Read His Wicked Kiss for Free Online Page A

Jack and his men, along with this small fortune in timber, they would set sail across the Atlantic , and ride the trade winds back to the British Isles .
     
    It was midmorning by the time Eden was finished cataloguing the latest editions to her father’s ever-growing herbarium and making sure that all their recently pressed and dried botanical samples remained undamaged by the relentless humidity.
    At last, finding herself at her leisure, she wasted no time in escaping up into the green Gothic cathedrals of the canopy.
    From the age of ten, Eden had mastered the art of climbing trees using an ancient invention from the Indians called a foot-belt. Ascended to some five stories over the forest floor, she stood in the elbow of a towering mahogany for a while, staring out at the beckoning distance.
    Not even Father liked climbing this high, but Eden did. She could see forever from up there; somehow, from that higher vantage point, it was easier to think.
    Things seemed clearer, simpler. Miles upon endless miles of jungle opened up on every side around her, sprawling horizons, with a misty blue glimmer of the sea beckoning from the great beyond. As she stared into the hazy distance, restlessness churned in her veins, born of too much isolation.
    Here in her fierce paradise, the loneliness whispered its ever more urgent question:
Will I always be alone
?
     
    Jack was not sure how long he had dozed when Trahern spoke his name in an odd tone.
    He opened his eyes and looked around, and could have sworn they’d traveled back in time a thousand years.
    Leaving behind the golden savannahs with their blue skies and vast horizons, they had entered a mysterious, dripping, emerald world of green light and moss-colored shadows.
    The miles-wide river had split into a thousand narrow fingers at the Delta, a complex maze of smaller natural canals, called
canos
, all of which led to the sea.
    Jack saw that their swarthy mestizo pilot was taking them down one of these quiet arteries through dense jungle. The lush vegetation formed a tunnel over the waterway, sealing in the hothouse environment. The air was thick and moist, without a breeze.
    As the boat glided deeper into pristine tropical forest, the constant birdsong and animal noises somehow did not disrupt the profound stillness of this place. Jack stared in wonder.
    Even his raucous crew had gone silent.
    Countless long-legged insects skated on water whose surface looked like olive-colored glass. Suddenly, an aggressive, throaty roar shattered the stillness from somewhere up in the trees. His men jumped then looked around uneasily as the roar turned into a series of staccato screams.
    “What the hell was that, Cap’n?” Higgins, the foretop man, muttered, blessing himself with a hasty sign of the cross.
    “Howler monkey,” Jack murmured, recalling descriptions he had read. Searching the boughs overhead for the large monkey, instead he spotted the magnificent white plumage of a harpy eagle with the noble bearing of a mythical griffon. He pointed, showing it to his men. “Look at that!”
    Green parrots, orange-billed toucans, and riotous macaws fled out of the harpy eagle’s path as it pushed off the branch it had been perching on and swooped off down the clear path of the
caho
, its six-foot wingspan carrying it along at an astonishing speed. Jack stared down the river as the great eagle swooped upward again with an easy flap of its giant wings and disappeared into the canopy, but then a flash of bright motion in the dark water drew his attention lower.
    “What was that?” Trahern murmured, scanning the waterway ahead alongside Jack. “Crocodile?”
    “But I could swear it was… pink?”
    They looked at each other in consternation, but then the creature swam by the boat and all of the men exclaimed in wonderment as the thing proved to be a pink dolphin.
    “
Buoto
,” said their local pilot sagely, then he pointed over the wheel. “
Mira aqui!”
    On the right bank of the