Brandt felt her watching him and turned to look at her.
“What are you thinking?” he said.
“About their water. About my volunteer work and what it means to me.”
Brandt held her gaze, something softening in his eyes, then he turned back to the village. “One jeep,” he said. “Over there, parked behind what looks like some kind of communal building.”
“Can we bargain with them for the jeep, do you think?”
“I don’t want them to see us. If Amal gets wind these villagers have any information on us, he’ll slaughter them all—like he did everyone at the lodge.”
“You want to steal it?”
“Liberate it, temporarily.”
She smiled. “I’ll pay them back for it once we’re safe.”
“Your brother will.”
“No. He won’t.”
He shot her a fast glance, brow raised.
“This is not his mission. Not anymore.”
Brandt opened his mouth, but she spoke first.
“I don’t care what you say about paying him back, or owing him. That’s between you and him. This is about me. My life. My mission. I’m taking it back, taking control. My brothers don’t run my life.” Then she muttered, “As much as they might try.”
He laughed, softly, darkly. “They do control it if you marry for them and not for yourself,” he said.
She held his gaze. “If I marry, it’ll be my choice.”
His features tightened, eyes narrowing.
“If?”
Dalilah’s heart beat faster. She hadn’t intended phrasing it that way. She averted her eyes.
A woman came out of the school building and rang a handbell. The noise of the children rose as they pushed and jostled and raced to line up in front of her. The woman waited until the line fell silent, then she led the kids single file into the building. In the shade of a tree two men were talking.
“How can we get that jeep with all these people about?”
Brandt took the camera from his pack and panned the village using the telephoto lens. “We could wait until dark,” he said. “But that could cost us valuable time. The foot-and-mouth fencing makes it more difficult,” he said, adjusting the lens and focusing on the jeep. “There’s only one way in and out and that’s through the cattle gate and disinfectant troughs over there.”
“Is that fencing and trough to control the spread of hoof and mouth, then?” she asked.
He nodded. “The disease devastated Botswana some years back,” he said. “See, next to the cattle gate is a smaller trough for people to walk through so they don’t carry the disease on their shoes.”
They lay a while longer in the sun, watching for opportunity.
Brandt cursed softly. “I hate the very idea of bringing Amal close to this place. This village,” he said, “is what Botswana is about for me. This peace. This lack of outside distraction, just people living in the present with what they’ve got.”
“Is that why you came to Botswana, Brandt?”
He grunted, moved the camera, focusing in on the jeep again. “The longer we wait, the closer Amal gets. It’s becoming a toss-up between keeping this village safe, and you alive.” He swore again, set the camera down, fingered his gun, watching, thinking. She could see he was conflicted.
He turned and looked toward the western horizon. She could see him calculating alternatives.
“That road you mentioned—how far is it from here?”
He rubbed the back of his neck—it was being burned by the sun. She could feel her own skin burning and was grateful for the hat. He had none.
“It’s not just the distance to the road. Once we hit that road we need to go south, then veer off into bush again. It would take us days on foot.”
“Maybe we could flag down a vehicle on the road.”
“The traffic is sporadic at best. We could be sitting ducks waiting out there.” Tension was tightening his voice. He was being eaten up with this immobility, the waiting. She swatted a fly. Another hour ticked by, but life continued to move in the village.
“I made your brother a promise,” he said quietly, as if thinking out loud. “No matter what you say about this mission being yours or his, I’m going to get you home alive. And I need that jeep to do it.”
The sun hit its zenith, small and white-hot in the hazy sky. Dalilah took off her hat and smoothed back her hair, wiped her brow. Brandt handed her a stick of biltong. They chewed in silence.
“So, what did happen ten years ago, Brandt, that has you paying Omair back like this now?”
His mood darkened. Then after a few beats he said, “I think you already have it figured out, Dalilah.”
She hooked her brow up. “How so?”
