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

After a two-hour drive and a morning buying supplies—all after breaking camp and loading the Range Rover at dawn—I beat the television crew’s plane by only minutes. I ran a comb through my hair in the building’s only restroom, but that was the extent of my freshening up before their flight was wheels down on the runway.

The 4-engine prop plane was one of those that carried maybe 20 passengers, and only six deboarded. The smiling young man behind the ticket counter locked the cash register, motioned me and the four other people in what masqueraded as a terminal in this small Zambian town, and led us out to the runway where he transformed into a baggage handler, hurrying to offload the luggage from the belly of the plane onto the hot tarmac.

The one-person ground crew wheeled a ladder to the plane’s door and the first three people out were claimed by the two couples waiting with me. That meant the three left were mine. The Indian woman, the black man and Chris were all “beautiful people,” smartly if casually dressed and, despite being supremely tired with untold layovers and puddle-hopping to get here to Zambezi after an 8000-mile flight to Africa, they were impeccably made up and all smiles as they each stepped out onto the rolling ladder.

Smiles that faded abruptly as they realized the only paparazzi on hand to greet them was a fairly disheveled camerawoman with a palm-sized handheld, self-consciously tucking stray bits of hair behind her ears.

Lowering the camera, I waited for them by the astonishing pile of unclaimed luggage on the tarmac.

“I’m Deidre Young. Dee.”

Both men ignored my outstretched hand. The woman clasped it briefly, her warm brown skin soft and without callous in my rougher hand. She didn’t, however, offer her name. Almost apologetically I let go the unblemished hand and turned my attention to the luggage, mentally calculating how much space would be left over in the Range Rover after four adults piled in with the supplies I’d just picked up.

“How much of that is yours?” I asked.

“All of it,” the man who wasn’t Chris Corsair, Hollywood star, said, his voice clearly pained about having to speak to me.

My eyebrows shot up. Well, that made my calculations easier at least. “You’ve arranged for a rental, then, I assume. Better be sure it’s 4-wheel drive.”

“I’m sorry, didn’t
you
do that?”

I didn’t think my brows could arch up even further. I was wrong. “Uh, no. I was assured everything was being taken care of on your end. I assumed
everything
meant, I dunno,
everything
.”

“You didn’t, I dunno,
confirm
?”

What a prick, mocking me like that. This was going to be a long—long—two weeks.

“Two things about that. One, not my job. Two, I’m on a sat line. Getting a signal and confirming your flight was impossible enough.”

“Fine,” the prick clipped out before turning to the ticket-master-baggage-handler who’d been grinning his way through our conversation. “Where’s your rental counter?”

“In Lukulu.”

“Where’s that?”

“100 kilometers south.”

“What do you mean? There isn’t a desk in there?”

“Look at it.” I nodded toward the squat terminal building. “There’s barely room for
his
desk much less a rental one.”

“Komani Mabaso has a tow truck and a cargo van,” said our ticket-master-baggage-handler. “An SUV too that he runs passengers to the motel in. He may have something to rent. Most of our business is from the safari tour camps. They provide their own transportation.”

“Uh-huh.
They
provide the transportation.” The prick looked pointedly at me.

“Then maybe you should have booked a tour with one of them. I’m not a tour service, Mr.…?” I looked pointedly back at him.

“Cox,” he supplied, and I fought the 12-year-old in me to keep from smirking at such an apt name for a prick.

The plane’s engines revved, making further conversation impossible until it taxied away to the single hangar near the fuel depot, where I expected it would be cleaned and gassed up for another roundtrip to Lusaka tomorrow. I wondered if they even serviced any other passenger flights than to and from the Zambian capital, maybe 500 kilometers to the east.

Chris’ sunglasses masked a lot of his expression, but the star’s attitude screamed boredom.

The woman with him looked exasperated but resigned.

“Can we at least get inside out of this heat?” Mr. Cox asked, fanning himself.

If he couldn’t last two minutes in it, how did he expect to last two weeks? Not my problem, I wanted to tell myself, but the success of this farce of an expedition would only be as good as our weakest member. If one of our group couldn’t keep up… “Please don’t tell me you’re the cameraman, Mr. Cox.”

The look of feigned horror he turned on me was rather insulting considering my own skillsets. “I am Chris Corsair’s personal assistant.”

“Then I guess you should be trying to find a way to assist him out of here…personally.”

The corner of Chris’ mouth twitched. It was just a hint of that famed smile of his, but at least it was some reaction.

The woman’s demeanor softened as well. “Luckily, I’m the cameraman. Reena Narayanaswamy. Don’t even try pronouncing that. Reena’s fine.”

