Hearts on Fire: Romance Multi-Author Box Set Anthology

by Violet Vaughn

  And the bigger the game animals, the more tempting to poachers they’d be.

  I had a lot of work ahead of me.

  But for today, I laid my tablet aside in the early afternoon, rested against the hard trunk of a towering baobab tree and enjoyed a life that I was fully aware I’d been blessed with.

  Of course, in Africa, you rarely see the lioness crouching in the grass ready to take you down until it’s far, far too late to run.

  11

  Nicky

  The evening’s dinner had gone well, despite Abasi’s constant assurances he would be hale enough to take over jumbe duties any minute now. Between assurances, however, he was generous with pointers for how Peter should do his job. Over-generous, since half the time Peter didn’t understand the thick mix of Swahili and English, and the other half Abasi was telling him about areas of the sanctuary Peter hadn’t yet heard of, much less seen.

  Badru, the gardener, took pity on us all and trundled Abasi and his leg cast off to his quarters early enough the rest of us could get in some conversation of our own.

  When dinner broke up, I told Peter a pointed “Goodnight,” and left him to Steve’s company to walk the short distance with Melea to their quarters. Then I treated myself to a warm shower and an early bed.

  A loud staccato rapping woke me in the morning just minutes before my alarm would’ve gone off.

  “Doctor Nic! Doctor Nic!”

  It was Melea.

  Shrugging into shorts and shirt and quickly slipping on socks and safari boots, I headed for the door, grabbing a scrunchie for my hair as I went.

  “The elephant!” were the first words out of Melea’s mouth when I threw the door open.

  “Jasiri?”

  “The fence!”

  “Oh God, has she gone through?”

  I was already running through the gray dawn for the boma below.

  Steve and Peter were already at the gate. By the gate actually, bent over the battery that charged the fence.

  A flash of gray caught my eye as Jasiri thundered into the camouflage of the trees. I exhaled in relief. She was still inside the boma.

  “What’s wrong?” I called when I was within earshot.

  Before either man had a chance to answer, that flash of gray reappeared, ears pinned tight to her head, trunk up, and charging us with every intent, it seemed, to come right through the fence. A feat of which she was quite capable.

  “Wires are down!” Steve shouted. “No power!”

  I froze. No power. Nothing to stop her charge.

  She’d tear through the fence, and then what? Keep running? Or would she turn her frustration on one of us?

  Why, Jasiri, why?

  “Spread out!” Peter shouted. “Over the fence if she comes around!”

  Good advice in a firefight, maybe, but with an elephant? Not that I had anything better to offer, and Peter was at least proving he could keep a clear head. I just hoped Jasiri was going to let him and the rest of us keep our heads period.

  “Jasiri!” I cried. “Stop! Please, stop!”

  Had she hesitated? Or was my imagination trying to find any reason we weren’t about to die?

  “Jasiri! No one’s going to hurt you. Not here. Not us.” The words, of course, didn’t matter. Only the tone, only my voice, only the person who’d sat with her, watched with her and who’d never tried to hurt her.

  But what was going on in her head? What had sparked her rampage this morning? A nightmare? Was her rage too blinding for her to see and remember who we were? Who I was? Was she, as Rasheda had feared, too far gone in grief to ever be recalled?

  Tears splashed my cheeks. No matter what happened next, if she went through that fence, she was lost. And if she couldn’t be recaptured, then her baby, too, was lost.

  Because a rogue elephant, no matter how much she was wanted, no matter how much she was loved, couldn’t be trusted in a closed environment with other animals. And if she escaped the sanctuary, there were none outside willing to trust her at all.

  “Please, Jasiri.” I had no breath for shouting any longer, so I could only whimper, “Please stop.”

  “Move!”

  I heard Peter’s sharp command, and something inside urged me to obey. But that something wasn’t enough to dominate whatever it was that kept me rooted into place, trying to stop an elephant by my will alone.

  And suddenly, miraculously, Jasiri turned.

