Proud Hearts (Wild Hearts Romance Book 2) (14 page)

I watched the play of emotion across Dee’s expressive face. If I could fault her for one thing, it would be how she wore every feeling so clearly on her sleeve. There was such a thing as too much honesty with one’s heart and soul.

Wasn’t there?

I saw the moment she began to look at me differently, when she conceded me the first win in the battle for her heart. Pulse racing, I felt like a school boy who’d just been told his secret crush liked him back. In some ways, I was still that awkward kid needing to be liked.

In the ways that mattered most, though, I needed more than just her like. I needed more than just her body. For the first time ever, I found myself needing a woman’s heart.

The first piece of her heart I had won through honesty. That alone was new to me. Not that I was a dishonest person in general, but Chris Corsair tended to deliver the words his women had already scripted for him in their fantasies. I merely acted a role in their private plays. With them, I had always been true to Chris’ character.

With Dee, however, who had no preconceived script, I had no role to play. She forced me to strip down to my naked self, to be the Christopher Darnelle I thought I’d buried long ago.

She didn’t want Chris Corsair. After all the careful molding my press agents and I had done to create him, I had to find the only woman on the planet who didn’t want him. Well, Reena had rejected me too, but Reena was a different case altogether.

Wasn’t she?

Were there more women out there ready to reject Chris Corsair? More women ready to embrace Christopher Darnelle instead? At first, I thought what attracted me to Reena and Dee was the challenge to seduce them. Maybe what attracted me was that they were everything that wasn’t Chris Corsair. Maybe they affected me so much more because they were the type of women Christopher Darnelle was attracted to.

I had lost Reena because of my unwillingness to be honest with her—to give up the Chris Corsair persona in favor of winning her heart. Because I was too arrogant, or too afraid, to be the person she wanted me to be. There was no “redo” with her; besides, we had moved far beyond that point to a place where friendship and respect were the only possible options. I accepted that. Accepted her place in my life as a friend without benefits, who I could tease and flirt with, but never have.

The fact was, I knew now from the time I’d spent with Dee, I never really needed Reena to be more to me than the friend she was. Sure, I wanted her to fall in love with me, wanted to have mad, crazy sex with her—for the same reasons I wanted everyone to like me. Her rejections colored my sensibilities, making my wants feel like passionate needs.

I had only to compare—honestly—what I felt for Reena with what I felt for Dee.

No contest.

Stripped bare before her, Christopher Darnelle was head-over-heels in love with Dee.

And for all the women and parties and experience Chris Corsair had been through, love was the one true emotion he’d never bumped up against, much less embraced.

One thought terrified me to the core—if I didn’t want to lose her, how was I supposed to act?

In the end, we needn’t have worried about our tents and possessions. Dee, being a true miracle worker, had won the pride’s hearts as surely as she’d won mine.

My tent, 15 feet from the Rover’s door, tempted me all morning with its open flap and promise of wallet, phone and tablet secured inside.

“Addicted much?”

My umpteenth longing look their way must have given me away. Well, two could play the addiction game. I snatched the handheld from her grasp with ninja speed, a move that would have looked a lot more wicked if the camera hadn’t almost gone flying from my fingers at the top of their return arc.

“Hey!”

“Let’s see how long you can go without.”

“That’s my work,” she protested.

“Take a break. No one works 24/7. No one but an addict.”

With a lift of her perfect if stubborn chin, Dee folded her arms across her full B-cup breasts. “Fine.”

“Fine.”

We spent the next 30 minutes staring at our true loves—my gaze locked on the tent where my phone and tablet were trapped, and Dee’s eye wandering between the tripod in the back and the handheld in my lap. That lap stare was uncomfortable as lap parts under the camera assumed she was staring at them. Parts that very much liked pretty ladies staring their way.

Thirty minutes later, as the lions continued to drowse by the stream, I blew out my breath in frustration. “That’s it. I’m tired of feeling like that mother in
Cujo
. I’m going in.” Flipping the camera on, I faced it toward me. “If I die, at least it’ll be rescuing something I love.” I gave my audience a long, slow, noble nod, handed the camera back into Dee’s eager hands, and clicked the door. I swung it open with caution as I drew the .38 I seemed to have made mine.

A quick glance streamward assured me the lions, if they were even watching, didn’t care. “You do know that’s insulting,” I muttered their way.

Jesse Owens would have been proud. I made the 15-foot dash, retrieved wallet, phone and tablet, and dashed back to fall into the passenger seat, my heart pounding as I holstered the gun all in what had to be 10 seconds flat.

Almost disappointingly, the lions never moved. When I caught Portia mid-yawn, my eyes rolled over how foolish I was feeling hunkered up in the Range Rover’s cab.