Donning the cap of concierge, the ticket-master-baggage-handler-cum-concierge escorted Mr. Cox inside to try to secure a rental from his local contact.

“Anything meltable in your bags?” I asked, the heat off the tarmac adding a couple of degrees to the already sweltering temperature.

“I wonder if spray cans explode?”

“Scientific curiosity, Mr. Corsair?” I asked.

“Nah, I just like watching things explode.” He winked pure charm my way.

“I’d like to get the camera equipment off the runway, at least,” Reena said, moving to pick up two of the heavier bags. I threw in to help her and, surprisingly, Chris slung a couple of bags over his well-muscled shoulders and helped move the mound of bags into the shade by the terminal.

After, carrying only the most sensitive of the equipment, we went inside to sit on plastic chairs under the
thwock, thwock, thwock
of a ceiling fan. Ten minutes later, Cox crossed the short distance from the ticket desk to join us. “There’ll be something here in 30 minutes.”

“Which means we’ll be lucky if it’s here in a couple of hours,” I cautioned. Thank god for the wifi tower on the hill just beyond the runway. We pulled out phones and tablets so we wouldn’t have to talk to one another.

It turned out Komani Mabaso was pretty johnnie-on-the-spot. He drove up an hour-and-a-half later, long after the plane crew had left and just before the concierge’s patience was taxed to its end. At least I did see a nice sum of currency pass between Cox and our concierge for his pains, after which the concierge’s patience improved immensely. That was at least one international language that Hollywood taught well.

My Range Rover was well-broken-in at four years old. The Land Rover that drove up, however, had to have seen 30 years or more. Its tires alone were probably older than my SUV.

“How far are we going?” Chris asked, his gaze flicking between the two vehicles.

“Ninety kilometers or so. A couple of hours drive,” I said.

He nodded. “I’m riding with you.”

We followed the older Land Rover to Mabaso’s place to drop him off, then found the town’s only diner for a late, late lunch. The sets of tin tables and chairs and matching tin ware didn’t inspire confidence in my companions.

“Whatever you order, enjoy it,” I encouraged. “We have a day or two of fresh groceries but after that we’ll be eating out of cans and boxes.” I was looking forward to a fresh-cooked meal no matter the ingredients, and to my company’s surprise, the cook didn’t disappoint. Large tin platters of traditional mealie bread appeared followed by a communal bowl of spinach swimming in a curry of rice, carrots, hot spices and coconut milk dotted with chunks of what was probably guinea fowl. Chai tea and sugar-dusted plantains at the end rounded out a meal far more satisfying than any I’d had in the past month or was likely to have in the next two weeks.

Of satisfying conversation, there was no sign. Hearing Chris read some news off his phone about some Hollywood couple I’d never heard of breaking up was about as stimulating as it got. Mostly, everyone was off in their own worlds, frantically browsing and texting after I reminded them early on when we sat down, “It’s satellite only once we leave town.”

That meant limited communication with the outside world. That meant we’d have to rely on each other for entertainment. For two long weeks.

Why had I ever agreed to this?

Two weeks. Surely I could get through two weeks without wifi, eating kale out of cans, and hanging with lions. As a bonus, the woman, Dee, wasn’t as crazy as I thought she’d be. She was pretty sharp, actually. Funny even. And she had some spunk to her. Although that last was problematic. Until I met her I figured I wouldn’t want to bed her. That spunk could mean she’d play hard to get.

So there was my challenge. Getting her to say
yes
. A delicate balance between the chase keeping me entertained for a few days and the pay-off of sexy times for the rest. Two weeks, though, was a long time—I’d need to plan for an extended chase.

But the prospect of sex did make things a little brighter.

And really, how long could she say no to
me
?

Bedding her, however, was still in the future. Right now it was enough to enjoy an authentic African curry and look forward to that other activity so pleasurable in bed—sleeping off jetlag.

Before that, though, it looked like we’d have to kill a couple of hours of drive-time with small-talk. Switching on the charm, I slid into the passenger seat of the Range Rover, ready now, on a full stomach, to commence the chase. The SUV nosed out of the gray and dingy town with its concrete-and-cinder buildings punctuated by the occasional bright, traditional dress of the indigenous folk who lived there, then hit the narrow feeder road north to Kaposa that connected to a slightly better-maintained two-lane autobahn that struck off northeast. As we sped off to find our lions, I waited for the inevitable barrage of questions about Hollywood, my roles, my real height and whether or not I sleep in the buff.

