Proud Hearts (Wild Hearts Romance Book 2) (15 page)

Why couldn’t Chris live up to my expectations?

Arrogant, self-absorbed men didn’t respect boundaries, especially subtle, non-verbal ones. They plowed ahead stupidly with whatever they were doing, making it easy to turn them down, to say no, to thwart their every attempt to take advantage of my body or my heart.

What they didn’t do was make me second-guess my decisions. Or make me yearn for the alternating current of heat and chill that coursed through every intimate hollow under the gentle pressure of a strong and capable hand.

Damn him.

How could I entice that hand back to my bare skin without making it seem like begging or that I didn’t know what I was doing when I chased it away in the first place?

Not that I’d meant for him to take away its warmth and security and the heady promises of that wise thumb circling over my outer thigh. Not at all. I’d only meant to test his self-control. Only I’d wound up testing mine as well. It was all I could do to keep from grabbing that hand and slapping it back down above my knee.

Hell. Who was I kidding?

What was sexier and more infuriating than a man so in tune with you and so in control of himself in the moment that he responded immediately and respectfully to your every signal? That was no chaste hand, nor was there anything chaste in the way Chris looked at me. My body craved that hand in the most unchaste of places, cupping here, stroking there, fingers thrumming—
oh yes!
—right there.

I fought to keep my breathing steady, grateful for the camera, a prop to hide my emotions behind. Chris had taught me he could be trusted—at least this far. What other purposes might he have for me?

As many as the lions, perhaps?

Foolish move or not, I eased open the door and stepped outside, at that moment needing distance between me and Chris if I wasn’t going to make an even more foolish move in the cab with him.

Almost at once, Sheba’s ears perked, and she padded my way.

Which was the greater threat—the shark in the cab or the one now circling the boat?

Was either the real threat? Or was I my own worst threat?

What would happen if I let go my need to control and allowed myself to trust?

Stepping around the shield of the steel door, I waited for Sheba to come. The fact that lions don’t purr didn’t stop me from making a reassuring purring noise deep in my throat as I exuded as much calm and confidence as possible. This was a lion who had taken down antelopes and zebras twice my size with practiced ease. Eight months of living with them wasn’t going to make me forget which of us was dominant here. Science might give me the edge overall, but Nature had endowed the lioness with more brawn and instinct than I could ever hope to match.

She butted against my knee, running the length of her body along my leg, imprinting me with her scent and her with mine, making me one of the pride, acknowledging me for one of her own.

I trailed my fingers in the fur along the ridge of her spine as she wove against me. Then she turned, and my purr caught in my throat as I saw what she intended next.

She head-butted my hand, running her cheek against my palm. As she twisted her head, I scratched whatever she presented me—cheek, chin, top of head.

“Sheba.” I spoke her name, softly, gently. I had spoken to her, to the lions, every day for eight months so she wasn’t startled by its sound. Her ears swiveled to catch her name. “What a love you are!” I half-whispered. She tilted her head at the words as though she approved, even as Cleo came bounding up from the stream to join us.

A dozen feet away, Cleo paused. Fear and habit in her amber eyes warred with curiosity and a burning desire to copy the behavior of her favorite aunt.

Sheba
whuffed
at her. Whether it was simple assurance or an invitation, the effect was the same. Even the camera caught the way Cleo’s eyes lit up as she crouch-trotted the last few feet over, clearly afraid of a possible rebuff at any moment, but equally delighted to be joining in on something new. A foot away, she stopped, stretching her neck the final distance to the back of my hand that I presented her.

When she wrinkled her nose, my heart skipped. A nip or even a warning swipe from a cub her size—easily half of her aunt’s hefty 300 pounds—could be potentially dangerous.

Sheba, taking her teaching duties to heart, stepped smoothly in, rubbing her cheek against my outstretched hand.

Cleo’s nostrils flared, but when Sheba retreated, she butted her head into the back of my hand without hesitation. What fear I had fled as my fingers disappeared into the soft down of fur at the base of her ears. The tremble in my heart was no longer trepidation but jubilation. My reward for opening my heart up to new possibilities by giving myself permission to trust.

They stayed only a few minutes more after that, nosing the Rover and peering into Chris’ tent before sauntering back to the stream to join the others on the shaded bank. Chris, meanwhile, had eased into the back seat to film them from the tripod.

I’m not sure why it didn’t hit me fully until just then that all of these moments, private or otherwise, would no longer be just ours. That they would be shared with millions. Perhaps not even in the context they occurred but through the vision of a film editor and producers who might have a different story they wanted told.

I wasn’t naïve; it was something I’d known on a logical level since the day I’d signed away all my rights, all my say in whatever form the final version of the episode might air.

“How do you deal with it?” I asked Chris as we sat daringly exposed beside the righted camp stove in the circle of tents and SUV, cameras and guns both close.

He shrugged, and something about that honest, languid movement here in the African heat seemed so…right. When had he become so easy to be with?

“I remember it’s Hollywood Entertainment. Just because the rest of the world might believe something different,
I
always know the truth. And the fact is, that truth is usually a lot more boring and a lot less real than the edited version.”

“So boiling down all of yesterday and all of today into whatever five minutes of it they use is how you’ll want to remember it?”

