The Guardian (A Wounded Warrior Novel)

by Anna del Mar

  Caught with my leg off. It was one of the things I hated the most about my loss. Couldn’t stand the horrified looks, the pity. I clenched my teeth and roared inside, rushing to put on the rest of the stuff. Let the sweet-ass marine think I was down, ’cause today had shoved me to the very edge of my limits and next I was gonna show her that down wasn’t out.

  11

  Jade

  Hiding behind the door, I smothered a strangled gasp when I saw the damage I’d caused Matthias. I felt like the meanest witch on the planet. I didn’t want to steal his privacy or hurt his pride. So I pressed my back against the wall and tried to regulate my emotions, which ran the full gamut between compassion and admiration. I was oddly moved by the contrast of his strong, striking body and the absence of his lower limb. What was it about him that touched me so deeply?

  Matthias’s facets were too many to grasp. He was the stubborn, grouchy game warden I’d first met, but he was also the ex-SEAL I’d seen in action, the stoic athlete I’d dared earlier, the poachers’ worst enemy and the reserve’s chief guardian, defender of beasts and men.

  My gaze wandered over the classroom, taking in the blackboard and the kids’ bright drawings. Several of the sketches depicted a giant white man in a Tilley hat playing soccer with a bunch of tiny stick figures, or atop a roof with a hammer in his hand, or stepping down from the Land Rover, arms filled with presents. Matthias took care of these orphans. He’d founded an orphanage, for Christ’s sake, and that, on top of everything else, made him irresistible to me.

  I was so enthralled in my thoughts, that I almost didn’t hear the woman, as she opened the door and barged into the classroom, humming under her breath. On impulse, I ducked farther behind the door as if I were some sort of a thief afraid of being discovered. The woman, who was most likely one of the teachers, picked up a few coloring books from a nearby shelf and promptly left. I waited until the silence returned before I stepped out from behind the door.

  “How long have you been hiding there?”

  I jumped three feet high. Matthias stood at the threshold beaming his glower on me, feet braced apart, pants wet where the blood had been before. I prided myself on being quiet when out on recon. He was even quieter than I was.

  “Um…ah…not long,” I mumbled. “I came to check out the schoolhouse.”

  “So, Jade also lies,” he said in an acerbic tone.

  “I…um…” My mouth seemed to be stuffed with cotton balls.

  “Did you see it?”

  I could’ve played dumb, said no, or asked him what he was talking about. In fact, I started to do just so. “No…yes…well…” What was the point of lying when he already knew the truth? “I did.”

  “You came after me.” He crossed his arms over the broad expanse of his chest and stared. “I wanted privacy but you wanted to see the gruesome freak show. And you did. Because Jade does what Jade wants.”

  “It wasn’t like that.” Was it?

  “Tell me.” His savage glare intensified. “Did you find it disgusting? Horrifying? Revolting?”

  “No,” I said defensively. “I saw your leg, I mean, your injury, and I thought that…”

  “What?” He cocked his brows expectantly. “What did you think?”

  Fire flashed through my veins, not fed by anger this time, or from rage as it was my usual, but rather by knowledge, knowledge I inferred from him, from everything I’d learned about him, about how he lived his life.

  I raised my chin in the air. “I thought you’d been lucky.”

  His eyebrows spiked on his forehead. “Lucky?”

  “Where others died, you lived—no—you thrived, despite your injury. It must’ve been a bitch to heal, but you did. You raced death, like you raced me today, and you won on both counts.”

  “Not entirely true.”

  I narrowed my gaze on him. “No?”

  “You and I.” He waggled two fingers between us. “We tied.”

  He was right about that. “That doesn’t happen very often,” I said. “Not to me.”

  “Me neither.” He actually smiled.

  The grin lit his eyes with the spark that ignited my combustible core. His wickedly sexy smile smashed any chances I might have had at regulating my internal heat. The memory of his lips on mine fanned the flames into a raging wildfire. I was suddenly struggling with the powerful emotions overtaking me.

  He was a goddamn fighter, a cocky son of a bitch who never quit, a SEAL worth knowing, a runner worth racing. It hit me right there, what I was going to do, before I did it, and yet I couldn’t stop myself. Because above all, he was a man worth kissing.