Fifteen minutes later as we rolled through parched savanna and I craned my neck to better see a herd of tiny antelope grazing in the distance, Dee and I stilled hadn’t passed a word between us. I was the first one to break the silence. “What are they?” I nodded toward the herd.

“Springbok.”

As far as small-talk went, we couldn’t get much smaller. It occurred to me only then that this woman spent days and weeks at a time alone in the wild with only a pride of lions for company. Likely she was far more practiced at silence than I would ever be.

That, of course, didn’t explain her lack of curiosity about me. Was it possible she’d been isolated out here so long she hadn’t heard of me, didn’t know who I was?

“You do understand why we’re here, right?”

She gave me a peculiar look. “Of course. I signed the contract, didn’t I?”

“I suppose you must have. I’m not involved in that side of the business.”

“You mean you’re not interested enough to care.”

“I mean I have an agent to handle all that for me, and the production company handles it for others.”

“So you have
people
to run your life.”

“They don’t run it.

“Don’t they?”

What the
hell?
That couldn’t be pity in her eyes. “And just how did you get involved with all this? With us.”

“Reluctantly. Truth? Circumstance made that decision for me. I need funding. You might be surprised how few ways there are to raise the capital needed for documentary work.”

“Oh, come on. A big show, a celebrity. How reluctant could you have been?”

“You think I approve of all the staged nonsense you guys air?”

“I get it. You’re one of
those
people.”

“If by that you mean I’m not a fan of making people think they can walk into a den of bears or a herd of elephants on a two-week vacation without preparation or common sense and come out alive on the other side, then yeah, I am one of
those
whackos. Any other insults you care to throw my way? Keeping in mind I’m the one who’ll be holding the dart gun for the next couple of weeks?”

A cold shower couldn’t have flipped my thoughts away from seduction any more effectively. Now it was pride I was after. “Do you really think people can’t tell the difference between the high-brow work you do and that entertainment dreck we put out? Or that people need to be educated 100% of the day? Or want to be? Tell you what—you take the left-brained audience and we’ll take the right. Just get me in close enough to get some face-time with your lions without them chewing my face off and we’ll be done and gone. Deal?”

“I believe that’s essentially what the contract said. Except the part about not getting your face chewed off. I made sure I wouldn’t be held responsible for any ‘accidents’ on location. Dart guns going off accidentally. Lions chewing off faces or biting off other sentimental parts by accident. Monkeys accidentally carrying off canisters of film or digital drives. Lots of accidents that could happen—none of which I’ll be responsible for.”

“Look, a little cooperation is all I’m asking for here.” Time to re-engage the charm, I decided. “You, me, the lions. A little give, a little take, and we all come out ahead. Keeping in mind, of course, there’s nothing actually ‘little’ about me.” I flashed my best grin and waggled my eyebrows.

She blushed, and her gaze dropped to the area of my sentimentals for a split second before she snapped her eyes back to the road again.

“How about it?”

“I agreed to cooperate when I signed the contract. As for anything else…”

“Yes?”

I knew that expression well. I’d seen it on Reena’s face often enough. Reena—the only woman I’d actively pursued who’d ever turned me down. Until now, apparently, although it was still early in the game with Dee. She was going to say
no
. Probably even
hell no
. Might even throw in a
you worthless piece of work
for good measure. I steeled myself for rejection by mentally racking up the reasons I shouldn’t be hooking up with her in the first place—contrary, unpleasant, outspoken, stubborn and would probably fight me over who should be on top.

“Anything else will have to be negotiated separately, Mr. Corsair.”

Give a little, take a little
.

Maybe this wasn’t such a lost cause after all.

“Call me Chris.”

“Nyala.”

I blinked in confusion.

She pointed to a pair of large, striped antelope by a copse of trees just ahead on the passenger side. “You won’t see them often.”

“Are they endangered?” They were certainly big and probably very beautiful. I was sorry my binoculars were packed away in the other vehicle.

“Not yet.” Dee reached behind my seat and handed me a pair of binoculars she pulled out from the mesh pocket organizer. A good host anticipating my needs or a gesture of truce?

Our fingers brushed, quite on purpose, as I took the binoculars from her. There was no fabled jolt of electricity in the touch, but there was something else. A hint of future. A promise of possibility.

Whatever it was, for a moment it filled me with the same sense of wonder and beauty as the nyala that filled my field of vision.

Staring at them, I let all the meanings of
not yet
roll through my mind. Two little words with so much history and so much future attached. A future that would be determined by how we acted today.

I watched the nyala until the road dipped and I could see them no more.

Maybe, I conceded, I understood Dee just a little more.