Heart of Fire Read online

  “I’ve been running the rivers for fifteen years. Experience.”

  “Would they actually shoot at us?”

  “It’s possible,” he drawled. “I wouldn’t push it.”

  “Are there a lot of smugglers on the river?”

  “Enough, sweetcakes. The safest bet is to keep to ourselves.”

  An abundance of smugglers meant that Kates, if he should get his hands on the Empress or any other artifacts, would find it fairly easy to get the contraband out of the country. She was sure he would have noted this, too.

  A sheet of rain swept toward them as lightning crackled. Ben put his hand on her shoulder and turned her toward the shelter of the tarps. “Get behind the tarps and hold on. It could get a little rough before I find a place to tie up.”

  Since she saw no point in getting wet when she didn’t have to, she did as he said, seeking shelter and bracing herself against one of the poles that held up the top. The boat began pitching as the waves increased, and the wall of rain hit them without any warning pattering of drops. Jorge, holding tight to another pole, shouted something at her, but she couldn’t hear what he was saying over the pounding rain and reverberating bass of the thunder. The boat pitched forward into a trough, then rose alarmingly. It was like white-water rafting, only she didn’t have either a helmet or a life jacket, and she couldn’t see a blessed thing inside the sheltered area.

  She wasn’t frightened; the storm didn’t seem rough enough, or the waves high enough, for them to be in real peril. Discomfort, yes, but nothing more. Of course, everything was relative; if she’d been in an airplane and it had been pitching the way the boat was currently doing, she’d have been saying her prayers.

  After a few minutes she felt the boat begin to turn and ease its way into more sheltered waters. The pitching settled down, though the battering of the rain still made normal conversation impossible. The chill brought goose bumps to her arms and she hugged herself, drawing her knees up to preserve as much body heat as she could.

  Pepe and Ben tied the boat securely and ducked under the shelter to wait out the rest of the storm. Both of them were as soaked as if they’d jumped into the river. Ben pushed his dripping dark hair out of his eyes and made his way over to where Jillian was sitting. When he got close, she could see the brightness of reckless excitement in his eyes.

  “Good ride,” he said, raising his voice so she could hear him. He hooked his sodden shirt off over his head and tossed it aside. Jorge threw a towel to him and he deftly caught it, rubbing it first over his hair and face, then down to his chest and shoulders. All the while he stood right in front of her, never taking his eyes off of her.

  The sight of his naked torso was causing her to entertain definitely impure thoughts, and he knew it, too, damn him. That was why he was watching her with that expression of taunting delight, waiting to catch every slip she made. Deliberately she looked right at his tight little nipples, half hidden in dark curly hair, and licked her lips. She saw his own involuntary response in the tightening of his abdominal muscles, and glanced up at him with her own taunting smile. It wouldn’t hurt him to realize that two could play that game.

  “Want to dry my back?”

  He pitched his voice lower this time, so low that she didn’t actually hear him, but read his lips quite well. She smiled. “I’m sure you can manage.”

  Inwardly she stifled a sigh. The urge to touch him was almost irresistible. He had the kind of body that literally made her mouth water, strong and hard without being indecently muscle-bound. A man’s body, not a boy’s: heavy in the shoulders, dark hair on his chest and down the center of his abdomen. His skin was sleek and tanned, glowing with health.

  He picked up her hand and put the towel in it anyway, then turned his back. She stared at the deep furrow down the center, at the hard muscles that flexed with his slightest movement. She didn’t want to touch his bare skin, didn’t want to feel his living power, the seductive warmth. . . . Yes, she did. Too much. She also wanted to lean forward and press her open mouth against that intriguing furrow, run her tongue over the sections of his spine. It would serve him right if she did, but it might cost her more than it did him.

  So she contented herself with briskly running the towel over his back, not letting her hand touch his skin at any time. “There.”

  “Thanks.” He turned around and took a seat beside her, draping the towel around his neck.

  “You’re getting the supplies wet.”

  He looked at the box he was sitting on. “No problem. It’s the tents, and they won’t mildew.”

  Because the rain continued to beat down so loudly, he sat beside her without saying anything else until it slackened. When it did, he spoke to Pepe in dialect, and the small, lean Indian silently got to his feet and slipped out of the shelter. A moment later the engine started and they began moving. The tarps were quickly rolled up out of the way, letting sunshine and fresh air sweep over them.

  As they chugged upriver, Ben lounged lazily on the boxes, casually resting his forearm beside her thigh. Jillian looked down and just as casually shifted away.

  He gave a low laugh. Conversation was possible now, even one quiet enough to be private. “Stop being so jumpy,” he said. “We’re in this together, remember?”

  “I remember that you’re a better bet than either Kates or Dutra,” she corrected.

  He looked hurt. “You don’t trust me?”

  “As much as I would a cat in a cage full of canaries.”

  “Give me the chance, and I’ll sure eat you up,” he purred, his tone making the promise so lascivious that her heartbeat speeded up. He should have had a net thrown over him a long time ago, for the safety of the planet’s female population.

  “Now that we’re under way and you can’t be left behind, why don’t you tell me what that tricky little map of yours says? There may be something in it that you haven’t deciphered right, something that I would spot because I’m familiar with the jungle.”

  “Good try,” she said, loading her tone with admiration.

  “I’m serious.” He moved his hand a little and lightly stroked the side of her thigh. “Why not tell me? It’ll be safer if two of us know.”

  She pushed his hand away. “I won’t tell you because you’d probably maneuver me into the other boat and leave us behind while you race ahead to see if you can find any gold or jewels.”

  “You really don’t trust me!” Now he sounded frankly incredulous.

  “You bet your ass I don’t. Nothing’s changed. If I don’t go, no one goes. I’m sorry you wasted your little seduction routine.”

  7

  Little seduction routine. Ben ground his teeth every time he thought of that dismissive, condescending phrase. All right, so he’d been trying to work on her, but those not-so-accidental touches had been making his heart race, and he’d actually been getting a hard-on. From barely touching her! He hadn’t felt like that since high school, as if he had to sneak up on some delicious but forbidden fruit to get even the slightest taste of it. There he’d been, going down for the count in that damn, stupid, inexplicable fascination he felt for her, and she’d been as cool and unaffected as if she were shooing away a fly. She kept throwing him with that; damn it, was her coolness real or not? He’d seen exciting passion in her when she erupted in anger, felt her respond to his kisses—he thought—even though she’d stubbornly refused to admit it. And she’d kept him up half the night with that enraging tidbit about making love in a hammock on her balcony, just the sort of thing a man liked to hear, how a woman he was interested in had made love with someone else.

  His body, his instincts, insisted that she was a passionate woman, but his mind couldn’t come up with any corroborating evidence. She was making him doubt himself, the way she shrugged off his advances as if they were nothing more than ploys—all right, so maybe they were, a little. But only a little, and only on the surface. On a deeper, more fundamental level, he was dead serious. His relationships with wome