Proud Hearts (Wild Hearts Romance Book 2)

by Phoenix Sullivan

  “I only hope to have as comfortable a life as full of memories as them in my senior years,” I confessed.

  “They do seem to have figured out life is all about sleeping. Don’t they sleep like 20 hours out of the day?”

  “Not the sleeping. The dreaming. But that’s not what I mean. Look at them. Don’t they seem awfully content?”

  “Like an old married couple.” Chris had slid into the passenger seat when he’d returned from whizzing behind the tree, all zipped up with a resigned look in his eye. Resigned about me or our situation? I wondered. When he took my hand in his, I realized he hadn’t given up on me. Yet. “Is that what you mean?”

  It wasn’t when I said it. But now with my fingers cradled in the warmth and security of Chris’ hand, I allowed myself a waking dream of what my future could be.

  What I saw made me giggle. Not at all the reaction Chris expected. “Spill.”

  I couldn’t, not something so personal, something I could only see myself sharing with my best— Oh. Hadn’t he shared earlier with me? Wasn’t I obligated to share something back?

  “When I think of being old, I think of sitting on a porch somewhere in the bush, holding hands with my hubby and watching lions parade on by.”

  I was beginning to enjoy that damnably sexy grin of his. “So you’re saying you’re already that old lady. That of all the futures you could dream about, where you’re at now is where you want to be for the rest of your life?”

  “Well, some of the details might be different, but essentially, yeah.”

  “You mean that, don’t you?”

  Another question that deserved honesty. “I’ve lived in the world. I grew up in St. Louis and went to Caltech for a handful of years before transferring to Berkeley for my MA before coming to Africa. I’m not some agoraphobic introvert, but I have… I don’t know—a simple soul. Your life—paparazzi, travel, entourages—that’s not even remotely tempting. I’m just not built for that kind of life.”

  “I think you’re remarkably well-built—for anything you want to do.”

  Heat rose in my cheeks. “What about you?” I asked before I could embarrass myself further. “What does a senior Christopher Darnelle look like?”

  Before I could answer, my attention was caught by Brutus and Nana on a deliberate path toward the rest of the pride lazing by the stream. I sat up straighter, praying there wouldn’t be a confrontation.

  Sheba swiped an ineffectual paw their way from her prone position. Not so much a threat, I thought, as a warning that she was watching.

  Ignoring her, Brutus and Nana strolled directly up to Caesar. I held my breath. Brutus briefly touched noses with the cub, and Nana ran her cheek along his in truce and welcome. She moved to Portia next, head-butting her daughter affectionately before settling down beside her on the grassy bank. Brutus deliberated a moment about where to sit his royal haunches, deciding away from Sheba and Caesar might be best, finally stretching out on Nana’s far side, squeezing his bulk between her and the water’s edge.

  Our pride, at peace again.

  Only… There was that word again. Our.

  My hand being squeezed was an echo to my thoughts.

  “You know,” Chris said, his voice quiet in the cab, “your vision of the future isn’t half bad.”

  “No? I bet those pesky intervening years of yours look a lot different from mine.”

  He turned his face from the lions then to fix me with a blue stare that melted every bit of me. “You’d be surprised.”

  First it was dessert my body had craved. Now it was surprise my heart desired. Coupled with that sensuous grin and those melting-blue eyes, I was fast in danger of saying the one word I’d never thought I’d say to Chris Corsair.

  Yes.

  CHAPTER 23

  Chris

  I watched the play of emotion across Dee’s expressive face. If I could fault her for one thing, it would be how she wore every feeling so clearly on her sleeve. There was such a thing as too much honesty with one’s heart and soul.

  Wasn’t there?

  I saw the moment she began to look at me differently, when she conceded me the first win in the battle for her heart. Pulse racing, I felt like a school boy who’d just been told his secret crush liked him back. In some ways, I was still that awkward kid needing to be liked.

  In the ways that mattered most, though, I needed more than just her like. I needed more than just her body. For the first time ever, I found myself needing a woman’s heart.

  The first piece of her heart I had won through honesty. That alone was new to me. Not that I was a dishonest person in general, but Chris Corsair tended to deliver the words his women had already scripted for him in their fantasies. I merely acted a role in their private plays. With them, I had always been true to Chris’ character.

  With Dee, however, who had no preconceived script, I had no role to play. She forced me to strip down to my naked self, to be the Christopher Darnelle I thought I’d buried long ago.

