Proud Hearts (Wild Hearts Romance Book 2)

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Proud Hearts (Wild Hearts Romance Book 2) Page 8

by Phoenix Sullivan


  Behind them, a long, low streak skirted the pond like a golden ribbon, following them from east to west.

  “A mongoose!”

  The sudden screech from a handful of vervet monkeys in a nearby date palm apparently arguing about whether they should leave or not nearly drowned Dee’s voice.

  The scamper of six little silver bodies down the trunk and across the veldt told me the argument had been settled.

  I looked back to the east. Atop a rise at the lip of the dambo’s swale maybe only a mile away, my binoculars picked out an orange flicker among the low grasses. The fire’s vanguard. A herd of zebra arrowed directly across its path, heading north.

  Suddenly, the distant fire, which had been a curiosity only, became very real.

  And it was headed our way.

  I jumped into the Range Rover. Dee, however, stood, transfixed, behind her camera.

  “Get in!” I yelled. “Let’s go!”

  Her addiction to that camera ran deep.

  “We have to save the camp.” I shouted at her. “We have to—” Oh damn. “Caesar!”

  That broke through to her even as I was processing it myself.

  She slid into the driver’s seat. For a moment I had no idea which way she’d take us first.

  It was the camp.

  For what little we had, it seemed to take forever to strike it all.

  “Use the backseat only, nothing in the cargo bay,” Dee instructed as she piled her tents and the camp stove in. I stuffed in Gary’s tent and mine on top of the generator, with the satellite array on top of it all. Not even a week old, Reena’s tent and the supply tent would be our sacrifices to the Fire Gods.

  A hurried glance over my shoulder saw the nearby swell of the veldt to the east now limned in flames. A sharp crack echoed down to us as the fire split one of the dry tambotie trees.

  We threw the last of the equipment and supplies into the backseat and raced to the escarpment. Dee dared the SUV in a few more yards than usual, but we both knew those tires might be our only lifeline out and risking them and the chassis any closer to the rocked terrain would be a fool’s move.

  She tossed a heavy ground cloth into my hands before grabbing the air rifle and the black case.

  That quarter of a mile up to the lions’ escarpment seemed a helluva lot farther when I thought about the return trip.

  As we crept closer to where we’d left Reena’s camera on its tripod, it became clear the lions were already restless. Portia paced the ridge shading Caesar from above. Cleo was circling her brother while their aunt stood at the top of the ridge sniffing the smoke-laden wind. At the base of the ledge, Nana and Brutus stood shoulder to tawny shoulder, Brutus whuffing his displeasure over the interference to his day’s agenda of napping followed by more napping.

  Caesar’s head was up, alert to the agitation around him.

  “That’s a good sign, yes?”

  Dee nodded. “Maybe he’s not hurt as badly as we thought.”

  When I looked back to the east, smoke blanketed the entire berm now and was curling across the savanna toward us, riding close to the low flames that blackened the grass and climbed the thorn bushes and acacia trees in its way. The wind had picked up, which was why there was no stately column of smoke to mark the fire’s progress. Flames and smoke both were being blown our way.

  Ground squirrels raced past us and a flock of hornbills squawked their way overhead.

  Sheba leapt down from rock to rock, and the cub’s mom joined her, the two lionesses and Cleo pacing around Caesar, spurring him up. With effort, he gained his feet.

  The lionesses trotted off, stopping a few yards away, waiting for Nana and Brutus and the cub to join them. The older lioness and lion ambled along, their gaits only hurrying when another distant crack shivered the air as a half-dead acacia tree exploded from the heat.

  Portia trotted half-way back to her cub, whuffing encouragement.

  I reached for Dee’s hand, not even realizing I’d done so until I’d felt her fingers squeeze mine.

  Caesar took one faltering step, then two.

  His mom whuffed again.

  Gamely, Caesar took a third step, breaking out of the brush where we could better see him. Could better see the deep punctures to his neck and shoulder and see how his right paw curled high between his third step and the fourth. He didn’t even try to put his injured leg down, reluctant to endure the pain from his mauled forequarter.