  Instead of the vulnerable fence and the puny humans pleading for her life outside it, she rammed into a tambotie tree, pushing, shaking, tearing at it until it gave under her brute strength and rage, and she tossed its uprooted trunk before her as she trumpeted victory to the skies.

  Then she shook her head, her great ears flapping, lumbered over to the bags of feed by the fence only a few hundred feet away from where we watched, tore one open and downed a few mouthfuls of the life-giving grain.

  Then she tore another one open, and another, until she’d strewn the contents of six bags across the ground, eating maybe 20 or 30 pounds of it.

  She lifted her head then and stared at us. At me. We took have a long look at one another, and maybe something like understanding passed between us. Whatever it was, when she lifted her trunk my way, it felt like a salute, a salutation, an agreement. I lifted my hand in acknowledgment. Satisfied, she swung her head away and headed for a quiet spot under the acacia trees.

  12

  Nicky

  It was Kapuki’s day off, so I invited Peter, Steve and Melea to the house to scrounge breakfast.

  “Whatever was going on between you and that elephant,” Peter said as we crowded around the table stacked with cold leftovers and fresh fruit, “you were extraordinary.”

  Although I blushed, I knew I didn’t deserve the accolade. I only blushed when I got credit for something totally out of my hands. Acting from a place of desperation wasn’t exactly a cool-headed plan. “I was lucky, you mean. We were all lucky.”

  “The hot wires in the boma are literally just barely hooked together. Jasiri only has to sneeze on them,” Steve pointed out. “If we fed her further down—even on the other side of the boma by the pond—maybe we can work on getting a better connection while she’s eating. But that means getting more food in there without her freaking…”

  I nodded. “What else do you have going today?”

  A shadow appeared at the edge of the veranda, resolving into Abasi swinging himself along slowly and awkwardly on his crutches. “I am here!” he called cheerily, waving a crutch. “I am here!”

  Steve rolled his eyes, and I smothered a laugh.

  “I was planning to check the east bridge over while it’s dry. Jamil and Tumo will be here again today,” Steve whispered, fast and low so Abasi wouldn’t tear.

  I nodded, saying equally quietly, “If you don’t explicitly need Peter, I’ll introduce him to the rest of Kulinda today.” I raised my voice. “Abasi, want to grab some breakfast and help Melea down at the clinic this morning? I noticed a slow leak in the sink in the exam room the other day.”

  Melea shot me a sharp look. I shrugged helplessly and mouthed an apology while Abasi struggled to handle his chair with crutches in hand. I left him to Steve and Melea’s keeping.

  As Peter and I headed for the Land Rover, I gave Peter my sweetest smile. “Your first official duty as jumbe is to find something to keep Abasi busy with for the next two months.”

  “Is it bad manners to turn in a resignation on the first day?”

  I stuck my tongue out at him. He stooped swiftly and caught it between his lips. I thought I was laughing too hard for it to turn into a kiss but I’d underestimated my talent and his. We thoroughly abused each other’s lips for a good 30 seconds before I broke it off. “Next you’ll be accusing me of sexual harassment.”

  “I’m not sure yet that it is harassment. Can we do it again so I can decide?”

  Prudently, I kept my tongue firmly behind my teeth, and gave him my best nose scrunch instead.


  Any excuse to drive the sanctuary made my heart happy. Coupled with the relief that Jasiri was calmed and eating again and that the company I rode with was not unpleasant either to the ear or to the eye, this excursion defined for me the reasons I had left the States to come here in the first place.

  Well, one of the reasons. The biggest one, I told myself, because I didn’t take the thought I might be running from something rather than to something very well.

  There were thousands of fresh-faced vet school grads in the U.S. churned out each year ready to cater to the masses of animals patiently waiting to be attended. And precisely because we were so good at tending them meant those numbers kept increasing year after year. Somewhere in there we’d reached a tipping point in our nation—where legislation failed us and a healthy economy offered the false hope that doing nothing would somehow rectify the problem the farther into the future from the tipping point it got.

