Hearts on Fire: Romance Multi-Author Box Set Anthology

by Violet Vaughn

  After I snugged her into the blanket Melea laid, I tweaked down the pup’s lower eyelid and lifted her drooping lip. There was no fancy technology anywhere that could better tell me what I needed to know. Her conjunctiva and gums were starkly and appallingly pale. No blush of healthy blood flowing through her arteries and capillaries. Only because I was a coward stalling for time did I slip on the stethoscope and listen to the sad struggle of her failing heart. With a slow turn of her head, the pup weakly licked my fingers.

  A small hand rested in love and fear on the dog’s sharp back. The dark hand against the darker fur brought tears to my eyes. I hated this part more than anything. Hated it even more when it was children whose parents were two miles or more away.

  The boy spoke. “You have medicine to make her well, right?” Melea translated.

  I didn’t speak Swahili well. I could have foisted the whole of the responsibility onto Melea who knew as I did by now what the prognosis was. I could have retreated into full vet mode and educated the children on parasite loads and preventive wormings and getting the next dog in sooner to mitigate another situation like the one we now faced. But that would only make it easier on me. What good would it do the children to be told they were the ones who’d let their beloved pet die? What good would it do the dog?”

  “What’s her name?” I asked through Melea.

  “Nguvu.” On her own, Melea added, “It means strong.”

  I nodded. “Strong. That’s what you have to be now. Do you understand?”

  The little girl’s eyes widened, brimming with tears. I heard the boy’s sharp intake of breath, loud in the small room. He struggled so valiantly not to cry.

  “Do you think she would like to go peacefully to sleep, with those who love her holding her paws?”

  “Will it hurt?” the little girl asked.

  “Not her at all. But us, our hearts? Terribly.”

  Melea sniffled through the translation, and I passed tissues to her and the little girl. I knew not to offer one to the boy who turned aside to wipe his eyes on the strap of yellow sleeve at his shoulder.

  I clipped a tourniquet to the pup’s back leg, praying she had enough blood pressure to raise a vein while I pulled up a syringe full of the euthanasia cocktail. Melea dragged a chair over for the little girl to kneel on so she could easily reach the table’s top. The boy and girl each gripped a front paw with one hand and stroked an ear with the other, murmuring their love into her straggled fur. Nguvu didn’t react to the prick of the needle, and the last memory she had was of being showered with soft pats and praise, before she laid her head softly down and closed her eyes forever. The little girl slipped the red ball in between Nguvu’s paws.

  I was especially glad of the blanket now, for when they said their last goodbye a few minutes later and I closed the door, it felt more like leaving her to sleep in a warm bed and not cold and alone on a hard, steel tabletop.

  “Does Nguvu have any brothers or sisters?” I asked when we were back out in the waiting room.

  The boy held up two fingers.

  “Will you bring them here tomorrow?”

  A sudden spate of fresh tears told me something in the translation had gone horribly wrong.

  “To give them medicine,” I amended hurriedly. “So they don’t become as sick as Nguvu. So they’ll grow up strong…just like you two.” I smiled my most reassuring smile, praying we would get to the other pups in time and I wouldn’t be caught in a lie.

  The children nodded.

  “You’ll be all right going home? Or would you like us to drive you back?” Children generally roamed several miles around the Makonde village, so here in the middle of the day, I had no real concern for their safety.

  They shook their heads. The boy was trying so hard to be a brave role model for his sister.

  “Why don’t you hold her hand?” I suggested. “I think she could use the comfort.”

  With a grateful smile, the boy caught his sister’s hand and, together in grief, they left for home.

  * * *

  When they returned the next day with two brown pups, I was relieved to see that, while the dogs were anemic from their parasite load, they hadn’t reached anywhere near the critical stage Nguvu had. I wormed them and vaccinated them with strict orders for the children to return them in three weeks for follow-up. I had little doubt they’d be counting the days diligently. It wasn’t a lesson the two would soon forget. In that regard, Nguvu’s short life and sad death had meant something after all, something beyond the eternal struggle to survive. Her two littermates would live now because of the example she had set. And the brother and sister might grow up a little more wise in the ways of animal husbandry and Western medicine. And, with any luck, they’d teach that lesson to their friends and parents and others in the tribe.

  In this new world of mine where clients paid only what they could, and most paid nothing at all, I was pretty sure these children would wind up paying far more than they would ever owe.

  21

  Peter

  Being away from Nicky and Jasiri, even for only a handful of days, was proving harder than I imagined. Compared to where my special ops tours had sent me, I was practically still next door to them. But it wasn’t the physical distance that mattered. The hot, clear days were good for one thing—decent satellite reception, which meant fairly reliable phone service, just maybe slow load of the pictures Nicky sent, mostly showing Jasiri hovering in the distance. I did have a smile over the candid shot of Melea and Zuri caught napping together. And I had a much different kind of smile over the even more candid selfie Nicky sent one night from the privacy of her camp by the boma.

