Guarding the Princess

chapter 8



The elephant charged in a thundering cloud of boiling dust. Brandt floored the accelerator, one hand gripping the steering wheel, his other arm over the backseat as he tried to keep an eye on both the advancing bull while blasting the jeep backward at full throttle through thick sand. He swerved round a clump of trees, tires whirring up dirt, brush catching under the chassis.

Bang!

The jeep jarred as something hit underneath. Crap. And the bloody bull was still coming. Swinging the wheel hard, sweat drenching his shirt, blood pounding in his ears, he fishtailed backward around an outcrop of red rock.

The bull slowed near the outcrop, then stopped, his ears fanning in and out from his head. Brandt kept going, engine whining—he wasn’t certain the charge was over—but his heart sank as, in the sand in front of the jeep, trailed a black swath that was pouring out from under their vehicle like blood from a severed artery.

He brought the jeep to a stop in soft sand, his attention riveted on the animal as he carefully read the bull’s body language, the position of his ears, trunk. The elephant’s ears flared slowly out then in once more, as if deciding whether to charge again, then he turned and loped slowly into a copse of trees in the distance. Leaves began to shiver as the bull took out his grievance against the trunk of the tallest tree.

Brandt turned off the ignition, furious with himself. This entire area was populated with Mopani that had been eaten uniformly squat by elephants—he should’ve been on the lookout for the giant pachyderms. Instead, his blood had been raging and his brain clouded by this fiercely intriguing—and damn sexy—princess he was supposed be saving, not getting stomped to death by a sexually frustrated bull in musth.

Like the goddamn situation with Carla—he’d let himself get sucked in, and it could have gotten Dalilah killed.

They sat for a while, dust settling around them, on them. Heat pressed down, the sounds and scents of the bush filtering back into their consciousness as they watched the dusty gray giant in the distance.

“Jesus, that’s one mean-ass, sexually frustrated bastard.” Brandt turned to Dalilah. Her black eyes were huge, her face bloodless and streaked with dust. “You all right?”

She nodded, her gaze flicking nervously to where the beast was uprooting his tree as she reached up to wipe sweat from her brow with a trembling hand. The gesture smudged a gray streak of dirt across her face.

Brandt stared at the streak, adrenaline still slamming through his body.

“How did you know it was going to charge?” she whispered. “Usually it’s a mock charge.”

“Usually?”

“I...I’ve been on a safari before. Sometimes the game-viewing vehicles get too close, and the elephant does a little run, but it never ends in a full-blown charge.”

“Did you see the moisture down the sides of his face?”

“The tears?”

“Not tears. Temporin from glands behind his eyes. And the urine dribbling down the insides of his leg—” Brandt nodded toward the shuddering tree. “That young bull is in full musth—high as a kite on sex hormones. That sharp, bitter odor was a dead giveaway. Humans can usually pick up that scent from a few hundred meters away.” He paused. “I should’ve noticed before we even got into that situation.”

“I didn’t notice anything.”

“Not your job to.” He dragged his hand over hair thick with dust, then he swore softly. “You could see he meant business the instant he tucked his trunk under and his ears back out of harm’s way. Musth bulls, especially the young ones, can be extremely aggressive and unpredictable. You need to give them a wide berth.”

“Like someone else I know.”

He looked at her in surprise, then threw his head back and laughed. The release felt damn good. Talk about sexual frustration—this woman could read him like a book and had the nerve to say so.

“I get the impression you only smile or laugh when everything around you is going to hell in a handbasket,” she said, a glimmer of amusement twitching at the corners of her own gorgeous mouth.

“Damn,” he said softly as the laughter eased and tears of mirth leaked into the dust around his own eyes. “You take the cake, woman.” He gave another snort of laughter, then, as he sobered, he said more quietly, “I could really get to like you, you know.”

She went silent. They sat like that for a while, hearts racing, adrenaline pounding, a kinetic energy arcing between them, pulling them together even as they both fought against the sexual impulse. Slowly, very slowly, Brandt reached up, even as his brain screamed don’t, and he touched her, wiping the dirt from her brow with the pad of his thumb.

Her gaze held his, dark, loaded. His groin went hard and he couldn’t breathe.

“You’re getting dirty, Princess.”

She broke the gaze, looking down at the diamond ring on her hand in the sling.

Before he could say anything, she’d turned away from him, hair falling in a curtain across her cheek, hiding her expression.

