That was what I was ultimately after. Living With… was just my path there. And “Living With Lions” merely a stepping stone along that path. But we did have an hour to fill, and right now it was looking like a whole lot of nothing to fill it with.
Dee eased the SUV to a stop and threw it in park. Looking around, I couldn’t see what made this a better spot than a half mile back or a half mile ahead. She seemed confident, though, as she climbed down from the driver’s seat and we all followed her out.
“It’ll be a quarter mile on foot,” she said. “There’s a rocky outcrop where they’ll hang that’s pretty rough on tires. One spare is all we have and I’d like very much to not have to use it.”
We shrugged into our backpacks and helped Reena with the equipment bags. The air rifle, presumably that could be loaded with the tranquilizer darts housed in the small case Dee grabbed, and the revolver holstered at her shapely hip didn’t escape my notice.
Nor did they escape Reena’s as she filmed snippets of us getting ready to pack our way in. A pretty woman carrying an assortment of firearms with the natural comfort Dee had with the weapons was the stuff of ratings. Whether or not she could use either weapon effectively remained to be seen.
“You wouldn’t have a reason to dart one of the lions, would you? Fit them with a transmitter, do some kind of physical exam? Maybe you and I could each have a turn shooting them?”
She cocked her head and stared at me like I was speaking Swahili. No, Swahili she would probably understand.
“No darting,” she said at last.
“Look, you’ve got to give us something—”
“No, I don’t. Normal day-to-day activities is all I have to give you. By contract. I’ve spent far too long building up a trust with my pride. They are my priority. Not making you look macho or bad ass. And you know what lions do most of the day? They laze around and sleep. If we’re lucky we’ll get to follow them on a hunt or two. If you thought you were going to get more out of this, that’s your problem, not mine.”
“Maybe you can afford to be out here soaking up grant money,” Gary snapped, “but we’re on a tight deadline. Entertainment doesn’t just make itself.”
Dee shrugged off her backpack and rested it by the wheel of the Range Rover. “Fine. Go out and make it yourself then. I can guarantee at least a couple of minutes of entertainment if one of you is attacked.”
“Moron,” Reena stage-whispered at him. “If you’re going to poke her, be sure I have a camera in my hand first.”
“Reena’s right,” I put in. “If we can’t get an hour’s worth of footage from the lions, the rest’ll have to come from us. So hold those thoughts, Dee. You may have to re-play them for the camera later.”
The disgust she threw at me was palpable, but I met her look for look and shrugged. “It’s Hollywood’s reality. Or does that sacred contract of yours prohibit that too? If not, pick up your stuff and let’s go.”
From her glare, it was clear she didn’t like being told what to do. No wonder she worked out here alone. Probably wouldn’t allow any competition—in the workplace or in bed. There was a difference between having enough balls to make a woman interesting and having too much, which, ironically, turned them into a bitch. Made them infuriating. I didn’t need that kind of grief.
Even if my own balls were telling me otherwise. Telling me that attitude amped her low-grade desirability into full-bore sexy, making me want her even more. She was like bacon or cigarettes. If she was that bad for me, then she had to taste pretty damn good. The inverse law of attraction.
So here I was stuck out in the wild, blessed with a woman who tempted me in every physical way possible but who would be bad news if I touched her, the woman who was my only failed seduction to date, and a hyper-jealous man I had no attraction for but who would bed me at the drop of my briefs.
It was going to be a long two weeks.
And the African heat wasn’t going to help.
With a sullen quirk to her mouth, Dee shrugged back into her backpack and picked up the rifle. Without a word, she stalked off, and we followed across a quarter mile of hardpan that gave way to a rocky outcrop. When she slowed, my heart started to race.
There was a rush unlike any other being around dangerous animals. Their unpredictability was an intoxicant, forcing a hyper-awareness, a constant vigil. Wild animals had a sixth sense that let them know the moment your guard was dropped. And it was that moment they invariably chose to attack. Never when you were ready for them. Never when you were prepared.
