Proud Hearts (Wild Hearts Romance Book 2) (7 page)

Last evening’s inventory of shot video revealed a couple of seconds of the snake attack. Technically, they were seconds from right after the adder bit Reena, striking from where it had probably taken refuge for the day since adders normally hunted at night. It was more likely a surprised reflex on the snake’s part at being disturbed than a premeditated attack. Training and habit had swung the lens around as she fell to capture her attacker. It was dodgy filming because she had been setting the camera on its tripod just before being bit, and the tripod fell with her. But the dodginess gave the footage a nice panicked feel—precisely the kind of cliffhanger the show liked right before it broke to commercial. The editors—and Reena—would be pleased.

Since the satellite receiver and my laptop would be recharging overnight while the generator ran, I decided to use the last of the battery juice to send a digital clip of the snake to Gary and Reena’s phones.

At first light, with primary and backup batteries for Reena’s tripod and handheld cameras fully charged, I picked up the handheld to practice with, learning its commands—locations and switch combinations—so I would be able to transition quickly from one to the other out in the field where it mattered. I followed my practice subject through the viewfinder as he moved through his daily workout. Whatever trick made the camera further accent and define his already highly sculpted body wasn’t of my doing, but I made it my duty to try to figure it out, zooming in to capture the glisten of his tanned skin, applying filters to change the mood of those penetrating blue eyes, until finally, after I’d been through every trick the camera offered, I just let it run while I enjoyed the natural view.

“Performance all good?” he asked as he joined me for a ready meal breakfast.

I must have been distracted. “Sure. You looked great, as always.”

He laughed, the sound as cool and easy as a stream bubbling over pebbles. “Thanks. Always happy for a compliment, but I did mean the camera.”

Heat stung my cheeks. “Yeah, that was great too. Quality equipment.”

“You’re talking about me again, right?”

I rolled my eyes.

“Care to get sweaty with me tomorrow?” He waggled those expressive brows of his.

I gave him my best school-marm stare.

He gave me his best boyish grin, and I felt it thrill through to my toes. “Work out with me, I meant.”

I continued to stare.

He continued to grin. “I’m not the only one here who always has dirt in my mind. I really mean work out—crunches, jumping jacks, push-ups, the whole regimen.”

“So you’re telling me I’m soft?”

“Oh, I’m sure you are—in all the right places. Truth is, you look pretty perfect to me. I just thought working out could be something we could do, you know, together. Like…a date.”

I blinked. “A date?”

“Sure. No cameras. Just you and me getting physical. Seeing if we’re a fit. Without the actual…fitting. At least not on the first date. And if it goes well, we can meet here for breakfast after. Just a date—no strings attached.”

It was absurd. Yet it was also kind of sweet. What woman in her right mind would say no to an invitation like that from Chris Corsair? Then again, what other women would Chris have to promise no shenanigans to in order to tempt her out with him?

Maybe if I’d been less fit or more self-conscious I’d have had a good reason to say no. Not that I could hope to keep up with him—it was his routine, probably refined over weeks or months for his specific needs. Which would actually make it a good test of character. Could he make adjustments to accommodate me to make me more comfortable, or would this be a competition already biased in his favor that he’d be determined to win? Was “compromise” even a concept he knew? Or would arrogance get the best of him?

As a way to gain insight into him, this idea was intriguing. And once I started wondering about how it would play out, I knew there was only one answer to his invitation.

“Sure. It’s a date. But let’s see how it goes before we decide whether we’ll be having breakfast together afterward. Because breakfast…that’s a pretty big commitment.”

He nodded, very serious. “You’re right, it is big. Almost as big as my…challenge.”

I hid my snort in a gulp of coffee.

There was a wrongness in the air from the moment we parked the Rover. Nothing I could pinpoint, although I kept looking around and behind as we unpacked the equipment to carry to the escarpment.

“What is it?” My behavior must have put Chris on guard as well.

I shook my head and shrugged. “Maybe nothing.” But I couldn’t shake the feeling the world was holding its breath right before unleashing some catastrophe. Some kind of psychic intuition? I didn’t disbelieve something like that existed, had possibly caught some flashes of it before, although coincidence could probably account for most of the incidences. It certainly wasn’t something I normally held active court on, but today the feeling only kept growing as we started our trek toward the pride.

“Hey!” It was the back of Chris’ hand thrown against my shoulder—a gesture as protective as a mother crossing an arm in front of her child to stop her from heading into danger—that made me turn.