  She didn’t want Chris Corsair. After all the careful molding my press agents and I had done to create him, I had to find the only woman on the planet who didn’t want him. Well, Reena had rejected me too, but Reena was a different case altogether.

  Wasn’t she?

  Were there more women out there ready to reject Chris Corsair? More women ready to embrace Christopher Darnelle instead? At first, I thought what attracted me to Reena and Dee was the challenge to seduce them. Maybe what attracted me was that they were everything that wasn’t Chris Corsair. Maybe they affected me so much more because they were the type of women Christopher Darnelle was attracted to.

  I had lost Reena because of my unwillingness to be honest with her—to give up the Chris Corsair persona in favor of winning her heart. Because I was too arrogant, or too afraid, to be the person she wanted me to be. There was no “redo” with her; besides, we had moved far beyond that point to a place where friendship and respect were the only possible options. I accepted that. Accepted her place in my life as a friend without benefits, who I could tease and flirt with, but never have.

  The fact was, I knew now from the time I’d spent with Dee, I never really needed Reena to be more to me than the friend she was. Sure, I wanted her to fall in love with me, wanted to have mad, crazy sex with her—for the same reasons I wanted everyone to like me. Her rejections colored my sensibilities, making my wants feel like passionate needs.

  I had only to compare—honestly—what I felt for Reena with what I felt for Dee.

  No contest.

  Stripped bare before her, Christopher Darnelle was head-over-heels in love with Dee.

  And for all the women and parties and experience Chris Corsair had been through, love was the one true emotion he’d never bumped up against, much less embraced.

  One thought terrified me to the core—if I didn’t want to lose her, how was I supposed to act?

  In the end, we needn’t have worried about our tents and possessions. Dee, being a true miracle worker, had won the pride’s hearts as surely as she’d won mine.

  My tent, 15 feet from the Rover’s door, tempted me all morning with its open flap and promise of wallet, phone and tablet secured inside.

  “Addicted much?”

  My umpteenth longing look their way must have given me away. Well, two could play the addiction game. I snatched the handheld from her grasp with ninja speed, a move that would have looked a lot more wicked if the camera hadn’t almost gone flying from my fingers at the top of their return arc.

  “Hey!”

  “Let’s see how long you can go without.”

  “That’s my work,” she protested.

  “Take a break. No one works 24/7. No one but an addict.”

  With a lift of her perfect if stubborn chin, Dee folded her arms across her full B-cup breasts. “Fine.”

  “Fine.”

  We spent the next 30 minutes staring at our true loves—my gaze locked on the tent where my phone and tablet were trappe
d, and Dee’s eye wandering between the tripod in the back and the handheld in my lap. That lap stare was uncomfortable as lap parts under the camera assumed she was staring at them. Parts that very much liked pretty ladies staring their way.

  Thirty minutes later, as the lions continued to drowse by the stream, I blew out my breath in frustration. “That’s it. I’m tired of feeling like that mother in Cujo. I’m going in.” Flipping the camera on, I faced it toward me. “If I die, at least it’ll be rescuing something I love.” I gave my audience a long, slow, noble nod, handed the camera back into Dee’s eager hands, and clicked the door. I swung it open with caution as I drew the .38 I seemed to have made mine.

  A quick glance streamward assured me the lions, if they were even watching, didn’t care. “You do know that’s insulting,” I muttered their way.

  Jesse Owens would have been proud. I made the 15-foot dash, retrieved wallet, phone and tablet, and dashed back to fall into the passenger seat, my heart pounding as I holstered the gun all in what had to be 10 seconds flat.

  Almost disappointingly, the lions never moved. When I caught Portia mid-yawn, my eyes rolled over how foolish I was feeling hunkered up in the Range Rover’s cab.

  I was checking voice mail when Dee nudged me with her elbow. Letting Gary drone on about arrangements for Reena’s flight out tomorrow, I followed where Dee’s camera pointed to see Caesar wobble to a stand. Then, with the encouragement of his family, he took a few halting steps. Even without binoculars, it was clear the cub was still in pain as he attempted each tentative step.

  My career required me to be a hyper-empathetic observer. The visual of a situation was important, but that was the director and videographer’s jobs to capture the physical essence of a scene. As an actor, my job was to bring the emotional truth to the story.

  Funny how much easier it was to act emotional truth than to feel it. At least for me.

  At least before this trip.