  One moment I clung to the door, the next moment I was fast on the way to Matthias, three strides that felt as if I were running uphill in a dark night to conduct a surprise raid on a Taliban compound, three seconds of heart-pumping adrenaline, terror, and doubt. Alarms screeched in the back of my mind and yet my feet kept going.

  His eyes flared with gold. Any chance I had at reversing my reckless impulse died the moment his arms opened to me. Then I was on him, arms entwined around his shoulders, my body gliding against his like a magnet on metal. Contact. His body enveloped mine, encasing me in a human cocoon. His arms came around my waist and his hands pressed like hot brands against my flesh. All my high-minded resolutions shattered.

  I pressed my mouth against his lips. They fitted perfectly against mine. My tongue tasted his salt and slid between lips that parted eagerly for me. Never one to lag in initiative, he crushed me against his chest and deepened our kiss with the vital swirl of his tongue, now probing my mouth.

  Good. So good. This man had been made to kiss and be kissed. He closed his eyes, completely committed. I closed my eyes too and gave myself permission for thirty seconds of bliss. I savored the moment, enjoying the solid presence of his hands gliding over my back, and his broad chest pressed firmly against my breasts. The heat of his mouth spread through my body and wrapped me in a blanket of tingles and warmth. Thirty seconds were over, and still, I didn’t want it to end.

  I’d always felt like a whirlwind inside. I visualized my raging emotions as this huge, wobbling, roaring column of mayhem, a fiery tornado rotating around a black hole, powerful, destructive, irrepressible. But as Matthias’s tongue introduced me to his body’s flavors, something strange happened, something that had never happened before. The chaos inside of me quieted, the storm came to a standstill, and a small, distant shimmer radiated from the black hole at the center of my being. That shimmer? It was him, Matthias. Could a kiss from him appease the mayhem in me?

  I felt as if I had plugged into a brand new source of energy that restored, replenished and satisfied. Contained in Matthias’s embrace, I was strong, valuable, whole. His fingers slid down the line of my jaw and cradled the back of my head. Tender. So tender was the touch of his powerful hands. This was surreal. Dreaming, yes, that had to be it, because I was being kissed by Matthias Hawking, the most aggravating man in the world. One small change. He wasn’t aggravating me at the moment. Not at all.

  A few more seconds of this couldn’t hurt…

  The world reeled around me. What the hell are you doing, Jade? Hannah’s voice echoed in my head. You need to establish a professional relationship with the game warden. This was hardly the right kind of relationship. This was actually the prelude to the kind of disastrous relationship I couldn’t possibly have. A wallop of fear hit me so hard that my knees buckled.

  “Steady.” Matthias braced me against his body, gently, as if he was bringing a ship to shore. He kissed me some more, mouth so full and appealing I couldn’t stop kissing him back. He tasted delicious, like my favorite flavors, coffee imbued with a hint of ozone. He smelled even better, like surf on a summer day and grass right after the rain, like Serengeti and pure maleness baiting my girl-gone-wild femaleness. He felt deep and vast like the ocean, and I sank into him like a diver in the sea.

  I have no idea how long we kissed. All I know is that I could’ve stayed in his
arms for days, months, years. My body was like mud in his hand, willing to be shaped and reshaped to his touch, soft and pliable in a way I’d never been. His kisses were glory to my senses. The way his tongue swiped into me was a preview of better things to come. The feel of him was addictive, enthralling. And the way he moved against me? He was already making love to me.

  My body began to look for solutions to the need liquefying my sex. If the passion fueling his touch was any indication, so was his. His bulk was hard against my groin, kindling the heat between my legs. Waves of pleasure birthed in my pussy and washed down my body. The furnace flared. I’d been set on wearing an imaginary chastity belt for a while. Now that imaginary chastity belt loosened. I was in serious trouble.

  I made an attempt to retake control. I tried to pull away, but Matthias wouldn’t have it. He held on to me, growling against my mouth, a low, rumbling, sexy sound that made my body contract with want. At the same time, he spun us around. I ended up trapped between his arms, backed against the wall. His kiss transformed into a full, desperate mauling that had me groaning with desire.