Caesar came plunging out of the brush to our right. Out of pure reflex I thumbed on the handheld and started filming the cub, at the same time craning around to see what had inspired his mad dash.

Almost immediately I saw. A flash of gold with dark mottled spots sped out of the brush behind him. Elegant, collected and focused, the big cat leapt, catching the cub across the shoulders and bringing him down in a tumbled match of half-grown lion and full-grown leopard.

Oh. God.

I had weapons. I could stop this. My maternal heart cried for action. But first and foremost I was a naturalist and a journalist. And this was Nature. No different from the lions taking down a gazelle. This was what leopards did. If the lions ran across a leopard cub they would attack it too. My job was to capture it on film to analyze later. Nothing more. And I couldn’t let my tears interfere.

Chris’ actions, though, had no such shackles. Unable to rip the strap of the tranq rifle slung across my shoulder opposite him, he drew my .38 instead.

“No!” I cried after him, fearing what he’d do, fearing for the leopard, for him, for Caesar.

So much fear.

For a moment it looked like Chris would run right up on the cats. Maybe only ten feet away he stopped, firing the revolver into the air, yelling “Hai!” to scare them apart.

As the scuffle came to an abrupt stop, he leveled the gun at the leopard.

“No,” I whimpered, too quietly for him to hear.

He didn’t shoot; it was a protective stance only.

The leopard stood there, startled but not as frightened by the gunshot as Chris had hoped. As I had hoped. It could as easily rush Chris as return to ravaging the cub.

Its decision was made for it when Portia charged out of the bush, her momentum driving her relentlessly toward the leopard who would need precious seconds to accelerate.

Muscles bunching in panic, the leopard abandoned the cub, springing with precision, arrowing away from the charging lioness, from Chris, and from the wide-angle lens of the camera.

I zoomed back in to see Portia swing her head toward Chris and heard her warning growl.

.38 muzzle aimed at Portia, Chris backed his way toward me, one slow, deliberate step at a time.

At Chris’ first backward step, however, Portia’s attention was only for her cub. Zooming in tighter, I watched her licking him, seeing splashes of blood across his shoulders and chest. How badly he was wounded I couldn’t tell. Not until Portia encouraged him up, and he limped after her toward the escarpment and the rest of his waiting family.

We followed them, and though it couldn’t have been a quarter of a mile, Caesar stopped to rest three times, and each time his mom had to encourage him up again.

As we came up on the escarpment, Caesar’s sister bounded over to them. She sniffed the blood, then butted her head into his neck in sympathy. Exhausted, Caesar lay down, with Portia and Cleo stretching out to either side next to him, dutifully licking his wounds.

After a few minutes, Sheba and Nana left together, each with a determined look on her face.

“How bad off is he?” Chris asked. I noted he still held the .38, although he had thumbed the safety back on. He wasn’t a stranger to guns.

“I can’t tell.”

“That was his aunt with Nana going off together, wasn’t it? Where are they going?”

“To hunt food for Caesar, I imagine.”

“Not after the leopard?”

“Revenge? That’s really more of a human thing.”

“Oh,” He didn’t sound convinced, though, and the look he threw me dared me to believe all bets were off where vengeance was concerned.

I shouldn’t have bet against him. About an hour later Sheba and Nana reappeared. Neck firmly clutched in Sheba’s jaws, its graceful body dragging the ground between her massive paws, hung the unfortunate leopard. Sheba laid it on the ground in front of the cubs with a satisfied
whuff
and left it there for them to eat.

It was the flies that bothered me the most. Thick swarms that settled over Caesar, feasting on the caked, black blood where the leopard had mauled him. They seemed worse than the wounds themselves.

“Disgusting,” I grumbled. “Spreading disease.”

“Only if there’s disease to be spread,” Dee pointed out. “If the animals and land are healthy, flies can be beneficial. Here’s what you can tell your audience: Flies don’t feed on live tissue. They snack on the dead stuff. They’ll lay their eggs in the deeper wounds and, if the lions don’t lick those eggs out, they’ll hatch into maggots, which will feed on dead tissue under the skin until the maggots turn into flies. They do naturally what a doctor would do with a scalpel.”

A few minutes later, Dee swapped out the telephoto lens trained on the cub and framed me instead saying just those words. When we were done, Dee laughed—two, maybe three notes only with an accompanying shake of her head. It wasn’t a smirking laugh nor did it go on long enough to be a demeaning one either.

“What? Did I screw it up?”

No. No, you were perfect.”