  The second day back, I’d spent the morning arranging shipments of horns and tusks and a pair of live Cape buffalo from the small warehouse WildLot maintained on the shipping lanes of the Indian Ocean. After I started to get a feel for how double shipments were likely going out under cover of the legitimate shipping documents I was preparing, I knocked on Brandon’s office door, ready for something other than paper pushing.

  “Look, you didn’t hire me just for my brilliant bill of lading preparation technique. You could have found a university student to do what I’m doing at half the price. I want out in the field.”

  “Patience,” Brandon said. “You’ll get there.”

  “Not if it’s going to be much longer, I won’t. I’m bored out of my mind here. I know I came begging back for the job but that’s only because I thought you would take the training wheels off. If it isn’t going to happen soon…”

  Brandon responded well to backbone, so long as the person of note didn’t push it too hard. Understanding, finding and respecting that line was my task here today. Apparently I succeeded.

  “Hodari is due in tomorrow night with some impala horns you’ll be shipping on Thursday. He’s strictly local. I’ll pair you up with him and he can take you out in a few days on his next hunt. Do well with him, and I’ll see about getting you set up with some big game targets of your own.

  “That’s what I’m talking about.”

  “Meanwhile, while I’ve got you here, I need you to get with customs about a special live shipment—a mother/daughter rhino pair.” He slid the paperwork across his desk.

  “Special?”

  “They’re going to the States.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Zoo?”

  “Not this pair,” Brandon said. “No.”

  * * *

  “They’re going to a ranch in New Mexico, southeast of Albuquerque,” I told Nicky that night. “It’s an anonymous buyer but it’d be pretty easy to track the corporate owner of the land at least.”

  “I’m guessing they’re not going there to retire and live out their golden years.”

  “Yeah, no. Canned hunt would be my best guess.”

  “Damn, damn, damn.” She took a moment to compose herself, then asked, how are they getting the permits to bring them into the States?”

  “Proxy designation as a pr
ivate zoo engaged in nutritional research studies.”

  “They could have been my rhinos, Peter.”

  “We’ll be one step closer to shutting WildLot down because of them.”

  “It feels like such a betrayal, sacrificing the few for the good of the many. That’s a pretty rancid after-taste.”

  “So, what, you want to bail?”

  She sighed. “Of course not.”

  “I meet with one of the hunters day after tomorrow. With any luck I’ll have a couple of days off after that before we go out. See if Jasiri can schedule her birth for when I’m there, will you? Are you and she on speaking terms again?”

  “It’s slow progress. But she’s out in the open watching me right now. She’s just looking so…sad. And she’s barely eating. Although a depressed appetite right before birth isn’t uncommon for a lot of mammals.”

  “It’s killing you having her right there and not being able to hook up all your fancy machines to her, isn’t it?”

  Nicky laughed but there was the strain of truth in it. “Book descriptions and videos on the web are great. There’s a ton of questions they can answer. However, there’s a ton more I seem to still have. But I’ll talk over your schedule with her and see if she can accommodate.”

  “How about you? Will you be able to accommodate me?”

  “Every last, luscious inch of you,” Nicky assured me, and I flicked up that last candid selfie of her she’d sent and spent some time imagining just how she would.

  * * *

  Hodari was a compact man. Not impressively short, but stockier than most of the Africans I’d met. He was quiet to the point of being terse but he had a genial air about him. The kind of guy you might enjoy kicking back a few drinks with at a pub or a game, who wouldn’t talk your ear off with trivial nonsense. As an informer, though…well, a few more words would have helped.

  “When do we go out?” I asked him.

  “In three days.”

  “Do you want to talk strategy?”

  “By the dark of the moon.”

  “Yeah, but is there anything I should know—about you or our weapons?”

  “Dark of the moon,” he repeated, and I caught on that was his strategy.”

  “What about the animals? How do you know what to target?”

  Hodari handed me a punchlist of a dozen specimens.

  “I take it we keep going out until we have everything needed?”

  He gave me a single nod in reply.

  “How long do you think it’ll take?”

  He shrugged. “Five days, maybe.”

  I had him commit when and where we’d meet up later to paper. Then I finished up my last invoices and, out of habit, checked to be sure I wasn’t being followed before heading back to Kulinda.

  Back to a place where I wouldn’t be breathing the stench of death all day long.

  Back to my girls.

  22

  Nicky

  Kapuki clucked over my decision to continue camping by the boma. Nevertheless, packed picnics continued to appear each night. And although she had the next days off while Peter would be here, pre-packed picnics for two appeared in the fridge. Then when I mentioned to her I was thinking of lunching with Peter somewhere in the heart of Kulinda, another elaborate meal of easy-travel foods joined the ones already in the fridge before she left.

  “Plenty of moringa and bananas for you and the jumbe.” She nodded toward the closed fridge, and she and Leta chuckled knowingly as they left arm-in-arm for whatever aphrodisiac-inspired fun of their own they had planned with Badru. I didn’t think Kapuki and Leta ever indulged together—rather, that theirs was a serial-sex threesome and not a ménage arrangement. More like the splinter group of fundamentalist Mormons. And like the Mormons, too, the plural-marriage custom was a little-practiced holdout of an older era—the rarity, no longer the norm.

