A Wilder Heart

by Loki Renard

  “She’s feisty,” one of the rescuers noted in response to Aster’s temper tantrum. “We thought you two would be half dead, or full dead. Good job, you two, good job.”

  That was not the most subtle way of putting it, but Aster already knew that New Zealand men were given to plain speaking and she was not surprised by it. They were still insisting she put the harness on and go up into the helicopter though, which she found very rude.

  “There’s a bird,” she tried to explain. “I need to see the bird.”

  “She’s a bit loopy,” a rescuer noted. “We’ll get something into her.”

  “No, you bloody won’t,” Aster growled as they searched through their equipment for a syringe of something she was damn sure wasn’t going into her. “I’m not crazy, I just want to know where the bird—”

  “Aster.” Owen took her face in his hands and directed her gaze at him. “It’s time to go,” he said. “It’s time to go home.”

  “But—”

  “No buts,” he said firmly. “It’s time to go.”

  “But—”

  He leaned forward and growled in her hear. “Do you want to be rescued now, or do you want to be rescued after I’ve taken that harness off you and spanked you in front of these men?”

  “You’re mean!” she cried, becoming quite upset at the threat.

  “I don’t think it isn’t anything they haven’t already seen,” he replied. “We need to go. The weather could change and we could lose our window.”

  “But—” Her objections were cut off as she was clipped to the lines coming from the helicopter and one of the rescuers wrapped his arms around her and held her close. The line went taut and she was drawn up into the sky in the lap of a red-clad angel who did a decent job of keeping her more or less still, in spite of her squirming.

  “Bye, birdie! Bye!” she yelled the words out to the sky, hoping that they would be heard by her little avian friend.

  She was rewarded when they passed the tree line and the tui flew up to meet her, circled three times just as it had in her vision and flew away, leaving her thoroughly emotional and entirely certain that it was no mere bird which had watched over them. As their home in the woods dwindled into looking like a little toy, she shed tears of sweet sorrow. She’d had an experience with an entity most people never got to connect with anymore.

  In the space of a few minutes she was taken into the interior of the helicopter and strapped into a seat. In short order Owen was up beside her. He wrapped his arms around her and held her close as they were whisked to safety.

  “I’m going to miss this,” she said as tears ran down her cheeks. “I don’t know if I want to go.” She pressed her hand against the window and tried to look back at where they’d been, but it was already gone, lost to the speed.

  “It’s not going anywhere,” Owen reminded her. “We can go back. Just next time we visit we’ll have a map.”

  “You promise?”

  “I do,” he said, cuddling her close. “This is going to be a part of the both of us forever. You don’t have to worry about losing anything. This is a good thing.”

  “Bloody hell,” the fellow opposite them said. “Never had to convince anyone to be taken off the side of a mountain before. You two must have been having a right old time.” There was a hint of a smirk on his lips, Aster noted. She could not forget how they had been found, how very close to disrobed her lower half had been.

  “We made ourselves comfortable,” Owen replied with a little wink at Aster. She smiled and blushed a little, hiding her face in his shoulder as civilization drew closer with every revolution of the beating rotor blades.

  Chapter Eleven

  Being rescued was almost more bewildering than being lost, Aster discovered. There were a lot of people who wanted to do a lot of things to make sure she was healthy and well and they all jabbered at her at the same time. She found the whole thing very jarring, especially when they were taken inside the hospital at which their rescue helicopter had landed and she found herself in a world of bright fluorescent lights and chattering humans.

  “There’s no world here,” she complained to Owen. “This is so... fake. Look how dead it all is. Dead and painted and—”

  Owen drew her into a tight hug. “I know it’s all a bit much,” he said. “Just let them do their jobs, okay? They just want to make sure we didn’t hurt ourselves out there.”

  “I didn’t hurt myself,” Aster said. She repeated herself to the nurse who checked her pulse and temperature for the umpteenth time, and the doctor who subsequently conducted her examination.

  “I heard,” the doctor said. He was a cheerful man with kind brown eyes and salt and pepper hair and a laid back attitude which reminded her somewhat of Owen. “Do you mind if I double check that, just in case, you know, for the paperwork?”

  Aster agreed to help him out by letting him examine her so he could file the correct paperwork. He did a fairly thorough examination and made sure that her thighbone still connected to her hipbone and whatnot.

  She could not sit still for it. Being back in the midst of society, even a fairly relaxed and simple society like that of the lower south of the South Island was overwhelming. She felt as though everything was too bright, there were too many people. Owen was off with another doctor being similarly checked out and she missed him terribly.

  “Quit wriggling, ants in your pants,” the doctor admonished with a smile. “I don’t think there’s too much wrong with you. Your blood work has come back fine. You’re probably healthier now than you were when you went in, probably a bit skinnier. A couple of pies and you’ll be right. Let us know if you have any troubles and we’ll have another look at you.”

  And that was that.

  The moment she was released from the doctor’s care, things got better. Someone was waiting for her outside the room. Someone she’d missed in the depths of her heart ever since flying out of the States. Her father was standing there, looking not like a movie star, but like a worried parent.