I was checking voice mail when Dee nudged me with her elbow. Letting Gary drone on about arrangements for Reena’s flight out tomorrow, I followed where Dee’s camera pointed to see Caesar wobble to a stand. Then, with the encouragement of his family, he took a few halting steps. Even without binoculars, it was clear the cub was still in pain as he attempted each tentative step.

My career required me to be a hyper-empathetic observer. The visual of a situation was important, but that was the director and videographer’s jobs to capture the physical essence of a scene. As an actor, my job was to bring the emotional truth to the story.

Funny how much easier it was to act emotional truth than to feel it. At least for me.

At least before this trip.

For the cub, courage and determination were his truth, overwritten by a remarkable dose of acceptance. Abandonment, fire, abduction, reunion—any lesser spirit might have folded under the heartbreak and pressure of losing everything only to have it all restored in such quick succession. Yet, he had persevered.

So much to learn from a half-grown cub.

Beside him, his mother dutifully stroked his neck and shoulder with her strong tongue.

“See how stiff he is,” Dee pointed out. “She’s helping his circulation.”

“How does she know?”

To her credit, Dee didn’t patronize my question with some pat rhetoric about the awesomeness of Nature or the sweet mystery of life. Instead, she shook her head and simply said, “I hope we can figure it out one day.”

She didn’t, of course, mean “we” as in her and me, but for a moment, sitting together in the cab, watching the lions, it felt all kinds of good to pretend she did.

As Caesar hobbled the few steps to the stream, took a drink, then hobbled the few steps back into the shifting shade under the protective bulks of his family, my first instinct, a gesture as natural as breath, was to take one of Dee’s hands in mine. Both of them, though, were already occupied, clasped about the small camera to steady it.

Its attempt at the easy objective thwarted, my hand turned instead to a more daring target: the tanned thigh only a few shades darker than the beige interior of the cab. Its lean length between the cuff of her khaki shorts that rode up her leg when she sat and the curve of her flexed knee tempted with forbidden appeal. Putting aside thought of the warm twine of her fingers through mine, I focused now on how it would feel to caress that silken thigh skin, feel the tone of taut muscle beneath.

From thought to obsession took mere moments, but my sudden school-boy shyness stayed my hand from such an intimate touch. When was the last time I hadn’t simply taken opportunity by the proverbial horns? Opportunities that went well beyond the casual intimacy I contemplated now. What was Dee to me that I hesitated so? Shaking off such foolishness, I laid my palm, tingling in the pre-sweat phase, on the bare expanse of thigh presenting itself for such easy conquest.

She flinched at the unexpected touch, a surprise that communicated itself in the tiny leap of muscles beneath the cradle of my hand. Resolved now, with more daring when she didn’t pull away in protest, I clasped my fingers firmly around her, letting my thumb massage the outer reaches of that most perfect limb while I contemplated what her reaction might be should I slide my hand carefully around the upper curve and let my fingers play across the soft silk of the inner reaches of her thigh. Less than a handspan lay between one side and the next, between casual intimacy and the intimacy reserved for lovers.

I was ready for that further intimacy. Beyond ready. My ego, though, wasn’t ready for her rebuke when she closed her legs together to dissuade any further advances. The gesture wasn’t made quickly or cruelly. It didn’t even dislodge my hand from where it continued to enjoy its casual touch. It simply encouraged it to seek comfort elsewhere, which I obliged by slipping it to the gearshift beside her. In its way, the move was the kindest form of
no
at her disposal. Not that I had been proposing more than the first innocent exploration of intimacy with her. Nothing beyond a furtive touch or two.

Kind or not, it was still a
no
, and Chris Corsair wasn’t used to women saying no, especially when we hadn’t even progressed to real foreplay yet. Who wouldn’t want me wrapping a gentle, experienced hand around them and trailing promises across their tender skin? And if I could encourage them to do the same for me…

No matter how kindly it had been delivered, that
no
enflamed me. Here in the closed cab with no escape, the jolt of rejection had no room to expand and dissipate. Instead, it flooded over me, drowning me, forced as I was to stay beside her. I could easily see conflicting passion turning to rage, the hurt from a simple
no
becoming an affront to all that was male. I held on to that emotion, following it as far as I dared, making it a part of me, a part of my memories, something to call upon in the future should a role require the kind of anger that would force a woman into submission. How easy to abuse the power that was mine. To take what would be denied. I clung to that dark desire until I understood it to its depths, was certain I could recall its thrall at will.

And then I closed it up, warehoused it in that great store of emotions that were my stock in trade. When I reached for it at need, it would be there. It was a tool—nothing more.

That darkness wasn’t me.

I was flame not fury.

Mine was a different desire.

My need was not to force my affections on unwilling participants, but to seduce a
yes
from them. I needed their acceptance and adoration if not their love.

I needed them to like me.

I needed Dee to say
yes
.

I needed Dee to want me.

I needed Dee to love me.