  “Hell, Jade, you’re like a match to my fuse,” he rasped as he lifted me onto the tips of my toes and fitted his knee between my legs. “I’ve wanted to kiss that sassy mouth of yours ever since we kissed that first time.”

  He had? I was shocked. And here I thought he was just irked by me. Desire pumped through my veins along with a rush of pure adrenaline. My heart beat a million times per second. Glory and disaster struck together. My imaginary chastity belt gave way. Click. It just fell away. It scared me that it bust open so easily, but I couldn’t help it. This man was an opiate to my system and there was nothing I could do at the moment to resist his pull.

  I rubbed myself over his muscular thigh, enjoying the heat of the friction and the pressure of his hard flesh against my sex. He fitted his hands under my ass and lifted me up in the air. I wrapped my legs around him and clung to his shoulders. He stumbled backward, whirled around, and deposited me at the edge of a long table.

  I braced my hands on the wooden top and adjusted my legs to receive his full brunt. He curled his hips and rubbed his hard-on against me, working me up through the thin layers of spandex and nylon that separated us. He dipped his other hand under my sport bra, claimed my breast, and fingered my nipple until I whimpered aloud, gasping from pleasure. Gone. I was so far gone. Out of control. A willing traitor to all my plans.

  “Matthias?” A voice broke through the haze, tentative yet urgent. “Matthias!”

  I jerked away from Matthias, breaking off the kiss and with it, the spell that held me in place. On impulse, I pushed off his thighs, vaulted halfway over the table and landed on my feet, breathless and wild.

  I looked around, awakening from the dream. Zeke stood by the door clutching his radio, gaze firmly planted on the wall behind us, shifting uncomfortably on his feet. Matthias braced on his rigid arms, hands splayed on the table, white knuckles clutching the edges. His head hung low. His jaw flinched with his clench. His chest rose and fell, fighting for breath in a desperate attempt to reclaim control.

  I knew that, because I was gasping and fighting for control too. My body squeezed at the void inside, an aching, desperate protest. I felt deprived, as if I’d just experienced a power outage. All the light was gone. So was the friction, the pressure, the pleasure. I gritted my teeth and dug my nails into my palms. I was still reeling from a serious case of withdrawal and not a little embarrassed at being discovered in such a feral state of lust.

  Matthias straightened. He aimed his glare at Zeke. “This better be an emergency.”

  Zeke lifted his radio in the air. “We’ve got an unidentified contact at the north boundary.”

  “Kumbuyo?”

  Zeke nodded. “Highly probable.”

  “Assemble a team,” Matthias ordered. “We’re going.”

  “Right away.” Zeke stepped out of the room, calling out commands into his handheld radio and waving orders from just outside the front door.

  Matthias’s gaze fell on me. He was still breathing hard. So was I.

  “I’ll have Claudette drive you to the station,” he said, voice rough and hoarse.

  “I want to go with you.” I cleared my throat. “I need to go.”

  His Adam’s apple bounced up and down his throat. “Negative. Not right now. You’re going back to the station and that’s final.”

  “But—”

  “Can’t you see?” he snapped. “I can’t take you. And I can’t do this right now.”

  “Do what?”

  “This!” he said. “You and I. What you do to me? Mind-bending clusterfuck.”

  A clusterfuck. That’s what I was to him. The mere thought incensed me. “For the record, there is no you and I, there’s never been, there will never be.”

  He stared at me as if I’d said something hideous. “Then what the hell was that?”

  “A clusterfuck, in your own words.”

  He scrubbed his face with his hand and puffed out a long breath. “This wasn’t supposed to happen, can’t happen, not now, not like this.”

  “No kidding.” I hid the sting his words caused me behind a sneer. A clusterfuck and a mistake. I’d made myself both in the span of a few short minutes. Way to go, Jade.

  The Land Rover brakes’ screeched and the vehicle came to a stop before the door.

  “We’re ready,” Zeke called out, mounting the truck and taking the wheel from the driver. “The rest of the team is on the way.”