  Regardless, it was in Kapuki’s best interest to know the tricks for keeping Badru’s interest…up. And while Peter needed no outside assistance there, it was nice—in a motherly, embarrassing way—for Kapuki to be looking out for my enjoyment. And I planned to enjoy myself a lot while Peter was here.

  Funny how you could go weeks or months without sex, and if no stimulus was there, save for the solitary frolics with a toy or two, the drive would simmer along complacently in the background. Until a new stimulus came along and, wham, you’d be back full boil with no sign of the heat letting up.

  Not that I was looking for let up. Everything about Peter was amazingly perfect and amazingly easy. When we came together, we fit as tight as a machine-cut puzzle. And it wasn’t just how he fit in me, but on me and around me too. How he meshed right into my personal space without questions or demands.

  He was comfortable without being cloying. Casual without being intense. Yet when he touched me there was fire and sizzle and a burn that went long and deep.

  How long we would boil together I didn’t know. But I was determined to enjoy every hot inch of him while he was here burning up my life.

  It was dark when he came to me behind a circle of flashlit night, smelling of musked cologne and coconut shampoo. Kapuki’s supper waited while we reacquainted our bodies in noisy reunion, only partly for the benefit of the large gray lady lurking behind the acacias.

  As he held me after, the shape of me nested perfectly against him, I wondered why it was we fit so well. If there was something more than lust that bound us. Something more than the cumulation of pheromones and endorphins and adrenaline that was orchestrating whatever this was between us, luring us together as surely as Jasiri was lured to us.

  Not love—I wasn’t that naïve.

  Hope, maybe?

  That seemed appropriate.

  Peter and I were in hope with each other.

  And Jasiri was in hope with us.

  It was only a question of how long our hope might last.

  * * *

  “Up for a picnic this afternoon?” I asked Peter after I completed my brief rounds at the clinic the next morning.

  He wrapped his arms around mine, drawing me into him. “For you, I am always up,” he purr-growled in my ear.

  I shivered under the warm breath of him and at the faint twitch behind me that proved his point. Muscles deep within clenched around the sudden stab of electric memory that shot through me. God, I was always up for him as well.

  I exhaled slowly before trusting my voice again. “I was thinking the river bank.”

  His hand slipped down to cup the arch of bone between my legs. “I was thinking your bed in ten minutes.”

  What the hell. “I bet we can get there in five.”

  * * *

  We dragged ourselves out of my room two hours later to walk down to the boma in the gathering heat. We brought mangoes that we pitched toward the thicket where we could just make out a great gray shape, hoping to lure her out with the sweet treats. After an hour it looked like she wasn’t in a luring mood today.

  We headed back up to the house to pack a ground sheet and Kapuki’s picnic lunch into the Land Rover. As we were carrying the packs out the door, Melea was on her way up the drive to her apartment behind. She wasn’t alone. Braving the half-mile walk with her was Zuri, bounding along as though she were oblivious to the over-sized splint immobilizing her back leg.

  “She’s looking strong,” Peter said, Melea beaming like a proud mother.

  “And you’d be heading where?” I asked.

  Melea’s beam shifted into guilt. She rolled her lips into her mouth and bit them as she studied the ground.

  “How long have you been taking her home with you?” I asked.

  “A…while,” she admitted.

  Probably since I started camping at the boma. It was clear the little kudu was a lost cause to conservancy. I rolled my eyes and heaved a sigh for effect. “I suppose the wilds of Africa won’t miss one little kudu. But you’re going to have to find a way to keep her exercised and safe. And to not be lonely. She won’t always be little and cute
and willing to follow you around.”

  “Little, no,” Melea agreed. “But cute…always. And why would she stop following me just because she grows up? Do puppies stop loving their people when they become dogs?”

  I stared at Melea, wondering when I’d decided that being older automatically made me wiser. “You’re right, they don’t. Usually it’s their people who stop making time for them. As long as you keep loving Zuri, there’s no reason she won’t keep loving you right back. But love has a way of changing over time. You may not love each other any less, but you might love differently. And you need to think about that and be prepared for what that might mean. Okay?”

  Melea nodded. “I guess I’ll just need a bigger heart.”

  “Don’t we all,” I whispered after her as she and Zuri continued on to her apartment.

  I felt Peter regarding me quietly from behind.

  23

  Nicky

  We spread the groundsheet under a date palm on the edge of the Mbingi River in the middle of the sanctuary where the bank sloped easily into the water on this side but cliffed about ten feet in on the other.

  It was the dry season and the river was shallow and sluggish, far from the raging monster it could be, but dangerous still with the number of reptiles that called the river home. Silent danger for the most part. Biding danger. The river was a serene and slumbering beast as we picnicked on its shore, unknown numbers of eyes watching us from below.

  Peter touched my arm and pointed across the river. “Zebras.”

  The beta herd, maybe 30 adults and 20 foals, from a few months old to yearlings, were grazing through. Though it was the dry season, it wasn’t a full-fledged drought this year, and the grass, though sparse, was enough to sustain them as they moved up and down the seven-mile stretch of river from one end of Kulinda to the other.