Noble Hearts (Wild Hearts Romance Book 3) (21 page)

Mid-turn, the cat made its own decision. Scrabbling to gather its feet under it on the slick ground, it sprang, catapulting—

Away.

Away
, my brain echoed as the okapi’s frantic hooves slung mud in my face as she raced by then skidded around behind my position to peer over my shoulder as we watched the big cat lope fast away at the edge of the flashlight’s beam.

Letting the rifle fall to the end of the shoulder sling, I wrapped my trigger hand around Nyota’s muzzle. Her freakishly long tongue swiped my knuckles as she leaned her nose into my palm. We stood like that, the two of us, while our hearts, kicked into overdrive, geared down and our breathing slowed.

“Mark?” Kayla’s cry came from the direction of the shelter. That I could hear it meant Gus had stopped barking. He knew the danger was gone.

“We’re OK!”

Together, Nyota and I traipsed our way back to Kayla. The little rhino had shown her own mettle by not running off in panicked flight but by taking cover behind Kayla and the shelter where she waited for the okapi to join her. They bumped noses in happy reunion while Jengo crawled out of the shelter and took Kayla’s arm in his as she and Gus waited just outside for my return.

The lump in my throat grew the closer I came to them. I couldn’t help but feel like a warrior returning home.

And Kayla’s kiss—long and sweet and hard in the night—was my reward.

“Leopard,” I told Mark from the description he gave. “They’re common enough in the rainforest, although here they tend to be darker and not so spotted. Usually they’re more interested in smaller prey. Easier to catch. As this one found out in spades.”  I flashed a grateful smile his way. “
Asante-sana.
Thank you. For keeping us safe. For keeping the leopard safe.” All around a much happier outcome than the hyena encounter had been. “Now will you tell me where a rich city boy picks up such wicked rifle skills?”

I only meant to compliment him; instead, I hurt him somehow, dredging up memories it was quickly clear he didn’t want to be reminded of. “
Pole-sana. Sawa-sawa.
I’m sorry. It’s OK.” I held his upper arm between my hands, the rock-hard bulge of muscle an anchor, a stanchion I hadn’t realized I needed until I had it. “I don’t need to know.”

“No. I need for you to. Otherwise, you’ll be imagining way worse things about me. I was in ROTC as an undergrad. No real chance of being called up and deployed, so it was a way to play army without any of the consequences. We had weapons competitions that I trained for. No different from any other competitive drill exercises—with the exception of live ammo.”

I closed my eyes. It was too painfully clear to see where this was heading.

“It was an accident, of course. A group of us firing on the range. A group of drunk kids acting out in the wrong place at the wrong time. The investigators never released the name of which of us fired the rifle that put one of those freshmen in a wheelchair for life. They didn’t want to scar the one of us that pulled the trigger for life too, so we all walk around now with a different kind of scar, wondering. It’ll be another 10 years before they unseal the records. I never picked up another rifle after that. Until I came here.”

I caught my breath, realizing how much about this man I didn’t know.

The accident was a horrific, painful thing that he’d kept sheltered in his heart, and I was incredibly touched he’d shared it with me. I washed myself in his remembered grief, not daring to touch any more wounds tonight. But there were 30 years of mystery buried in him, and I wanted to know it all. To celebrate every victory anew with him, to mourn every loss, to absolve him of all his guilts.

A shiver jolted through me. What was I thinking?

If I had thought sex with this man was dangerous, what I was contemplating now—knowing him more intimately than sex could ever bring us—was doubly so.

I couldn’t allow that any more than I could allow myself to get so attached to my orphans that when it came time to let them go, I wouldn’t be able to. Every release into the wild was painful; I loved them that much. But by loving them more than that, I risked their welfare if I clung to them and never let them free, and risked my heart not just breaking cleanly to where it could still be mended, but shattering beyond repair.

It was such a thin line between loving enough and loving too much. I feared the day I would cross that line, whether by choice or accident. That day, however, was not now.

But that didn’t mean I couldn’t sit with Mark, pull his head to my breast and stroke his pain away.

Not that he and I were alone, of course. Jengo sat beside us, a long, thin arm wrapped tight about us both, and Gus laid his chin on Mark’s crossed knee. The okapi folded her legs and rested against me, back to back, while the rhino settled herself at Mark’s side.

A hundred thousand acres of rainforest surrounded us, yet we crowded into less than five square meters of it, finding comfort in each other’s touch. Another might have begrudged the intrusion of my fur kids, but Mark, never lifting his head from my breast, draped his arm across Tamu’s neck while a troop of vervet monkeys chattered nonsense at us from the trees above.

