Darkest Love

by

Melody Tweedy

TORRID BOOKS
www.torridbooks.com

Published by
TORRID BOOKS
www.torridbooks.com
An Imprint of Whiskey Creek Press LLC

Copyright © 2015 by
Melody Tweedy

Warning: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 (five) years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.

Names, characters and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-63355-661-4

Credits
Cover Artist: Vinessa Riley
Editor: Fern Valentine

Printed in the United States of America

For Anton

Acknowledgment:

Thanks to the team at Torrid and Start Publishing

Were the Kaamo tribesmen serious? Annie Childs, associate professor of anthropology, had never imagined her career would lead her to this.

Life in academia was about forty percent field work, forty percent editing-while-latte-sipping, ten percent lecturing, nine percent groveling for tenure, and one percent miscellaneous. A grim truth now dawned on Annie as she stood, surrounded by glaring tribesmen on the South Pacific island of Sivu, hundreds of thousands of miles from the nearest hospital, policeman, security company, family member or friendly face.

The truth was that miscellaneous category contained a grim possibility: excruciating death at the hands of the people one is studying.

Annie stared at the line of faces and gulped. All around her mud-streaked men stared back. Each one held a totem stick that could easily have been used as a spear if he so chose. One stake through the heart would probably finish Annie Childs, Vampire-style. And if that didn't, the mocha-colored biceps and fists of a Kaamo warrior would certainly do the trick.

One hand around her neck. One twist. Then the world would turn black.

The tribesman at the front, whose name was Niin, was dangling a silver chain between his fingers. Annie watched as he raised her necklace and looped it over the top of his totem stick, letting the pendant dangle between the feathers and the tiny rodent skull he had affixed there. He mumbled something in Kaamo that made Paulo—the expedition's linguist—narrow his eyes into fearful slits.

Paulo turned to her and hissed: “Annie. Their anger is moving to the wrist. That is what they say—it is their strongest expression for anger. It means they will strike!”

Paulo sputtered the final sentence, sending a shower of spittle-flecks onto the dust with his last word: ‘strike.' Annie Childs actually bit her lip in amusement, despite the escalating danger of the situation.
I never thought I'd see him like this
. Paulo the linguist was an impassive man with a hangdog face that seemed to become jowlier in the midday heat, as if he were melting. Annie had literally pulled him out of his hut that morning, fibbing that the heat wouldn't be too bad and reminding him that his Solitaire cards would be there in the evening. Paulo translated the words of the Kaamo people—the natives of Sivu island, and the human research subjects for Annie's present study—pretty well, despite looking half asleep all the time. Annie was impressed that his pronunciation stayed crisp even as he seemed to drift in and out of full consciousness.

That ‘hangdog' face was sure looking scared now. His skin color had transitioned from Irish setter-brown to Maltese terrier-white in under three seconds. “Miss Childs, leave it,” Paulo begged. “Please. Leave what you have given them and run!”

Before Annie could protest that she needed her necklace back, thank you very much, her research colleague Rain Mistern grabbed her by the shoulder and jerked her so violently she wailed.

“Get your hands off me, Rain!” she gasped.
Ouch
. A bruise was the last thing she needed. Annie gripped her throbbing shoulder, amazed by the amount of sweat that was trickling down her arm and darkening the cotton of her white tank. Paulo and Rain both had crescent-shaped patches staining their armpits, and Annie's long hair was sticking to her skin in salty strips.

“Miss Annie,” Paulo pleaded. “They believe the gift is preordained. That it came with the rain. You must let them keep it now.”

“I'm not letting them keep my necklace!” Annie cried. “Paulo, it's a family heirloom.”

How Annie wished she had a better grasp of the Kaamo language. Then she might be able to negotiate. Unfortunately it was Paulo who had the best working understanding of Kaamo culture and language in the world.

Annie turned to Rain, mouth open and ready to protest, but gulped and shut her mouth when she saw his expression. His lips were pursed, his jaw was tensed, and his eyes had new crinkles in their corners. Rain Mistern—the darling of the NYU anthropology department—was Annie's favourite field collaborator for a few reasons: erudition, unflappability, heart-stopping sexiness, coolness in a crisis. This was the first time she had ever seen him looking anxious.

The sapphire was dangling under Niin's rodent skull.
That has to be the most blinged-out dead rat in the whole Pacific, if not the world.
What a mockery they were making of her grandmother's gem; Annie's blood spiked at the thought. She opened her mouth one last time to plead, but Rain was too quick. He seized her by the wrist and pulled her down the mud bank, running so quickly mud flecks covered her calves in itchy brown streaks.

“Annie, shut up,” Rain ordered as the shouts of the Kaamo followed them down the bank. Annie was flying, barely keeping up with Rain's longer, more powerful strides. Her hair whipped back from her face—all but one itchy strand that managed to lodge itself in her eye—and she was in danger of toppling over. The slippery ground and Rain's relentless wrist-pulling was too much. As they passed the cyathea ferns on the bank she collapsed, wheezing.

“They're not following. Rain. They're not following.”

“Never, ever, do anything like that again!” Rain let her drop to the ground with a carelessness that stung Annie a little. “That was beyond stupid. If a dozen Kaamo warriors are certain that your necklace belongs to them, it bloody well does!”