“You’ve been digging information out of me in bits, storing them like puzzle pieces in that pretty head of yours—I figure you’ve put most of the puzzle together.”
A dung beetle tried to roll a ball of dung up the sandbank. It got almost to the lip, then the dung rolled back down. Like a small black crepuscular tank the beetle scurried after it, started again. Almost at the lip, the ball escaped the beetle’s grasp, rolled back down, and the beetle once again began the upward push—a Sisyphean task. Beetle needed a damn break. She picked up a stalk of dry grass and pushed the dung ball over the lip for the beetle, then dusted her hand off on her pants.
“You want me to tell you what I’ve got, then?” she said finally.
“Not really.”
She poked holes in the dirt with her stick, thinking. “I’m going to tell you anyway.”
A wry smile twisted his mouth. “Why does this not surprise me?”
“I got that ten years ago something happened while you were with the FDS. Maybe on a job. It involved a woman, and it involved betrayal. And you blame yourself for her death—it cracked something inside you.” She glanced at him. “It made you bitter, leery of any level of commitment, afraid to fall in love again.”
His eyes bored into her, intense. A muscle began to tick at his jaw.
“Omair intervened and saved your life somehow.” She paused, thinking. “It had to be something big, or you wouldn’t be here with me now, paying him back like this.”
She doodled her stick, then slid her gaze back to meet his. He wasn’t smiling. He looked dangerous—a look she’d glimpsed in him before. She swallowed, throat dry, feeling nervous suddenly. “But the part I haven’t figured out,” she said, “is that you mentioned you were betrayed twice. Promises broken twice.”
He remained silent, regarding her intently.
“So—what happened? Does it have something to do with marriage?” she said after a while.
“Why do you ask that?”
“Because you said you were not the one to talk about marriage, that you’d failed at that.”
“Dalilah.” His voice was low, cool. “Why are you pressing me like this—what difference does it make to you?”
Her face heated. She glanced away, watched a row of little red ants trying to attack a dragonfly—iridescent green and turquoise. She thought of her jewels, her wealth. Her ring.
Slowly she glanced up and met his eyes again. “Because you’re not the only one who cares, Brandt.”
“And that’s where it ends.”
“Does it?”
His eyes narrowed sharply. “What are you saying, Dalilah?”
“I don’t know what I’m saying.” But she did know—she was thinking beyond caring for him. She was thinking about the possibilities of acting on her affection. Of being with him beyond this mission.
He moistened his lips, a pain gleaming in his eyes, brief, then gone. He wiped his brow, fingered his gun.
“When I was twenty-one,” he said slowly, “just after I got out of the army—they had conscription back then in South Africa—I married the woman I loved. We had a son.”
Shock whispered through Dalilah—this she had not expected.
“What’s his name, Brandt? How old is h
e?”
“He’s dead.”
Double shock. Dalilah’s brain raced, a reticence to push further fighting with her now-intense curiosity.
“What happened?”
He checked his watch as if the time would miraculously give him a way out. He shifted his body on the sand, features tight. He was like a caged lion who couldn’t handle immobility, trapped with her questions in this cauldron of dust and heat.
She touched his hand. “It’s okay, I don’t need to know.”
He inhaled deeply. “His name was Stefaan, Stefaan after my father. A beautiful blond little boy, hair like white fluff—blue eyes.” His voice thickened, catching. His eyes were raw.
Emotion gripped Dalilah’s throat.
“He was two years old when he was mauled and killed by our dog.” Brandt looked away, getting a grip on himself. “It was my fault. I left the two of them alone in the garden for one second—went in the house to get lemonade for Stefaan.” His voice was flat now, empty. “Yolanda, my wife, blamed me for it. We ended up in different rooms, different beds. She wouldn’t—couldn’t—look me in the eyes. Sometimes I’d feel her watching me, though, and I’d turn, and recognize pure hatred on her face.” He inhaled, blew out a long, slow breath, wiping sweat from his brow again.
