Chapter 18
Sarah
It had been a week since our first night sleeping side by side on the cattle drive. Now, we were in my cabin. His mouth was on my neck and his arm around my waist.
“I’m going,” he said against my skin.
“You’re not going.”
“I’m literally walking out the door right now.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “Impressive you can be all the way out the door while still in bed.”
He pulled back enough to look at me. The cabin was dark except for the first shafts of morning light coming through the blinds. I could barely see his face, but I could sense that he was grinning just as much as I was.
I tried to stifle a laugh. The walls in these cabins were thin. A week of this and I still hadn’t figured out how to be quiet when he made me laugh.
He kissed me again. Then he pulled away and actually got one foot on the floor.
“Okay,” he said. “Going.”
“Allegedly.”
He didn’t move a muscle toward the door, but he did move his hands toward the ticklish spots near my ribs.
I pressed my face into the pillow and shook with laughter. He leaned over and kissed the back of my shoulder, and I grabbed his wrist and pulled him back down.
“One more minute.”
“You said that four minutes ago.”
“And you’re still here, so clearly, you agreed.”
He slid his arm around my waist. He pulled me back against him, my spine flush to his chest, and I could feel his heart through both our ribs.
One more minute.
He shifted behind me. His hand moved from my waist to my hip, his thumb tracing the ridge of bone through the thin cotton of my underwear. A slow, deliberate drag. I pressed back against him and felt him hard against me.
“If you start this,” I whispered, “you can’t leave halfway through.”
“When have I ever left you halfway through anything?”
I rolled to face him. His mouth found mine in the dark. I pushed at his waistband and he pushed at mine. Free of everything between us, I settled over his hips and took him inside me. The sound I made was too loud, so his hand came up over my mouth.
I bit the heel of his palm. He sucked in a breath through his teeth.
His other hand came up and gripped the back of my head, pressing the first one harder against my mouth. An absolute seal. He pulled my face down to his so he could whisper while staring me directly in the eyes.
“You have lost your noise privileges, babe. You have to ride in silence now.”
I couldn’t help but let out a suppressed squeal of delight against his hand. In response, he bucked his hips up harder.
He recognized from my whimper that his bucking underneath me was not likely to keep more noise from happening. I could tell because he was grinning devilishly.
We moved together, his hands still locked on my head, one sealed over my mouth and the other gripping the back of my skull.
He pressed down, holding me pinned between the weight of his hands and the upward drive of his hips.
We were almost silent except for the bed shifting under us, which we both ignored because stopping wasn’t an option.
I braced against his chest and let him set the pace, each thrust pushing the air out of me in short, muffled bursts into his palm.
I came with his hand still loosely covering my mouth and my fingers digging into his pecs. He followed seconds later, a hard shudder running through him that I felt in my own bones.
We lay there for a moment. He removed his hands and cradled my face as we managed several slow kisses while still slightly breathless.
“Now I really do have to be going,” he said.
This time, he meant it. He eased out from under me, found his clothes in the dark by touch, and dressed without turning on a light. I lay on my side and watched the shape of him move through the room.
He came back to the bed, leaned down and kissed my forehead.
“See you at breakfast,” he said.
“See you there.”
He left out the door, and I was back to being alone.
I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling. The scent of him was still on the sheets, still on my skin. I’d come to love that—how it lingered long after he was gone.
The Citadel team was leaving in two weeks. Maybe three, if the work ran long. That was the number underneath everything, ticking whether I looked at it or not.
How long after that would his scent linger?
This past week had been stolen time. We were both busy during his training schedule. The animals didn’t care what my personal life looked like. What we had was this. Predawn and after-dark forays, but nothing in between that wasn’t professionalism maintained for the sake of the camp.
We hadn’t talked about what happened after. Not once. I hadn’t raised it because I already knew the answer. Donovan wasn’t a long-distance man. He was a man who lived in the physical world. Months of absence were a slow death for that kind of presence.
And even if he wanted to try—even if he said the words and meant them—it was only a matter of time before he figured out what Gregory had figured out. That I was good at one thing. That the rest of me wasn’t enough to keep a man like him interested once the novelty wore off.
You know how this ends.
There was nothing to be done about it. I just had to enjoy it while it lasted.
