Hard to argue with that. Since she had known him he hadn’t lied to her, so she must trust his judgment now. “The executive decision has been made. We go northeast.”
He quirked a brow. “Executive decision?”
Amelia smiled at him, hitched her bags farther up on her shoulder, and marched past him. “You heard me,” she said over her shoulder and began battling the Amazon with a bounce in her step.
They had a plan. Let the adventure begin.
An hour later, she was exhausted, drenched in sweat and out of breath. Dropping the machete Brody had given her to her side, Amelia stopped and wiped sweat from her brow. There was no clear-cut path through the jungle and the closer they got to the river the thicker it became. If this was the easiest route, she’d hate to see the hardest. It was like chopping her way through oatmeal. Brody had showed her how to swipe at an angle instead of straight like she’d been and it made it easier, but it was still exhausting.
“It must be a hundred degrees out here,” she said, fanning herself with the collar of her blouse. It was sheer, thank heavens, but did no good.
Brody took the machete from her hand and replaced it with a water bottle. His pack was three times the size of hers and filled to the top with supplies. What, she didn’t know, but as long as he supplied her with water and food, she was happy. Her throat was parched and she hadn’t packed enough. She foolishly trusted her guide to provide provisions. And he ended up selling her down the river, the rotten fink. If she never saw Don Newton again, it would be too soon.
“Are we almost there?” she asked after taking a long drink.
“No.”
She slapped a bug that was feasting on her neck and let out a sigh. The jungle had held a certain amount of exotic mystery when she had been making her decision to go. The lush green forests, colorful birds, and exotic plants had drawn her. But the reality wasn’t quite so exotic. Or mysterious. It was hot, humid, thick, and noisy. The ground moved of its own accord beneath her feet and she was not going to ask Brody why that was. She didn’t want to know.
Slapping another bug, she reached into her bag for bug spray.
“Don’t bother,” Brody said. “Won’t help. It’ll only attract them more.”
“I’m getting eaten alive,” she argued. “It’s bug spray. It has to help.”
“If the bugs feasting on you were mosquitoes, it would.”
Amelia’s hand froze inside her bag. “They’re not?”
“No.”
“Oh, Lord,” she murmured, looking around. Did she really want to know what creepy insects were flying around her head? No, not really. Sometimes not knowing was better. “Got any net in that pack of yours?”
“That’s a rhetorical question, right?” Brody brushed past her and swiped a wide arc through the man-sized leaves blocking their path.
Amelia tucked the water bottle in her purse and followed him. He moved much faster than her, cutting a path through the fauna with ease. Intrigued by the ripple of muscle across his back each time he swiped the machete, Amelia let her thoughts wander to places they shouldn’t. As long as no one knew, she didn’t see any harm in fantasizing over her attractive guide who had so gallantly offered to take her to
Paraíso
and protect her from harm.
How could she not be attracted to a man that risked his life for her?
With a little sigh, she trudged on. Even hot, sweaty and tired she was having fun. She was doing it. Living her dream. With a handsome guide to boot. If she were a writer, she would pen this story because so far it had been full of adventure and danger. Maybe, someday she would tell it to her children.
Wistful, she stepped over a giant, raised tree root. She needed a husband for that to happen. And to find a husband she needed to date men who didn’t bore her to death. The men she dated were successful, well-mannered gentlemen to the core who doted on her and made her sisters smile approvingly. Unfortunately, they were well-mannered gentlemen in bed, too. That shouldn’t be a bad thing, but they left her unsatisfied and wanting more. More fire. More excitement. Just … more.
Kind of like her life. Which felt like it was lacking and left her wanting more. More adventure instead of failed attempts. Her attempts at dating had been failures right along with her failed adventures. Well, adventures in the backyard. She never really ventured out of her comfort zone.
Amelia stopped short, her last thought sinking in deeply. How had she never seen it before?
• • •
Brody turned when he no longer heard Amelia behind him. She stood a few feet away, head cocked, brows drawn, looking awed and confused. Tendrils of hair clung to her neck and her completely inappropriate sheer yellow blouse hugged her slender body like a second skin. It outlined her breasts and made his blood run hot, not for the first time since he met her. He had tried — God help him, he had tried — not to notice how perfectly feminine she was, but failed. Miserably.