“She was in pain. We both were. Yolanda looked to my older brother for comfort. Pieter.” His jaw tightened around the name. “Pieter had always had a thing for Yolanda, and he stepped in and took on the role of comforting her. And sleeping with her.” He paused, a long while. “He shot the dog.”
Words defied Dalilah. But she suddenly understood Brandt wholly, the bitterness. The issues with promise and commitment.
“It was my damn dog,” he said very quietly. “A Staffie cross, russet coat. I found him living wild in the bush when I was stationed up at Caprivi. I sneaked him home, named him Jock.” He made a wry smile. “Like the old story we all read as kids, Jock of the Bushveld. Do you know it?”
She shook her head.
“Written by Sir James Percy Fitzpatrick in the 1800s, a true story about his travels across the veldt with his dog. Jock’s become part of South African culture. My Jock was a good dog—I thought he was fine with kids. Until that day. I still don’t know what set him off. Maybe Stefaan just got in his space.”
She touched his arm, gently. His skin was hot. He stared at her hand.
“Brandt, I’m so sorry. You should have been able to grieve together—”
“Damn right.” He ground out the words. “I figure she’d have eventually cuckolded me with that brother of mine. Losing our son was a catalyst—gave him opportunity.”
The wind rose, dust picking up in small dervishes.
“Is that when you joined the FDS, after your marriage fell apart?”
“Yeah. Buried my boy. Buried the dog. Sold the farm. Got as far away as possible. I worked with men who understood loyalty. And I earned good money, played too hard, didn’t think too much.”
“Except for the photos.”
His eyes shot to hers. But he said nothing.
“And then you met someone else?”
He snorted softly. “Carla. Daughter of a Nicaraguan police chief. He had a big drug crackdown looming, a battle with a cartel leader whose son his daughter had started seeing. He wanted me to get her away and keep her away—he expected bloodshed and retaliation, and he figured the cartel would use his daughter to get to him. My job was to abduct her and hide her, protect her. It was a mission that took months. She was beautiful—dark hair, smoky eyes, dusky skin, body to die for. She pushed all my buttons.” He glanced her way. “You remind me of her.”
Dalilah swallowed, another puzzle piece clicking into place—his conflict over her, his brusqueness when they’d first met.
“You fell for her.”
Brandt was silent a long while. “I crossed a line, Dalilah. A line I had no bloody right to cross. She came on to me. And I fell for it.”
“What do you mean, fell for it?”
“She was using me, and I didn’t see it coming. We were in a remote mountain area. Just our camp, me and her. We started sleeping together. I lost focus enough to think I didn’t have to watch her every second. I began to trust her, and one night she used my communications equipment to tell Alejandro—the drug lord’s son—where she was. His father sent Alejandro and some men. They attacked two nights later. He killed her.”
“Alejandro killed her?”
Brandt closed his eyes and his voice went strange. “He was never into Carla. They were using her all along—her father was right. They surprised me, beat me, tied me up where I was forced to watch and hear them rape her. Then Alejandro slit her throat.” He swallowed. “They let me live—to deliver the message to her father.”
Horror washed up her throat. “Oh, God, Brandt.”
How did someone come back from that?
“People do make mistakes in life,” he said quietly. “You learn from them and move on. But my mistakes—they resulted in death. I tried to run from the images in my head, the sights, sounds, smells…her screams. But they would wake me in the night. That’s when I hit the whiskey—looking for relief. I was blind drunk for months, living in a slum. That’s when your brother came to Nicaragua, to find me, haul me out. He took me back to the FDS base on São Diogo, sobered me up, slapped me around and forced me back into some sort of functional shape. And that, Dalilah, is why I’m going to hand you back to Omair in one piece, or die trying.”
No man left behind.
The final puzzle pieces locked into place. Emotions rushed through her chest.
“So that’s when you quit military life—you vowed to get out, to stop killing.”
