Chapter 26 #2
Nick looked at the lobby, his eyes cataloging every guest before returning to Sarah.
He didn't lower his voice, but he narrowed the field of it. “Tracks confirmed near the old salt lick,” Nick said. “These aren’t local opportunists, Sarah. The signs point to an organized cell. Heavy weapons are possible. Night vision too. They’re here for the rhino horn, and if they’re cornered, they’ll trade fire to get out. ”
Sarah’s face tightened.
“We found signs of human movement in the dry riverbed below it,” he continued. “No breach into the lodge area, but the western tents stay closed. I’m not moving vehicles until I know who was using that route.”
“What can I tell them?” Sarah gestured toward the guests.
Nick looked past her to the lobby, where conversations had thinned into watchful silence. Too many people pretending not to listen.
“Route assessment. Anti-poaching involvement. No confirmed threat inside the lodge area.”
“That sounds like someone hiding the expensive part,” I said.
Nick’s gaze shifted to me.
Not the look of a ranger checking on a guest. The look of a man deciding whether he respected the argument enough to hate it.
Nick leaned his weight against the desk, his hand inches from mine. “You want me to tell people who paid ten thousand a night for a giraffe experience that there are men with rifles in the bush?”
The question should have belonged to the crisis. Unfortunately, his hand was close enough to make my pulse disagree.
“I think they should know Mara Khaya takes their safety seriously enough to call in the professionals,” I said. “Uncertainty is the enemy, Nick. Not the truth.”
He held my stare for half a second.
Then he pushed away from the desk.
“Fine,” he said. “Then I’ll tell them.”
Sarah blinked. “You?”
“They need the reality. Not the panic version.”
He crossed to the center of the lobby.
The room quieted before he spoke. Nick had that effect when he stopped moving. Even Graham lowered his phone.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Nick said, his voice carrying without rising. “I’m going to be very clear, because vague information creates bad decisions.”
A few guests shifted. Someone near the coffee service stopped stirring their cup.
“We have confirmed signs of unauthorized human movement west of the main road, near one of our animal mineral sites and the dry riverbed below it. Our anti-poaching unit is involved. Law enforcement has been notified.”
Graham’s hand tightened around his phone. “Are we talking about armed men?”
Nick looked at him. “We are talking about organized criminals who know the land, know what they’re after, and do not like being interrupted.”
The lobby went very still.
“They are not here for guests,” Nick continued.
“Guests bring attention. Rangers are the people they confront when they’re cornered.
That does not make guests irrelevant. It makes them collateral if they leave the controlled areas.
That is why you are staying inside cleared lodge areas, and that is why no vehicle moves until my team says the route is safe. ”
No one argued.
Not even Graham.
“You are not being held here for convenience,” Nick said. “You are here because this is the safest place on the property right now. Sarah’s team will help with flights and onward travel. My team will clear the road and airstrip. Until then, you stay where staff tells you to stay.”
His gaze moved across the room once, calm and absolute.
“Follow instructions, and this stays contained.”
For one beat, no one spoke.
Then the room moved again. A cup set down. A chair shifted. Someone near the windows let out the breath they’d been holding.
Sarah moved first, directing the front desk team toward the transfer board. Owen lowered his voice near the coffee service. Naomi stopped looking at her phone. Even Graham, miracle of miracles, stayed quiet.
Nick walked back to the desk as if he had not just made a room full of furious rich people obey him.
I hated how much that worked for me.
He pulled a folded map from his pocket and spread it over the end of the desk, effectively claiming the space next to me. He didn't ask if I minded. He just started marking the salt lick with a red pen.
We moved around one another with unsettling ease.
Sarah handled the phones. Nick handled the ground. I handled the guests. Somehow, no one had to ask twice.
Nick brought me a coffee without asking, setting it down near my elbow. I slid him the one I knew he actually drank—black, no sugar. He corrected a map note and I handed him the red marker before he even reached for it.
When Graham approached with a demand for a private charter, Nick said, “No.”
One word. No decoration.
Graham turned to me, clearly hoping for a more expensive answer.
“What Mr. Mercer means,” I said, “is that a private aircraft still requires safe access to the airstrip, and right now, that access has not been cleared.”
Nick’s mouth twitched without permission.
Graham hated both of us. Excellent. Common ground.
I felt the corner of my own mouth threaten to follow suit. Then we went back to work.
Wanting him was inconvenient.
Trusting him was much worse.
I stepped into the library, the quiet room smelling of polished wood, beeswax, and the faint citrus oil someone had used on the shelves. I pulled my phone out.
Three missed calls from Summer.
I hit the contact. She picked up on the second ring.
“Juliette? Why are you still at Mara Khaya? The satellite tracker says you haven’t moved in twenty hours.”
“There’s a delay,” I said, leaning my head against the cool glass of a bookcase. “There was an incident near one of the access roads. The reserve paused transfers until everything is cleared.”
“What kind of incident?” Summer’s voice went sharp. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, Summer. I’m helping Sarah manage the guests while they wait for transfer.”
“They? Where are you in the reschedules?”
“On a list.”
“That is not an answer, Juliette.”
“It is technically composed of words.”
There was a long silence on the other end. Summer shifted on the other end. Office air-conditioning hummed behind her, cool and controlled and impossibly far from the wet heat pressing against the lodge windows. “That is a very polished answer,” she said.
