Sandra Moore - The Orchid Hunter

Me racing to get out of the jungle with my orchids, Lawrence Daley, my one serious rival, racing to catch me and steal what I had in my backpack.

Now, looking down through a break in the midstory’s dense leaves, I noted with some satisfaction that my wait had not been wasted.

“Jessica!” Daley called. What he said next was incomprehensible, but it didn’t matter because anger made him boring. And predictable.

I released the slipknot and plummeted. The rope sang through my gloved fingers. Vines and branches whipped my legs. My boots thumped into the thick forest floor, raising the rich, heady scent of moist earth. The backpack whacked my rump as it caught up. I quickly hauled the remaining rope up and over the branch, then stepped back to let the bitter end slap the ground like a whip.

His hat had fallen back on his neck, the leather strap tight on his throat. His sweaty face was tanner than I remembered, and his blue eyes shone with anger.

“You’d better be careful,” he said. “There are other collectors far more ruthless than I.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s why we’re more successful.”

Dear Reader,

You’re about to read a Silhouette Bombshell novel and enter a world full of excitement, suspense and women who stand strong in the face of danger and do what it takes to triumph over the toughest adversaries. And don’t forget a touch of thrilling romance to sweeten the deal. Our bombshells always get their men, good and bad!

Debra Webb kicks off the month with Silent Weapon, the innovative story of Merri Walters, a deaf woman who goes undercover in a ruthless criminal’s mansion and reads his chilling plans right off his lips!

Hold on to your hats for Payback, by Harper Allen, the latest in the Athena Force continuity. Assassin Dawn O’Shaughnessy is out to take down the secret lab that created her and then betrayed her—but she’s got to complete one last mission for them, or her superhealing genes will self-destruct before she gets payback….

Step into the lush and dangerous world of The Orchid Hunter, by Sandra K. Moore. Think “botanist” and “excitement” don’t match? Think again, as this fearless heroine’s search for a rare orchid turns into a dangerous battle of wills in the steamy rain forest.

And don’t miss the twist and turns as a gutsy genius races to break a deadly code, trap a slippery terrorist and steal back the trust of her former CIA mentor, in Calculated Risk, by Stephanie Doyle!

Strong, sexy, suspenseful…that’s Silhouette Bombshell! Please send your comments to me, c/o Silhouette Books, 233 Broadway Suite 1001, New York, NY 10279.

Sincerely,

Natashya Wilson

Associate Senior Editor, Silhouette Bombshell

www.millsandboon.co.uk

has been a technical writer, poet, martial arts student and software product manager, occasionally all at the same time. Although she obtained her master of arts in English from the intensely literary University of Houston Graduate Creative Writing Program, she has happily embraced the fact she’s a commercial fiction writer at heart. She lives on the Texas coast and when she’s not writing action-adventure novels, she can be found hovering over her lone Phalaenopsis, trying to get it to bloom. Visit her on the Web at www.sandrakmoore.com.

Many thanks to Laurie C. Skov, President of Orchids and Tropicals, LLC of Houston, Texas, for his technical information about the fascinating Orchidaceae family; to John E. Erickson for allowing me to use his gorgeous orchid photographs on my Web site; to Heather Giles for her information about the pharmaceutical industry; and to Richard Shepley and Emerson Ricci for their help with the Portuguese. A complete bibliography is available at www.sandrakmoore.com/orchidhunter/. Any outstanding errors of fact are entirely mine.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

On the northern ridge of Mount Aiome, not far from the highest point in Papua New Guinea, just inside the province of Madang, a broad stone ledge juts out from a sheer cliff. Carpeted with lichen, the ledge overlooks a handful of majestic emergent hardwoods poking out from the dense canopy of the rain forest below, hardwoods similar to the one a tomboyish woman like me might choose as her vantage point for keeping watch.

She’d be high enough on this ledge and in this tree that on a clear, predawn morning she could see in the far distance, just over the coastal ridge that hid the swamps, the Bismarck Sea’s great darkness. If she waited long enough, the sun would rise over the water and the archipelago islands would gleam like emeralds on a silky topaz bed. The howling nocturnal cacophony would steadily give way to the brighter tones of the dawn chorus. The light mist fingering the treetops would scatter and disappear beneath the sun’s abrupt heat, and the woman might wish she’d worn a lighter-weight pair of canvas pants.

She might also wish she’d used a wider strap to fashion her climbing harness because her ass was, quite literally, in a sling and gone dead as a doornail. After another twenty minutes, she’d wonder if there was any good reason for suspending herself here like bear bait, her backpack full of carefully packed rare plant specimens. A little while later, she’d start wondering if there might be a better way for a woman of her talents to make a living, since she was bored as hell now and her butt was starting to tingle.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The truth is I’d been up in the tree for a good hour because Lawrence Daley, my one serious plant-collecting rival, had been tracking me all yesterday and last night. For us, it’s an old game: me racing to get out of the jungle with my orchids, him racing to catch me and steal what I’ve got in my backpack. We’d pretty much been enemies since grad school, when Daley’s idea of a good time had been trying to one-up me with graduate advisors and on lab projects, generally making a nuisance of himself. He craved competition. I craved adventure. I guess that’s why we both gravitated to exotic-plant collecting, the only adventurous, competitive niche in the otherwise ho-hum world of botany.

So I was stuck there, roughly ninety feet up in the canopy in the predawn darkness, my butt starting to tingle. I could have tried climbing down the ledge in the dark, but the nocturnal jungle is far more dangerous than the daylight one, and I’ve had one too many run-ins with boa constrictors, poisonous ants and loose rock to be cavalier about it. Back in the golden age of orchid hunting, the Victorian era, hunters died of dysentery or malaria, or disappeared without a trace, or killed each other over a plant. The killing part had slacked off some, but the rest of the experience was intact. Stay sharp or get dead. I tried to stay sharp.

My plan from here on out was simple. If Daley didn’t show by first light, I’d drop from the canopy and head down the ledge. From there, it was twenty miles to the airstrip where a decrepit Douglas Dakota and a genuine muscle-bound Aussie bush pilot waited for me.