River of Eden Read online

  River of Eden

  Tara Janzen

  First published by Bantam, 2002

  Copyright Glenna McReynolds, 2002

  EBook Copyright Tara Janzen, 2012

  EBook Published by Tara Janzen, 2012

  Cover Design by Damonza, 2012

  EBook Design by A Thirsty Mind, 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  To the Shamans—

  Stan, Loreena, Chad, John, Michael, Anthony...

  Close your eyes and I’ll kiss you.

  Dear Readers,

  Tara Janzen, New York Times Bestselling author, is the creator of the lightning-fast paced and super sexy CRAZY HOT and CRAZY COOL Steele Street series of romantic suspense novels. But before she fell in love with the hot cars, bad boys, big guns, and wild women of Steele Street, she wrote RIVER OF EDEN, “One of THE most breathtaking... adventure novels to come along in years!” Jill Smith for Romantic Times, an epic medieval fantasy trilogy, THE CHALICE AND THE BLADE, DREAM STONE, and PRINCE OF TIME, and steamy romances for the Loveswept line under the name Glenna McReynolds. All of her books are now available as eBooks.

  Writing as both Glenna McReynolds and Tara Janzen, this national bestselling author has won numerous awards for her work, including a RITA from Romance Writers of America, and nine 4 ½ TOP PICKS from Romantic Times magazine. Three of her books are on the Romantic Times ALL-TIME FAVORITES list – RIVER OF EDEN, Winner of the Best Romantic Suspense Award 2002, SHAMELESS, and CRAZY WILD, Winner of the Best Romantic Suspense Award 2006. LOOSE AND EASY, a Steele Street novel, is one of Amazon’s TOP TEN ROMANCES for 2008.

  Titles

  Classic Romances

  Scout’s Honor

  Thieves In The Night

  Stevie Lee

  Dateline: Kydd and Rios

  Blue Dalton

  Outlaw Carson

  Moonlight and Shadows

  A Piece of Heaven

  Shameless

  The Courting Cowboy

  Avenging Angel

  The Dragon and the Dove

  Dragon’s Eden

  Medieval Fantasy Trilogy

  “A stunning epic of romantic fantasy.” Affaire de Coeur, five-star review

  The Chalice and the Blade

  Dream Stone

  Prince of Time

  River of Eden – “One of THE most breathtaking and phenomenal adventure tales to come along in years! Glenna McReynolds has created an instant adventure classic.” Romantic Times – 2002 BEST ROMANTIC SUSPENSE AWARD WINNER

  Steele Street Series – “Hang on to your seat for the ride of your life... thrilling... sexy. Tara Janzen has outdone herself.” Fresh Fiction

  “Bad boys are hot, and they don’t come any hotter than the Steele Street gang.” Romantic Times

  Crazy Hot

  Crazy Cool

  Crazy Wild

  Crazy Kisses

  Crazy Love

  Crazy Sweet

  On the Loose

  Cutting Loose

  Loose and Easy

  Breaking Loose

  Loose Ends

  SEAL Of My Dreams Anthology

  All proceeds from the sale of SEAL Of My Dreams are pledged to Veterans Research Corporation, a non-profit foundation supporting veterans’ medical research.

  Panama Jack, by Tara Janzen

  For more information about Tara Janzen, her writing and her books please visit her on her website www.tarajanzen.com; on Facebook http://on.fb.me/mSstpd; and Twitter @tara_janzen http://twitter.com/#!/tara_janzen.

  A fiend like thee might bear my soul to hell.

  —William Shakespeare,

  Twelfth Night

  ~ PROLOGUE ~

  William Sanchez Travers stood perfectly still in the forest, barefoot and naked except for the loincloth hanging by a string slung low around his hips. His heart pounded in his chest. His breath came hard into his lungs. The rain had stopped, a brief, fierce shower pouring over the heated earth and turning the jungle into a sauna. Billows of steam rose from the ground. Trails of vapor wound upward through the trees to hang in the lower branches of the canopy and drift through the understory. All was green, in every direction, a thousand shades of shadowed green, dense and rich. Leaves dripped water. Vines glistened, thick and twisting, sky-ropes leading to the unseen heavens far above.