  More healthy animals simply meant more disposable animals and a more casual attitude toward an over-abundant commodity. More and more, animals in America were becoming an ‘it’. I just wanted a piece of the world where animals lived and died by their own cultural rules with only minimal push from someone like me.

  When I shared my disillusionment with my practice in the States and my vision for Kulinda with Peter, even though my words came haltingly as I searched for the right way to express myself without sounding like a flower child from the ‘60s, he seemed to get it.

  “It takes a special person to see the world the way you do,” he told me. I looked hard into his eyes then, never naïve enough to believe pretty words simply because they dropped from the lips of pretty men. Especially not pretty men eager to bed me again. But nothing in his eyes betrayed the sincerity of his words.

  I smiled my gratitude, another expression between us that didn’t need words, pretty or not.

  As we jounced slowly along in the Land Rover, I pointed out highlights of the more mundane things he’d need to know for his job, from how things worked on Kulinda to why.

  “So the perimeter fence is set off 40 feet from the property line, and trees are kept cleared on either side. That’s so any treefall doesn’t take out the electric fence—which always runs to the inside of the regular fence line. The bonus is that the clearing makes a good truck path too. The six-foot web fence is enough to keep most herd animals in or out—unless they’re in rut or running for their lives from predators or even the occasional fires. The electric wire is just a reminder and a deterrent to lions or leopards or other predators that otherwise might simply scale the fence. What it doesn’t protect against is the wild pigs and dogs and warthogs and hyenas that will dig under. Even the big cats will dig if given enough reason. That means most of your time will be spent patrolling the fence and arranging work crews to repair any damage. We generally contract men from the Makonde village just outside. Some of them have been helping out here for years. You’ll find most of them are hardworking and reliable. The ones who aren’t…well, the ones who are don’t want them around either.”

  Just ahead, the land slipped away for a few hundred feet before we could see it rising again in the distance. “That’s the Mbingi fork of the Matandu River. It cuts through the northern half of the sanctuary, with about seven miles of river running through it.”

  I pulled up to the steel bridge that spanned the slow river. The same web fence was strung across the outer girders as the rest of the fence line, continuing down to the river below.

  “It may look peaceful now, but when the rains come, it can become a monster. Or so I’m told. Abasi’s seen it come roaring through as a 10-foot wall of mud and debris on more than one occasion. Even in the dry season the fence line below has to be cleared periodically—branches, vines…carcasses.”

  Peter simply nodded, as if dealing with carcasses was already a daily ritual for him. “In the dry season, the only thing you really need to be careful about when you’re working around the river is the crocs. They get especially cranky when the water’s low.”

  Peter did a double-take to see if I was joking. When he saw I wasn’t, he merely filed that piece of information away to deal with when and if the time came.

  Instead of going over the bridge, I turned off onto a rutted road that ran along the river bank.

  “We’ve got about 40 miles of roads altogether. About 20 miles along the perimeter and another 20 cut through the interior that have to be kept up. There’s a map in the glove compartment in case you get lost. The interior roads not only run along the riverbank—it gets cliffy toward the middle—but go to all the other major points too. There’s a road, for instance, that circles the 20-acre lake in the southeast quadrant. That’s where most of the herds hang during the heat of the day.”

  “What kinds of herds?”

  “You’ve seen the kudu calf. There are also healthy populations of impala, eland and zebra. We’ve also got a fair number of warthogs and bush babies, plus a few water buffalo, wildebeest and monkeys. Bush pigs and hyenas are always digging in and out. And we have a mated leopard pair we’re always anxious to spot when we can.”

  I stopped the Land Rover and pointed across the river past where it dropped away between the steeply eroded banks. A herd of zebra grazed on the far savanna. “That’s the beta herd. The alpha herd takes the best land on this side of the river and forces the beta herd to stay out there.”

  “Best land?”

  I laughed. “The lake. A few more trees. I can’t tell the difference but they certainly can. Like gangs staking out streets in the hood, I guess.”

  When another trail of a road appeared heading south, I turned off the river road, heading toward the lake.

