Wild Encounter (17 page)

But her fingers against his zipper showed her just how real this was.

“He wasn’t there.” Simon’s lips pressed against her temple while parts lower down pressed against her hand. “My superiors weren’t there.”

No. The only two people in the world who knew for certain what went down in that farmhouse were here. Together again.

She curled her arms up around his neck.

“As career-enders go,” he whispered, easing her down onto her back, “this is a damn fine way to go out.”

His mouth found hers, heavy and hot, and she opened to him on a rush of joy and relief. His kiss was familiar and new all at once. She mouthed him greedily, mind and body exalting. He slid his thigh between hers—hard between hers—and the pressure increased the pulsing ache there. He ground it against her. She rubbed her hand against the v-seam of his cargos, returning the favor.

It would be so easy just to lie back and let him love her. But there was something he’d said—the bit about career-ending.

“Wait…” She pushed up into a sitting position. Not very convincingly. All he had to do was touch her and she’d be back under him. Surrendering.

His kisses eased and he followed her up, chest heaving. He didn’t let her go. “What’s wrong?”

“You can’t.” She took a steadying breath. “If it’s against orders, we can’t.”

His eyes darkened. “I’ve had it up to here with orders, Clare. People telling me what I can and can’t do. Against my own instincts.”

“But it’s not forever, right?”

“It could be Christmas.”

Damn. Really? She took another deep breath. “What’s a few more months? We can celebrate together. It’ll be the best Christmas gift ever.”

He ran his tongue over her lips. “You can wait that long to unwrap it? I can’t.”

The desire to stop whispering and just lie back on God’s hard earth and let him take her was almost overwhelming. Dogs be damned. Career be damned. Conscience be damned.

“I thought I’d never see you again.” Her breath hitched. “Christmas is still a win for me.”

His eyes crinkled. The desire in them morphed into something softer. He pulled back a little. “You’re serious?”

“This isn’t an either-or, Simon. It’s not like it was at the farmhouse. We can have both. Your career and each other.” She took a shaky breath. “Just not today.”

Or tomorrow, or any time before the translocation of the dogs was complete. But once it was… Once he had his evidence…

A flash of movement drew her eyes to the edge of the clearing. She put her fingers to his lips and sat up slowly, so the movement wouldn’t be seen from outside the blind.

She smelled him before she saw him. The pungent odor of wild dog on the early morning breeze. She hoped by the time he picked up the scent of a human upwind, the lure of the rotting carcass would be too strong.

All of a sudden, the wild dog trotted boldly into the clearing, a reflective red tracking collar around his neck.

Jambi.

His giant ears were erect and twitched like leathery satellite dishes, tuning in to the surrounding sounds, his sharp eyes alert to the slightest movement or danger. Clare controlled her breathing and concentrated on not yanking the rope in excitement as Jambi patrolled the edge of the clearing a few times, trotting back and forth, ensuring there was no danger.

Then, unexpectedly, a second dog stepped into the clearing. He was just as lean as his leader, with beautiful, distinctive face markings. Osumi, Jambi’s littermate. The two males crisscrossed the clearing on padded feet, getting closer to the opening of the pen. Clare’s chest squeezed with excitement. Not only had their chances of catching a dog just doubled, but a rival for the carcass would hopefully distract them both long enough for her to swing the gate shut behind them.

Simon silently curled his fist around the rope, adding his strength to hers.

With a slow scan of the yard, Jambi turned his majestic head and trotted into the hold, toward the carcass. She held a hand up to stop Simon from yanking the rope. The dog fell on the chunk of carcass and immediately began emitting the high-pitched, excited whine so unique to the species. That was Osumi’s cue. He sped straight into the pen and leaped in to tug the meat away from his brother. The alpha fought back.

There would be no better opportunity.

“Now!” Clare mouthed.

She and Simon hauled on the rope and started the large gate swinging. Both dogs leapt back at the sudden movement from behind them, but neither ran toward the diminishing opening, each a slave to his instinctive prey drive.

Two…three seconds and still they maintained their grisly tug-of-war. The gate closed and Clare scrambled across Simon, crawled out of the bush-hide, and ran to the holding pen to secure the latch.

Leaning on the steel mesh fencing with shaking hands and a big grin for Simon, she took in a lungful of cool morning air and let the adrenaline play out.

Two down, twelve to go.

In the distance, one of her team emerged from the tent, alerted by the noise. Clare tied a big red rag to the fence—the signal that dogs had been caught in the enclosure—then sprinted round to the far side to open the slide door into the second segment of the holding pens. She needed the first two dogs to move through so she could reset for the other dogs that would be drawn in by Jambi’s
hoo
calls.

The slide made a clanking noise as she opened it and the sound finally scared the dogs away from their treasured treat, but they raced each other into the next yard and fell on the larger carcass waiting there.

She clanged the slide shut behind them and sagged against the door. Craving celebration. Craving Simon. She ducked to crawl back into the hide, smiling broadly.

It was empty. She straightened. Scanned the bush around her.

Her smile faded.

Simon had disappeared as silently as he’d come.

…

As soon as her early morning shift in the hide was relieved, Clare fell into endless tasks in preparation for the coming translocation. Setting up equipment, loading Mitch’s dog-marking identifications into her laptop, double-checking to ensure all their vehicle and road permits were still in place.

She tried to block out Simon’s constant presence a dozen feet away, but constantly felt the steady warmth of his surveillance. Every time she looked up, he was otherwise engaged. Writing notes. Deep in conversation with Agent Amazon or one of the team members he was interviewing. But the whole time she could sense him keeping one eye and one ear on what she was doing.