  “Aster!” He wrapped his arms around her and lifted her off her feet. “You’re alive.”

  “Of course I am,” she said kissing his cheek and hugging him close.

  “There’s no of course about it,” her father said. “You wouldn’t believe what’s been in the media.”

  “Nobody should.”

  He laughed and he cried and he held her tight. “I’m taking you home right now,” he said. “And I’m not letting you out of my sight again.”

  Aster pulled away slightly and shook her head. “No, Daddy,” she said. “I can’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t want to go back,” she repeated simply. “Well, maybe I do, but I don’t want to go back to the city. I want to go and find all the wild places. And I want to film them. And I want—”

  Her father was looking at her as if she was telling him she wanted to cuddle crocodiles. “You have got to be kidding me, Aster. After all you’ve been through...”

  “I’m not,” she said, her eyes shining. “I know how to operate a camera, and Owen knows how to keep me alive. Look at me, Dad, not a scratch on me!”

  At that point, Owen was released from his medical exam. He came over to shake her father’s hand and apologize for what had happened. “Sorry, sir,” he said. “Things didn’t precisely go according to plan.”

  “You can say that again,” Zach Wilder said grimly. “I send my daughter off with you thinking she’s going to be shooting a movie and you crash and lose her in the middle of a forest.”

  “Daddy!” Aster’s tone was horrified. “None of that was his fault, he kept me safe!”

  “He did, didn’t he?” Zach said, a glimmer of a smile breaking through his stony exterior. “You did a hell of a job, Owen. I’ll never be able to thank you enough for getting my Aster back safely.”

  “Don’t you worry about her,” Owen replied. “She’s a natural born survivor. Tough as nails.”

  “She better be
, with the life she has planned. Wants to go running about the world filming the wilds. Says she has a taste for it now.”

  “Well, she’s got a talent for it, I’d say,” Owen said. “We basically had to pry her out of the forest. She didn’t want to leave.”

  “There was a tui, a bird who helped us,” Aster said. “And I’m going to go back, and I’m going to find him, I am. And I’m going to thank him.”

  “At least come home first for a bit,” Zach said, holding her close. “Let me see you safe and sound for a while before you go back off into the middle of nowhere. Maybe I can find a backer or two for this new project of yours. Let me spoil you.”

  “I guess I can let you do that,” Aster said with a smug little smile over at Owen. There was no way she was going to be getting in trouble now, not with her father watching over her.

  What followed was a trip by limousine to the airport, a private charter plane to the main terminal in Auckland and first class back to the United States. It was all a very far cry from the simplicity of the forest and within half a day, looking out the plane’s window at the Pacific Ocean, she was no longer sure it had happened at all – aside from the fact that Owen was still there beside her through everything.

  Her father did not know of their relationship, not at first. He seemed to not consider it a possibility, but that was because he was so relieved that she was still alive and in one piece that he clearly hadn’t thought about much else. It wasn’t until Owen sat down next to Aster on the plane and took her hand in his own that a brow was raised.

  “Is there something I should know?”

  Aster glanced across at Owen. “Well...”

  “I love your daughter,” Owen said bluntly.

  “Do you?” Zach’s expression was inscrutable. “Is that what professional bodyguards do these days, go around falling in love with their clients?”

  “Not typically, sir.”

  “I love him too,” Aster added her voice. “He’s a good man, and he’s probably the only one who is going to be able to keep me alive through all the adventures I plan on having.”

  Zach snorted and shook his head. “You might be right there,” he admitted. “Hell, I’ve been married half a dozen times, who am I to say you two shouldn’t be together? I’d tell you to take care of her, Owen, but you already have and I’ve no doubt you’ll keep doing that. I’m more grateful to you than I can ever say.”

  Her father’s voice shook a little, and Aster realized that all his bluster had been covering his own fear and pain. She rose from her seat and gave her father a big hug. “I’m sorry I put you through all this,” she said. “You must have been in hell.”

  “Yeah,” Zach admitted. “I thought I’d lost the one person that truly mattered. You know... after your mother...”

  She knew. Though they had everything, all the riches money could buy and all the fame anyone could ever have, at the end of it all, all they really had was one another.

  “Well, I’m going to stay as safe as I can,” she promised. “And you won’t have to worry ever again, because Owen is good at making me be safe.”

  “That I believe,” Zach said with a chuckle.

  * * *

  All was well until they landed at LAX and the world went crazy with flashes and cameras and people clustering and clamoring on all sides. In New Zealand she had barely been noticed by anyone. But her return to the US was like some kind of mad circus, full of people shouting inane things at her.

  Zach had a contingent of four bodyguards waiting, so including Owen there were five people providing immediate security. That didn’t stop the crush of screaming fans and overeager photographers from hemming them in on all sides in a way that made Aster feel horribly claustrophobic. The sound of a hundred people speaking all at once was enough to make her grit her teeth and yearn for the tui’s warble and the remote peace of the New Zealand forest.

  “Aster! Are you alive?”

  “Aster! Did you lose much weight while you were lost?”