“Dalilah?”

“It’s nothing.” But her voice was thick.

Brandt frowned as empathy squeezed his chest. He was feeling all sorts of emotions he didn’t want, but in spite of his best efforts, Princess was winning, and he was powerless around her. Brandt didn’t like the feeling.

Irritably he grabbed the rifle and climbed out of the jeep. He dropped to his knees and peered under the chassis. Oil pooled heavy and dark in the sand, confirming his worst fears—a ruptured sump. He reached under the vehicle to dip a finger into the liquid to be certain.

“Brandt!”

“Just a sec. I need to—”

“Brandt!”

He bumped his head as he jerked back out from under the jeep and peered up over the hood. His heart stalled at the terror on her face. She pointed.

“He’s coming back!”

Brandt spun round. Holy crap. The bull was not content with his tree—the big bad pachyderm was heading their way in another cloud of boiling dust.

He braced a hand on top of the door, hurtling clean into the driver’s seat and dumping the rifle on her lap. Firing the ignition, he hit the gas and slammed the gears into Reverse, wheeling hard and spinning the jeep around a hundred and eighty degrees. He floored the accelerator, bombing forward through scrub, bashing against rocks. The elephant loomed in the rearview mirror and the trail of black blood leaking from the jeep’s innards grew thinner and thinner. Panic clawed at Brandt’s throat—the engine was going to seize any second now, but the bull was closing the gap. He began planning how to get Dalilah out of the vehicle should they stall.

“He’s falling back!” Dalilah yelled suddenly. She was twisted round, rifle balanced on the back of her seat, aiming and ready to fire with one hand.

Brandt glanced up into the rearview mirror. The elephant was dropping back into a trot.

He slowed the jeep, but kept going until the animal turned and started retreating, this time heading toward a faint wisp of gold spindrift rising above the Mopani scrub. Relief gushed through Brandt’s chest—the bull was rejoining his herd, finally. But the jeep’s engine coughed, choked and stalled.

He sat back, breathing hard.

Dalilah was, too.

Brandt pounded his fist on the dash, angry. This was a good vehicle—it could have gotten them far. He might have been able to mend the oil pan, but now that he’d run the engine without oil until it died, it was toast. Their jeep was dead, done, gone.

She watched him, then glanced nervously into the cloud of dust settling in their wake, silence suddenly loud, not even the call of a bird, or the sound of insects.

“You really can’t fix it?”

“No,” he said. “I can’t goddamn fix it.”

He raked his hand through his dark blond hair again, dust making it stand up in front. He swore again, softly.

“I’m sorry, Dalilah.”

“Brandt, you saved my life a couple of times over already. You have nothing to be sorry about.” She reached for his thigh. A touch, just fingertips against skin. A quiver ran through his muscles, like a small electrical shock chasing over his skin.

“And now that I’m still alive,” she said softly, voice thick, “I have to say, that was truly incredible to witness. Honest.”

He looked slowly into her eyes.

“You mean it,” he said. It wasn’t a question. She really did get off on the thrill. Everything about this woman was exciting, unanticipated. There was nothing safe about her at all.

“I keep forgetting,” he said quietly, devouring her with his eyes. “You’re no newcomer to Africa. How many safaris have you been on?”

The guttural sound of his voice curled into her chest, the intensity in his ice-blue eyes cutting her to the quick. But something in Dalilah hardened as she saw where he was going with this—he was aiming for his switch again, seeking something to dislike in her, a way to shut her out.

“A few,” she said guardedly.

“And before you arrive at the safari destination of your choice, you fill in one of those forms, check off what animals you want to see? A lion kill. An elephant charge. Like going to Disneyland. Big tip to the guide at the end of the trip if he delivers?”

She removed her hand from his thigh.

“I thought,” she said quietly, “that you might be trying to irritate me, get under my skin in order to keep me angry. Or that maybe you were being a jerk because you had issues over something in your past. But I was wrong.” She paused, looked up and directly into his eyes. “You’re just a prick. An arrogant, self-absorbed, pigheaded bastard.”

He said nothing.

Tension simmered between them. Sexual. Fierce. She could see it in his face. She could feel it in herself. And in the distant sky dark forms circled. Vultures.

She turned away. “Fine. You’ve got your assignment from my brother, you’ve got a package to deliver so you can get paid. Where do we go now, and how?”

