Noble Hearts (Wild Hearts Romance Book 3) (4 page)

“What the—!”

I tensed, reflex only, as Kayla beside me seemed to be encouraging the beasts our way.

The two animals charging us couldn’t have been more different. One I recognized, the slower and heavier of the two, stubby legs pumping as it tried to keep up with its companion. A rhino, young and small, with a blunt face, big feet and bat ears perched high on top of its head.

It was the second animal that baffled and awed. Truly the strangest-looking beast I’d ever seen, like some wild genetic experiment right out of the pages of
The Island of Dr. Moreau.

A gazelle, I thought at first, seeing its long legs, but it ran more like a horse. Some sort of mutant zebra then, I guessed, the dappled light through the trees splashing across stripes that would no doubt dazzle a leopard’s eye. But no, the stripes were horizontal, not vertical, and only ran along the animal’s butt, thighs and upper forelegs. The rest of it was mainly a deep chestnut with striking gray-white cheeks and a black nose. As it neared, it was clear there was nothing equine about the shape of its head or its long, slender neck—more like a cross between a deer and giraffe.

What I did know as it capered in front of Kayla, wagging its bottle-brush tail, was that it was pretty damn cute.

Jengo left Kayla’s side and threw his spindly arms around its neck. A few yards behind, the rhino had stopped to sniff noses with Gus.

“The rest of the family,” Kayla said as she shrugged out of her backpack. “The rhino is Tamu and the okapi is Nyota.”

“So Nyota is supposed to look like that?”

Kayla laughed as she unpacked what looked suspiciously like baby bottles. “Wait ‘til you see her best trick.”

Tamu came pushing up between us, squealing and eager for whatever was in the bottles. Kayla gave her nose a stern push away. “Be polite,” she admonished. To my surprise, the rhino plopped down on her haunches like a dog, obediently waiting for what I guessed now was her supper.

Kayla offered Jengo the smaller bottle, and he unwrapped his arms from his okapi friend’s neck and scampered the couple of feet to take it. Kayla then offered the next-larger-size bottle to me. “For Nyota. Keep it tilted up just above her head so she doesn’t swallow air. And no matter what, hold on tight.”

There was something about her tone and smile that made me think I was being set up.
I
I eyed the okapi with suspicion while Kayla handed Gus a large dog biscuit before positioning a gallon-sized baby bottle just over the little rhino’s head. Tamu’s eyes shut with contentment as she began to nurse.

The okapi took a step toward me, her wide eyes staring hopefully at what she apparently knew was
her
bottle. Her back was only about waist-high, but her long neck gave her added reach. I held the bottle over her head…and despite Kayla’s warning, I damn near dropped it when a long blue snake streaked out of her pointed muzzle.

I gasped.

Kayla snickered.

It wasn’t a snake, of course, but her tongue. Darker blue than a Chow’s tongue, and longer than the tongues of giraffes I’d seen foraging at the zoo. How it fit in her mouth without her strangling I didn’t know, but she swallowed it back in right before latching on to the bottle and sucking away.

The next 10 minutes were Eden-like bliss, with the calls of monkeys high above us, a flutter of brightly colored wings through the trees, and the noisy contentment of our menagerie of suckling babes. If those moments could have stretched into eternity, I would have gladly stayed forever in this idyllic piece of heaven.

It couldn’t last, of course, but I was given an extension when the okapi finished her bottle, licked the last drops of milk from her lips with that amazing tongue of hers, and snuggled by the rhino to catch a nap. I sat beside them, my hand on the rhino’s rough shoulder watching her suck down the last of her milk, and watching the exquisite face of the extraordinary woman who’d made these moments possible.

When she was done, the little rhino—little only in the sense of being young since size-wise she was easily the mass of four 100-pound Rottweilers—stretched out under my hand, careful of the calf curled up next to it. Not to be left out, Jengo brought his half-finished bottle over and kicked back, using the rhino’s broad rump as a backrest.

Just another litter seeking the comfort and security of family. My eyes met Kayla’s over the sprawl of babies, and she smiled, all of Eve and the First Garden in her full and perfect lips and the warmth of her dark eyes.

A pang shot through me in response—a deep and powerful longing, though for what I wasn’t sure. I followed the mystery of it as it twined through my gut, my brain, my heart.

Peace. Family.

I shook my head. That was the Percocet whispering foolishness in my ear. Right now, I didn’t have time or place in my life for a goldfish. Not according to my 10-year plan. Once I was hired on as an attending physician at one of the better hospitals in Boston or Hartford or even Upstate New York, maybe then I could entertain thoughts of wife and kids and condos with all the amenities. When the student loans were all paid off and I could direct money into college funds for another generation. That, however, was a dream for the 20-year plan. A decade away from even starting it.

A lifetime from here.

In the settled quiet, the soft buzz of Kayla’s vibrating phone carried clearly. She flicked a look at the display, then held it anxiously to her ear. “Jamal!
Habari ya jioni
. How is Lisha?”

I needed the coming 10 years to better learn how to deal not just with patients but with their families. To deliver bad news compassionately. To not keep my emotions walled-off in my soul, but to share just enough of them that we connected not as doctor and client, but as caring human beings. God knows I felt those emotions to the core, but somehow, somewhere in my training I’d learned that to protect my own heart, I had to be as steel in the face I turned to my patients.

Watching Kayla’s expression crumble and feeling the surge of grief that washed over me on her behalf, I wondered if 10 years would be enough.

“I’ll be by soon,” she promised, before pocketing the phone and turning a wounded look on me.

