Chapter 8
Sarah
Three days had changed everything I thought I knew about Donovan Hughes.
I hadn’t meant to watch the training. My mornings belonged to the animals, and the muster yard was on the other side of camp from the vet facility. But the camp was small and sound carried, and by the second morning, I’d started finding reasons to cross through on my way to the supply shed.
What I’d braced for hadn’t come.
The rangers showed up before anyone called them.
They were there at first light, formed up, boots laced, rifles cleaned.
Zayn stood straighter than I’d seen him in the year I’d known him, and something in his bearing had shifted from willing to proud.
Baraka carried equipment without being asked and kept his mouth shut while his hands were full.
Even the ones who’d coasted through every day I’d worked alongside them moved with a purpose that hadn’t existed a week ago.
They handled their weapons with a care that looked almost tender, checking and rechecking. They ran the obstacle course they’d built without anyone standing over them, and when one of them struggled at the wall, two others pulled him over without a word.
“They’re different,” I said to Alyson at the rail of the vet pen that morning, watching Zayn lead the group through drills across the yard. “All of them.”
“You mean the guys who couldn’t find their own canteens last week?” She didn’t look up from her chart. “Yeah, I noticed.”
The aggression I’d feared wasn’t happening. The opposite was.
And underneath that shift, underneath the grudging respect I couldn’t pretend away anymore, was the thing that had never been in question. I was attracted to Donovan Hughes, and I had been since Paris. Since the dance floor, the rescue, the walk back to the hotel. Since all of it.
I treated it as a fact about myself. A private one. He was here to do his job and I was here to do mine, and whatever my pulse did when he crossed the yard was mine to manage. It was one-sided, and that was the end of it.
The day’s work was a collar check. One of the rhinos I monitored carried a tracking collar that needed a scheduled assessment, routine and on the calendar, vet-specific, and nothing a ranger would have any reason to come along for.
The animal ranged in a remote corner of the reserve, three hours out and three hours back, and the drive was mine.
Cole and Andrew were running the rangers through a patrolling exercise that would take all day. Which left exactly one person free to ride along.
Donovan was already at the truck when I came around the vehicle bay with my field kit. He had one boot on the running board and was scanning the eastern horizon, his eyes moving across the tree line before they came back to me.
“Morning,” I said.
“Morning.”
Neither of us mentioned the giraffe or the conversation three nights ago or the silence that had lived between us since. I loaded my kit in the back and climbed into the passenger seat. He got behind the wheel and pulled out. The camp shrank in the mirror, and neither of us spoke.
The track ran east through open grassland for the first twenty minutes. Acacia trees stood at wide intervals, their flat canopies casting shadows that moved across the hood as we passed. A herd of impala lifted their heads and watched us go, then went back to grazing.
He broke the silence first.
“I owe you an apology.”
I looked at him. He kept his eyes on the track.
“The other night. What I said to you.” His jaw worked once, like the words cost him something. “I was an ass. You came to me with something you cared about, and I shut you down. That’s on me.”
I waited for the rest of it. The defense of his methods. The explanation for why he was right about the training. The part where he relitigated the argument and came out justified.
It didn’t come.
“That’s it?” I asked.
“That’s it. I was wrong in how I spoke to you. I’m sorry.”
He’d drawn the line so precisely it took me a second to find it. He wasn’t apologizing for the training or backing down from what he believed. He was apologizing for treating me like my concern didn’t matter. For the delivery, not the content.
“Thank you,” I said. “I appreciate that.”
He nodded once. The truck rattled over a washout in the track, and we both grabbed for the dash.
The silence after was different. Lighter. The air in the cab had lost the pressure that had been sitting in it since I’d climbed in, and I let myself breathe.
“I need to say something.” I pushed out the words.
“Go ahead.”
“Paris.” I let the word sit there. “I never apologized properly for that night. The whole disaster. The elevator and the—” I closed my eyes. “I am so sorry.”
“Sarah.” His voice was even. Almost gentle. “You had too much to drink, and something bad nearly happened to you. You don’t owe me an apology for any of it.”
“I threw up on you.”
“I’ve had worse on my shirt.”
“That’s not exactly comforting.”
He almost smiled. I saw the corner of his mouth move and then flatten. “Were you okay afterward? The next morning?”