  For the cub, courage and determination were his truth, overwritten by a remarkable dose of acceptance. Abandonment, fire, abduction, reunion—any lesser spirit might have folded under the heartbreak and pressure of losing everything only to have it all restored in such quick succession. Yet, he had persevered.

  So much to learn from a half-grown cub.

  Beside him, his mother dutifully stroked his neck and shoulder with her strong tongue.

  “See how stiff he is,” Dee pointed out. “She’s helping his circulation.”

  “How does she know?”

  To her credit, Dee didn’t patronize my question with some pat rhetoric about the awesomeness of Nature or the sweet mystery of life. Instead, she shook her head and simply said, “I hope we can figure it out one day.”

  She didn’t, of course, mean “we” as in her and me, but for a moment, sitting together in the cab, watching the lions, it felt all kinds of good to pretend she did.

  As Caesar hobbled the few steps to the stream, took a drink, then hobbled the few steps back into the shifting shade under the protective bulks of his family, my first instinct, a gesture as natural as breath, was to take one of Dee’s hands in mine. Both of them, though, were already occupied, clasped about the small camera to steady it.

  Its attempt at the easy objective thwarted, my hand turned instead to a more daring target: the tanned thigh only a few shades darker than the beige interior of the cab. Its lean length between the cuff of her khaki shorts that rode up her leg when she sat and the curve of her flexed knee tempted with forbidden appeal. Putting aside thought of the warm twine of her fingers through mine, I focused now on how it would feel to caress that silken thigh skin, feel the tone of taut muscle beneath.

  From thought to obsession took mere moments, but my sudden school-boy shyness stayed my hand from such an intimate touch. When was the last time I hadn’t simply taken opportunity by the proverbial horns? Opportunities that went well beyond the casual intimacy I contemplated now. What was Dee to me that I hesitated so? Shaking off such foolishness, I laid my palm, tingling in the pre-sweat phase, on the bare expanse of thigh presenting itself for such easy conquest.

  She flinched at the unexpected touch, a surprise that communicated itself in the tiny leap of muscles beneath the cradle of my hand. Resolved now, with more daring when she didn’t pull away in protest, I clasped my fingers firmly around her, letting my thumb massage the outer reaches of that most perfect limb while I contemplated what her reaction might be should I slide my hand carefully around the upper curve and let my fingers play across the soft silk of the inner reaches of her thigh. Less than a handspan lay between one side and the next, between casual intimacy and the intimacy reserved for lovers.

  I was ready for that further intimacy. Beyond ready. My ego, though, wasn’t ready for her rebuke when she closed her legs together to dissuade any further advances. The gesture wasn’t made quickly or cruelly. It didn’t even dislodge my hand from where it continued to enjoy its casual touch. It simply encouraged it to seek comfort elsewhere, which I obliged by slipping it to the gearshift beside her. In its way, the move was the kindest form of no at her disposal. Not that I had been proposing more than the first innocent exploration of intimacy with her. Nothing beyond a furtive touch or two.

  Kind or not, it was still a no, and Chris Corsair wasn’t used to women saying no, especially when we hadn’t even progressed to real foreplay yet. Who wouldn’t want me wrapping a gentle, experienced hand around them and trailing promises across their tender skin? And if I could encourage them to do the same for me…

  No matter how kindly it had been delivered, that no enflamed me. Here in the closed cab with no escape, the jolt of rejection had no room to expand and dissipate. Instead, it flooded over me, drowning me, forced as I was to stay beside her. I could easily see conflicting passion turning to rage, the hurt from a simple no becoming an affront to all that was male. I held on to that emotion, following it as far as I dared, making it a part of me, a part of my memories, something to call upon in the future should a role require the kind of anger that would force a woman into submission. How easy to abuse the power that was mine. To take what would be denied. I clung to that dark desire until I understood it to its depths, was certain I could recall its thrall at will.

  And then I closed it up, warehoused it in that great store of emotions that were my stock in trade. When I reached for it at need, it would be there. It was a tool—nothing more.

  That darkness wasn’t me.

  I was flame not fury.

  Mine was a different desire.

  My need was not to force my affections on unwilling participants, but to seduce a yes from them. I needed their acceptance and adoration if not their love.

  I needed them to like me.

  I needed Dee to say yes.

  I needed Dee to want me.

  I needed Dee to love me.

  CHAPTER 24

  Dee

  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 sexi
er 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.