  That he wanted to obey his mom and follow wherever she and others led was evident in his heartbreakingly expressive eyes.

  Portia padded the last couple of yards between them and rolled her big head under his chin. She licked his neck, his ears and muzzle before whuffing a soft goodbye.

  Then she turned, gathered the others with nothing more than a look, and they were gone, without another parting glance.

  I stood, frozen, as stunned as Caesar seemed to be.

  “They left him.”

  Five tawny tails disappeared into the tall grass to the north.

  My shoulders slumped.

  “They left him.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Dee

  “Which is what we’ll have to do, too, if you don’t get your butt in gear.” I looped my thin belt through the camera strap to turn the handheld into as much of a bodycam as I could.

  Another glance to the east where the Range Rover sat between us and the racing fire told me we might already be too late. How was it possible the fire could have moved so fast?

  Kneeling quickly, I lifted the rifle to my shoulder to sight it. Beside me, Chris knelt and opened the black case I’d carried in.

  “Blue dart,” I told him. They were half-dose of the tranquilizer cocktail the red ones carried.

  I fitted the dart Chris passed into my hand into the rifle chamber while the cub stood, still stunned, watching his family leave.

  As I aimed, he limped forward another step before accepting the futility of his efforts.

  Through the sight, I saw the moment he gave up. The moment he knew his pride wasn’t coming back for him. Knew he couldn’t catch up with them. He’d never seen fire before or smelled its smoke. But he seemed to know its danger and understand the finality of his plight.

  I knew all that and could empathize with the cub because I’d known him practically all his life.

  It was a heartbreaking moment. Had I only been a little faster, a little surer in the handling of the rifle, he would not have had to experience that moment of utter mortality and despair. I aimed carefully, not willing to cause the poor guy any more stress than necessary. When I squeezed the trigger, it was only when I was sure the dart would travel true.

  The same winds speeding the flames our way flirted with the dart. On my side, I had long hours spent on a practice range learning to handle the rifle before I ever came out into the bush. I figured fortune favored the skilled, the ready, and the ones who acted decisively no matter how insecure and terrified they felt inside.

  The dart buried itself in Caesar’s well-muscled flank, precisely where I wanted it to be. Chris’ low whistle of admiration stirred that moment of satisfaction into a warmth that spread into my blushing cheeks. More so when I saw he had his phone out, recording the bits I couldn’t.

  As the cub crumpled, we ran in, rolling him onto the groundsheet. The lacerations from the leopard looked ugly and painful. However, except for a deep puncture in his shoulder that had likely torn through the muscle and was the reason he couldn’t bear weight on that leg, the wounds, from my frantic and cursory inspection, looked mostly superficial.

  “As long as infection doesn’t set in,” I cautioned. “I don’t know about leopards, but hook a domestic cat’s claws into another cat or a dog and they’ll almost always leave behind a lot of nasty bacteria.”

  “Let’s just worry about the fire now,” Chris suggested.

  Nodding, I wrapped two corners of the groundcloth around my hands to ensure my grip didn’t slip, then together we heaved the
cub up.

  Panic clutched my chest.

  Cub and half-grown didn’t fully express the reality that Caesar weighed a good 200 pounds. Almost twice my own weight. All dead weight to carry half a mile over rocky terrain. As fit as I thought I was, I could only raise my side of the groundcloth a few inches. High enough to swing over the ground now, but after a few dozen feet… Could I keep it up for a half mile?

  The flames bearing down on the Range Rover said I had no choice. Gritting my teeth, I willed myself to lug the cub along.

  After what seemed an interminable amount of time I had to call a halt to regrip and regroup. Shoulders aching impossibly, I risked a look back only to see how distressingly small a distance we’d come.

  The loud crack of another acacia tree exploding in the flames below was a scream of failure in my ears.

  “Don’t firemen do this all the time?” I cried in frustration. “He’s going to wake up. Or the fire… Damn it!” With a deep breath, I grabbed up my corners again, trusting to that same adrenaline rush that let mothers lift cars off their babies to kick in.

  Nothing.

