move until she, too, found herself suddenly surrounded. Every one of the tribe’s fifteen adult women circled her, some smiling, some curiously fingering her muddy clothes or her long red hair. Suddenly laughing and giggling together, they grabbed her and hustled her back down the path out of the village.

  “Takura!” she called, startled.

  He must not have heard her, because he never looked back.

  Helpless to prevent it, Levina was dragged away.

  * * * * *

  “Takura, Takura,” Yaolo mimicked in a falsely feminine voice—one which didn’t sound anywhere near as alarmed as Levina had, but rather sultry and seductive. “Help me. I pay you.”

  Sitting in a semi-circle around an impromptu supper of fat, white grubs, everyone laughed at him. Takura wasn’t fond of grubs, but he ate them anyway. When one needed to buy a machete using only the currency of an old friend’s kindness, one did so by eating whatever they put in front of him. And he thanked them for it.

  “You wife very big,” one of the elders, Tumi, commented.

  “She’s not my wife. She’s my client.” Takura had a funny feeling he was going to be saying that a lot. He wouldn’t be surprised if Levina were the first white woman these people had ever seen, and for an unmarried man to travel with any woman other than a wife or family member was simply unheard of.

  “She pay him,” Yaolo was only too happy to add. “One dollar. Too much!”

  They all laughed, and Takura took the ribbing for what it was worth. He even smiled.

  “She go with you?”

  “She’s looking for a flower,” he told them, which effectively stopped the laughter while they no doubt tried to figure out if they’d understood him right. There were flowers everywhere. What did he mean, she was looking for a flower?

  “Upriver,” he confirmed. “About fourteen miles, around the Basin.”

  He glanced out through the open doorway, trying to see where the women had taken Levina. Probably to the small stream that ran to the southeast, just below the plateau, to bathe and wash her clothes. He didn’t know if he could stand traveling with her through the jungle in just her underthings, wet, semi-transparent and clinging to her in all the maddeningly right places. God help him, he could still feel the rounded flesh of her bottom where he’d smacked her trying to get her to move that shapely ass up the banks of the Negro before he was eaten by the ‘logs’ creeping in from behind.

  “Help me, Takura,” Yaolo softly called to him from across the circle, and that started the group of warrior men and elders laughing all over again.

  He stopped looking for Levina.

  “You want go with this woman?” one elder asked, passing him a cup of slightly fermented chicha.

  Not particularly, but he was going to get a new boat out of it. “Yes, I do.”

  The elder sitting cross-legged next to Yaolo shook his head in disapproval. “No good. You leave you woman here. You go faster and come back with flower. She like you more better then, anyway.”

  “If I knew exactly what she was looking for, I might be tempted.”

  There was a familiar shriek, followed by the sound of women laughing and faint splashing. Takura tried not to think about long white naked limbs frolicking with brown ones in a swift stream bath. The chicha burned the back of his throat, but he took another deep draw, as if hoping the strong alcoholic drink could wash away those unwelcome imagines. He had no idea why he was thinking about it anyway. He didn’t even like Levina, and from the way she’d glared at him in the jungle, she wasn’t all that fond of him, either.

  Well, so long as she did what he told her to, he really didn’t care if she liked him or not. When he passed the cup, he caught Yaolo’s eye. The native man was grinning and his almond black eyes glittered knowingly.

  “Stay tonight. Eat with us,” Tumi decided. “Tomorrow, you, you woman go.”

  “Thank you,” Takura said, then winced slightly as he wondered if his footing with these people was strong enough to ask a favor. He’d been fairly chummy with Yaolo for years, but this was only the third time that he’d been invited into their village, and the first time that he’d been invited to stay for supper. Still, he had to ask. “Should Montague come looking for us…”

  The elderly Tumi leaned sideways and spat on the ground. Although his expression never changed, there was something distinctly unfriendly in his tone when he said, “Montague no come here. He know better. You, you woman safe one night.”

  The temptation to stress yet again that she was not his woman tickled at the back of his throat, but in the end, Takura simply thanked them. It would have been useless to argue anyway. To the Neuvo, actions spoke louder than words, and they were traveling together.

  Another round of grubs was passed his way, but Takura politely declined and let his gaze be lured back toward the sunny goldenness of the village just outside. A few of the women had gigglingly returned from the stream. One of the men took Yaolo’s monkey out to them and dinner preparations began.

  It very quickly became apparent that the Nuevo weren’t planning to make this just any dinner. They butchered two chickens to go with the monkey and gathered a massive basketful of yams from the garden, along with abiu fruit from the surrounding rainforest. The yams were wrapped in leaves and settled with the meat amongst the coals to cook, and as the smells began to waft through the village, the other women came up from the stream to help. And yet, there was no sign of Levina.