  Matthias started for the door.

  I was beyond pissed; I was frustrated and needy, furious and offended, one hot ball of outrage. “If you don’t let me come with you—”

  “Don’t threaten me.” The anger that darkened his face as he spun to confront me hit me like a punch to the gut. “I’m not bartering with your life. Ever. So hush your mouth and go with Claudette. And Jade?”

  “What?”

  The look he gave me could’ve burned the whole of the Serengeti. “Do not defy my orders.”

  12

  Jade

  A week later, I sat on my deck, repairing my broken body camera harness with carefully placed strips cut to size from the duct tape I always carried with me. I worked under the supervision of my closest neighbors, the troop of black and white colobus monkeys that had taken up stadium seating in the trees around me and seemed to find my actions fascinating. As far as I could tell, I was their newest form of entertainment, Jade Nat Geo, for monkeys.

  Between grooming sessions and games, they watched my every move, cawing, squeaking, and clicking, as if commentating on my clumsy attempts. I might have found them fascinating subjects for a segment as well, only I wasn’t in the mood for a shoot. I dropped the roll on the table. If only I could patch my pride and dignity with a strip of duct tape.

  I hadn’t seen Matthias for a week. A whole freaking week. Seven days had passed and not a word from him. Sure, I’d heard he’d gone after Kumbuyo, a hunt that probably kept him seriously busy, but that was no excuse. I was sure he was avoiding me on purpose, to teach me a lesson, to drive me insane. I added “vindictive” and “infuriating” to the long list of character deficiencies I’d compiled for him.

  But could I really blame him, after the fiasco at the orphanage?

  I’d acted like a bitch in heat, like a young, pliable fool, dying for attention. I blamed a year of self-imposed celibacy for my extreme reaction. I also blamed the over-reaction on the sexual oven that smoldered at the center of my being, the exhausting, irrepressible trait I associated with flawed DNA. True, my sexual fire had a tendency to flare and disrupt my life, but what I’d felt at the schoolhouse? That had the makings of a life-altering cataclysm.

  I squeezed my legs together, took a deep breath, and tried to calm the need tormenting me. I’d dreamed about Matthias every night this week. Every morning, I woke up with my panties drenched and hornier than the night before in an escalation that was driving me insane. Worst part? Even i
f I tried to take care of the problem myself, it didn’t seem to make any difference.

  It served me right. For letting my guard down. I had to stop thinking about him in a sexual way. Yeah, I could fix this. I just had to stay mad at the jerk. Stick to plan A: get my pictures, file my reports, and get the hell out of this place. Compliance didn’t come naturally to me, but neither did defeat. I was going to complete my assignment and soon.

  As if feeding on my sexual energy, the monkeys around me began to click, caw, and howl. The big male, an impressive thirty-pounder with a gray face and intelligent eyes, mounted a female right there on the railing, not five feet away from me.

  “Really?” I puffed. “Show offs.”

  I set the harness aside, lifted up my camera, and shot a few stills of the encounter. Monkey porn. Hannah would find a market for it. At least someone was getting laid around here.

  The rumble of engines from the trucks returning to the lodge after a day of research in the field came from afar. The elephant team was out and about, and so were the members of the rhino project and the German group studying the habits of hippos. But not me, uh-uh, I wasn’t allowed to go out into the reserve, not until I proved I could be good and obedient. Obedient. Me. Right. I snorted at that.

  I’d kept busy during my captivity/probation. The combined IQ power in this place was off the charts. On the scientific angle, I’d interviewed Martha Knowles, the legendary pioneer of the most established lion satellite tracking program in Africa, and Darryl Valdez, Sarah’s boss, the world’s foremost elephant communication specialist. Not bad for a week’s work, but I could’ve done a lot more if allowed.

  Through Zeke, I’d gotten my reports approved and out to Hannah. The footage wasn’t as compelling as the video about the poachers, but it’d kept up record views and thankfully, the GoFundMe—the main reason I’d been allowed to stay—continued to grow at a healthy rate. By now, I pretty much knew everybody. People were kind to me, probably because they knew that I was on Matthias’s naughty list.