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  “Two weeks, give or take a day,” Ben replied without looking at her. His attention was on the loading of the last of their supplies.

  Inwardly she groaned at the thought of two weeks cooped up on board, but didn’t complain out loud. There was no help for it. Riverboats were the only way to get their supplies upriver to where they could begin the trek on foot.

  “Coming back, that time will be cut in half,” he said. “We’ll be riding with the current rather than against it, for one thing. For another, we won’t be bringing all of these supplies out, and the load will be a lot lighter.”

  They had eight helpers, counting Dutra. Ben had hired an additional seven, five Brazilians and two Indians from the Tukano tribe. The two Indians, one on each boat, were silently distributing the weight of the supplies so the loads were evenly balanced. Ben divided his time between the two boats, his eyes shaded by dark sunglasses but missing nothing. He knew exactly where every item was, how much they had of it, how long their supplies should last. If they hadn’t found this lost city by the time half of the supplies were gone, tough. They were coming back out anyway. He figured he’d have more trouble with Jillian than with any of the others if that happened, but he’d bring her back if he had to string her up on two poles like a peccary and carry her out.

  When she had arrived on the docks this morning, ready to leave, it was the first time he had seen her since he’d left her hotel room two nights before. She had clubbed her shoulder-length dark hair, and in the bright sun it gleamed as lustrously as mink. “Put your hat on,” he said automatically. He himself was bareheaded, for he hadn’t wanted to take the chance that Dutra would recognize him if he wore a hat and sunglasses. He’d gotten rather fond of the khaki hat and had brought it along, but for now, if the sun got too hot for him, he would put on his usual baseball cap.

  She obeyed. He liked the way she looked in her sturdy canvas pants and white short-sleeved shirt. With the straw fedora set firmly on her head, she was brisk and no-nonsense, her experience showing in every move she made. The canvas pants also revealed every delicious curve of her rounded buttocks, and he whistled silently to himself. She’d be sleeping beside him on the crowded deck for two weeks, and every night of those two weeks was going to be pure temptation. Nothing else, though, damn it. Not with four other people right beside them.

  “What do you think of our friend Dutra?” he asked in a low voice.

  She didn’t have to look at the man in question to see him in her mind, and she suppressed a shudder. “We’ll be lucky if he doesn’t kill us all,” she murmured.

  A few inches shorter than Ben, Dutra probably outweighed him by thirty pounds or more. He wore a shirt with the sleeves ripped out, and huge sweat stains ran from his armpits to his waist. His head looked too small for his massive shoulders, even though his skull was covered by a thick mass of dull, unruly black hair, more like an animal’s in texture than a human’s. His brow ridge was as prominent as a Neanderthal’s, but his eyebrows were sparse, almost nonexistent. His deep-set eyes were small and mean and cunning, his jaw unshaven, his teeth stained brown. His incisors were as pointed as an ape’s. Between those teeth and his hair, he didn’t appear quite human. She couldn’t look at him without feeling her stomach roil with distaste and fear.

  Dutra wasn’t working, though he was supposed to be one of the helpers. He leaned against a post, his massive arms crossed as he stared unceasingly at Jillian. Ben let it slide; for one thing, the boats had to be precisely balanced, and Dutra would deliberately screw it up. For another, let him make Jillian uneasy; she might reconsider her decision about sharing a tent.

  Rick Sherwood was on the second boat, sitting lazily on the prow with his feet propped up. Steven Kates, however, was pacing back and forth on the docks as if he were personally directing the placement of every box that went aboard. Ben spared both of them a disgusted look, knowing that the sunglasses hid his eyes. Those two would be in for a shock when they got upriver.

  The humid heat had bathed them in steam by the time everything was loaded. Jillian took pleasure in seeing that the knife-edge creases in Kates’s pants had wilted. She could have told him that having his clothes pressed was a useless effort in the tropics. She suspected both Rick and Kates were in for a rough time when they reached land upriver, for neither of them was used to hard physical labor and they would have to carry a load through the jungle just like everyone else. She kept herself in good physical condition, but she wasn’t looking forward to the first few days.

  “That’s it.” Ben said something to the two Tukano tribesmen in their language, and they murmured soft replies. One would be in the lead boat, the other in the second, piloting it. Both of them knew the rivers. He put his hand on Jillian’s arm as he turned to Kates. “Kates, you and Sherwood go in the second boat. Jillian and I will be in the front one.”

  “I’d planned to be in the front one,” Kates said.

  “Won’t work. You don’t know how to navigate the river. I do.”

  “I meant, put Jillian in the second boat with Rick.”

  “Nope. Since she’s the only one who knows where we’re going, she has to ride with the navigator.”

  It was an argument Kates couldn’t refute, but he didn’t like it. Being on the second boat offended his sense of self-worth. Ben didn’t give a damn; he didn’t want Jillian on the same boat with Dutra. She walked calmly aboard the first boat, surefooted in her deck shoes, cutting off further discussion.

  “We’re casting off,” Ben said impatiently, and Kates stalked aboard the second boat.

  Ben took the wheel and started the engine. The boats didn’t look like much, but the engines were first-class. They had to be, to buck the current. They surged to life with deep, guttural roars. The two Tukanos slipped the mooring lines, tossing them on board and following with agile leaps as the boats eased away from the docks.

  “Talk to me,” Ben said to Jillian as he deftly steered through the maze of ships and boats in the harbor. The idea had come to him that morning. “I’ve been thinking about something. Can you find this place as easily if we go in on the Rio Negro rather than the Amazon?”

  She cleared her throat.

  He took the chance of looking at her rather than at what he was doing, and her expression made him swear softly under his breath. “Goddammit,” he muttered. “Just when were you going to say, ’Oh, by the way, Mr. Lewis, we need to go up this river rather than the other one’?”

  She made a show of looking around. “Actually . . . right about now.”

  “And what if I didn’t know anything about the Rio Negro?”

  “You aren’t the only one who can snoop around,” she replied easily. “I asked around about you. You’ve guided as much up the Rio Negro as you have up the big river.”

  “So why didn’t you bother to say something before now?”

  “To throw off anyone who might have been nosing around, anyone Kates or Rick might have told. 1 had my reasons.”

  “Yeah, lack of trust being at the top of the list.”

  “You got it.”

  He frowned, but only for a minute. What the hell, so she’d been one step ahead of him all along. It happened. Not often, but it happened.

  “Well, I agree with you,” he said. “Not only will it give us an advantage, but it’ll be more comfortable. No mosquitoes.”

  “Really? Why not?”

  He shrugged. “Something in the water. Black-water rivers tend to have fewer insects.”

  She’d already had experience with the swarming black clouds of mosquitoes that inhabited tropical areas. If the Rio Negro had fewer of the insects, she was all for traveling on it. It would certainly make sleeping on deck much more comfortable.

  Ben whistled as he handled the wheel. Manaus sat on the Rio Negro, but he hadn’t actually thought of going up the black river until that morning. He had assumed they would head downstream for seven miles and pick up the Amazon. But upstream the rivers penetrated similar regions. And