  A low, guttural growl sounded to his right, and he silently shifted his grip on his spear. A bow and quiver were slung across his back.

  Jaguar. Tutanji’s pasuk yawa, the shaman’s jaguar apprentice, a powerful being, but no more powerful than Will, for he, too, was pasuk to the shaman Tutanji.

  He scanned the wall of vegetation, his senses heightened to take in every movement, a flash of golden eyes, a streak of tawny hide in the dusky light of the forest floor.

  The chase had begun at dawn and led him deep into the jungle. He was miles from the village where he lived with Tutanji and other Dakú... and miles farther from where he’d lived before... before Tutanji had called him into the forest... before he’d lost his way in the endless green coils of the shaman’s giant anaconda.

  Night was coming. He felt the subtle coolness in the air, noted the color shift in the light, from a verdant gray to brief amber. The sun would set soon and plunge him and the jaguar into darkness.

  He lifted his hand to the single chunk of rock crystal hanging from a cord around his neck. If necessary, he would track the cat into the Otherworld. There was no escape for the jaguar.

  A rustling in the tree above him brought his head up and sent the feathers tied into his hair sliding down his neck. Black genipa body paint ran in rivulets down the brown skin of his arms and chest, streaked by the rain. A monkey peered down at him from between the tree’s branches and began to chatter.

  Will returned his gaze to the forest on his right. The jaguar was there, somewhere, hidden within the broad leaves of the heliconias growing at the base of a munguba tree. Without moving his gaze from the patch of plants, he dipped his fingers into a gourd tied at his waist and scooped up three fingerfuls of green powder. He put it in his mouth and let his saliva form it into a paste. In minutes, he felt strength return to his limbs, felt his spirit begin to soar. There would be no escape for the jaguar—not tonight.

  The finely pulverized mix of Erythroxylum coca and Cecropia sciadophila leaves had sustained him all day, and if necessary, would sustain him through the long night to come. He’d seen the jaguar in a vision, and the cat was his, as the anaconda had been his in the end.

  With silent stealth, he moved forward, skirting the huge buttressed roots of an agrobigi tree, Parkia nitida in the Latin, from the family Leguminosae. All around him were hundreds of other plants—vines, trees, lianas, ferns, palms—and he knew each of them, could identify each of them in Dakú, Latin, English, and Portuguese. On other days, the plants were what drew him away from the village into the wild reaches of the forest. On other nights, it was the plants who gave him the visions. An infusion of Banisteriopsis caapi had shown him Tutanji’s spirit jaguar. And through it all, the visions of the Otherworld and the forests of this world, a great river ran unhindered, its thousand serpentine tributaries running down from the mountains and snaking through the lowlands, each silt-laden eddy and blackwater freshet born of the rain and the glaciers of the Cordilleras. The Amazon nurtured and consumed half the South American continent with the same inexorable power with which
it nurtured and consumed him. His veins were its confluence. His heart pumped its vital flow. The forest itself rose from the waters, eighty thousand species of plants rooted in the earth and each other. The canopy trees were his body, the lianas the sinew that wrapped around his bones.

  The cat moved, a streak of shadow-dappled black and gold in the green forest, and Will took off after it. Tonight he would kill the jaguar. Be the jaguar. Take the animal’s spirit for his own. With the jaguar’s power, he would release himself from the dream that had held him for too long, the forest dream where time ran as fluidly as the river. With the jaguar inside him, Tutanji would set him free to track the Dakú’s demons, and if the jaguar was very strong, free to find the life he’d known before... before the night Tutanji’s anaconda had gone hunting in the lost world... before the giant serpent had found him asleep on the shores of the blackwater river and devoured him deep in the heart of the rain forest.