“Honestly? I wanted to die. I woke up feeling like I’d been hit by a truck, and then I remembered what happened, and that was worse than the hangover.”
“The room service helped?”
I turned in my seat. “What room service?”
He glanced at me, then back to the track. Something crossed his face that might have been regret at having said it.
“Someone sent room service to your room that morning,” he said. “Breakfast. Coffee. Headache medicine.”
I stared at him. The memory surfaced slowly, distant and blurred by the hangover that had swallowed the entire morning. A knock on my door. A tray. Coffee and a bottled water with a covered plate of wheat toast and scrambled eggs and a foil packet of paracetamol.
I’d assumed that it was part of the hotel’s service or that Alyson had arranged it. I’d eaten everything on the tray and never thought about it again.
“That was you?”
He didn’t answer, which was its own answer.
“You sent me room service, and you never said anything.”
“It wasn’t a big deal.”
“Donovan.” I was still staring at him. “That is—why wouldn’t you tell me?”
“Because it wasn’t a big deal,” he said again, and he meant it. He hadn’t done it for credit or for a story to tell. He’d seen someone who needed a light breakfast and headache medicine, he’d handled it, and he’d moved on.
The man I’d reduced to “the one I threw up on” had quietly taken care of me and never intended to let me know.
I turned back to the windshield. The grassland was giving way to rougher terrain, scattered rock, and thicker brush. My throat was tight, and suddenly, I didn’t trust my voice. So I sat with it caged in my mouth instead of sharing it.
After a while, I said, “I should apologize for the bar too.”
“The bar?”
“When I walked up to your table. You were clearly meeting someone, and I just—barged in. I’m not normally that person. Alyson had been pushing me all night and I’d had too much tequila and I just—” I shook my head. “You were polite about it, but I know I was bothering you.”
“You weren’t bothering me.”
“You told me you were meeting someone and touched your ear three times in thirty seconds. That’s a pretty clear signal.”
He was quiet. The truck climbed a low rise and leveled out, and the view opened up ahead of us, miles of open bush running toward a ridge on the horizon.
“I was working,” he said.
“Working?”
“The nightclub. That was a job. Paris was a Citadel operation.” His voice stayed level, giving the information to me in pieces I could hold.
“We were there because French intelligence asked for help with a surveillance sweep. There was a trafficking cell operating out of clubs in that district. My job was to sit and watch a man who’d been flagged as one of their abductors. ”
My hands closed in my lap.
“When you came to the table, I couldn’t break surveillance. That’s why I was short with you. The earpiece, the hand to the ear—I was on comms.”
“The man outside the club,” I said. “The one who grabbed me.”
“He was one of them. He wasn’t a random creep. He was a bad criminal.”
The truck cab felt smaller. I sat with both hands in my lap and tried to reconcile the night I remembered with the night he was describing. I’d walked out of that club thinking the worst thing that happened was a handsy stranger. I’d told Alyson the story like it was a bad end to a bad night.
“How close was I?” I asked.
He didn’t look at me. “Close enough.”
“And I never felt it. I had no idea.”
“That’s how they work. You wouldn’t ever know until it was too late.”
The road roughened, and he slowed the truck. I watched his hands on the wheel, steady, and tried to make my breathing match.
“So when you walked me to the hotel—”
“I wanted to make sure you got back safely.”
All of it. The calm after the punch. The distance he kept in the lobby. The gentleness that had felt so deliberate, so careful. He’d been coming down from an operation, and he’d still made sure I got to my door.
“I thought you left the bar because you weren’t interested,” I said. I heard my voice go small. The old script was right there, ready and waiting. “I figured I’d read the whole thing wrong and you just didn’t want to deal with me.”
“Sarah.”
“It’s fine. I’m just saying, I understand. You were working. I was drunk and in the way and—”
“That’s not what happened.”
“No, I know. You just explained—”
“Working or not,” he said it quietly, eyes on the track, “under any other circumstances, I’d have been very interested.”
The truck hit a rut. We both jolted. I grabbed the door handle and held on, and the words caught up with me in the silence that followed.
I’d have been very interested.
He hadn’t dressed it up or softened it or turned it into a line. He’d just said it and left it there between us as a simple matter of fact.