“I used to think of violence as a harsh but justifiable means to an end—most soldiers do, or they couldn’t keep doing the job. But violence has consequences—it always, always comes with collateral damage. You think soldiers, cops, become inured—that’s a myth. Most perpetrators of violence just keep pushing their reactions down deep, until there’s too much buried, and you wonder why they snapped.”
A profound and powerful affection for this man swelled so fast and hard in Dalilah’s chest it was painful. This powerful body of Brandt Stryker’s housed a man with depth and compassion. He’d been hurt inside and out, and was badly scarred because of it.
Dalilah understood that kind of scarring—her family had been through it with her brother Tariq. And she was filled now with the need to nurture, hold him, love him, heal him and it made her eyes burn because it scared her.
His gaze flicked to her engagement ring.
“That’s also why I know marriage is not what it’s cracked up to be,” he said quietly.
Without thinking, Dalilah leaned forward, took his roughly stubbled cheek in her hand, drew his face toward her and kissed him. Softly, tenderly.
Brandt melted into the sensation of her lips over his, the touch of her hand against his skin. His eyes burned with a sweet kind of pain as he kissed her back gently, so gently it hurt every aching, burning nerve in his body. And he wanted her—all of her—for himself.
He wanted to take her home. Make her his.
Brandt had never taken a woman back to his farm.
His world narrowed as he threaded his fingers into her hair, soft and thick in his hand, and he drew her closer to him.
Then a slow prickle started up Brandt’s neck—a hunter’s instinct. A sense of being watched, preyed on. He froze. Her body stilled under his.
“Don’t move,” he murmured against her lips, his hand going for his gun, finger curling into the trigger. He breathed in slowly, very slowly, then whipped onto his back, spinning the rifle round.
Chapter 14
A little black face peered at them from between the scraggly branches of dry scrub. Brandt’s heart slammed against his chest, fury lacing through him as he released his finger from the trigger—he should have been aware, heard this kid approaching.
Now they’d been spotted. T
his small child, and possibly his whole village, had just been put in jeopardy.
Brandt raised his finger slowly to his lips, telling the kid to stay quiet. But the boy exploded from behind the bush and bolted on skinny little dusty legs and bare feet toward the village, calling out in a high-pitched voice.
Brandt swore, lurching to his feet as he took chase. He dived for the boy, tackling him to the ground. The child squealed in terror, squirming like a snake in his arms. Brandt held the kid steady until he stilled. Eyes huge and white with fear looked up into his face. Again Brandt cursed—the boy was only about eight years old.
“Take it easy,” he said in Setswana. “It’s okay. We mean no harm. We just want to buy that old jeep parked inside the fence. What’s your name, boy?”
“Wusani.”
“Who does the jeep belong to, Wusani? Can you bring him out here to me?”
The boy remained motionless, transfixed by Brandt’s eyes. Brandt was used to this—the color of his eyes was likely unusual to this child, and possibly frightening.
Slowly releasing his grip on the boy, Brandt repeated his question. “Wusani, who owns the jeep?” But the kid dashed off.
Brandt dived, caught him again, got him in a hold.
“Listen,” he said, urgency biting into him, “I need your help, son. There are some bad men searching for us. They want to hurt that lady over there.” He pointed to the rise, Dalilah’s head just visible.
The child looked where he was pointing.
“I need to take her somewhere safe. Fast. And I need the jeep because my airplane doesn’t work.”
Brandt could see the wheels turning behind Wusani’s dark brown eyes, bright with a mix of fear, intelligence and curiosity. He looked Brandt up and down.
“I’m a pilot,” Brandt said. “I fly planes.” He pointed to the sky. “You ever been in a plane, Wusani?”
He shook his head.
Out of the corner of his eye Brandt saw a man coming out the village gate, calling for the boy.
Crap. This was going downhill fast—he’d hoped to limit potential damage by keeping this between as few people as possible.
“Who’s that man, Wusani?” Brandt said with a jerk of his chin toward the man.
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