The muscles under my fingers jerked and petrified.

‘Mr Linton!’

‘What?’ My lips teased the corner of his mouth. ‘Is something the matter, Sir?’

‘What is your hand doing down there?’

Catching one of the buttons of his shirt between two fingers, I started to twirl it around. ‘Try to guess.’

‘Mr Linton-!’

His voice broke off abruptly when I undid the button and slipped my hand inside.

‘Mr Linton!’

‘No, no,’ I corrected him courteously. ‘Miss, remember? I’m a Miss. But you…’ My eyes widened as my fingers explored farther down. ‘You are “Mister” all right! Oh, yes, quite definitely Mister!’

‘You little…!’

Suddenly, I was airborne, my hand ripped from his shirt, my feet off the ground. It took a moment for me to realise that Mr Ambrose had swept me up in his arms and was carrying me towards a giant of a tree, some of its gnarled old roots reaching as high as my knees. With the eye of a man who knew exactly what he wanted, he headed straight for the right root and set me down so my face was level with his. Grasping my face with both hands, he claimed my mouth with hungry ferocity.

‘God!’ he breathed against my lips. ‘I have no idea why I am doing this. It is madness! It is waste and risk and irresponsibility - but I can’t stop! I-cannot-stop!’

‘Then don’t!’ I whispered. I didn’t want to think about him stopping to kiss me now. I didn’t want to think about him ever stopping.

Then something he had said earlier suddenly drifted back into my mind:

When we get back to London, should I do some comparative research?

When we get back to London…

I stiffened in his arms, averting my face when his lips tried to find mine again. Good God! Was I stupid enough for this to occur to me only now? Of course we couldn’t keep doing this forever! Of course we would return to London, eventually! And of course we would be back in the office, where I would have to pretend to be a man. This thing…Whatever it was we had between us - would it have to stop when we returned to London? Could it stop? Could I?

Somehow, I doubted that jumping on Mr Ambrose and chewing on his lips would be compatible with my male disguise. If people found out - My aunt, my uncle, Ella…Oh God! Ella! She would die of guilt! She would think I had been seduced by a ruthless rake (never mind that it had actually been the other way around) and would torture herself for all eternity for not noticing earlier and putting a stop to it! And as for my friends, Flora, Eve and Patsy…

I swallowed, hard.

Patsy.

Oh dear.

Oh dear oh dear.

I remembered all too clearly the day when Patsy had attempted to hold a suffragist rally in Hyde Park, and had been steamrollered by Mr Rikkard Ambrose’s icy eyes and masterful rhetoric. If Patsy found out that I had succumbed to Mr Ambrose’s dubious charms…

Well, let’s just put it this way: I had better quickly discover a way to survive a stab wound through the heart from a sharpened parasol.

And then, of course, even worse than Patsy, there was the one person who would probably be most horrified if the truth about me and Mr Rikkard Ambrose came to light: Mr Rikkard Ambrose. He had made no secret of his disdain for women, no secret of the fact that if I wanted to work for him, I had to do so disguised as a man. If I were revealed as a woman, and, moreover, a woman with whom he was having an illicit affair, the scandal would be so enormous it would fill the newspapers from London to Kuala Lumpur. My heart picked up the pace. The mere thought of his reaction…!

Taking a deep breath, I fought down the rising panic and got a grip on myself.

No need to fret, Lilly, I told myself. What happens in the jungle, stays in the jungle. Tropical trees and monkey dung are more than enough proof of that. You’ll just have to hope that these unfeminist cravings you have are due to tropical fever and will vanish as soon as you set foot on good old English soil.

‘What’s the matter?’ touching my cheek with a gentleness I would never have believed him capable of, Mr Ambrose lifted my face until my gaze met his.

‘Nothing,’ I told him. ‘Kiss me!’

*~*~**~*~*

‘Stop! We’ve arrived.’

Halting, I looked around. There was nothing but jungle to be seen. No sign of the landmark that was described in the manuscript. And it wasn’t really the kind of landmark that could be overlooked.

‘Are you sure, Sir?’

He gave me a level gaze.

Of course he was sure. He was Rikkard Ambrose.

‘But how do you know? How do you know we’ve travelled ten miles along the river yet, as it says in the manuscript?’

‘Because I counted my steps. A simple trick, if you can keep them steady and regular.’

Which he no doubt could. Regular as clockwork.

‘Hm…’ I gazed around, searching for the landmark. Oh dear. Maybe this was going to be a bit more difficult than I had imagined.

‘You mentioned some kind of landmark earlier,’ Karim said, with his customary atrocious timing. ‘What is it, anyway?’

I cleared my throat. ‘A mountain.’

There was a moment of silence. And, since it emanated from both Mr Ambrose and Karim, I hoped to hell it wasn’t pregnant!

‘Mr Linton,’ my dear employer finally said, his voice cold and controlled, ‘in case you have not noticed, we are surrounded by one-hundred-feet-tall trees on all sides. We cannot even see the ground a few yards away, let alone any mountains!’

‘I noticed!’ I snapped. ‘I’m working on it! I’ll find a solution!’

‘Indeed?’

‘Don’t act so…so…ice-cold all-knowing arse-like! Do you have any ideas?’

He just looked at me. That cool, hard, look told me everything without words: he did not need to have ideas, because that’s what he paid me for.

