Jade

My eyes grew misty and my throat tightened. Jesus, he was gonna think I was a human seesaw. In truth, my emotions were all over the place. My heart boomed really hard in my ears and part of me was delirious that he wanted to have…what? Something with me? The other part of me was terrified, because I didn’t think I could have a fling with Matthias and then carry on as if he was just another hook up.

I hid my emotional reaction by lifting the camera to my face. I put my eye to the viewfinder, zoomed in on a dark dot racing on the golden savanna, and found a pair of ostriches going through the motions of a mating dance. Click, click, click. I loved the soothing sound.

“Jade?” he said, after a little while. “Your turn now.”

I groaned inwardly. He hadn’t told me everything I wanted to know, but wasn’t going to let me off the hook either.

“Come on.” He nudged me softly with his elbow. “I’ve never given that self-righteous little speech to anyone else before. You’ve got to make an effort too.”

I sighed and lowered the camera. “The thing is…” How could I even begin? “I’m not very good at this. In fact, I’m a disaster. So I swore off men. No offense, but I want to keep it that way.”

There. I’d said my piece, even if the better part of me wanted to violently choke me for it.

“You swore off all men?” He lifted his hat and scratched his head, before he donned his hat again. “Damn. That’s harsh, don’t you think?”

“Maybe, but it worked.” I raised the camera to my eye and began shooting again. “In the last year, I’ve had a measure of peace. Peace is not something that comes very easy to me.”

“Why not?”

“Oh, you know.” I kept shooting. “Old shit and stuff like that.”

His hand landed softly on my arm. “Can you please put the camera down?”

Reluctantly, I lowered the camera and let it hang from the strap.

“Thank you,” he said. “So what’s this old shit and stuff?”

“Junk,” I said, “stuff I don’t want to talk about. Kind of like you and your leg.”

He seemed to absorb that for a moment. “Fair enough. So we’ll skip that part and talk about why you gave men up in the first place.”

Right. Just kill me now.

“Come on,” he urged me on. “Give it a try.”

“I have a really bad eye.” I stuffed my idle hands in my pockets and stared at my feet. “I’m attracted to dangerous situations. I can’t tell the good apples from the bad. I like bad boys, men who cheat, lie and treat women like shit. And then of course, as soon as I figure it out, which is usually, like, pretty quick, I hate those sons of bitches. It’s that sort of mumbo-jumbo twisted crap you hear all the time.”

“Hmm.” He considered what I’d said. “So am I a bad boy in your eyes?”

“Hell, I wouldn’t know the difference if it smacked me in the face.”

“Then why not try to find out?”

“It’s too freaking confusing.”

“Then let me ask this,” he said. “Why are you always attracted to bad boys?”

“It’s got to do with the way I grew up.” I put a lid on the bad memories that threatened to spring out of the can and trounced on. “My biological mother supported her heroin habit by bringing men to the house. My true mother thinks her taste in men fashioned mine. Revolting, I know, but she might be right. Maybe I just have bad genes.”

His shades aimed at me. “Sounds like you had a tough time growing up.”

“It sucked, but I stuck it out and survived. You lost your foot. I got to grow up with an addict and a psycho. So what. People like us, we go on. I’m here and honestly? I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

“Okay,” he said. “Can you at least tell me how you ended up with the Romos?”

“Oh, come on!”

“I get you don’t want to talk about your childhood,” he said, “but your adoptive parents are not out of bounds, are they?”

“Anita and Joseph Romo are awesome,” I said. “Anita was a judge in family court. I ended up in front of her on a charge of assault and robbery.”

His eyebrows spiked. “Assault and robbery?”

“Yep.” I felt obligated to elaborate so he wouldn’t think I was a serial killer. “My biological mother taught me to shoplift if I wanted to eat. That’s how the robbery part began. First gig with the police? Age five. I had a few more encounters with the law before it got serious.”

“As in how serious?”