  Leaving the men, Takura pulled his muddy shirt up over his head and made his way down to the water to clean up as best he could without soap. As he came down off the plateau, he spotted freshly laundered undergarments draped over twin bushes to dry beside the stream. He stopped, but even knowing better, he still glanced back over his shoulder just to make sure
Levina hadn’t snuck into the village with the other women. He was pretty sure he’d have noticed a long-legged, regal-looking red-head wandering naked among the natives.

  Once more, he faced the white-draped bushes. The water here wasn’t more than knee deep so he was relatively assured that she hadn’t drowned. Which meant…

  “Princess?” His eyes swept up into the nearby jungle opposite of the stream, but quickly snapped back when the bushes beneath her clothes startled.

  In the next instant, her head popped out between two branches, her bright green eyes huge in a face as red as a sunburn. “Don’t come any closer!”

  If she hadn’t looked so distraught, he might have been tempted to laugh. Somehow Takura managed to keep a straight face. “I was wondering where you’d gone.” Dropping to sit beside the stream, he took off his boots.

  She tried twice to duck back out of sight, but couldn’t quite seem to take her eyes off him. “Wh-what are you doing?”

  “I’m cleaning up.” Tossing each boot off into the grass higher up the bank, Takura stood up. He tried his best to pretend complete disinterest in peeking back at her—at those milk-white shoulders that he could see so clearly as she shifted behind her leafy covering, at all those other parts of her that played a tantalizing game of peek-a-boo through the bush, parts that he at first mistook as extensions of her underthings but which he could now see were moving as she fidgeted nervously. She was as naked as the day she’d been born, he realized, his mouth running remarkably dry at the thought.

  Takura stood up, his hands going to the waist of his beige trousers. Her eyes grew even wider and with a strangled squeak, she disappeared completely behind the bush. Not just ducking down but turning her back fully and flashing him a brief glimpse of naked nether cheek in the process.

  “You can’t do that here!” Squatting in her bush, she clutched her knees up to her chest and stared up at the jungle canopy in abject panic.

  “Too late.” His pants were already off, and in his current physical state, a cold dip in the stream was just what he needed if he was going to maintain any dignity at all among the Nuevo. Especially with Levina right here, not ten feet away, so vulnerable and accessible, and (surprisingly) appealing. She hadn’t been this appealing in Manaus when he first saw her on the docks. Of course, she hadn’t been naked then, either.

  Getting down on his knees, he submerged himself in the shallow water, letting the coolness wash over every part of him and steal away some of his ardor. Levina made tiny squeaking noises the whole time, her ladylike sensibilities suffering real distress the longer he lingered there. The sounds—the sensibilities, really—so thoroughly out of place in the jungle, made him smile first, and then chuckle. He couldn’t help torturing her a little. He took his time, washing every inch of himself first and then his clothes. He wrung them out between his hands, getting out as much excess water as possible before wading across the stream to hang them over the same bush she sat cowering behind.

  She squeaked again, but he kept the bush between them while he rearranged her chemise and lace-covered underdrawers to make room for his clothes. Both her things were really wet. Gathering them in his hands, he folded them down far enough to wring them out as well. With a curtain of clothes between them, all he could see of her now was the tips of her drawn up knees and her bare, pink little toes, curled so tight and tense against the hard-packed ground.

  “There you go.” He re-hung her tattered shift. “That should dry faster now. They might even be wearable by supper time.”

  “Please, just go away.” From the sound of it, she had covered her face with both hands.

  “Sorry, princess,” he chuckled. “I’m almost done with my bath. Good news though.”

  “Humiliation is fatal in the jungle, so I won’t have to suffer much longer?”

  She sounded so morose. Takura couldn’t quite bite back his laugh. “No, the Neuvo have invited us to stay the night. They’ve prepared a veritable feast for our enjoyment. I hope you like monkey, because I expect you to eat everything they offer you. It’s bad manners to refuse.”

  He turned and waded back into water. As he knelt to give his hair one last dunk, he thought he could hear her muttering. He couldn’t make out the words, though. Chuckling under his breath, he finally deemed himself clean enough., he stood up and went to check on his clothes. Another hour or so and they might be dry enough to put back on. Unfortunately, as high as the humidity was, it would take a day or more before they dried completely.

  Levina sniffled.

  His smile fading, Takura raised his head, looking over the bush at the tops of her knees. “Are you crying?”

  “No,” she lied, her voice wobbling and watery.

  He stared at her knees and the little pink toes clenched so tight in the dirt. She hadn’t moved the slightest bit the whole time he’d been at his bath. If he left her alone, she’d probably sit in this very bush all night long, waiting for her clothes to dry. His voice gentled. “No one’s going to care, you know.”