Abruptly he reached for the rifle in her lap. He yanked open the glove compartment, removed a pouch with maps. Unhooking the GPS from the dash, he swung open his door and jumped out.

Brandt spread the map out on the hood and bent over to study it, sun beating down on his back, his skin gleaming with sweat. Dalilah watched the lion tattoo on his biceps as his muscle flexed when he moved. Tautona. They were right—he was a gnarly scarred lion of a man without a pride or the social skills required to belong to one. No wonder he prowled and hunted alone, lived in his own territory.

Sweat pearled and dribbled down between her breasts, the sling and splint making her feel irritably hot. She glanced up as a massive bird flew low overhead, its wings beating with a soft whoosh whoosh whoosh through the air. A snake writhed in its beak. There was a scent of hay, or sage, coming from the grass and in the distance she saw dark shapes moving slowly. Buffalo? Nerves whispered and Dalilah’s attention shifted to the rifle lying on the hood near Brandt’s hand. She just wanted this over now.

“We need to go on foot,” he said, fiddling with the GPS.

“Obviously.”

He shot her a sharp glance.

Dalilah recoiled at the look in his icy eyes. More softly she said, “Which way?”

He jerked his head to the map. “You want to see, come look.”

She muttered a curse, got out, went round the hood to stand beside him. The sun baked down on them like a furnace and Dalilah realized just how much she was going to miss the shade provided by the jeep’s cover.

“This is where we were headed via vehicle—” He pointed to the topographical map, the hairs on his bronzed arm gleaming gold in the sun, his skin glistening. “Along the plain, toward this rift.” He jerked his chin up to the horizon. “The rift is that way—it’s a big cliff that runs for several kilometers. The idea was to drive north where the terrain levels out a bit, and then drive up onto the plateau here.” He jabbed his finger on the map. “From this point the plan was to head to the paved road here.”

He pointed to a thin line bisecting the eastern part of Botswana from the South African to the Zambian border. Dalilah squinted against the glare of the sun and shaded her eyes, studying the map, conscious of the scent of him. And the smell of oil and dust.

“That road serves as a main thoroughfare for occasional truck convoys carrying oranges from Zambia, copper from the Congo, laborers, cattle. It bisects a game conservation area here, where I wanted to cut off the road and head through bush to the west, there.” He jabbed his finger at a space of nothing.

“What’s there?”

He rubbed the dark blond stubble appearing on his jaw, not looking at her, thinking. “My farm,” he said quietly.

“Your farm?”

He didn’t answer. He was busy plotting a route into the GPS. He glanced up, squinting into the distance. “Now we’ll have to walk directly west to the rift wall, and climb up. On one hand it’ll be slow. But it will also save us having to drive a full day north in order to access the plateau via jeep. You up to a hike?”

“Do I have an option?”

“Nope.” He hooked the GPS onto his belt. “Amal will have found my plane by now and be looking for a way over the Tsholo. Like I said, they’ll come fast—our tracks will have baked like clay into the mud. If we climb up the cliff, they won’t be able to follow us up the face with horses or jeeps. They’ll still have to drive the full day north to get up onto the plateau and then they’ll have to cut back again for our tracks. It’ll buy us a small advantage.”

Fear coiled cold and tight in Dalilah’s gut as she thought of Da’ud, his throat slit in his bed, of her dead parents. Of all the terrible things the Ghaffar clan had done to her family and country. Amal would spare her no mercy—she knew that. Her death would be violent. He’d make her suffer, and he’d make her brothers suffer, too.

Shading her eyes, Dalilah squinted into the distant glare. Heat shimmered off the veldt in waves. It would be just her and Brandt out there, crossing these Botswana plains. She wasn’t sure that they’d make it, but it was better than waiting for Amal.

“Can we take the two-way radio from the jeep dashboard?” she asked quietly.

“No one to communicate with.” He went around to the back of the jeep and opened the rear compartment. Dalilah watched as he took out a blackened kettle and a small camp stove, which he balanced on a flat rock. Filling the kettle from the water container on the backseat, he lit the stove and set water to boil.

“Keep an eye on the kettle,” Brandt said as he began emptying the backpack he’d stolen, laying the contents out on the backseat, deciding what to take, what to leave. Out of the pack came a small cosmetics bag, a wallet and a camera with zoom lens.

“Arm all right?” he said, opening the first-aid kit, selecting supplies.

“Fine.”

He shot her a quick glance. “It doesn’t hurt?”

“Not much.”

“Good.”