And no one—not me, not Dee, not the guy who was eaten by the grizzlies he was studying in Alaska nor the Australian wildlife expert speared by a ray when he was swimming with them—no one could ever be 100% vigilant. Especially when a natural complacency built up over time. A trust both in your abilities and the animals’ behavior. A belief, maybe, that you were different—or they were.
Because it was in that one unguarded moment they could gut you.
People could do it too. A very few quite literally, but most metaphorically. Gut your friendship, your bank account, your trust, your heart.
Give me the literal over the metaphor every time.
The first of the big cats I saw was a lioness stretched on her side on a rock ledge, her tail twitching slowly in the sun. She knew we were there; her open eyes were fixed right on us. She just didn’t think we posed enough of a threat to bother rising.
“Should I be insulted she’s not getting up?” I whispered to Dee.
Her lips quirked into a half-smile and she snorted in a smothered, quiet way so as not to alarm the cats.
Yes, cats in the plural as the slow twitch of another tail caught my eye. It was another lioness, this one on the ground to the right of the first, lying behind a stand of brush. From behind the same brush, two half-grown cubs appeared, padding closer for a better look.
Dee motioned with her hand, and we all crouched low.
A warning whuff from their mother stopped them, but didn’t bank their curiosity as they watched us.
Dee was scanning the rest of the area. The third lioness and Brutus were still unaccounted for.
“Could they be hunting?” I asked.
From behind an outcrop to our left, half my answer came strolling, rubbing his great mane and cheek along the rocks, seeming to stress his nonchalance.
“He’s marking,” Dee said, her voice low, “and doing it openly, making sure we know this is his territory.”
She whuffed then, a soft and deep sound. Brutus pricked his ears and, reassured by Dee’s familiar presence, yawned in a great display of fangs and teeth and an impressive bite radius. If he was trying to intimidate, he was doing a damn fine job.
“Sweet!”
Beside me, Reena was capturing Brutus’ welcome on the handheld she’d pulled out as soon as we stopped. Her voice was equally low and she was smiling, in her element now.
From around Brutus’ rear, the third lioness appeared. To my layman’s eye, she looked older—thin with a wise but haggard face, her eyes set back in deep, sad hollows.
“Nana,” Dee said. “The matriarch. How she goes, the pride goes. Brutus is just a figurehead. It’s Nana’s good side you want to stay on.”
We stayed crouched while Nana gave us the once-over. Apparently we passed muster after Dee whuffed her reassurances at them again, because Nana then ambled over to the cub twins and greeted each of them nose to nose before dropping and rolling in the dust between them. Big paws slowly paddling the air, squirming her back into the dirt, she enjoyed her dust bath as Reena filmed, clearly happy with the turn the morning had taken.
Her bath done, Nana lay contentedly on her side with the cubs sprawled beside her, while Brutus stretched beside his rock.
Dee gave them a few minutes more, then rose slowly. “We’ll set up here. Just no sudden moves or loud noises. I talk to them, so they’re used to that, but I don’t know how they’ll react to several new voices and new bodies around them.”
“Probably,” Dee agreed. “What weapons did you bring?”
“I assumed you—”
“Not in my contract. Plenty of safari shops when you came through Lusaka on whatever airline you flew in. And there’s at least one in Zambezi. You can always drive back there.”
“But we’d lose a day for filming!”
“I said you not us. Or are you somehow necessary here for the filming? So far it seems a pack mule could handle your contribution.”
Reena snickered behind her camera. It was true Gary had an inflated sense of ego about his job role, but he was indispensable in the planning stages. Usually. Outfitting us with rifles was an oversight I could understand, however. There had been three others on the bear set with us. And we were in an underwater cage with the sharks. So far, we hadn’t needed to pack our own protection. Well, of the firearm variety anyway. I could always rely on Gary to stay on top of the condom supply no matter where we landed.