He tore his eyes away. “Problem?”
Her bright green eyes met his. “I’m out of my comfort zone.”
Baffled, Brody lowered the machete, watching excitement grow on her face. When she began explaining, it was with warmth and vibrancy.
“You have to understand,” she said. “When I was little I used to dream of being like my Aunt Pan. She was amazing. When she dropped in — always unexpectedly — she brought gifts from all over the world, along with tall tales of her grand adventures. Swimming with sharks in Australia, climbing Mt. Everest and narrowly escaping death, traipsing through the jungle looking for buried treasure. I used to drive my mother crazy asking when Aunt Pandora was visiting again. I couldn’t wait to hear her stories and see her photo journals of all the places she went. She was an incredible photographer and her pictures were so … amazing. I wanted to go everywhere she visited and do everything she did.”
She paused to wipe sweat off her brow and Brody felt his chest tug a bit. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes luminous. She looked beautiful. Alive. Dangerous. It made fighting his attraction to her more difficult.
“Well, growing up in a small Michigan town didn’t lend that kind of adventure. The most we had to look forward to was the summer fair. So you can imagine how exciting it was when Aunt Pan visited. Unfortunately, my parents didn’t agree. They disapproved of Aunt Pan’s lifestyle and the choices she made. My father thought his sister was a foolish dreamer that wasted her life away and my mother believed Aunt Pan should have settled down and had a family. I don’t blame them for feeling the way they did, but it made Aunt Pan’s visits few and far between as I got older. Eventually, she quit coming around except for Christmas and birthdays. But she always sent me her photo journals. Did you ever see one of her journals?”
Brody shook his head. His time with Pandora had been short and crazy. A whirlwind blowing through his life, taking what she needed and leaving him haunted with the memories of knowing her.
What he didn’t understand was why Amelia was telling him all of this now. And why he was so interested. He shouldn’t be. Didn’t want to be. But seeing her like this kept him rooted in place, hanging onto her every word.
“That’s too bad,” Amelia continued. “They’re beautiful. I’m rambling, aren’t I? I don’t usually do that. I guess realizing that I never really left my own backyard to have one of Aunt Pan’s ‘adventures’ makes me exactly what I suspected I was. A coward. I wanted the adventure but I was afraid to go out and get it. I never had the courage to take that leap of faith Aunt Pan was always talking about. I rationalized it using my sisters, telling myself it was to protect them from worrying, so I settled into a nice, comfortable, safe lifestyle. I’m a pastry chef working in my sister’s B & B, for goodness sake. How cushy is that? No real adventure there. I was living the life I told myself I never would.”
“Until now,” Brody guessed.
She met his eyes and smiled, soft and utterly endearing. “Until now,” she agreed. “Don’t get me wrong, my sisters are extremely overprotective — Lord knows I’ve given them reason with all my misadventures — and I love them dearly, but it’s time for me to stop using them as a crutch.” Determination turned her eyes a light, sea green. “I want to find
Paraíso
. I want my adventure.”
Her tone was equally as determined and Brody had to admire that. He didn’t have a family to love and care about what happened to him, but he understood the need to do something on your own. To prove yourself. If Amelia was ready to make that stand, then he would be the one to watch her back and make sure she accomplished her goal.
Guilt sliced through him. He couldn’t promise anything after that. Reality said they both had lives to get back to, and right now his life was in financial turmoil. He needed to find
Paraíso
as much as she did. Just not for the same reasons. She needed to find herself and he needed to pay off the debts his friend left him. His life depended on it.
“I can get you there,” he said, pushing the guilt down deep. He would do what he had to do when the time came. It was something he had learned to be very good at.
Her sunny smile hit him like a punch in the gut, forcing him to turn away and swipe violently at the saw-toothed leaves in front of him.
“I knew there was a part of you that believed,” she murmured. “Well, let’s get moving. Time’s wasting.” A second later, she took the machete from him and started pushing through the jungle with renewed zeal.
Brody scrubbed a hand over his face and after a moment followed along, wishing he didn’t feel like such a heel for what he had to do.
“You know, I was thinking — ”
“Amelia, don’t take another step.”
