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  Thèresa drifted back over to Ben’s table several minutes later. “Those two guys are trying to find you,” she murmured as she bent over and wiped the table, which didn’t need it.

  Ben admired the view, looking forward to the moment when she would take her blouse off completely and he’d have unlimited access to those lush breasts.

  “Something about a guide job upriver,” she continued with a smile on her face, knowing exactly what he was looking at and thinking. She shrugged her shoulders, letting the blouse slide a little farther down and reveal even more of her cleavage.

  “I don’t need a job,” he said.

  “What do you need, lover?” she purred.

  There was a lazy, slow-burning fire in his eyes. “A couple of hours of screwing would take the edge off,” he allowed.

  She shivered, and her little cat’s tongue licked out. That was what he liked about Thèresa; she wasn’t any great shakes in the brain department, but she was good-natured and completely sensual, always ready for a good time in bed. She was already getting turned on. He knew the signs as well as he knew them in his own body, though it was kind of difficult for an iron-hard dick to go unnoticed or be mistaken for anything else. Thèresa had to have a steady supply of sex, just as he did. When he wasn’t around, someone else would do. Hell, just about anyone else would do. Sweet Thèresa wasn’t particular, she liked all men, as long as their equipment was in working order.

  She was beaming as she went back to work, her face lit with anticipation.

  Ben studied Kates and the man with him. It was the truth; he didn’t need a job now. He had plenty of money in the bank, and his life-style wasn’t extravagant. Fancy sleaze could cost a lot of bucks, but plain sleaze was dirt cheap. As long as he had food, a bed, good whiskey, and plenty of sex, that was all he asked out of life. Ben Lewis was a contented man.

  Like hell.

  The nose for adventure, which had led him into one hellhole after another for most of his life, was working at full strength now. If a slime ball like Steven Kates would put himself out by tramping through the Amazon basin, there had to be a mighty important reason behind it. The Amazon wasn’t an ordinary river and any expedition wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. From what Ben knew of him, Kates was the type who hung back and let others do the work; then he stepped in and relieved them of their hard-earned loot.

  It had to be something big to entice Kates to active participation.

  Ben got to his feet and ambled over to their table, snagging the bottle of whiskey from his own table as an afterthought. He tipped the bottle up and let a small amount run into his mouth where he held it on his tongue, savoring the taste for a delicious moment before swallowing it. Damn good whiskey.

  Kates was staring at him with cold disdain. Ben cocked one eyebrow at the two men. “I’m Lewis. Y’all looking for me?”

  He almost laughed aloud at the look on Kates’s face, and he knew what the other man was seeing: someone who hadn’t shaved, whose clothing was stained and wrinkled, and who was cradling a bottle as if he never let it out of his arms. Well, he hadn’t shaved, his clothes were dirty and wrinkled, and he didn’t intend to let that bottle go just yet. He’d come straight here from a bitch of a trip upriver, and the shaving and bathing would wait until he got to Thèresa’s place, because she liked to take a bath with him. And this was, in fact, fine whiskey; he hadn’t had even a taste of booze in a couple of months, and if he’d left it on the table some son of a bitch would have swiped it. He’d paid for the bottle, so where he went, it went.

  The other man, though, was looking at him eagerly. “Ben Lewis?”

  “Yep.” This guy looked to be in his mid-thirties, maybe older but with boyish features that disguised his age despite a certain look of dissipation. Ben sized him up immediately: a do-nothing, the type who whined about being dealt a bad hand in life rather than getting up off his lazy ass and doing something about it. Even if he did do something, it would be along the lines of robbing a convenience store to improve his finances; actually working hard at a job wouldn’t occur to him. Ben wasn’t much on the nine-to-five routine himself, but at least he was solvent through his own efforts, not someone else’s.

  “We heard you’re the best guide available for an expedition we’re planning,” the other man said. “We’d like to hire you.”

  “Well, now.” Ben hooked an extra chair around and sat down in it backwards, his arms propped on the back of it. “I’m the best, but I don’t know if I’m available. I just got back from a trip, and I’d planned on a little R and R before I went back up.”

  Steven Kates seemed to have recovered from his distaste, maybe figuring that anyone who had just returned from a guide trip was entitled to look dirty and unshaven. “It’ll be worth your while, Mr. Lewis.”

  Mr. Lewis? It had been so long since Ben had been called “mister” that he almost looked around to see if someone was standing behind him. “Just ’Lewis,’” he said. “My while is worth a lot right now. I’m tired and looking forward to sleeping in a real bed for a couple of weeks.” A real bed with a woman in it.

  “Ten thousand dollars,” Kates said.

  “For how long?” Ben asked.

  Kates shrugged. “We don’t know. It’s an archaeological expedition.”

  That was doubtful. Ben couldn’t imagine Kates being involved in anything as high-minded as an archaeological expedition. He might use it as a cover, but that was it. This was getting more interesting by the minute. “What’s the general area? I’ll be able to judge the length of the trip then.”

  The other man pulled out a map of Brazil and laid it on the table. It wasn’t a large or detailed map; in fact, it looked as if it had been torn from an encyclopedia. He tapped his finger on an area far inland and north of the Amazon. “In here somewhere. We don’t know exactly where.”

  Ben stared at the map with half-closed eyes and took another sip of whiskey. Damn, that was good stuff. It burned all the way down. Appreciation of it kept him from laughing out loud at the preposterousness of the situation. These goofballs had come down here with a grade-school map and no idea what they were getting into. “It’s uncharted up there,” he finally said. “I’ve never gone into that territory, and I don’t know anyone who has.”

  “You can’t do it?” the second man asked, looking disappointed.

  Ben snorted. “Hell, yes, I can do it. Just who are you, anyway?”

  “I’m Rick Sherwood. This is Steven Kates.”

  So Kates wasn’t going by an assumed name. He apparently thought no one would know of him down here. That meant he felt safe.

  “Well, Rick Sherwood and Steven Kates, I can take you up there. I’ve never been, but I know how to get along in the jungle, and I don’t suppose it makes any difference that I don’t know exactly where I am if you don’t know exactly where you’re going. The problem is, ten thousand is peanuts. You won’t be able to hire anyone who knows his stuff for that amount. You’re talking about two, maybe three months in hell. My price is two thousand a week, and you pay for all the supplies and extra help. I’ll cost you roughly twenty, twenty-five thousand, and the rest of it will come to about another ten. So, are you still so all-fired set on this ’archaeological expedition’?”

  The two exchanged looks. They hadn’t caught his faint emphasis on the last two words. “No problem,” Kates said smoothly.

  Ben was now past curious, he was flat-out intrigued. Kates hadn’t even blinked an eye, which meant that whatever was up there was worth so much money that thirty-five thousand dollars was a drop in the bucket in comparison, and Kates sure as hell wasn’t involved out of a burning desire to be written up in any archaeological papers. Scavenge the site was more like it, assuming there really was an archaeological site up there, which Ben thought was doubtful. The jungle destroyed evidence of man almost as fast as man could leave it. Still, until he had a better idea of what was going on, he was going to assume there was a site up there, because there sure as hell w