  CHAPTER ~ 1

  Manaus, Brazil

  Drenched to the bone, Dr. Annie Parrish stood in the doorway of the ramshackle waterfront cantina called Pancha’s and wiped what she could of the rain off her glasses. Putting them back on, she let her eyes adjust to the dim light. Water dripped off her green shirt and baggy khaki shorts, adding to the mud she’d dragged in with her off the street. The tropical afternoon rain poured down behind her, running off the cantina’s tin roof and coursing in streams down the dirt slope to the black waters of the Rio Negro where it flowed past the city of Manaus, Brazil. Inside the tavern, a samba beat blared out of a radio, while a toothless young man added percussion with the rapid beat of his open palms against the bar.

  A scattering of seedy-looking patrons littered the shadowy interior, their faces obscured by a pall of cigarette smoke, but it was the couple dancing in front of the bar that held Annie’s attention.

  The woman was mulatto, her skin a creamy café au lait color, her yellow halter top and orange sarong the brightest things in the dingy room. Her partner was chameleon-like in comparison. The most noticeable aspect about him was movement—the flick and sway of his hips to the music, the flash of gold bracelets on his upraised arms, the rippling of his open, midnight-blue shirt against his sun-bronzed skin.

  The woman was a sunburst. He was a star-flung night, his dark brown hair streaked blond in places and flying with every toss of his head, then falling back into multihued layers that hung low on his neck. Red seed bracelets stacked four inches high around his right ankle were revealed by the rolled-up legs on his black pants, shoroshoro seeds from the forest adding a susurrus of sound with every step he took.

  Annie didn’t have a clue who the woman was, but the man was William Sanchez Travers, and sure as she was standing there, he didn’t look like any Harvard-trained ethnobotanist she’d ever seen, “defrocked” or not. He looked like the kind of man mothers warned their daughters about and the reason fathers kept shotguns. But he was Annie’s best chance for getting upriver, and given that one asset, she was inclined to overlook a lot of faults.

  With an absent gesture, she shoved her fingers back through her short-cropped blond hair, slicking the wet strands off her face. A quick pat-down of her pockets proved them bulging with the usual junk, too full to organize, so she stuffed what she could deeper, and ignored the rest. Tidied up as best as she could manage, she squared her shoulders. For better or worse, Travers was exactly the type of man she’d been looking for—broke enough to come cheap and shady enough not to ask too many questions. Annie knew plenty of men who fit that description, but she’d worked in the Amazon long enough to add a third caveat: she needed a man who wouldn’t slit her throat in the dead of night. When her research sponsor, Dr. Gabriela Oliveira, had recommended Travers, telling Annie he was back in Manaus and headed upriver to Santa Maria, Annie had figured the ex-Harvard botanist, no matter how degenerate, would more than fit the bill. Hell, she’d read every book he’d ever written—twice.

  Now she had an offer to make.

  As she started forward, the music slid into a lambada rhythm. Without missing a beat, Travers and his partner came together in a hip-swaying Latin swing that bordered on lewd. Then they took it over the border.

  Annie’s gaze dropped down the length of their bodies and quickly came back up in a warily skeptical once-over. Anything could happen on a dance floor in Brazil—and it looked like anything might.

  She only hoped he and the woman stopped somewhere short of actual public copulation. She didn’t have the strength for it after spending half the day looking for him in every seedy, portside dive in Manaus he was known to frequent. There weren’t many he’d missed, and after observing his favorite haunts firsthand, she wouldn’t put anything past him, even if only half of the rest of what she’d heard about him was true.

  Three years ago, he’d forsaken academia and his fieldwork and disappeared into the Amazon rain forest. The rumors had been bountiful and gruesome: he’d been eaten by an anaconda; he’d taken one too many hallucinogenic trips on the Banisteriopsis caapi liana and was living in a near vegetative state in a cave near the headwaters of the Putumayo; or—and this had been Annie’s favorite—he’d had his head shrunk by the Jivaro. No bones or body, vegetative or otherwise, and no identifiable shrunken head had ever been found. A year later, he’d disproved all the rumors by resurfacing in Manaus safe, though not necessarily sound. The verdict was still out on his mental state—way out.

