Curse of the Condor Read Online Free PDF Page A

side of the canoe and the other to that silly straw purse of hers that looked like it belonged at a tourist stand.
    "What's your name?" he asked, scoping their surroundings while he talked.
    "Jetta," she answered.
    "What?" His eyes met hers for a brief second before she looked away.
    "Jetta. Jetta Fitzgerald," she said, playing with a loose piece of straw on her purse. She found more interest in that than she did him. Or perhaps she feared him and just didn’t want to show it.
    "Umph," he mumbled. "Strange name." He wasn’t good at conversing with women. After all, most his life had been spent with Jivaro women who weren’t much for conversation. In Lima, he’d had several flings these past five years, but none of the women meant anything to him at all.
    "I'm a school teacher," she retorted, her chin raising in the process, this time her eyes looking straight at him. He met her gaze, finding himself pulled into their blue, swirling depths. He wondered how old she was or if she’d ever had a lover. She looked innocent and naive. She didn’t belong anywhere this side of the equator, let alone so close to him.
    "How far is it to your home? Where exactly do you reside in the jungle?” she asked, as if he were her pupil and she were quizzing him on a geography lesson. Then she threw another question at him, one he was not prepared to answer. “Is Ryder staying with you, or is he located with the Jivaro tribe, or perhaps deep in the jungle?"
    If only she knew exactly how deep in the jungle her brother lie. But he couldn’t tell her. Not now. Not here, not like this. He’d have to find a way to break the news to her when she wasn’t so vulnerable.
    "We've only been traveling for five minutes,” he told her. “Why don't you relax that grip of yours and try to take in the sights?"
    Conrado saw her nod. Her long, blond hair tied back in a ponytail bobbed as she did so. She placed the smashed straw purse on her lap, putting her forearm through the long straps, throwing him a sideways glance.
    What did she think? That he was going to try to steal it? As if he was in need of anything she could possibly possess. Her other hand still clutched the side of the boat. The canoe was so loaded down with supplies and the weight of their bodies, that her fingers were nearly touching the water over the side. She squinted in the hot sun, her cheeks a bright crimson, and Conrado knew by nightfall she'd be in pain.
     
    Jetta looked around at her surroundings, the dense foliage of the jungle swallowing them up as they moved down the river. She felt like a mere speck of sand on a vast desert floor. Never did the world seem so large or foreign, and she so out of place.
    The canopy of trees towered above her, reaching so high she couldn’t see the tops. Vines hung down, plants shot up, and she sat in the midst of it all feeling like she was being devoured by the elements of nature. This was more wilderness than she’d ever seen. The rain forest took her breath away. 
    A slight breeze drifted over the water, filling her nostrils with the musty dampness that soaked the spongy shores and made its home among the moss-laden trees. The breeze stung her sunburned cheeks and nose, like an adder lashing out its tongue in a wicked kiss of welcoming her to the jungle. She curiously looked down and surveyed the tan water, unable to see the bottom. She wondered just what kinds of things lived in there, then decided she'd rather not know.
    She closed her eyes for a brief second, hoping and praying this was all just a bad dream. She couldn't really be sitting in a dugout canoe with a jungle man floating down the Amazon to the middle of God knows where. Gee, she'd have one enormous tale to tell when she swapped 'what I did over the summer' stories with her students.
    Her eyes shot open at the sound of screeching, or was it squawking from the trees above her. The flicker of red and green flashed in a streak of sunlight, and she saw a flock of huge