  Each question was more inane than the last, and most of them were completely incomprehensible for being screeched over half a dozen other questions. Her father took it all in stride, but Aster’s tolerance for that sort of thing had never been high and it was at its lowest ebb yet.

  She balled her fists by her sides as she walked between her father and Owen, until one paparazzi broke through the guards and shoved his camera right into her face. That was her breaking point. Before the bodyguards could haul him off, Aster aimed a swift kick to his ankle. It caught him exactly where she meant it to and made him roar with affected pain. There was a collective gasp and then a cacophony of cries as the onlookers expressed their horror and dismay at her actions.

  “No,” Owen said firmly, taking her by the hand. He spoke with his lips right next to her ear, and still his words were only barely audible, thanks to all the shouting. “We do not kick people.”

  “I kick people,” Aster disagreed at the top of her lungs. “I kick them when they talk to me like that.”

  “And what’s going to happen now you’ve kicked someone, you vicious little beast?” He said the words with no small amount of fondness.

  “I don’t care,” Aster replied boldly. She was feeling quite fierce, and very agitated. She turned around, raised her arms and lifted her middle fingers proudly before letting out a yell that almost eclipsed the rest of the yelling. “Why don’t you all FUCK OFF!”

  “Aster!” Her father and Owen barked her name at the same time. She didn’t care. She continued to make rude gestures until Owen decided enough was enough and swept her up off her feet. Flashes were almost continuous as she was physically carried away to a spot behind a security barrier where the paparazzi could not follow.

  “Behave yourself,” he growled as he put her back on her feet, not before giving her a hard smack on her backside. “I am guessing you don’t want to be spanked in front of your father and everyone out there.”

  “Why the hell would you punish me? They’re the assholes!”

  “I know,” he said. “And I’m sorry they’re here, but the sooner we get out of here, the sooner you’re free of them. So let’s just go, without the kicking and the shouting and the rest of it, okay?”

  “Fine,” she agreed glumly. She managed to walk the rest of the way out of the airport on her own two feet with the cameras flashing and the idiots yelling and she almost got to the limousine without further incident, but for one of the paparazzi cursing at her.

  It was one thing to be questioned, another thing to be crowded, but being sworn at by a lowlife with a lens and a flash was more than Aster could take. If he wanted to swear, she’d show him what swearing was. Aster turned around and unleashed a string of curse words, some of which weren’t curse words, or words of any kind.

  Each and every one of them was caught a dozen times over in digital media, and uploaded almost immediately to the Internet. She didn’t care, until Owen’s palm caught her hard across her backside and he hauled her into the car by the back of her neck much like a struggling kitten.

  Her father was already in the car. He raised no objection to the fact that Owen had just laid a hearty slap across her bottom and he stayed silent as Owen buckled her seat belt and frowned at her. “We just discussed this,” he said. “I mean, not two minutes ago.”

  “I don’t have to put up with that!” Aster pointed toward the tinted window. “I don’t have to put up with them! I don’t have to do a damn thing!” She was quite furious, and the simple slap had not done much to cure her of that anger. “After everything we’ve been through... they do that... I want to go back out there and...” She let out a growl. “I would kick all of them.”

  There was no opportunity to kick all of them, because the car was moving.

  “A couple of weeks in the woods turned you feral, my girl,” her father observed. “I’ve not seen a tantrum like that since the Lohan girl.”

  “Well hell.” Aster frowned. “They deserved it. I don�
�t care.”

  Owen’s silence bothered her more than her father’s comments. She looked over at him, wondering why he wasn’t also adding his two cents.

  * * *

  It turned out that he was saving those two cents. He saved them all the way back to her father’s mansion, through the homecoming, through all of it until they were alone in her rooms at which point he secured the doors and turned to her, his expression grim with disciplinary intent.

  “You disobeyed me today,” he said. “And you know that’s not going to fly, don’t you?”

  “Give me a break,” Aster sighed. “Those paparazzi deserved everything I did and said and more.”

  “And what do you deserve, for disobeying me and acting like a strung out Hollywood brat coming down from a bender?”

  “Let me guess,” she sighed dramatically. “You’re going to spank me.”

  “Among other things,” Owen said, his eyes slightly narrowed as her attitude escalated. “We’re not in the forest anymore, but I still expect you to do as you’re told, and I especially expect you to be able to keep your cool.”

  “Why? Why should I do that? Give me one good reason!”

  “I’ll give you a very good reason,” he said, taking hold of her. Aster squirmed, thinking she was about to be spanked, but that was not what Owen had in mind. What Owen had in mind was stripping her of every last little bit of her clothing and leaving her entirely naked under his glowering gaze.

  “Clothes are a privilege,” he said. “And you haven’t earned them. Go stand in the corner. Now.”

  Aster objected with every inch of her body, but all that lead to was Owen smacking her very bare bottom all the way across the very large room. By the time he had herded her into the corner, at least a dozen hard slaps had landed.

  “Jesus, Owen, you never cut me any slack!”

  “You don’t need slack,” he replied firmly. “You need what you’ve always needed, discipline. Just because things are hard right now doesn’t mean you get to act however you want. I expect better from you.”