  Looking at him now, Annie would guess he’d abandoned botany for his true calling as a sambista. The kind of moves he was making were grounds for arrest in some countries: arms down, shoulders loose and rolling, his hips doing a buck-and-shimmy against the woman’s. Rumor said Gabriela had been the one to bail him out with Howard Pharmaceutical Labs, the company funding his research. Even so, half a dozen lawsuits were still waiting for him back in the States, compliments of old man Howard, who hadn’t planned on his high-priced glory boy disappearing without delivering some new magically medicinal plant Howard Labs could make millions of dollars synthesizing.

  Well, she thought, that bright hope had sure gone to hell in a handbasket, with the way smoothed by more than a few bottles of rotgut cachaça, Brazilian sugarcane alcohol. It was a damn shame, but all Will Travers was known for now was ferrying people up and down the Rio Negro and the Rio Solimoes and showing up in the Manaus bars often enough to qualify as a waterfront attraction.

  At six feet, he had the gringo looks for it, tall and rangy, with that wild, sun-streaked hair and a face that had set more than one coed on the path to a botany degree.

  Annie was way past the coed stage of her life, but from what she could see of him, he hadn’t lost his poster-boy looks, even if the veneer of his Harvard days had worn so damn thin as to be invisible.

  He probably didn’t know it, but he’d once one-upped her on a plant identification, getting his specimen in mere days ahead of hers. Since then, for all time, whenever anybody enjoyed a certain South American balsam herb in their garden, the label read Dicliptera traversii, instead of Dicliptera parrishii. It was as close as she’d ever gotten to getting the best of him. Then he’d gone and dropped out of the game—and that was the real damn shame.

  As she watched him dance, her mouth curved into a rueful grin. What a waste, she thought, and what a great opportunity for her. With William Travers out of the running, a place in the history books was up for grabs, and she was going to take it. Still, she would have loved to have met him in his prime and given him a run for his money, before he’d gone to seed—and like everyone else in the Amazon and academia, she couldn’t help but wonder what in the hell had happened to him. He’d been on top of the world before he’d gone off and gotten himself lost.

  The music changed again, and Travers grasped his partner’s waist with both hands. The woman went willingly into his embrace, the two of them slithering together in a serpentine mating dance.

  “Damn,” she muttered. They really were going to do the deed right there on the dance floor, as if sh
e didn’t already have enough problems.

  Johnny Chang, the two-bit felon she’d been dealing with all week, had warned her to leave Manaus once their business was done, and God knew she’d tried, but the boat she’d been counting on had gone belly-up and left her dry-docked. She couldn’t afford any more delays. She had to be out of the city by morning.

  She glanced out the door. The rain looked as if it would go on forever.

  The radio sputtered to a stop behind her, and the sudden quiet drew her attention back to the bar and a bit of good news: Travers still had his pants on.

  Thank God for little favors, she thought and moved forward. She needed to cut her deal while she still had the chance.

  “Dr. Travers,” she said, pitching her voice to carry above the racket of the rain on the roof.

  The man she’d been tracking all over the waterfront turned, weaving slightly with the woman still in his arms, and Annie had to fight back a pang of irritation. Drunk before three o’clock, he was in worse shape than she’d expected, and she hadn’t expected much. On the other hand, with him two sheets to the wind, talking herself onto his boat ought to be a piece of cake.

  “Dr. Travers,” she repeated, approaching him with a smile firmly in place. She’d never been much in the bees-and-honey department, but she knew enough to make nice when she wanted something.

  “Will,” he said, smiling back, his dark-eyed gaze slightly confused as he studied her face. He had a day’s growth of stubble along his jaw, macaw feathers tied into his hair behind his left ear, and possibly the longest, thickest eyelashes she’d ever seen on a grown man. “Just Will.” With a glance over his shoulder and a gesture, he ordered a beer. The woman was plastered to him.

  Probably holding him up, Annie thought, exasperated with herself for needing him. He and the woman leaned a bit too far, having to take a half-step to stay upright, and Annie couldn’t even keep a forced smile on her face. No doubt about it, he’d started his party hours ago and was headed downhill. His hair was wildly disheveled. His shirt was completely unbuttoned, and with his pants low slung and hanging by a thread and the grace of God on his hips, he looked as if he were coming undone, as if his clothes could finish the slow slide off his body at any second.