  Chris’ hands, strong and steady, covered my trembling ones. Swiftly he squatted down, leaning forward till he could half-lift the limp body and duck his head under it, draping the cub across his broad shoulders. I helped balance Caesar there, but after that it was all on Chris.

  I exhaled with him, once, twice, three times as he prepared to push himself up out of the squat. He broke from the attempt long enough to scowl at me. “If you miss getting this on camera, you know I’m never going to forgive you,” he threatened.

  Hurriedly, I trained it on him.

  The camera’s unwinking eye leant him strength. We exhaled together again, and he rose cleanly, the cub requiring only a minor shift once Chris was standing.

  The distance still looked daunting. More so as smoke thickened the air. Breathing was already becoming uncomfortable, and would likely be strangling if we managed to get to the SUV before the fire did.

  Right now, it was still a close race.

  A herd of kudu wheeled out of the smoke just to our south. A flock of colorful lovebirds winged off to the west. Those were the ones who could outrun or outfly the wind and flames. The ground squirrels and badgers, hyraxes and aardvarks would head for their burrows to put inches and feet of dirt between them and the scorching ground.

  The smoke, though… At least it had a tendency to rise. If the winds kept the fire moving quickly and the smoke stirred, the burrowed beasts had a chance of surviving. If smoke were trapped inside unventilated dens, the occupants would suffocate.

  For the very young, the very old, the sick and injured, Nature had no mercy. This was no roaring forest fire that could burn high across the same ground for days, feeding off plentiful long-burning wood. This was a swift-moving ground fire, the flames only running grass-high save for the thorn bush thickets and the scattered trees it leapt into. With the fickle wind behind it, any of the thousands of animals caught in its path who were not fit or fleet enough would perish. Either from the flames, the smoke or the scorched earth left behind, hot enough to melt the soles off tennis shoes.

  Possibly hot enough to melt tires.

  Hundreds would die in Nature’s cull, but Chris and I were determined our cub wouldn’t be one of them.

  Halfway to the Rover we got a reprieve as a shift in the wind sent the worst of the smoke billowing to the north. We gasped in great mouthfuls of the less-tainted air before another shift curled it right back toward us.

  The toe of Chris’ boot caught on an outcrop of rock and he stumbled forward, desperately trying to balance the cat across his shoulders as well as himself. I was beside him instantly, one hand high on Caesar’s back to steady him and the other looped around the rock-hard bulge of Chris’ bicep, providing an anchor. For a split second he leaned his weight into me as he found equilibrium. For that one split second I held them both, a vital part of them. A vital part of this.

  As we neared the Rover, I ran ahead to open the cargo hatch. The crackle of the flames was close now, and there were intermittent but frequent pop pop pops as deadwood and seedpods imploded with the heat.

  Chris held to the bumper when he reached the Rover, twisting around as he squatted so I could safely guide the cub from his shoulders and into the bay. Together we shoved the mass of cat, legs and tail out of the hatchway and slammed it shut.

  I threw the handheld at Chris, tossed the rifle and dart case on top of the tents and supplies in the backseat, then slid behind the wheel. In the navigator’s seat, Chris was already shouting directions.

  “Back up 20 feet, then a take a sharp right. Go, go, go!”

  Dips and rises in the terrain made it hard to judge where the low-burning flames were or where they’d already been. Three minutes out we ran up on a huge peninsula of blackened grass, the fire chasing behind us, rock ledges to our right and the shifting winds threatening to swing the fire to our left.

  I beat my palm on the steering wheel.

  “We’ll have to go across,” Chris said.

  “It could burn the tires up. We only have the one spare.” Every lecture I’d ever sat through about living life on the veldt stressed one thing: that safety, travel and convenience all depended on the condition of your tires. “If we get stranded in that, we can’t get out till it cools or it’ll melt the boots right off our feet. I’ll remind you we have a cargo net and a stack of supplies between us and what’s likely to be one very mad lion once he wakes up. I’m going left.”

  Already I was swinging the SUV around that way. A ribbon of flame snaked across our path. Gunning the engine, I charged us through and didn’t let off the gas till a mile later when Chris shouted, “Rock ahead! Go left!”