After what had happened that morning, concentrating was next to impossible. She spent the better part of the afternoon with her chest perpetually tight. And her mind emotionally high.

Knowing he was watching her.

Imagining him thinking about her.

Feeling him wanting her.

It was all she could do to keep from marching over there and hauling him back to the privacy of the blind.

She straightened and flexed. “I need a break,” she said to Tim.

After her 4 a.m. start, she was more than ready for a nap. The fact that it would also get her out from under Simon’s professionally disguised avoidance was just a bonus. The unspent chemistry was killing her.

She wandered the hundred yards to the carefully distant latrine, rolling her neck slowly the whole way. Sleep. Yeah, sleep was her friend right now. She’d worked her butt off since getting the first two dogs in, she could afford a couple of hours of shut-eye.

She minimized her time in the sauna-like latrine and stepped back out into the welcome, fresh air, but as she turned to re-secure the fabric door the smallest hairs on her body sprang to attention. The same way they did when she caught a trace of Simon’s eyes on her. But not warm-and-fuzzy attention… This was bad attention.

Bad, bad.

She froze where she stood. Listening. The distant yip of a vervet monkey far off to her left. Jambi’s plaintiff alert calls to his pack to her right. Insects doing their thing all around her. Clusters of jagged leaves rubbing against each other in Africa’s ubiquitous
swish.

But no birdcalls.

She tilted her head, wishing for ears like Jambi’s.

Nope, not a one.

Her entire skin prickled up into the kind of gooseflesh Africa’s roasting sun shouldn’t have generated. Silent birds meant silent predator. And not just any predator.

Something big.

Her heart lurched against her chest wall as her eyes flicked the perimeter of camp. Everyone in the far distance seemed unconcerned and oblivious. A dozen things should have occurred to her first—lion, leopard, elephant. But her instincts screamed something else. Something malevolent.

Man.

The most dangerous predator of all.

She had nothing to go on except the cell-deep certainty that someone was in the shadows, watching her. But her instincts had served her well in the past. She bent to tie her perfectly tied shoe and used the moment to scan the fringes of the bush. Then she walked, slow and calm, back toward the safety of numbers, her senses acutely tuned to everything around her.

And the nothing. No tell-tale cracking of fallen branches, no slow, controlled breathing except her own. And still no birdcalls.

Zambia was more peaceful than some other African nations but it was a poor country and thieves still abounded. The black market was crowded. And their camp was packed with things that might be of interest for someone looking for things to eat, trade, sell or traffic.

Including humans.

She swung her arms in big circles to disguise the slight pick-up in her pace. She’d done the human trafficking thing once before and wasn’t about to do that again. Every step took her closer to the muted chatter and laughter of the WildLyfe team. Every step took her closer to Simon and his weapons and training and courage.

Every step created a metronome to pace her hammering heart and slow it.

And the closer to safety she got the more her logical mind overrode the alarm-call of her instinct. She’d spent six months reprogramming herself to believe that shadows didn’t automatically hide someone. Every noise wasn’t necessarily danger. And, in this case, every silence wasn’t either. The birds probably stopped singing because she had suddenly emerged from out of sight in the latrine.

She
was the predator.

Clare shook off the adrenaline and tucked herself between the nearest two tents, then scooted in the door to the women’s tent. She stripped off her outer shirt and flopped down on her bed, close enough to the rear flap of the tent to afford a hint of afternoon breeze but still shaded from the heat of the African day.

Every now and then she heard a word or a tone drift to her on the breeze and recognized it from among all the other voices as Simon’s. She focused in on it, letting it calm her and still her racing blood, letting the rest of the sounds fall away—the clank of equipment, the hypnotic pulse of the bush chenje, the insects and the birds which were starting up again—until it was just Simon murmuring in the distance. Hypnotic and reassuring. No words. No recognizable phrases. Just…

Simon.

…

“She’s quite the dynamo,” McKenzie said after Clare disappeared into her tent.

“She certainly is,” Simon agreed.

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

He continued to write his notes from his interview with Luka. Just as Weiss had said, they were all desperate to provide what little information they had. And Luka had a good memory for description. “For right now, it’s an irrelevant thing.”

“Oh, spare me. Something’s changed with you, and it’s got something to do with her.” She jerked her thumb at the tent.

He opened his mouth to deny it.

“Do you seriously think I could be this good at my job and this good a friend and not see what’s going on? I can practically
smell
her on you.”

“You’re fishing, Mac.”

“Come on deVries, I know you. She’s not your usual type.”

“And what type is that?” Even he could hear the chill in his tone. Mac wasn’t the slightest bit intimidated.

“You know… Needy, wafty.”

“Wafty?”

“Fluffy. Pretty.”

“She’s plenty pretty.”

Mac waved her long fingers dismissively. “You seek out a certain type of woman. And she’s not it.”

He thought about all the women he’d dated, all disasters, and what type of people they were. An accountant, a gym-junkie, a teacher, a cop. Totally different, every one. “Right.”

“Don’t ‘right’ me, deVries. Watching you date has been like a spectator sport. We practically take bets on how long before you’re single again.”

“Nice. Did you have a point to make?”

“The teacher with the trust issues, the fitness freak with bad body image, the cop with intimacy problems. You’ve tried to fix them all. Except, this time, I think you’ve found a woman who doesn’t need saving. And you’re adrift.”

Simon’s brows furrowed. “I’m not here to save her.”