  “I have a fiancé,” she said thickly, and sniffled again. “He’d care. He’d care a lot. My mother would be horrified. M-my f-father would d-dis-o-o-own me!”

  A little sorry now that he’d found her discomfit so amusing, Takura listened to her soft gasps and hiccups as she struggled to swallow back her sobs. “Aw, come on now. Don’t cry, princess.”

  She gasped twice more and then managed a half-whispered, half-whined, “I-I’m not.” She sniffed again.

  “Levina,” he said gently. “If I had clothes for you to wear, I’d give them to you. But I don’t. And neither does anyone else here. And if your fiancé cared that much, he never would have let you come here alone.”

  It was an even longer time before she admitted. “He doesn’t know.”

  His eyebrows arched. “How,” he asked incredulously, “did you manage that? It’s not as if you could hang a note outside your bedroom door, ‘Sick in bed. Be well in eight to ten weeks.’”

  “No.” He didn’t have to be looking at her face to hear her guilty wince from here. “He’s here already.”

  “Here,” Takura echoed, no longer in a mood for smiles or gentleness. “How close to here is ‘here’?”

  “Oh, he’s hiking in through the jungle. But he’s…also looking for that orchid.” Suddenly scrambling to her feet, Levina spun around. She squeaked once when she found out how close he was and immediately slapped her hands up to cover herself, crushing herself into the bush before he could catch anything more than a curvaceous glimpse of bare breast. Her face took on that sunburned redness all over again, but when he only stood there frowning, she mustered the courage to say, “That’s why I’m here, you see. I have to find that flower before he does. I have to, Mr. Takol. I have to.”

  “So you can show him up?”

  She visibly startled. “No! Never! But I—I—” She stopped and glared at him with such frustrated passion that he couldn’t help but believe her when she said, “I have to prove that I can be of more use to him and…and to the museum than—than to just sit in the tombs printing file cards! I’m not useless, Mr. Takol. I’m not someone he can—can—pat on the head and—and—and—send to sit at a desk in his corner office, always under his eye and—and—”

  She stopped so suddenly and flushed so guiltily that Takura could almost hear the unspoken words ‘under his thumb’ springing past her now tightly pressed lips.

  “All right.” Takura held up his hand, stopping her before she grew any more flustered than she already was. His tone gentled. He might not understand her reasons, but he understood what it was like to strive so futility to prove himself to the elusive satisfaction of another. “All right. I am averting my eyes.”

  “What do you mean?” In a blink, worried confusion replaced at least part of her visible frustration. She scrunched even deeper into her shielding bush as he covered the left side of his face with one hand and came around the leafy barrier to her side.

  “Oh my goo
dness!” she strangled when he strode, every bit as naked as she was, up the embankment and into the jungle.

  A few minutes later, with a cry much like a tea-kettle, she all but crawled backwards through the bush, her hands scrambling to pull the branches in around her nakedness when he came back again. He brought with him several long, thin strips of string-like tree bark and a handful of wide taro leaves. Unsure which of their nudity distressed her more at this point, he took pity on her already strained sensibilities and sat down with his back to her on the bank while he separated the bark into even thinner strips and wove them into a sturdier cord.

  “I suppose you’re going to want a top to go with this.” His hands worked quickly, cutting slits into the base of each thick leaf and looping the cord around the stem, letting them overlap enough to ensure she remained covered. From the waist down, anyway.

  “Is that a skirt?” she asked, dubiously.

  “Yeah. Come here.” He adjusted the waist length for what he guessed she’d require, then shifted onto his knees and turned his head away from her. Holding up the leafy skirt, he gave it a slight shake. “Put it on.”

  “You’re going to peek,” she accused.

  “I won’t, I promise. See, my eyes are closed.” He jiggled the skirt again. “Come on. You could sit in that bush all night, if you want, but the Nuevo will think you’re a snob unless you come and help the other ladies with dinner preparations.”

  If she came up to join them dressed like a taro plant, they were going to think her strange, but he kept that part to himself. She didn’t speak Pano anyway, so she might not even recognize it when they started poking fun at her.

  Levina made a soft, uncertain growling sound in the back of her throat, but with soft, rustling steps, she abandoned her cover. Not wanting to be out in the open for any longer than absolutely necessary, she rushed him, bumping her hips up into the line of leaves and grabbing the ends to wrap around herself. She kept her back to him while he tied the cord snugly at her side. By the time he deemed it safe to open his eyes, her shoulders were hunched and she had her arms folded over her breasts to hide them. A half second before their gazes met, he caught her staring into his naked lap. She quickly looked away, the color in her cheeks heightening.