The rain held off through mid-afternoon. While the idea of a bit of sun to dry us out was a nice fantasy, the continued overcast was actually marginally better for our uphill trek. Not that much sun would have reached us anyway beneath the thick canopy above, but adding heat to the saturated ground would have shot the humidity to an unbearable level. It was only barely tolerable as it was, and in some hollows, a warm fog shrouded the undergrowth.

Worse yet were parts of the forest floor. We stuck as much as possible to where there were thick layers of peat that absorbed the rainwater before siphoning it to the ground below so we walked on what felt like sponges that gave us good traction as we went. The occasional long flats of mud slicks, however, were unavoidable, exhibiting the most irritating property of mud—that it became its slurpy, suckiest worst hours and days after the rain had long since stopped.

We were skirting the massive mountain rather than intentionally climbing it, sticking to the warmer elevations with plenty of cover. Above us, just a few degrees off the equator, the last remnants of great glaciers could be found. And above that, the rocky peaks, covered with snow and ice, promised below-freezing nights none of us could tolerate. Here, though, 1000 meters below the treeline, it was still warm enough to break a sweat.

When the jungle opened up to a rushing stream and a cliff waterfall, Mark and I were more than ready to wash off that sweat and the mud and be clean even if just for a few minutes.

“Back in the States,” Mark said, “people pay good money to visit pristine falls like these. They’re gorgeous.”

Leaving our safari boots on the bank, we waded into the cool stream, clear and swollen with rainwater. Tamu and Nyota plunged in a few meters downstream, and the Rottweiler joined them, paddling happily in circles between the banks. Only Jengo refused to come in, sitting streamside with his arms clasped around his knees, content it seemed, to keep watch for us.

I quickly gave up trying to wring the mud from my shorts while they were on me. “Well, this isn’t working. I’m going to have to strip.” 

“Don’t let me stop you.” Mark waded closer.

I shook my head. “I’m not stripping unless you do too. It’s both of us or neither.”

Mark didn’t waste a moment with his decision but immediately tugged the wet tail of his shirt from his shorts and began unbuttoning it. I watched, mesmerized and eager with anticipation. Until he abruptly stopped.

“I thought we were in this together.” He grinned and nodded with equal anticipation toward my shirt.

“Oh. Yeah.” Having started this game, I was obligated to follow through. In a moment, my breasts were staring back at Mark’s wide, bared chest. Then like synchronized swimmers, we both bent over together and shucked off our shorts. Standing thigh-deep in the rushing stream, it was the work of just minutes to rinse the mud and sweat from our cloths, then lay them out on the bank where they had no hope of drying in the saturated air.

We didn’t lay them there with expectations of drying, though. We simply wanted them stashed safely while we took a few minutes to play under the waterfall, splashing seductively only a few meters away.

I dove first into the water, swimming against the current. With longer strokes than mine, Mark caught up quickly, and we reached the splash of the falls together. Standing beneath the fall itself, we sluiced our bodies and hair clean under nature’s most beautiful shower, then, holding hands, we stepped out of the pounding rush of the waterfall into the secluded swirl behind.

If there was one word I could name that place and moment it would be
peponi
.
Paradise
.

We stood on large, flat rocks smoothed by hundreds, maybe thousands, of years of falling water. The clear, clean liquid tickled our knees while the faint smell of moss clinging to the rock face behind us tickled our noses.

We could have been First Man and First Woman—Adam and Eve as Mark would likely know them, as my father had taught me. Naked and alone with a world to populate. I clenched hungrily at that thought while Mark rose to it.

Then there was no more thinking, only feeling. Tongues and lips and fingers exploring, probing, arousing.

He suckled at my wet skin and I bit at his. I cradled the male of him as it worshipped the woman of me. We had no condom between us, but I had no fears. I welcomed him as First Woman welcomed First Man, and we thrust together to the rhythm of the falls pounding in our ears.

Once could never be enough to satisfy the call of Paradise. He pushed me back against the slick mossed wall, and I laid him down on a bed of rock and rode above him, desperate to wring every drop of ecstasy from him that I could, only to return it to him under the fall itself, the pour of water washing away the sweat of our labor but not the surety of our love.

Yes, love. But I was not yet ready to name the kind of love that poured like the waterfall through our souls.

Spent but sated beyond measure, we left the waterfall in the mid of day, collecting our treasure of strays along the way. And though the pound of the waterfall soon faded behind us, we weren’t diminished in its passing.

Because, within, we still carried a piece of Paradise between us.