“There was this pimp and drug dealer that used to hang out at our place, a real piece of crap. The woman who birthed me was his number one girl. He tried to rape me when I was twelve. So I hit him over the head with a shovel and took all his junk, including his merchandise, and flushed it down the toilet. My own mother called the cops on me. So there you have it.”

I bit down on my lips and stole a mortified glance in Matthias direction. His forehead was furrowed in thought and his gaze was fast on me as if his mind was trying to infiltrate mine. I never talked about that stuff. Why the hell had I just told him that story?

I snapped. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like how?” he said.

“I know what people think when they hear a story like that.” I fiddled with my camera. “They think I come from trash and to trash I should return.”

“Jesus, Jade, I sure hope that sassy mouth of yours is getting ahead of you, ’cause that’s not what I’m thinking at all.”

“Oh, yeah?” I cocked my eyebrows. “Then what are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking you’ve always been brave,” he said. “I’m thinking I’m glad you took care of that asshole, otherwise I might’ve had to go looking for him myself.”

I don’t know why, but my eyes welled up. Me. Tears. Twice in one day. No way. I dug my nails in my palms and got myself under control. Part of me was touched by Matthias’s words. He wanted to protect me. The other part was mildly offended. I could take care of myself, had done so for as far back as I remembered. I was about to say so when a plume of dust appeared in the distance, announcing the approach of a vehicle. Matthias got on the radio to figure out if it was one of his.

I aimed my camera at the truck and zoomed in my lens. “Tourists?”

“Lost ones.” He tracked the vehicle with his binoculars. “They’re a while out yet. So what happened after you met Anita Romo?”

His mind was like a laser-guided Hellfire.

“She and her husband came to see me at juvi jail,” I said. “They told me about their daughter, Amber. Funny story. She was Amber and I was Jade. I guess they were into semi-precious stones?”

Matthias’s lips curved up. “And?”

“Amber overdosed on heroin at fifteen.”

His mouth thinned. “Tough.”

“It was real tough going for the Romos for a while,” I said. “They’d lost their only daughter to drugs. I’d lost my biological mother to drugs. I mean, she wasn’t dead, but for all practical purposes she might as well have been, because I was yanked out of her place and she didn’t even care. My mother chose drugs and her crappy pimp instead of me.”

His lips compressed even tighter.

“The Romos suggested we were a natural fit.” I shrugged. “I had my doubts, but they insisted. It was hard for me. I couldn’t believe they wanted me.”

“Why not?” Matthias asked.

“My own mother didn’t want me,” I said. “Why should they?” At thirteen, I was an epic mess, a teenage nightmare, bad news all around. “We went through some really rough spots and yet Anita and Joseph stuck with me. They offered me something I didn’t think I could have.”

“And that was?”

“In their words?”

“Sure.”

I hesitated for a moment, throat tight with the memory, then forced myself to say the magical words. “They offered me a forever home.”

Matthias’s Adam’s apple bounced on his throat. “And that put you over the hump?”

“I didn’t believe in the concept at all. I thought of it as a huge cliché. I mean, everyone is always talking about forever this, forever that, blah, blah, blah. But I didn’t believe in forever.” I wasn’t sure I believed in it now either. Sometimes my life felt like a ticking clock waiting for the next blast. “But hey, I believed in for now. Plus they were sweet, and I needed a place to stay.”

“So at thirteen, you were already the queen of skeptics,” Matthias put in.

“I learned skepticism right on the delivery table, when my mother demanded a fix.” When a little girl didn’t have a today, how was she supposed to believe in forever?

“And yet, here you are, all these years later, tight as you can be with the Romos.” Matthias mouth turned up at the corners. “They sound like amazing people.”

“They are.” I said. “My parents changed my life.”

“And you changed theirs,” Matthias said.

The cynic in me rebelled against this conversation. “How would you even know that?”

“Your mom told me,” he said. “Last night, when I talked to her on the satellite phone.”