Amelia froze mid-step at the gruff order. Slowly, she lifted her eyes to Brody who stood a few feet away. He wasn’t looking at her but over her shoulder.
“What’s wrong?” she whispered, not liking the intense look on his face. It was one she’d seen before. When he rescued her from Mr. Newton and his pals. She had hoped to never see that look again.
Brody inched toward her, machete raised, ready to strike. But, strike at what? And why wasn’t he answering her?
“Brody?” she said warily as he approached with that deadly looking knife. “What are you doing?”
When he swung straight at her head, she screamed, her life flashing in front of her eyes. Her only thought was that he’d gone insane and she had seriously misjudged him and now he was going to chop her head off and leave her to rot on the jungle floor where no one would ever find her.
The machete sliced through the air close enough to hear the
whoosh
of air against her cheek. Something fell on her shoulder and she screamed again. She stumbled back, tripping over a root and falling hard on her backside.
A red, black and yellow snake landed in her lap and she let out a blood-curdling scream, smacking it with her purse as she tried to scoot away from it, chanting, “If-red-touches-yellow-you’re-a-dead-fellow-but-if-red-touches-black-you’re-okay-Jack,” as she moved.
Panic hit her when she seen the red stripes touching the yellow ones. Not only because she was deathly afraid of snakes, but because she read about the deadly coral snake in her survival manual. And this was most certainly a coral snake.
“Get it off,” she cried. “Brody. Please. Help me.
Red is touching yellow
.”
To her horror, Brody leaned down and picked up the snake with one hand. Amelia screamed, imagining him getting bit and the venom killing him within minutes. “Brody, no!”
“Would you stop screaming,” Brody said, holding the snake up. “It’s dead.”
“Dead,” Amelia repeated slowly, staring at the snake swinging in the air above her head. Brody had sliced it clean through. “You … you weren’t trying to chop my head off,” she breathed in relief, her heart threatening to beat right out of her chest.
“Chop your head off?” Brody said with a tiny scowl. “Tempting as it may be with all your screaming, no, I wasn’t.”
“Please, throw that thing away.” Trembling, Amelia turned away. Even obviously dead, it terrified her. How could he be so blasé? She could have been bitten and died.
It landed in the bush seconds later along with its other half. Dropping her bags on the ground, Amelia drew in a shaky breath. “Can we sit for a minute? I need a minute.”
Brody didn’t sit and she didn’t argue. Instead, she closed her eyes and waited for her nerves to calm. “How did Aunt Pan do this?”
“With grace and a whole lot of grit,” Brody answered to her surprise. She hadn’t expected him to answer.
Amelia opened her eyes to look up at him. “Tell me how you met her.” Anything to distract her from the snake that almost killed her.
Brody shrugged out of his pack and set it on the ground before leaning back against a tree. “Not much to tell.”
“Did she charter a flight from you?”
“Eventually. She wanted to rent one of my planes and pilot herself to
Paraíso
.”
Amelia smiled. That didn’t surprise her one bit. Her aunt had an independent streak a mile wide. “But you didn’t let her?”
“My plane. My rules.”
“You chartered her into the jungle then?”
“As far as I could. Her guide took her the rest of the way.”
Amelia frowned. “Guide?”
“A man by the name of Charlie Weston.”
Her frown deepened. “I know that name. Aunt Pan spoke of him a couple times. He was a professor or something. Archeology, I think. He went on adventures with Aunt Pan sometimes. Treasure hunting, writing papers, whatever professors do.”
“They were lovers.”
Amelia gasped. “Why would you say that?” She shook her head. “No, they were acquaintances. They explored together. Aunt Pan never had a relationship that lasted more than the time she spent in any particular place, which wasn’t long. She was a free spirit. Falling in love wasn’t her style. What makes you think that?”
Brody cocked an arrogant brow and she rolled her eyes. “It’s a guy thing, right? Ugh, never mind. Tell me the rest. So you dropped them off in the jungle. Then what?” She refused to believe he knew they were lovers because he was a guy.
Aunt Pandora would have told her if she’d fallen in love. Maybe not the rest of the family, but definitely her. She and her aunt had shared a special bond because Amelia was the only one who loved her for who she was and didn’t try to change her. No way would Aunt Pan have kept it a secret. Would she?