A knock at my door pulled me out of the bed and into clothes in under a minute. I was still pulling a shirt over my head when I opened it.
Zayn stood on the other side, dressed for patrol, his radio clipped to his belt.
“The collared male lion,” he said. “The one with the buffalo gash.”
My hands stopped on the hem of my shirt. “What about him?”
“The overnight patrol found him. He’s separated from the pride. Just lying there. He looks bad.”
“How bad?”
“They said he’s lying on his side. He didn’t react when they came close with the vehicle.”
I was already reaching for my boots. A lion that didn’t react to a vehicle was a lion in serious trouble.
We’d been monitoring that gash for weeks, watching it through binoculars from a distance, making the judgment call every wildlife vet lives with: intervene and risk the stress of darting and sedation, or wait and let the animal’s own system handle it.
Big cats healed on their own more often than not. We’d made the right call waiting, but now intervention was almost certainly necessary.
“The wound may have gone septic,” I said, more to myself than to Zayn. “Get Alyson.”
“She’s already getting ready.”
I laced my boots and grabbed my field kit from the hook by the closet. By the time I’d crossed the compound, Alyson was coming out of her cabin with her kit on her shoulder. Zayn walked ahead of us toward the vehicles.
Cole was at the mess tent with a mug of coffee, leaning against one of the support poles. He straightened when he saw us coming.
“What’s happening?”
“Lion emergency,” Alyson said. “The collared pride male. He’s got a wound that’s probably gone septic, and we need to get out there and treat him before we lose him.”
Cole set down the mug. “What do you need?”
“Transport. Zayn’s getting the vehicles.”
Alyson looked at Cole, and something lit up in her expression. “You know what, you should come. This is one of the cooler parts of this job. How many times are you going to get to see a lion up close?”
She glanced at me. A quick check. I nodded.
“Give me five minutes,” Cole said and went for his gear.
Alyson caught my eye after he left. I raised an eyebrow at her.
“What?” she said.
“Showing off for the Marine?”
“I am inviting a colleague to observe a medical procedure. Don’t make it weird.”
I let it go. Who was I to judge?
We loaded into two vehicles. Zayn drove ours with Alyson in the passenger seat and me behind them. Daniel rode in the second vehicle with Cole and Baraka.
The drive was forty-five minutes east, deeper into the reserve. Past the areas we patrolled on foot and into territory that was more brush than open grassland.
Alyson had her kit open on her lap, running through inventory. Gauze, sutures, antiseptic, hemostats. Her hands moved through the supplies diligently.
“I want to take lead on this one,” she said.
“It’s yours.”
She looked over her shoulder at me. “You’re not going to fight me?”
“Why would I fight you? You’re a better large-cat vet than I am, and we both know it.”
“I wanted to hear you say it.” She turned back and sealed the bag. “For the record.”
“I’ll tell you after you show us and Cole today.”
I watched the landscape change through the window. Grassland giving way to thicker cover, the acacia trees growing denser, the brush closing in along the track.
“Hey,” I said. “Are you and Daniel okay?”
She didn’t look up from the kit. “We agreed to take a break.”
“When?”
“Couple days ago. Mutual decision.” She shrugged one shoulder. “It’s been coming for a while. You know that.”
I did know that. The slow cooling between them had been visible for weeks, and the Daniel I’d seen the past couple months wasn’t someone I could advocate for anymore.
“Don’t worry,” Alyson said. “We’re still professional.”
Zayn glanced in the rearview but didn’t comment.
We found the lion in a clearing bordered on three sides by dense whistling thorn.
The collar signal led us to him. He was lying on his side in the short grass, and even from the vehicle, I could see the gash along his ribs.
The wound had changed since the last time I’d seen it through binoculars.
The edges were swollen and dark, the skin around it tight with infection.
His ribs moved in shallow, labored pulls.
He didn’t lift his head when we pulled up. That wasn’t a good sign.
Alyson loaded the dart gun. She checked the dosage against her notes, confirmed the weight estimate from the collar data, and seated the dart. She rolled down her window, braced the barrel against the door frame, and fired.
The dart hit his hindquarter. He flinched. His head came up for a second, then dropped back down.
“Now, we wait,” Alyson said. She pulled her window up and set the gun across her lap. “Fifteen minutes. Nobody gets out until he’s fully under.”