Page 37 of Empire of Shadows

Nine

The next morning

The sun was highand bright as Adam Bates reclined in a wooden chair in the Rio Nuevo’s front garden, plowing through a bowl of mamey sapote fruits. The brownish orbs had something of the look of fuzzy avocados, but the rich orange flesh inside tasted of yam and apricot with a hint of spice.

He pried the seeds out neatly with his machete, flicking them into the shrubs. Ximena de Linares hated it when he did that, but Adam always made it a point to yank out any rogue sapote trees that tried to sprout up amongst her parrot flowers.

He had only been back in town for a day, but he was already feeling restless—which wasn’t particularly surprising.

Six years ago, he had chosen to come to British Honduras, and he had no regrets about the move. He was glad he lived someplace where nobody knew he was a Bates of the Bates insurance empire. In British Honduras, Adam never had to worry that the people he met would start immediately calculating what they might be able to get out of him.

Sure, the colony was hot. The mosquitoes were obnoxious. The town was a literal swamp, and getting a decent pair of boots took some finagling—but Adam would still take it over San Francisco, where everybody was always trying to measure how relatively important you were.

There were still people who did that here, of course, but they all stayed at the Imperial. Adam didn’t have to worry about running into them at the Rio Nuevo—which was why he kept a room there.

That, and the food was great.

For a long time after he’d arrived here, Adam had simply been happy to have escaped his old life—solidly thwarting all of his father’s hopes and ambitions for him in the process. Lately, though, some of the shine had been wearing off.

Adam loved his time in the wilderness—living by his knife and his wits, constantly learning about what might kill him and what might make for decent eating. Still, he was less excited than usual about the prospect of heading out on another mapping expedition even as he itched at being confined to the insular world of the capital.

There were reasons for that lack of excitement… reasons he was pretty sure he wasn’t going to be able to ignore for much longer.

Every once in a while as Adam listened to the howler monkeys raising a racket outside the glow of his campfire, those same reasons had him wondering whether he was meant to be doing something else with himself.

Or maybe no matter what he did, there was always going to be a down side.

Adam sliced another sliver of orange flesh from his mamey, popping it into his mouth—then paused in his chewing as a trim, feminine figure hurried down the steps from the lobby.

The lady from the bath looked different with all of her clothes on… not that she’d looked at all bad in that soaking wet dressing gown.

Adam was fairly certain she wouldn’t appreciate him noticing that—but last time he’d checked, he still had a pulse.

As he swallowed his mouthful of fruit, Adam admitted that maybe kicking down her door with a machete in his hand hadn’t been the best move. Would he really have done the same thing if it’d been Diego or one of those annoying English guys from the lounge who’d done the shouting? Maybe he would at least have knocked first before busting the lock.

It simply hadn’t occurred to him that a woman would be capable of handling whatever was going on in there. To be fair, if therehadbeen a coral snake in that tub, she might not have gotten the chance for a second scream.

Adam wondered what could’ve brought her to the colony. Foreign women hardly ever came here, and those who did were almost exclusively the wives of some higher-ranking government official—or nuns.

He was fairly certain the lady from the bath wasn’t a nun. So what the hell was she here for?

She turned the corner, heading toward the bridge over the river. Her chestnut hair was pinned up into a mercilessly respectable bun under her flat-brimmed hat. He could picture the freckles he knew she had scattered across the back of her neck.

Before he quite knew what he was doing, Adam had tossed his half-eaten mamey into the parrot flowers and followed her.

She moved in the opposite direction of Fort George, which was where most of the colony’s white residents and travelers stayed. The neighborhood she headed for instead was still perfectly respectable, but it wasn’t the sort of place he would’ve expected an unaccompanied Englishwoman to trek into.

She finally stopped… at a door Adam recognized.

The tidy clapboard house was set on stilts, like most of the other construction in Belize Town. The paint on the boards was still bright, and the front garden was abundant with a mix of flowers and fruiting shrubs.

Adam tucked himself into a gap between the houses across the street and waited.

The woman was inside for about ten minutes. When she came out again, a deep, cross furrow shadowed her pretty eyebrows.

Whatever she’d heard in there, it clearly wasn’t what she’d been hoping for.

Adam fully expected her to head straight back to the hotel, but she continued further down the street instead, stopping at one point to politely ask another woman for directions. As she turned a familiar corner, Adam had the uncomfortable suspicion that he knew exactly where she was going.

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