No tears
, was all I could think.
Shouldn’t there be tears
? And shouldn’t I do or say something? Something professional or something personal? Or both? A part of me wanted to wrap my arms around her and share her pain, take it all away. But… professional distance—I needed it, as much now as in the future, or every bit of pain around me would become my own, would overwhelm me so I could no longer function, could no longer be the healer I wanted to be, needed to be.

I settled for taking her hand, feeling the long fingers and soft skin of that most efficient hand that could feed a zoo, run a plantation and doctor wounds with equal ease.

“Is it
Subs
?” I asked.

She nodded.

Sometimes it sucked to be right. More so, even, in this case because it was confirmation of a widening spread of the deadly disease.

Something she was thinking of herself. “How many more?” she whispered.

“It’s not just the direct cost of lives. If tourists stay away out of fear, and if those with the resources to leave do so, think of the economic consequences.”

“Just what we need—even more fear and panic before Ushindi’s first real elections.”

I felt the blood drain from my face. “Those men—the militia that took me—one of them said something about needing a medic because they had a war to fight. In Hasa. Add a deadly mosquito invasion into the mix—”

“They wouldn’t. Not when we’re so close to getting the kind of leaders Ushindi needs to grow and prosper.
Their
leaders…” Horror grew in her widening eyes. I had distracted her from her grief about her friend’s predicament only to have her worrying about the larger predicament her country now faced. “But of course that’s exactly when they would strike, isn’t it? News of the
Subs
virus will only help, turning public sentiment from political strife to simpler concerns about staying healthy and staying alive. Few people will care who is in power then. They’ll only care about who can best help. And the answer right now is…no one.”

I gripped the hand in mine. “None of that has happened yet.”

She stared at my bandaged side. “No?”

“Collateral damage. No one
meant
for me to be in that camp. I wasn’t a target.”

“
Someone
was. There had to be some kind of advance planning. Helicopters, guns—”

“—drugs.” I remembered the bag of cocaine. “Probably how they’re funding their operations—through cocaine and heroin trafficking.”

“Is there someone we can warn?”

I scowled. “I don’t even know which side to be warning or who to root for here. The side who kidnapped me or the other side who also may have shot me? I’m not really seeing an upside to either. My guess is being in Hasa isn’t going to be smart for anyone in the next week or two.”

“I’d heard rumors the incumbents might dig in, refuse to leave office, no matter how the vote went. That’s what happened in Angola , Rwanda and the Congo Republic.”

“And…what happened?”

“Uprisings. Civil war. Fighting that tore those countries apart not so long ago. They’re still recovering emotionally and economically. Politically, they may never recover.” I watched her thinking about that happening here. Saw the numbness in her face, the devastation in her eyes.

I tried to empathize with her country, but couldn’t. It was too far outside my experience where even the occasional riot in American streets was something on TV to shake my head over, but not something connected to me in any important way. The walls around my feelings were not ones I’d built consciously. All I knew was that they grew higher and more distancing every year. I was comfortable behind those walls where the pain of others’ misfortunes couldn’t affect me.

I would have been a much better scientist than doctor. In fact, I was considering going into research when I returned to the States. That was a field where cold logic was a benefit and lack of empathy wasn’t a handicap.

Right now, the separation between me and anything happening in Ushindi that didn’t directly affect me was too great to feel anything more than a pang of sorrow so fleeting I could barely remember it when it passed.

“Do you know what Ushindi means in Swahili?” Kayla asked in a quiet voice.

I shook my head.

“
Victorious
.
Overcoming
. We’re less than 1 million people, but just over 10 years ago we managed to carve out a new nation from the stranglehold of the Congo. Ten years ago I was still a teenager on my way to University in Cape Town. In my idealism, I saw Ushindi’s future as one of peace and prosperity under the rule of wise and competent leaders. Leaders who turned out to be little better than the dictatorial extensions of the government we’d just ceded from, and the parliament installed no more than a sham.

“Cape Town, though, showed me what was possible. It was amazing. Shiny. Modern. Prosperous. A city making a difference, not just to Africa, but to the world. At a cost, of course, to the land and the causeways. Africa loses so much as it struggles forward. Do you know pollution in Johannesburg is as bad as it is in Los Angeles? Idealism told me that in Ushindi, we could marry the future with the past. We could improve our plantations while maintaining the rainforests, improve our lives while maintaining the legacy of our fathers and grandfathers.

“Cape Town made me hunger for modernity. What it didn’t do was prepare me for reality. Better, I think, that I should have walked the streets of Kigali in Rwanda to get a taste of what Ushindi would be. What it’s to become.”

The incongruity between the gravity of her words and the scene at hand didn’t escape me. Jengo had fallen asleep with an arm wrapped limply around his empty bottle, his back against the rhino who cuddled beside the okapi. Even Gus had joined the sprawl, his chin resting comfortably across the rhino’s leathery gray flank.

I had puddle-hopped into Hasa on a seven-seat Avanti jet that was first-class 15 years ago, landing on a runway too short to accommodate anything larger. A hired van had jounced me through drab city streets that criss-crossed neighborhoods filled with gray cinderblock buildings on my way to the clinic. Deeply depressed and third-world had been my impression of Hasa, and by extrapolation all of Ushindi.

I had seen nothing—could see nothing—of the nation Kayla thought it could be.

And yet… I couldn’t discount her vision. Not for any concrete, logical reason since all the evidence I’d seen pointed contrarily.

I couldn’t discount it because of Kayla herself.

Because if she wanted to believe, I found myself wanting to believe as well.

Why, I wondered, did what she believe matter so much to me?