“Aren’t I always?”

She blew a
pfft
sound my way.

“Then what?”

I expected ridicule; what I didn’t expect was the way her face turned sober, her green eyes serious and darkening deeper and deeper the longer she stared at me. “That was foolish, you know,” she said at last. “Running after the cub like that.”

I shrugged. “Good television.”

“No. That wasn’t television. That was you.”

“So now you’re calling me a fool.”

“Yes. And stupid.”

“And you’re doing it on camera.” The studio editors were going to love this.

She flipped the
off
switch and crossed the short distance over to me. Funny, I knew she was coming to berate me face-to-face. Yet instead of whipping up a froth of righteous indignation, I just sort of relaxed into the inevitable. Maybe a part of me believed her. I hadn’t thought, I’d simply reacted. There had been no right or wrong, only that moment and only time for a single decision. Maybe it hadn’t been the right one. But at the time, for me, it had been the only one.

Now Dee stood before me, not even an arm’s length away, the closest she and I had intentionally been to one another. Even this close, her skin was still as flawless, her eyes as clear, her lips as full. Like a prisoner, I waited for her condemnation.

“What you did, Chris Corsair, was foolish and stupid—and very, very brave.” She swept in the half-step separating us and brushed a kiss across my cheek, retreating as quickly as the assault had been.

I blinked, then grinned. “
That
you couldn’t have caught on camera?”

Regardless, I felt like a grinch whose heart had just grown three sizes too big.

The adrenaline, the rewards…a man could get used to this hero business.

That night, Dee and I sat by the camp stove long after our empty cartons of flash-preserved stroganoff and peas had been discarded.

Her amended contract had come through from the studio in late afternoon, in record time. Filled with legalese about contingencies and non-union provisions, it was, nevertheless, pretty fair under the circumstances, and Dee had put her digital signature to it and returned it immediately. Which meant the one act of true heroism I’d ever committed would air publicly in a couple of months. I had composed a teaser for my Facebook page as I sat out by the lions and the cub I’d saved. Later tonight, while we had the sat signal, I’d post it, along with a picture of Caesar.

“Cheap PR,” I told Dee with a sheepish grin. “It’s expected.”

“It’s not that you’re getting off on it, then.”

Damn her for being so far under my skin that I let whatever she thought affect me so much. She was like a maggot, eating away at all the rotten stuff and forcing me to see myself not as the cameras saw me but as she did.

“Is it so wrong to be proud of what I did?” I snapped back, more harshly than I’d planned.

“Being proud? No. I’m proud of you. Portia and Caesar are proud of you. And you have every right to be proud of yourself.”

“But…?”

She frowned. “Pride is something that happens on the inside. It shapes our character, becomes a part of who we are. Real-life heroes, even movie heroes, don’t brag about it.” Her voice gentled. “They don’t need to.”

“What are you saying? That I’m insecure?”

She stared at me for an eternity before asking, “Are you?”

Such a simple question. And such a ridiculous one. Chris Corsair insecure? Mr. Hollywood himself, who could entertain a different girl in his bed every night, inviting them with nothing more than a crook of his finger, insecure? That wasn’t even worth the time of a shrugged dismissal.

Was it?

Something wriggled under my skin.

I did have a need to be liked. Every actor did—it was the reason most of us turned to it as a profession—to feed that need. Were all actors insecure? And did insecurity translate proportionally into arrogance?

“Do you think I’m arrogant?” I countered.

“Do you think there’s anyone out there who
doesn’t
think you’re arrogant?” she shot back. “You’re the dictionary definition of it.”

It was, in fact, a definition of myself I’d cultivated. It defined who I was. It was how my fans saw me.

How they remembered me.

How I’d be remembered long after my star imploded and became a black hole sucking every last vestige of my career into its nothingness.

“That’s not the legacy I want.” My whispered confession was half-plea, half-declarative.

“Only a jerk would want that,” she agreed. “The moment you walked off the plane I figured you were 100% jerk. Now…”

“Yeah?”

“Maybe only 95%.”

She threw me a quick smile then, 95% encouragement and 5% hope. Zero percent snark.

My odds with her seemed to be improving.

Lightning brightened the sky above the hills to the east, as unexpected as a paparazzi’s flashbulb at a quiet dinner.

“Storm?”

“Shouldn’t be,” she said. “Probably heat lightning.”

The night air was dry and brittle, crackling with an undercurrent of electricity. The lightning seemed to be a promise of change.

Change that I was deeply and sincerely ready for.