“Remember this”—he swept a hand out toward the napping lions—“or
us
?” Those ice-blue eyes chilled right through me.

“There isn’t any
us
,” I protested, although what wall I’d built between us was crumbling fast. He and I both knew the lie of it, and if I demanded honesty from him, I’d have to find it in myself first. “Not on film,” I amended, weak though that defense was.

“No? Out here, we see what we want to see. In there,” he pointed toward where the handheld strapped around my neck bumped lightly against my chest, “we see truth.”

I shook my head. “That truth can be framed and edited to be anything we want it to be. What
isn’t
filmed or caught in a shot is often as important to truth as what
is
.”

He quirked his lips as he tilted his head to the side, a finger of sunlight through the leaves highlighting the golden 5 o’clock shadow fringing a face he’d had no chance to shave this morning. “What makes you think I was talking about the camera?”

Because he had pointed… I looked down, realizing he hadn’t pointed
at
the camera, but past it, to my heart.

It was early dusk when the lions woke and stretched.

“Hungry, I imagine,” I told Chris. “The leopard alone wouldn’t have made much of a meal for the pride.”

The leopard kill had been nearly three days ago. Working with satellite images, physical maps and memory, we had pinpointed the location we thought we were now. The nearest body of water was two miles north. Our small stream emptied into a larger one about half a mile away, and that one led to a small lake. Big pond, really, as it barely blipped on the maps. Perhaps even seasonal, little more than a catch-basin in the middle of another swampy
dambo
. In a few weeks it, as well as our stream, might even dry up. For now, it would attract disenfranchised herds looking for new homes.

Whether the lions knew what they would find, we couldn’t be sure, of course. But that they struck off north following the flow of the stream seemed to indicate both their instinct and heightened senses acted like their own personal GPS and satellite imagery.

Caesar
whuffed
forlornly after them, although he did get up and stretch and pad around a bit, which I took as a good sign that he was on the mend.

Chris shouldered the tripod. “We’re just looking at a two-mile hike, right?”

“And back…in the dark.”

“You’ve got the guns and torches. And I’m already feeling lucky.”

“How’s that?”

“Here we stand and the lions are going elsewhere to find their dinner. Any day a lion doesn’t think I’m easy prey is a lucky day in my book.”

We crossed the choppy savanna, dodging the occasional thickets of thorn trees without incident. Except for migratory periods and rare disasters like veldt fires that drove herds together on the run, even populations of hundreds and thousands in unsanctioned land outside of government protective services didn’t translate into a landscape of wall-to-wall beasts. And when we came upon the pond that looked even smaller in person, we saw only a small herd of kudu on the closer bank and some angry-seeming Cape buffalo further on.

So long as the buffies minded their business while we minded ours, I was delighted to capture on video the herd of massive chocolate-brown beasts with horn spans that rivaled any longhorn steer back in the States. American cowboys had it easy compared to the bush tribes that had tamed African stock millennia ago.

“They aren’t endangered are they?” Chris asked.

“No. Plenty of game. Plenty of land. There are still healthy populations of both kudu and Cape buffalo.”

“So it’s legal to hunt them?”

“In Zambia it’s legal to hunt most anything. Even lions, as of recently. The government survives on tourism these days, and they’re happy to attract the hunters who can’t get permits elsewhere.”

“If that’s the case, then looking at the herds we saw yesterday and now these guys that don’t seem to care we’re here, this close to them, why is there so much hunger on the continent? Isn’t there enough meat-on-the-hoof out here to feed everybody?”

“You’d need stable governments first and monied ones second. The hungry are also the poor. Raising or hunting the meat, processing it, transporting it—there are time and dollar costs all up and down the food chain, including management oversight and lobbies to determine who gets what and when. Look at America. The folk who can afford to hunt deer legally usually aren’t the ones who need the meat to survive.”

I gave Chris credit for asking, for caring. After all, he probably never bothered to find out where his dinner came from beyond asking which restaurant he had reservations for.

Then I pointed to a tawny shape crouching in the gathering dark maybe 50 yards away. “Portia,” I whispered, just as I made out two other shapes in the tall grass. “Sheba and Cleo. Looks like the cub will get another chance to make her own kill.”

Hurriedly we set up the tripod and fitted on an IR night lens.

It was a herd of Lesser Kudus by the pond, and the calf that Cleo targeted was sized just right for her own weight and skill. Her take-down, captured on camera, was flawless. Together, Portia and Sheba brought down an adult, scattering the rest of the herd and rousing a flock of guineas ground-roosting by a date palm that set up a cacophony of alarmed squawks.

By the time the commotion from the agitated guineas died down, Brutus and Nana were feasting on the first adult kudu, and Portia and Sheba had added a second to the night’s menu.

For 40 minutes they gorged themselves, ignoring the brace of jackals that appeared out of the night like magic, yipping an alert to the rest of the pack that showed up only moments later, ready to claim the spoils.

When the lions, finally full, left the adult kills, the jackals descended on the remains with an ear-splitting clamor, snapping at and jockeying with each other for the best bits.

Portia swung by Cleo’s kudu calf and patiently dragged the carcass back to camp where Caesar waited, with a proud Cleo trotting along behind.