“Thank you. I prepared it specifically to stop you from weaponizing the family group chat.”
“Juliette. So there’s something to respond to.”
I closed my eyes. Summer had always been inconveniently good at hearing what I left out.
“I’m safe,” I said. “That’s the part that matters.”
“Is this about the ranger?”
“This is about me not worrying you with details that won’t help.”
“So yes,” Summer said. “Stay if you want to stay, Jules. I can keep the wheels on for one more Monday. But don’t call it logistics if it isn’t.”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. Because if I admitted it was anything else, I’d have to admit what it actually was. And I had nowhere to put that sentence where it wouldn’t make a mess.
“I have to go,” I said. “Nick is clearing the airstrip.”
“Be careful,” she said. “And I don’t just mean whatever you’re refusing to tell me.”
I hung up and turned. For one dangerous hour, the world stayed outside.
The air was heavy with the smell of old paper, coffee, and the earthy scent of him.
Outside, the guests murmured like a distant tide.
Inside, there was only the scratch of his pen, the low murmur of radio traffic, and the soft tap of my thumb against Sarah’s lodge tablet as I updated transfer notes.
The hour began collecting small, dangerous evidence. His silence beside mine. My hand finding his pen before he asked. The radio staying quiet one minute longer than it needed to.
I knew better than to confuse proximity with a promise.
Unfortunately, knowing better had never once stopped a woman from being stupid.
I reached for the mug, and his knuckle grazed mine. Barely anything. My body recorded the contact as a permanent record—the rough texture of his skin against mine, gone before either of us could pretend it meant nothing.
On the map, the marked access road ran past the abandoned western tents and the ranger positions pushed wider than they had been yesterday.
“Is it possible,” I said slowly, “that they wanted to see what you’d give up first?”
Nick’s hand stilled over the map.
“Road. Guests. Tents. Rangers,” he continued, his voice dropping. “We gave them all of it.”
“Not all,” I said.
His gaze dropped to my mouth, quick and controlled. My body had the poor taste to notice anyway.
The radio on the table barked, the static shattering the quiet.
“Mercer, come in.” It was Daniel.
Nick grabbed the handset. “Mercer. Go.”
“Airstrip access is clear pending a final sweep. The drainage is empty. We can move the priority group before dark if you want it. Main road is holding.”
The room went still in the exact wrong way. Sarah appeared in the doorway before Nick had even set the handset down. She must have heard enough in Daniel’s voice to hope.
“Tell me that means movement,” she said.
The hour we had stolen between quiet work and radio calls ended all at once. We had been fine while leaving was still a rumor.
Nick’s body changed before he even stood up. He capped the marker, folded the map with a sharp, final snap, and put three feet of distance between us. His face closed first. Then his shoulders. By the time he reached for the radio, I was looking at the version of him everyone else got.
“Sarah, start staging the priority group,” Nick said. “The Brussels couple with the tight connection first. Alina if she wants the seat. Anyone with an international connection we can still save.”
Sarah nodded once, already reaching for the tablet. “I’ll update the board.”
She left before either of us spoke again.
I looked at Nick. “And me?”
“Your suite is still inside the restricted zone. I’ll have your luggage pulled once the western track is clear. You’re on the dawn transfer, when I can move you with daylight and a clean route.”
My fingers tightened around the pen. He wouldn't look at me. That was how I knew.
“That was quick,” I said.
“It has to be.”
“Does it?”
Nick stopped at the door. For a second, his hand tightened around the radio hard enough to whiten his knuckles.
“Juliette.” My name came out rough. Not cold. Worse. Careful. “What we had this week…what we have right now…I don’t know what to do with it.”
My throat tightened.
He looked at me then, and the control was still there, but it was cracked all the way through.
“But I know what I’m supposed to do with you,” he said. “Get you out of here alive, even if every selfish part of me wants one more day.”
That hurt more than distance would have.
“So that’s it?”
“No.” His jaw flexed. “That’s the problem.”
I didn’t even know what I wanted him to offer.
A date? A flight? A promise to appear in Florida and ruin my carefully arranged life with that voice and those hands?
I wanted none of that.
I wanted all of it.
Perfect. Very stable. Excellent work, Wilder.
“I have to stage the vehicles,” Nick said. He looked at me then. The radio crackled once in his hand, but he didn’t answer it. “Stay in the main lodge again tonight,” he said. “Please.”
Then he turned and walked out, his boots heavy on the stone floor.
The library held its silence around me, the smell of him already fading.
On the desk, the manifest waited with my name written in my own hand at the top of the departure list.
I had not agreed to leave.
Apparently, my name had.
The pen remained between my fingers.
Click.
The sound cracked through the quiet room.
Incriminating.
My hand closed hard around the barrel, trapping the next one before it could give me away.
My phone buzzed on the table. A text from an unknown number, redirected through the lodge’s secure server.
Ask Mercer what he left unguarded.
I opened the attachment.
The photo was grainy, taken through a long lens in low light. It showed the library window from the outside. In the frame, two figures were silhouetted against the amber glow of the lamp.
Nick and me.
Sitting too close.
My pulse slowed.
Whoever had taken it had been close enough to see the library.
Close enough to see Nick.
Close enough to see exactly where his guard went thin.