She felt like a spare part waiting for water to boil as he busied himself selecting items and stuffing them into the pack.

“Here.” He tossed her a khaki hat. It came spinning through the air and dropped into the dirt just short of her reach. She picked it up, dusted it off and was about to put it on her head of thick, dust-caked tangle of hair when she stopped.

“Do you have a spare piece of string, or a shoelace, or something?”

He glanced up, crooked a brow.

“To tie up my hair.”

For an instant he looked dumfounded. “I...uh, ya.” Using his pocketknife, Brandt severed a strip off a finely woven triangle bandage from the first-aid kit. He held the strip out to her.

“Could you help me? I can’t do it with one hand.”

A flicker chased through his cool eyes. He didn’t want to touch her again.

“Sure,” he said, coming over.

Dalilah lifted her hair off the nape of her neck. It was hot and thick, and she was relieved to have it off her skin.

“I’d love to braid it, but that’s probably beyond your expertise, so could you just tie a ponytail?”

She felt him hesitate, then grasp her hair. His fingers brushed against the sensitive skin on the back of her neck and goose bumps chased down her spine. Dalilah swallowed. It was like this man was permanently charged with electricity and each time he connected with her body, she grounded the charge.

He pulled and yanked at her dust-caked curls and she realized he was actually trying to braid it. Emotion, sharp and sudden, pricked her eyes, even as a wry smile crossed her lips.

“There,” he said, stepping back, examining his handiwork.

Dalilah reached behind her head and fingered the braid. “Not bad,” she said, turning around. “You surprise me.”

They were close again, face-to-face. His gaze held hers for several beats, then flickered to her mouth, and heat pooled low in her belly.

He grunted, quickly averting his face as he bent down to take the kettle off the gas as it came to a rolling boil. “If a man can tie flies, I don’t see why he can’t braid hair.” He turned off the gas and poured water into a pale yellow enamel mug containing a tea bag.

Another little revelation about him, thought Dalilah—he farmed and he liked to fly-fish. She found the idea of those rough, strong hands working with tiny colorful threads and feathers and beads as he sought to imitate insects by creating the small lures oddly endearing. Maybe it was because she’d seen her own father do this—fly-fishing had been one of the king’s pleasures, and her dad had taken her on several fishing trips to remote and exotic lodges in Norway and Canada. A deep sadness sank through her chest at the thought of her father, his assassination. And it brought sharply to mind the marriage contract with Haroun, the impending wedding, and Dalilah suddenly felt exhausted. She seated herself on a rock and put the hat on her head, shading herself from the climbing sun.

“Powdered milk? Sugar?” he asked without looking at her.

“Black. Three sugars.”

That made him look up. “Sweet tooth?”

She gave a shrug. “Why else would anyone call me ‘sweetness’?”

That made the corner of his lip quiver as he repressed a smile.

“Careful. Enamel is hot, stays hot,” he said as he handed her the mug.

The tea was dark and sweet and tasted like nectar.

He opened a plastic baggie and offered it out to her. “Biltong?

She regarded the dark twists of dried meat in the bag.

“Kudu,” he said. “It’s like jerky, except better. Spiced and salty—salt will help with the sweat loss.”

“I know what it is. Thanks, but no.”

“Dalilah—”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Suit yourself.” He repackaged the biltong, not taking anything for himself.

“It’s not because it’s meat,” she said. “I’m just not hungry.”

He shrugged. He was busy fiddling with the camera, inspecting the zoom.

“Looks expensive,” she said as she sipped her tea.

“Poor tourists from Germany had their bags all packed for a morning game drive.” He stuffed the camera into the pack. “They wouldn’t have gone anywhere in that rain, though.”

“Is that an attempt to assuage your guilt for stealing their stuff?”

“I was just doing my job.”

“Even if it means robbing others in order to collect your paycheck at the end of the day?” She took another sip of tea. “I guess that’s the definition of mercenary.”

He resecured the sleeping bag to the bottom of the pack, which was looking rather big and heavy now. “You can’t push my buttons, Dalilah.”

“I’m sure I can.”

He shot her a challenging glance. “You sure you want to risk it?”

She laughed.

“Glad the tea is making you feel perkier. Save that energy—you’re going to need it.”

Dalilah finished her tea and watched him move. She loved the powerful shape of his legs, the way his back muscles rolled under his damp shirt, his efficiency of movement despite his bulk. Dalilah thought of his words again.

