excuse his actions. He'd pushed her. His chest tightened as he remembered her falling—just like his father had.
Clenching his fist, he silently commanded the visions to leave him in peace, but they would not. He'd been in a towering rage that day, too. Until then, he'd been too small and too afraid to stand up to his father, but on that last day, it hadn't mattered. The fury inside him had tripled his strength.
"We've been here three months, patrao," Ignacio was saying, pulling him back to the present. "It's a long time since we sold the coffee, and it will take at least three weeks to get home. Before long, the rainy season will set in, and the journey will be much more dangerous."
"You're right!" Jason declared, banging his glass on the bar for emphasis. Whiskey sloshed over the sides and onto his hand. "There's no point endangering the men just because I have nothing to go back to."
"Nothing?" Ignacio laughed. "You have what you have always had—the fazenda, the jungle. And now you have a beautiful wife waiting for you."
Jason turned his glass up and drained it. "Have you ever thought you wanted something, and when you got it you found out it wasn't what you wanted at all? I want things back the way they were before she came."
"Why? Nothing is so very different."
"Everything is so very different," Jason contradicted emphatically.
"What is different is better! Besides, you sent her away once and you only ended up going after her."
"She defied me!" Jason shouted. "She didn't even get on the bloody boat!"
Ignacio smiled wryly. "In all the years I have known you, I always believed you to be an intelligent, fair-minded man—until now."
"Well, maybe you don't know me as well as you think." He seemed to be pointing that out often lately. He'd said the same thing to Caroline.
"I know you better than you know yourself. You sit here in a filthy saloon feeling sorry for yourself—"
"Feeling sorry..."
"I may be overstepping my place, patrao, but someone has to talk some sense into you. I am speaking to you now as someone who has known you for a long time and can't stand by and let you destroy yourself. You sit here night after night drinking in order to dull your mind when you have a beautiful wife waiting for you in the house you built and furnished so that you could have a family, a wife who cares for you for some reason that I can't understand."
"Neither can I, Ignacio, neither can I."
"If she'd gotten on the boat, you'd have taken her off. You want her to stay but you do everything in your power to run her off!"
Ignacio was right. Fool that he was, he'd gone after her. Fool that he was, he'd allowed himself to be seduced by her beauty and her grace and her charm.
"It's the principle of the thing, Ignacio," he said with all the passion he could muster, "the principle! No matter! Tell the men we leave for home tomorrow morning. The boats should be ready in a matter of days."
With that, Jason stood on wobbly legs. The room swam around him, but he managed to right himself.
"Are you all right, patrao?" Ignacio asked, grabbing Jason by the shoulder to help steady him.
"I'll be fine as soon as I find my room."
"We'll walk together," Ignacio offered, groaning under Jason's weight.
Ignacio steered Jason toward the door and into the damp night air.
#####
Caroline placed her pen in the ink stand and went still. Brilliant sunlight poured through the window across the study, spilling bright patterns of light on the terracotta tile floor. She listened intently, the only sound in the cluttered study the loud ticking of the clock on the white stucco wall behind her.
It came again, a sound like no other. Shriller than a train whistle, the steamboat whistle had been a part of her life since her first recollection. In New Orleans, they came so frequently one hardly noticed them. But in the remote Amazon, any man-made noise caught the attention immediately.
Standing, Caroline straightened her skirt, hurrying around the desk to the open window. From here she could see the river for several miles, until it made a sharp curve on the horizon.
The first time she stood at this window and gazed down at the river and the orchards beyond it, she realized that this was the view from Jason's study that he'd described so poignantly in his letters—"the coffee trees heavy with berries