Right now, though, it looked like I wouldn’t be needing either type of protection. Dee spoke to the lions and whuffed at them, and after a few minutes they seemed to ignore us, although I wasn’t so naïve as to believe they forgot about us. They did, however, seem comfortable with us, just as I soon stopped thinking about petty arguments and focused on the wonder of being within yards of these beasts who were anything but the withered, mange-eaten specimens my cynicism had expected.
Sitting beside Dee, who was idly occupying herself by filming us filming the lions, I took a moment to consider what a remarkable achievement Dee had managed out here alone gaining the trust of this little pride. That took dedication…and guts. Aside from her sharp tongue and obvious dislike of me, was there anything about her that didn’t keep making her more attractive? Hell, even that deep whuffing noise she’d make every now and again to comfort the lions was kind of feral and sexy. Maybe it called to the ancestral cave man in me. Whatever, the whole package of her was a distraction, splitting my attention between her and the lions as the day progressed.
The adult lions barely moved as they lazed around the rocks, keeping an eye on us. The cubs, though, had energy to spare, sneaking up behind the adults and batting at twitching tails, pouncing on one another, mock fighting, and being typical pre-teen nuisances until they curled up together around noon for a nap.
“Caesar and Cleopatra,” Dee had introduced them. “They’re fraternal twins.”
“Their mother is…?”
“Portia, the one behind the makenge bush.”
“Which makes the old lioness Nana…”
“The cubs’ grandmother. She’s mom to both Portia and Sheba, the one up on the ledge.”
“And Brutus?”
“Found the pride a couple of years ago, right after game wardens discovered the pride’s old lion had been killed by poachers. Brutus is the father of the cubs; otherwise, he would probably not have let them live.”
“I didn’t think poaching was a big thing anymore.”
“It depends on the season, what part of Africa, what regimes are in power, how much political unrest there is, and how much corruption’s in the civil sectors. Overall, though, it’s too easy and too lucrative to not continue attracting way too many folk looking for a quick buck. Luring an elephant or rhino out of a protected habitat into the sights of some rich hunter’s rifle isn’t some rare, one-off event. It’s a way of life for a whole lot of people who just haven’t been caught yet.”
Reena had slipped a mic between us, so I asked, “Why are you out here with the lions? Surely they’ve been studied and filmed and cataloged to death over the past 50 years. At least since the Adamses and Elsa and Born Free. You’re getting grant money, so someone somewhere thinks there’s some educational value still to discover. What are you after?”
“It’s important to get as many snapshots as possible over time to get, first, a true picture of a species or a culture and, second, to understand what new trends there might be in, say, migratory behavior or hunting that might point to environmental concerns for the rest of us. You couldn’t stay in a college house in Haight-Ashbury in the 60s and declare that’s what all Californians were like then or continue to be like today. We’ll never be done studying other species any more than we’ll ever be done studying ourselves.”
All I knew when we left the pride that evening and returned to camp, was that I wasn’t close to done studying these lions—or Dee.
CHAPTER 7
Dee
As early as I was up the next morning, Chris was up right alongside me.
“I want to leave out by 5:30 tomorrow,” I had told them the night before as we finished up our ready meal entrees and I was passing around fresh mangoes for dessert.
As jet-lagged as they still were, any hour I named would be less than desirable, but Gary was determined to be contentious regardless.
“If you want us out that early just to watch those lions sleep even more…”
“Right, because my grant money is to prove my thesis let sleeping lions lie.”
“Care to share your itinerary, then?” Chris sounded only slightly less contentious than Gary.
“Anyone think to ask why those lions were so content to lie around?” I preferred to think it was the teacher in me that enjoyed their baffled expressions and not that I felt the need to prove my worth—no, my superiority, if I was honest—to them. But who was I fooling? “Anyone care to guess?”
