Proud Hearts (Wild Hearts Romance Book 2) (11 page)

Dee had been living alone with the lions far too long. Her instincts were good. She kept her head in a crisis. But throw in another person, like me, and she was second-guessing herself in a way I was certain she wouldn’t be if I hadn’t been in the Rover with her. That was her insecurity showing. She needed to be around people more to develop a better sense of herself.

No. Not just any people.

Me.

She needed to around
me
more.

And I needed to be around her.

Only not the way I had needed Reena around me. Dee kept me grounded the same way Reena had—by telling me
no
, a word I didn’t hear often these days. That didn’t stop me from trying to get a certain
yes
from Reena, but it was nothing more than a game between us—she knew it as well as I did. It was a way for us to define our relationship considering we spent half of each year in ultra-close quarters with one another. We had set bounds and habits we were each comfortable with. Although I teased persistently on the outside, we were platonic—and content to be so—on the inside. She was a challenge I didn’t feel the urgent, pounding
need
to conquer. So I could use her as my ground, my lode star—my friend. One of the few I had, and, I realized sadly, the only female friend I knew.

Dee was something completely different. I wasn’t content to be around her. In fact, the more I was around her, the less content I was. Nor was it simple lust. I’d been around women who were classic beauties with the machine-sculpted bodies to match. I’d had many of them in my bed even. And while I could pick out names of some I’d been with mainly because of their reputations, none of them were particularly memorable. Short-term satisfaction only.

Dee, with her admirable if perfectly imperfect lines, who wore no make-up and who kept her beautiful chestnut hair tied back, nevertheless inspired me to long-term dreams.

To be honest, she inspired other dreams as well. This morning I’d woken up erect and hard, thrashing out in her imagined depths. Passion enflamed, no doubt, by its forbidden temptation.

Beyond the lust, though, lay something unexpected. I’d felt it today when she loaded the tranq rifle, when she’d gunned the engine into the face of the fire, and as we’d swerved to avoid beasts and flames.

She was fearless. Decisive, too, when it mattered most. Caring, funny, snarky, though not obnoxiously so. It was that complete mix that was her that resonated so within.

I wanted her. Needed her inside me.

But as experienced as I was with sex, I had little knowledge of courtship. I knew a thousand way to seduce the body, but had little clue as to how to seduce a heart.

Especially a heart so disinterested in the arrogant, egotistical, fake bastard she no doubt thought I was.

Before I could win her heart, however, there was the not-so-small matter of winning over a lion.

Not long later, Dee eased the Rover to a stop. A thin, clear stream cascaded out of a hillock of rocks to the south, out of the burn, meandering off to where the land fell away to the north. The grass grew low under a single tall acacia tree.

“We’ll set up camp here,” Dee said. “Clean water off the rocks, but not a major source so it won’t attract a lot of animals. It’s flat and grassy, so hopefully no surprise burrows or lairs.”

“Only one thing it’s missing.”

She raised her eyebrows at me.

“Our lion.”

Nodding, she took a deep breath, all of this an obvious stall for time. With slow, unhurried movements, Dee reached into the backseat and retrieved the rifle and dart case from the top of the supply pile, passing each up carefully to me.

Taking the rifle, she clicked open her door. Caesar didn’t budge. “Blue dart.” She held her hand inside while I opened the case and passed one to her before clicking open my own door and sliding out.

We circled around to the back.

“Hey Caesar,” Dee crooned as she went. “We’re coming up behind you, munchkin. Don’t be scared. Or mad. Don’t tear the truck up. Or tear us up. Don’t make me use another dart on you. OK?”

Inside, the cub swung his tawny head around, ears swiveling to catch her words as he tracked her progress. She lifted the rifle and nodded at me. Camera in hand, I clicked the handle on the hatch. Immediately the cub’s ears laid back. I cracked open the hatch a couple of inches and his lip curled back in a silent snarl. A warning.

“No making faces, munchkin. Let Chris open the door.”

Caesar’s ears perked up again at her words. She was the only familiar thing in his world right now, and he responded to her presence, to her voice. Heck, if she ever spoke to me in that sweet, comforting tone, I’d respond too.

I inched the hatch up a little more. Caesar twisted on the floorboard, definitely favoring his right shoulder and foreleg. Whatever he might do, he’d be awkward and slow at doing it. Which made him only marginally less dangerous.

He stretched his head out and sniffed at the hatch opening. His tail thumped against the side and window.

“You’ve got his interest,” Dee told me. “Swing the hatch up and step back. Fast.”

With a tight grip on the camera, I stepped back toward the tail light, running my hand along the bottom edge of the open hatch door. Taking a deep breath, I lifted the hatch till the hydraulics caught and carried it up the rest of the way while I threw myself on the other side of the tail lights against the Rover’s rear panel.

Dee held her ground, the rifle pointed dead in the hold.

When Caesar didn’t explode from the hatch as I’d half-feared he would, I eased the camera around the hatch frame for a clearer view of the cub after getting a quick shot of Rambo Dee.

Caesar took a swipe at the camera with the paw on his good leg. Unfortunately for him, it was also the leg bracing the weight of his forequarters, so the claws passed far shy of their goal as he quickly dropped the leg back down to keep from pitching forward.