  That put us back to heading toward the flames, but the veldtland on the other side of the outcropping was level, clear but for dodging thickets of thorn trees and, most importantly, flame free. With a sigh of relief that did nothing to relax my death grip on the steering wheel, I looped the Rover around the rocks.

  Unhappy grumbling from the cargo area told us Caesar was waking up.

  “Damn it! Where’s the pride?”

  Thinking I’d be able to follow the lions to safety had been nothing more than ambitious fantasy. They’d headed north and we were now turned south. And still fleeing from the smoke and flames.

  We couldn’t just abandon the cub in the middle of the veldt even if we did outrun the fire, but the grumblings from the back were growing louder.

  This was certainly putting the reality into reality TV, I thought bitterly.

  CHAPTER 17

  Dee

  It’s funny how the mind can dissociate when things are at their worst. As I swung the Rover west, pushing it as fast as I dared over miles of unfamiliar terrain before angling back north in an attempt to beat the oncoming flames, my brain was working overtime, debating which metaphor best described our predicament. Caught between a rock and a hard place? Scylla and Charybdis? The Devil and the deep blue sea? Maybe cranky lion and veldt fire didn’t have the same poetic ring to it, but why was I obsessing over the words and not the lion itself, or us, or even the upholstery should Caesar decide to take a few casual swings at it?

  “That shark cage would sure come in handy right now.”

  I risked a glance off the way ahead to find Chris’ signature sexy grin planted firmly on those sensual lips of his.

  “You’re enjoying this?”

  The camera was going and Chris had an eye toward the back. A quick peek in the rearview showed me nothing more than the stacks of supplies in the backseat. Further back, Caesar’s mouthy growls as he was waking up had become deep, huffing breaths.

  “No so much the getting mauled or crispy crittered parts, but when was the last time you got to rescue a lion?”

  “Didn’t you just rescue one yesterday? Isn’t it becoming old hat now?”

  “There are some things you can do over and over and the thrill never wears of
f.”

  “Like what?” I knew as soon as I asked I shouldn’t have. But dividing my focus between the veldt, the fire and the lion had me a little rattled. I braced for some lewd reference to bumping bodies in the night.

  Damn him. He surprised me again.

  “Sunsets. Skydiving. Ride-alongs with pretty camerawomen.” He raised his voice. “Isn’t that right, Caesar? No? He seems to be finding the ride less exciting than me.”

  I craned for a better angle in the mirror to see into the cargo hold over the towering stack of supplies in between. “Why? What’s going on?”

  “Nothing. He’s settled down. Maybe like one of those babies that falls asleep when it’s driven around.”

  “You’re sure he’s okay?” No commotion from back there worried me more than if he were tearing up the seats to get to us.

  “Got most of him in the viewfinder. He’s up on his chest looking around. Listening to us—his ears are swiveling. Say something nice to him.”

  “Hey munchkin, we’re gonna find your family soon. Hang tight back there. It won’t be long.”

  “He definitely heard you. I think he’s smiling. Now, say something nice to me.”

  I scrunched my nose at him instead. But by the quick look I caught of his face, I wondered if he meant it. I really hadn’t been generous with the compliments. It wasn’t that he didn’t deserve them; more that I didn’t want to continually feed that ego of his. Today—and yesterday—however, he had truly crossed into the hero realm. He deserved better of me, and if that meant stroking his ego, I could do that. So long as he didn’t demand I stroke anything else of his.

  “I bet your trainer would be proud.”

  “Demetri? Nah. He’s a beast. When he sees this, he’ll probably growl at me for not wearing a weight belt.”

  “Why do you stay with him then?”

  “Are you kidding? Do you know how hard it is to find someone willing to give honest criticism to someone like me? Well, someone who isn’t a hater wanting to drag me down into the slime with them. Sure, I love the praise. Heap it on when I’m doing something right. But if I want to get better at something, I need people around me not afraid to point out my mistakes. I may not like it all the time, but I do respect honesty.”

 

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