“Oh, how fitting,” Annie said, still gasping. Rain was famous for the way he described primitive tribespeople in journals. He wrote from their point of view, as if their beliefs were scientific FACT.
The fasting between midday and sunset makes the sun come up extra brightly the next day,
he had written in the South Pacific Review, as if it were actually true. Annie could not believe they had actually published that. Rain was famous for his efforts to really get in the heads of tribal people, but to Annie that tone was definitely bordering on daft—cultural relativism had its limits.

Rain stood above her, examining her as she panted. “I'll get the necklace back for you.”

“Oh, will you really?” She felt the energy between them shift as Rain watched her, taking in her wheezy pants and exhilarated face. When he leaned down and touched her shoulder, Annie understood. It reminded him of all those other times she had gone down on her knees for him.

Their intimacy—whatever they had of it—returned for a second. “Annie, I'll get it for you. I know how to do it. You need to speak to them on their own terms.”

“Oh yeah? Like how? Tell them the gemstone shines like the fire that will burn through their huts if they don't give it back?” Annie was only half-joking. The venom in her own voice astonished her.

How dare they?

She gulped as Rain whipped a lock of sandy hair from his eye and squeezed her hand. His bicep tensed Kaamo-style and his eyes warmed. He seemed to feel her frustration for the first time.

Rain…stop being yummy.
She loved it when he felt her passion. How could this man lock in on her feelings so well? He was especially good at responding to Annie's fiery streak, her anger, and her deepest emotions: those feelings that sound almost infantile when you express them.

God, he made her feel so alive.

“I'll get it back,” he said. “Before I leave. I know you have to go tomorrow but…Annie, just leave it to me. You'll have your sapphire necklace in New York. And if they don't give it back…” He stood with one pump of his strong thighs.

“Yes?”

“I'll steal it.”

With that, Rain bounded back around the ferns. Annie listened to his feet squelching in the mud as he raced up the bank, and dropped her head in her hands.

* * * *

Annie was adding sugar to her cold tea and listening to the warbling of a Sivu bird later that evening when, without warning, a tear gathered in her eye, sharp and stinging as an insect bite, and fell in the cup.

I am a fool.
She had come to Sivu Island because she hoped it would be the experience of a lifetime. Sivu was the home of the Kaamo, a tribe who had had almost no historical contact with outside cultures.

An undocumented tribe, tucked away on an undiscovered island halfway between Hawaii and New Caledonia. How could she resist?! Anthropologists dream of such things: a people untouched by European influence, just waiting for a researcher to run her eyes over them.

Since arriving on Sivu, Annie had developed a suspicion that Christian missionaries may have visited in the 1800s—some of the bamboo art and the male coming-of-age rituals used motifs and symbolism that looked distinctly Christian—but still! Sivu was about as untouched as you could get in the modern world, where monster-cruisers had sailed to every shore and isolated isles were sold off to billionaires like Virgin's Richard Branson. The island was a researcher's dream come true: somehow, through some mystery or oversight, it had stayed unexplored.

Annie gulped her tea and collapsed on her bamboo bed, listening to the yells of Kaamo boys playing outside and the lapping of the river at the front of the dwelling. On either side of the hut (a clay-and-bamboo thing cobbled together by some linguists who had scoped the place out before she and Rain arrived) the river stretched as far as the eye could see. The mud banks were wet and oxide-red, and lush fringing forests were stuffed with species of insects no naturalist had yet catalogued. Annie had seen birds of a long-legged shape and gait she felt certain you could not find anywhere else, and heard birdsongs so strange she gasped, thinking it was a child's eerie song.

She was writing everything she could think of in her notebooks and even sketching interesting totems and jewelry and artifacts. Very polite of her, in retrospect–the Kaamo had simply
stolen
her necklace when they took a liking to it.

Annie listened to the rhythms of their language, observed their moves, tried to feel the subtleties of the way men treated their women. Since Rain arrived–a representative from a different team at NYU–she had felt like she could see more cruelty in the treatment. Suddenly, almost overnight, the Kaamo men struck her as brutes.
Pigs.
She saw dismissiveness, rough-handling, failures to acknowledge a Kaamo woman who came through a door or asked for a child.

Could it be the weather?
More likely it was a serious case of projection. Annie's eyes stung with a new set of tears and she pushed her teacup away, eager not to pollute the liquid again with a drop from her mud-caked eyelashes.

Definitely projection.
Rain Mistern had given her maybe an ounce of affection since he arrived. His smile haunted her in the field, beaming so yummily she lost her concentration and left her notebook on the bank. A Kaamo child had found it and handed it back, with new fingerprint smudges and a big mud seal on the front.

At least they didn't want to keep that.
It's probably useless anyway.
Her notebooks were filling with accounts that could definitely not be trusted. A title change was warranted:
Science Hath No Enemy Like A Woman Scorned.

What about a subtitle? Maybe
Rain, Rain, Go Away.

Annie whipped a fly from her face and took a sip of her icy, sweet drink. Why-oh-why, did her feelings for Rain Mistern persist? He had treated her so poorly, even bragging to his friends–their colleagues–every time the two of them slept together.

* * * *

The sun was setting. A parrot finch with a brilliant red breast sat on the windowsill of Annie's hut and started to sing.

The sound soothed her as she compiled her notes in her leather binders, which were so stained with mud and sap and raggedy from water flecks, that her friends exclaimed whenever she brought them home.