Dee’s smothered laugh was an echo of my own. In the camera’s viewfinder, the cub’s expression was priceless. Was he more bewildered or embarrassed? I caught myself. Cute and comical he may have looked, he was still potentially dangerous. As with Dee, I didn’t know what was going on in that muddled head of his. Treading softly and carrying a tranq rifle still seemed the prudent way to go.

“So what now, Caesar?” Dee asked in that motherly, sing-song voice.

As if in response, he stretched out on his good side and hung his head over the bumper, contemplating the knee-high drop. After a moment, he gave an experimental push with his back feet against the backseat. The
rrrip
of the vinyl upholstery made him pause only a moment before he pushed again, inching his body closer to the hatch. If he went over all at once, he could tear up his injured shoulder even more. Instinctively, he seemed aware of the danger. His back feet paddled slowly and deliberately, the scrabble of claws sharp and loud, only occasionally catching purchase against the molded plastic of the bay. Still, he made steady progress as his forequarters draped over the hatchway, then the bumper.

He stretched out his good leg, and when the paw touched the ground, he drew one back foot tight up against his belly where it caught the edge of the hatchway. Dee subtly shifted position, and my own muscles tightened in anticipation.

With a shove, Caesar twisted his haunches beneath him as he slid for the ground. The jolt when he hit hurt—his head ducked and the pain flinched along his shoulders and back. But he had three good legs under him, and the pain and trauma wasn’t nearly as bad as it would have been if he’d simply tried leaping to the ground the way we were afraid he would.

“Now what, munchkin?”

His tail twitched as he took a tentative step away from the Rover. Getting out of the vehicle, though, seemed to have taken all his strength. He lifted his head and either sighted or smelled the stream that flowed about 20 feet away. A fresh wave of smoke billowed over us, though the winds behind helped keep the smoke moving across the new campsite.

The cub didn’t, after all, appear to want to chew us up. All he seemed to want right now was a drink of water—and the stream seemed to be within his grasp.

It was painful watching his slow progress, but he made it to the bank, then slid into the water, lying in the shade of our acacia tree, and lapped at the liquid flowing languidly past.

Dee placed the still-loaded rifle on the floor of the now empty cargo bay and left the hatch open. Moving slowly, trying not to frighten Caesar, we unpacked the Rover and set up camp.

Later, when three tents—mine, Dee’s and the one for supplies—were up in a cozy triangle, the generator was humming along and the satellite receiver had found a signal to the north in the darkening sky, Dee and I sat at the camp stove for a warmed-over dinner of ready meals. Caesar had crawled onto the dry bank, the water a balm to his wounds, and slept now about 50 feet away.

I sipped on my tea, wondering if it was time to break out the bottle of brandy in my luggage. “Can I see a copy of the itinerary the studio sent you? Because so far this hasn’t been the trip I signed up for.”

That twerked a reluctant smile from her. I hoped to see another.

“I’m not sure you’re quite what I signed up for either,” she said. “In a good way.”

“Yeah, I do have that reputation for being a proper boor. Like that Alistair Cooke fellow with his suit and tie and proper English accent. I disappoint a lot of the ladies when it turns out that’s not me at all.”

That didn’t elicit the reaction I wanted. Instead of keeping that magical smile that somehow made her appear as beautiful in my eyes as any starlet I’d ever met, she frowned.

“Not a fan of Alistair Cooke?” I asked gently.

“Not a fan of a lot of ladies.”

“Oh.”
Dammit
. I should have known better. Dee wasn’t a player. Which was one of the things that attracted me to her. Really attracted the me of me, under the lust of me. My problem here was that I didn’t know how to deal with myself, much less women, at that heart-deep level. Glib wasn’t doing it, so how was I supposed to talk with someone like Dee?

I tried again. “Sorry. Look, I’m glad you think maybe I’m something better than what you thought you were getting when you signed on. Fact is, most of the time, I
am
that person you thought you were getting. That’s because that’s the person Hollywood’s trained me to be. That’s the person who gets the gigs, makes the bucks. The person that was with you today and is here with you tonight—that’s a guy even I haven’t seen in a very long while.”

“I like this guy,” she said, and my heart melted at her confession. “That other guy, he’s pretty much an ass. And I’m not into asses.”

“Depends on whose—”

A sharp look from her silenced me. “Sorry. That was the other guy talking.”

“You know, you don’t a get a pass playing the dual identity thing. I’m not going to sit here trying to determine who’s flirting with me or who isn’t. Before, I didn’t think I could like you at all. Now, I see you can be likeable, but if you have to work at it, then maybe that likeable part isn’t really the real you. Maybe it’s the act you’re putting on now. How am I supposed to know?”

“Don’t they say a crisis is the crucible of character? I only have my actions to speak for me, and if you think I was play-acting today or yesterday, then I don’t know what I can do or say to make you believe otherwise. I want you to see me as that surprisingly better person because you’re partly responsible for letting me indulge him. I want you to believe he’s the guy I aspire to being all the time.”

“Then why not ditch this Chris Corsair character if he’s just something you made up to get a job? Won’t true fans love the real you just as much?”

“You don’t know much about fans, do you? They want their sexy action hero who can fight a bear then turn right around and seduce the gorgeous model on set with him into his bed with a nod of his head. They want—no, they demand—that illusion. They aren’t
my
fans. They’re Chris Corsair fans. If I don’t keep giving them Chris Corsair…”

“Then what?” she prompted.

“Then I give up a lifestyle I’ve grown accustomed to.”

“All those gorgeous models in your bed?”