When I do choose to make a promise, that’s everything in my book.

Again the urge rose in her to explain herself to him, but she tamped it down this time.

Just survive this, survive him, and all will go back to feeling normal. You have to do this for your father, your country, your family...

Brandt poured the rest of the whiskey from the large bottle into a silver hip flask that he’d taken from the side pocket of his safari shorts. She thought of his drinking, his issues with his past. Her brother.

“Why’d you quit the Force du Sable?” she said suddenly.

He paused, then continued pouring.

“I didn’t say I worked for the FDS.”

“You said you were an ex-merc and that you worked with my brother. He was with the FDS until he took over the military in Al Na’Jar, and he’s still allied with the private army.”

He grunted.

“So, why did you quit?”

“The thing about being a merc,” he said, screwing the cap onto the flask, “for me, anyway, is you’ve got to believe in the jobs you take. You have to know why you’re prepared to kill someone for cash. When you’re a soldier fighting for your country, you still get paid, but you get orders that technically you can’t refuse. It kind of absolves a soldier from the personal responsibility of murder. I didn’t have that absolution, and there came a day when the monetary reward no longer justified the act of killing. What used to be easy no longer was.”

She stared at him.

“So you stopped believing, and you quit.”

“Something like that.”

“Was it a particular incident that provoked this?” A woman.

He cut free the rest of the rope that laced the jeep canopy to the bull bars and began coiling it.

“There’s always one job that does you in,” he said, tying the coil of rope to the bottom of the pack with the kettle. “You think cops, soldiers, become inured to violence? They don’t. That’s for fiction and TV. What really happens is they keep pushing it all down until something snaps.” He held out his hand out for the mug. “You ready to roll?”

She flicked the dregs of her tea into the bush, got to her feet, came up to him.

“What was it, Brandt—what happened? Was it that woman you mentioned, the one you said died because of you? The one who burned you with a broken promise?”

“Like I said, Dalilah, my past is not your business. And your future is not mine.”

Her lips tightened. He took the cup from her and stuffed it into the pack, closing the flap and buckling it tight.

“Yet you believe in this mission?”

He held her eyes a long, simmering moment. And she could feel his conflict, feel a lot of things.

“Like I said, I owe your brother. And I never renege on a promise.” He turned and hefted the pack onto his shoulders. “Even if it’s a bitter pill to swallow. Next time, the sheik owes me.”

He snagged his rifle.

“And what pound of flesh would you want to exact from Omair?”

His eyes dipped over her body, almost as if involuntarily, and he opened his mouth as if to say something, then changed his mind, ignoring her question instead.

“Remember, single file, behind me. Do everything, and I mean everything, I say. This is lion country. If you run, you’re lunch. Like I said, there’s nothing here you can outrun anyway. Best to stand your ground.”

He started out ahead, rifle propped against his shoulder, muzzle aimed into the air. Dalilah sucked in a deep breath, and she followed.

The sun climbed to its zenith in the empty vault of a sky, turning white-hot. There was barely any shade or shadow with the low scrawny scrub, and not even a wisp of cloud now. The heat was furnacelike. Insects buzzed and the grass rustled as they walked.

Dalilah focused on the rhythmic sound of their footfalls. They were moving along a game track—the internet of the bushveldt, Brandt called it, where animals read the stories of who was going where and doing what. She could make out the heart-shaped prints of cloven-hoof ruminants, large and small. The pattern of a snake in red sand.

Sweat began drying on her skin now, even as it formed. She saw a lion print to the side of the track, big as her splayed hand. She knew it was a lion from a previous safari—rounded pad prints like a giant kitty, no nail marks because of feline retractable claws. Dalilah glanced up and scanned the plain. The grass around them was longer, taller now, and tawny. The sense of being watched, hunted, prickled over her skin once more.

Dalilah sped up a little to be closer to Brandt and the gun. To keep herself focused in spite of the heat and fatigue, she forced herself to concentrate on Brandt’s powerful legs, the slide of his calf muscles under deeply tanned skin, the happy little sway of the black kettle at the bottom of his pack. Brandt Stryker, her only safety net out here. Her source of protection, food, water.

But as they moved toward the hazy red cliffs now visible in the shimmering distance, Dalilah got a sense that the deeper he led her into this hot, wild terrain, the more she was going to be forced up against a wall within herself.

And when she got there, what would she do?

Would her future survive this epic journey? Would it survive him?