  “Anything in particular I should watch for?” Peter asked.

  “Crocs around water, of course. Cobras, mambas. But really, you can go your whole life out here without ever seeing a venomous snake. Most of the beasties in the sanctuary will leave you alone unless they’re provoked. The tricky part is that you can provoke them unintentionally, without even knowing it. Accidentally step on the tail you don’t see hidden in the tall grass, walk between a mother anything and her baby…”

  I pointed to the glove compartment. “There is more than just a map in there.”

  He gave me a quizzical look before opening it. The top barrel of a .38 along with extra cartridges glinted in a stream of sunlight.

  “There’re a couple of rifles in the back too. To handle…whatever…might threaten you—or the sanctuary.”

  “You mean poachers.”

  “Mainly. Bastards. But no hero stuff, okay? I don’t want another Abasi on my hands…or worse.”

  “I wouldn’t still be alive if I didn’t value my skin.”

  The quiet words washed over me like alcohol on a wound. I wonder if he’d ever tell me what he’d done, what he’d seen, as a military man. I wondered if I really wanted to know.

  We topped a rise above the small lake, and Peter’s mood immediately changed as he gently closed the glove compartment door and gave a low whistle.

  A few hundred animals gathered at the water’s edge for as far as the eye could see. Distinct herds marked out their territories, but as a whole, the adults lazed peacefully by the water as calves and foals gamboled in the shallows.

  “Umbrella chairs and water coolers,” Peter said. “That’s all they’re missing.”

  I laughed. It did look much like a big holiday on the lake or beach. “Somehow this doesn’t feel as crowded though.”

  Stopping under two stately baobab trees, with their five-lobed, hand-shaped leaves to shade us from the sun, I said, “I thought this might be a good place for lunch.”

  “Lunch? I’m starting to think this might be a good place for the rest of my life.”

  Breath fled my body, leaving me cold and shaking. It was an expression only, I told myself. He didn’t mean here at Kulinda with me. He meant someplace like this. He meant Africa, in general. Because if that’s not what he meant, then I’d hav
e to let him go as soon as Abasi was well enough to take over jumbe duties again.

  Because no matter how gorgeous this man was or how amazing he was in bed, there wasn’t room for him—not permanently—in my life or in my heart.

  13

  Peter

  “Quitting?” Brandon Briggs had slammed his hand down on his desk when I threw the SUV keys on it the day before. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Money. Contacts. You won’t find the opportunities I can offer you anywhere else in Africa. Who skunked me?”

  “Nicolai Tarantino.”

  “Nicolai… Why does that name sound so familiar?”

  “Nicky. She owns the elephant you wanted me to…acquire.”

  The polite English exterior had dissolved in an instant. Brandon glared death at me. No exaggeration that, either. I’d seen the eyes of too many men who were either staring down the barrel of a gun at me or had me staring down one. Brandon was an alpha male, used to getting his way in a business dominated by men with guns. And I had just turned coat.

  “Get out—before I throw you out.”

  However I responded, it was clear he and I weren’t done. I didn’t know the kind of reach a man like him might have here in the wilds of Africa, but in another part of the world—one where Mafia men held the power, for instance—his men would find me in an isolated alley someday and show me just how wrong I’d been to leave the fold.

  My own alpha tendency snarled back. I brought it to heel at once, having learned it could be trained but never really subdued. One day it wouldn’t obey. But even it knew Brandon wasn’t worth the time or the pain.

  I gave him the satisfaction, that time, of doing exactly what he wanted me to—turning around and walking out.

  That interaction only reinforced my decision to hire on with Nicky.

  The incident with Jasiri early this morning solidified it. However foolish Nicky had been to risk her life to stare down an elephant, she had proven she had as much chutzpah as Brandon. She just wielded it in a much healthier way. But Nicky wasn’t the only one who’d caught my admiration. Nor even Steve, who was all quick-thinking and unhesitating action, precisely the kind of man you wanted—needed—at your back. It was Jasiri herself.