She broke the surface beside Shannon. He kissed her while she still drew breath and then they struck for a sunny rock on the far side. She watched him pull himself effortlessly from the water and sit facing her, his legs dangling into the pool.

Tanya reached him and drew herself up to his knees. “Are all plantation boys as full of themselves as you?”

He suddenly reached in and lifted her from the water.

Tanya laughed and fell forward, knocking him onto his back. He put his arms over his head and lay on the warm rock. The sun glistened off tiny beads of water on his chest. She propped herself up beside him and traced the droplets with her finger.

There was nothing she could imagine as lovely as Shannon. This stunning specimen of a man with whom she was madly in love. God had brought her into the jungle seven years ago for this, she thought. To find the man she would spend her life loving. To one day marry him and bear his sons. He swallowed and she watched his Adam’s apple rise and fall in his throat.

“I love you, Tanya,” Shannon said.

She kissed his cheek. He drew her down and kissed her lips. “I think . . .” He kissed her again. “I really think I’m madly in love with you,” he said.

“Always?” she asked.

“Always.”

“Till death do us part?”

“Till death do us part,” he said.

“Swear it.”

“I swear it.”

Tanya kissed his nose lightly.

“And I love you, Shannon,” she said.

And she did. With every living cell she loved this boy. This man. Yes indeed, she thought. This was paradise.

It was the last day she would ever think it.

CHAPTER TWO

TANYA LEFT Shannon near the pool, just after the heat’s peak. She jogged most of the mile home, smothered by such contentment that she wondered if the warmth she felt came from the Venezuelan skies or her own heart.

She ran toward her parents’ small mission station, and the image of a cool tumbler filled with iced lemonade filled her mind. The heat had parched her. Ahead, the tin-roofed house her father had built seven years earlier flashed with the dipping sun. Tanya had helped him paint the hardwood siding green. To blend, he’d said.

Her parents, Jonathan and Heidi Vandervan, had responded to the call of God seven years earlier when Tanya was ten. She could still see her father seated at the dinner table announcing his decision to take them to the jungle.

Her father’s family lived in Germany and her mother really didn’t have any family to speak of. A brother named Kent Anthony lived in Denver, but they hadn’t spoken in over fifteen years. Last they heard, Kent was in jail.

Either way, leaving the United States presented no great loss for either of her parents. A year later they had landed here, in the heart of Venezuela, among the Yanamamo.