‘We can always climb a tree,’ Karim suggested.

‘Oh yes?’ I arched an eyebrow at him. ‘And who would be crazy enough to climb one of those monstrosities?’

This time, it wasn’t just one gaze I felt on me. It was two. And they were both extremely calculating.

‘Oh no!’ I took a step back. ‘No, no, nonononono, no, no! Forget it! Never in this life or the next!’

*~*~**~*~*

‘Bloody tyrannical, insufferable, domineering bastard!’ My hand gripped the branch above me and I pulled myself up, just managing to keep a hold of the slippery, wet wood. ‘Curse him to hell and back! Bastardo! Avaro!’

Accompanied by a cacophony of Portuguese and Spanish swear words, I slowly made my way up the tree. Now and again, an orangutan would watch me quizzically from a neighbouring tree, probably wondering what this hairless rat on two legs was doing up here. I was wondering the same thing myself.

‘Are you there yet?’ a familiar cool voice rose up to me from far below.

Halting for a moment, I looked up at the eighty feet or so of slippery tree above me. ‘Not quite.’

‘Well, get a move on! We don’t have all day!’

Clenching my teeth, I bit back the selection of favourites from my collection of international curse words that I would have liked to hurl at him. ‘Yes, Sir! Right away, Sir!’

‘And don’t fall off! A fall from this height would kill you, and I don’t want to waste any time on a burial!’

‘Very understandable, Sir. I will do my best to spare you the inconvenience…’

…you self-centred son of a bachelor!

I grabbed the next branch.

Do you want to know what was most annoying about all this? You might think that it was the fact that my chemise was torn in more places than I could count, or that I had leaves and twigs tangled everywhere in my hair, or even, oh, I don’t know, the fact that I was hovering in a tree fifty yards above the ground, ready to fall to my death at any moment.

But no.

The most annoying thing about all of this was that, while I was climbing this thrice-blasted tree and he egged me on from below with his maddening little comments, all I really wanted to do was get down there and shut him up. With my lips.

Yes. That’s how far I was gone. That bloody bastard was the one who had sent me up here in the first place, and all I wanted to do when I got down again was throw myself into his arms and kiss him senseless. Now, I ask you, is that a sensible feminist approach to things?

A monkey on the tree next to me offered his opinion on the matter, by turning its back on me and waggling its impressive red bottom in my face.

Even the monkeys thought I was pathetic. Fantastic!

After one hundred and twenty-one more branches, and three hundred seventy-two more are-you-there-yets, I was finally as high as I dared to go. The branch I was sitting on already creaked suspiciously under my generous derrière, and I had a suspicion that the branches farther up would be even less likely to approve of my favourite diet of solid chocolate.

From far below me, out of the nether regions where the devils of hell lived, came a cool voice: ‘Are you there yet?’

I counted to ten, then decided even counting to a million wouldn’t help to cool my temper down, and simply answered: ‘Yes.’

‘Adequate. Though you took your time about it! What do you see?’

For the first time since reaching the upper regions of the tree I looked around - and words failed me.

A steaming sea of green velvet stretched in front of me in all directions. We had chosen a tree for my little climbing exercise that was higher than all the others around it, and so I had an excellent view of what people called ‘the jungle’. The word didn’t do it justice. Something more was needed. Something chaotic and beautiful and infinitely large and breathtaking. A colourful bird rose above a tree in the distance, calling out over the jungle with a mournful cry that tugged at my heart. Far, far away in the distance I could see a sparkling band of water glittering between the majestic trees and-

‘Mr Linton!’

-and I had better cut this description short if I wanted to keep my job.

‘Yes, Sir! I’m working on it, Sir!’

Ordering my eyes to stop staring in wonder and get back to work, I started searching the distant horizon for a mountain. It didn’t take me long. The peak rose high and solitary into the air, covered with luscious trees about halfway up its slopes, then slowly turning sparser until, at the very top, it revealed a jagged, bare stretch of rock. Pulling the compass Mr Ambrose had reluctantly entrusted to me out of its pouch, I let it snap open and levelled it at the distant crest.

‘Mr Linton? What are you doing up there!’

‘My work! Be quiet! That shouldn’t be too difficult for you, now, should it?’

I watched as the compass needle teetered and finally came to a halt. I took a good, long look at the face of the instrument to make sure everything was in order, then nodded to myself.

‘All right!’ I called down. ‘The mountain is to the west! Do you hear? We have to head westwards!’

‘Adequate.’

Blast him! Would it kill him to say ‘Good work’ just once in his bloody life?

Yes, he’d probably choke on it.

‘Now come down here Mr Linton, and stop wasting time! This isn’t a sightseeing tour!’

‘Yes, Sir! Right away, Sir!’

I tucked away the compass and was just about to start sliding down the tree again when something caught my eye. Some way off, in a patch of trees that wasn’t quite as thick as the surrounding jungle, a scrap of colour flashed. Freezing, I looked closer. There was movement there. Movement and-

Oh dear.

‘Um…Sir?’

‘Don’t waste time up there, Mr Linton! Get a move on!’

‘I will, in a moment, Sir. Just one thing. What colour was the flag of the Brazilian Empire again?’

‘Yellow and green, why?’

‘Because then I think we have a problem.’