Chris’ Hollywood-blue eyes narrowed as he stared out over the remnants of our dinner. It was fascinating to watch the changes in them as he thought through the riddle. Watching, I knew the exact moment he lit on the answer.
“They had fed recently.”
I nodded. “High insulin levels. They were still digesting their last meal. Like the nap after Thanksgiving Dinner. Or an afternoon siesta after a big lunch. They weren’t hungry today. But they will be soon. I know their behaviors well enough to know they’ll be on the hunt tomorrow, and that they’ll be on the move in the morning down to the dambo—it’s like a seasonal pond or swampland—where the herds hang out. Assuming we can time everything right, you might get a handful of opportunities to film them hunting while you’re here. But if you’d rather sleep instead…” I shrugged pointedly at Gary.
Even at 4 o’clock in the morning, Chris managed to look photo-perfect—nearly naked save for those nylon shorts, his dark blond hair sporting just the right amount of tousling, every move one of confidence and grace. Next to that social perfection, I felt self-conscious and ungainly. Which irritated the heck out of me because I usually had a healthy attitude about all things me. Sure, alone with the lions I was comfortable about my body, mainly because I rarely thought about how I looked or sounded or moved for the days, sometimes weeks, at a time when there was no other human around to see me—to judge me. Before now, though, I hadn’t been this awkward and insecure in social situations. Maybe because pre-lions I had been in-practice socially, interacting with people daily, most of whom had my same interests and goals.
But I had been removed from those personal interactions for a few months now. Emails and texting and Facebook conversations didn’t really substitute for direct human contact. I was out-of-practice, insecure and making a bitch of myself because I was desperate to get approval and respect from these three of society’s beautiful people.
The sad part was that I knew what I was doing and why, that I detested both my need for that approval and my behavior to get it—and yet I couldn’t stop myself from feeling or trying. It was like the real me on the inside was watching this fake me on the outside heading for a train wreck, and no matter how much I yelled, the train just kept coming.
The cocky grin Chris flashed at me in the lamplight simultaneously made my skin crawl and sent an electric shiver through me. And when he winked at me right before stretching his arms wide, emphasizing the breadth of those shoulders and the perfect sculpting of that m
agnificent chest, I couldn’t decide which I wanted to do more: slap that arrogance right out of him or throw down with him and let him take me however he wanted me.
Which action I would have followed through on was moot, though, when Reena emerged from her tent, camera in hand, filming eye candy for Chris Corsair fans, while Gary, once again, sat under the rolled-up flap of his tent, watching me watching Chris.
It took an act of will to tear my attention from Chris’ beauty ritual, especially knowing some of the upcoming exercises, but this whole situation was unhealthy. Pouring a cup of the coffee I’d just brewed, I clipped my .38 to my belt and went for a walk, timing it so Chris would be done by the time I got back.
He gave me a funny look when I returned. If he wasn’t a skilled actor, I would have said he looked hurt.
CHAPTER 8
Chris
Damn it. Why was Dee ignoring me so infuriating? It couldn’t be as simple as wanting most what I couldn’t have. I wasn’t that simple. And if I was consciously debating whether it could be that or not, then it couldn’t be I was subconsciously harboring that behavior, could it? Of course not. There had to be something more there.
I stared at her across breakfast trying to figure it out.
I still didn’t have an answer when we packed into the Range Rover and struck off, the anticipation of a hunt infusing us with a building excitement we each tried to temper in our own way.
We rolled slowly past where we’d turned off to park the SUV yesterday just as the sky began to brighten. Another mile further on and we broke out of the brush to an incredible sight. The peep of sun over the eastern hills highlighted an expansive vista—a large swale of wetlands, half-dry in this heat but with large pockets of standing water, teeming with herds of zebra and water buffalo and varieties of antelope I couldn’t name.
“How close can we get?” Reena asked, her handheld already whirring away.
Proud Hearts (Wild Hearts Romance Book 2) Page 3