Anne Mather - Country Of The Falcon

Mills & Boon is proud to present a fabulous collection of fantastic novels by bestselling, much loved author

Anne has a stellar record of achievement within the publishing industry, having written over one hundred and sixty books, with worldwide sales of more than forty-eight MILLION copies in multiple languages.

This amazing collection of classic stories offers a chance for readers to recapture the pleasure Anne’s powerful, passionate writing has given.

We are sure you will love them all!

I’ve always wanted to write—which is not to say I’ve always wanted to be a professional writer. On the contrary, for years I only wrote for my own pleasure and it wasn’t until my husband suggested sending one of my stories to a publisher that we put several publishers’ names into a hat and pulled one out. The rest, as they say, is history. And now, one hundred and sixty-two books later, I’m literally—excuse the pun—staggered by what’s happened.

I had written all through my infant and junior years and on into my teens, the stories changing from children’s adventures to torrid gypsy passions. My mother used to gather these manuscripts up from time to time, when my bedroom became too untidy, and dispose of them! In those days, I used not to finish any of the stories and Caroline , my first published novel, was the first I’d ever completed. I was newly married then and my daughter was just a baby, and it was quite a job juggling my household chores and scribbling away in exercise books every chance I got. Not very professional, as you can imagine, but that’s the way it was.

These days, I have a bit more time to devote to my work, but that first love of writing has never changed. I can’t imagine not having a current book on the typewriter—yes, it’s my husband who transcribes everything on to the computer. He’s my partner in both life and work and I depend on his good sense more than I care to admit.

We have two grown-up children, a son and a daughter, and two almost grown-up grandchildren, Abi and Ben. My e-mail address is mystic-am@msn.comand I’d be happy to hear from any of my wonderful readers.

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Cover

About the Author Mills & Boon is proud to present a fabulous collection of fantastic novels by bestselling, much loved author

Title Page Country of the Falcon Anne Mather www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Copyright

ALEXANDRA awoke with the familiar sensation of apprehension which came from knowing that any one of a dozen horrific creatures might have entered the hut during the night. She peered down warily from her hammock with the alertness which came from experience and saw to her relief that the mud-packed floor below appeared free from invaders. On her first morning there over a week ago, she had climbed down carelessly and almost trodden on an enormous spider which her host had calmly informed her was merely seeking refuge from the dampness of the tropical forest outside and was quite harmless so long as she didn’t attempt to touch it or attack it. As Alexandra was totally incapable of doing anything but standing there with every hair on her head assuming a life of its own, either alternative was beyond her.

Now she slithered in a rather ungainly fashion to the floor and looked about her drearily, stretching her aching back. She was not used to sleeping in a hammock, but that was the least of her worries. This bare hut with its thatched roof and mud floor had been her home for the past eight days and would continue to be so, so long as the rivers remained in flood and her guide refused to take her upstream. And as each day passed, the conviction grew within her that her father would not be pleased to see her.

She sighed. It had seemed such a great adventure, sitting in the common room, discussing the idea of coming to Brazil with her friends, but her pitiful knowledge had not prepared her for the savage reality of the Amazon basin. Until then, it had been her father’s place of work, and the more she was warned against doing anything impulsive, the more determined she became. All her life, she had rebelled against her father’s resolution that she should acquire a good education while he went off to all the most exciting countries of the world and only saw his daughter for brief periods at holiday times. When she was younger, she had not minded so much. She had tried to understand that because her mother had died while accompanying her father on one of his expeditions to some outlandish place, he had naturally wanted to protect his only offspring from a similar fate. But as Alexandra grew older, she had begun to doubt the validity of this. Her mother had always been a rather delicate woman, following her husband more faithfully than enthusiastically, while Alexandra possessed her father’s strength and determination. Or so she had thought …

She couldn’t deny that most of the time she had been happy at school. She was a popular girl and as the school accommodated boys as well as girls, she had grown up accepting a certain amount of male admiration as her due. She was not conceited, but she was aware that she was attractive to the opposite sex. Tall and slim, with straight corn-coloured hair, she possessed the kind of lissom beauty much sought after by less fortunate females, and even the most casual of attire looked elegant on her.

But she didn’t feel very elegant now. The thin cotton shirt was creased and so, too, were the tight-fitting jeans which had become her usual sleeping attire. She had almost forgotten how delightful it was to shed one’s clothes and climb between the sheets of a real bed, and how soft and relaxing an interior sprung mattress could be.

It was all her own fault, of course, but that didn’t make it any easier to take. And how was she to know that she was to be delayed in this godforsaken spot indefinitely?

She had flown up to Manaus ten days ago, ten days ago when the Rio Negro had been in full flood, its black, crashing waters swollen by the storms of the rainy season. She had, until that moment, never seen such a tremendous volume of water shouldering its way to the sea, but even then she had not really considered its possible effect on her journey. And it had been comparatively easy obtaining a passage to Los Hermanos, but no one had told her that Los Hermanos was nothing like Manaus …

Manaus was a civilised port, founded in the mid-seventeenth century, but owing most of its architecture to the rubber boom which occurred at the turn of the twentieth century. Then a thriving English corporation had built a stone quay, with warehouses and floating wharves that were unaffected by the tremendous swell of the river in the wet season. In consequence its public buildings looked reassuringly European despite their tropical backcloth. Alexandra had stayed at a reasonably good hotel, partaken of mainly European dishes, and decided that all the stories about the Green Hell of the Amazon basin were untrue. But that was before her journey to Los Hermanos.