Holy shit. “You called my mom?” My mind couldn’t stop spinning. “But…why?”

“I called them to introduce myself.” Matthias flashed a wolfish grin. “I figured they’d feel better if they knew some basic things about the guy you’re gonna be dating.”

My heart came to a screeching stop. “Excuse me?”

“Babe…” He stared at me, his mischievous grin expanding on his face. “Your parents have a right to know.”

Babe?

“Have you lost your freaking marbles?” The man standing next to me was certifiably insane. “There’s nothing to know!”

“Wrong. You and I? We’re getting together. No way around it.” He exhaled a frustrated breath. “Stand down, Jade. I don’t like the look on your face.”

I opened my mouth and closed it. “What look?”

“That one, the one you’re wearing right now, where you roll your eyes like a zebra about to kick off a stampede.” He shot me a long suffering look. “We both tried. Right? We each tried to eject from this trajectory since day one. But it didn’t work. We’re locked in the cockpit. We either get this jet to fly straight or we’re gonna crash in a hail of flames.”

Sarcasm was my last ditch defense. “That has to be the most romantic declaration I’ve heard since that shepherd at the Kabul market offered me two goats for a whiff of my panties.”

“No guy in his right mind is gonna sniff any part of you while I’m around.” The smile was gone from his face, replaced instead by that really intense expression that made his nostrils flare and his eyes spark with golden light. “Can’t you see? It’s like we were genetically engineered for each other. I mean, honestly. Who else is gonna put up with your hot head? And who the hell is gonna put up with me? It’s only a matter of when, babe. Your call.”

There wasn’t enough air in the Serengeti to inflate my lungs. “You seem pretty sure of something I’m not counting on.”

“My gut is telling me I’m right,” he said, “and I always trust my gut. You got a problem with that?”

I stared at Matthias. How the hell did I punt on something like that? My heart was jammed in my throat. Where could I start to unravel this mess?

“I called your parents because I wanted to know more about you,” he explained patiently, probably in response to the now overt panic he saw on my face. “I might look dangerous to you, but that stuff you do to my brain? That’s seriously terrifying to me.”

I was in shock, and yet I could understand that last part, because he felt equally terrifying to me. “So you decided to check me out?”

“As thoroughly as possible,” he admitted. “If I’m going to have a girl, and she doesn’t talk a lot about herself, I want to know who the hell she is.”

Talk about being blown away. He’d called my parents. He was sure we were getting together. He’d called me babe. God have mercy. I shivered inside, from shock, from delight I could never admit out loud, from terror all over again.

“Um…” I curled my fingers and stared at my nails. “Just curious. What did Mom say?”

“She told me you were a tough nut to crack.” He smirked. “She warned me that your skull is thicker than a Kevlar helmet and you kick as hard as a mule.”

Sounded like Mom.

“She told me a story,” he said. “When you first moved in, she told you to decorate your room however you wanted. She said you painted your room black as night and hung a poster of skulls and crossbones on the door, just to piss her off.”

Yep, he’d talked to Mom for sure. I’d hated the dark bedroom with all my heart. For the first three months, I’d snuck out after she and Dad went to bed and slept in one of six cheerfully decorated guestrooms with the lights on.

Matthias trudged on like a hippo on a hippo trail. “Your mother said that, one day, she left an assortment of paint cans by your door. Three days later, your room was purple with green and blue unicorns on the walls, proving that your true heart wasn’t black at all.”

My face was so hot it was probably on fire. I swear, I was going to give Mom a piece of my mind for sharing that ridiculous story. I was going to give Matthias a piece of my mind too, for…what? Reaching out to my parents? Being nice? Taking an interest in me?

Most people would be happy if something like that happened to them. Most women would be thrilled to have the attention of someone as seriously hot as Matthias. He was smart, capable, and sharp. But I wasn’t most people. I was jaded—no pun intended—and the world was full of scum. The Romos were the only people in the world I’d been able to come to terms with. And Hannah, of course, although in a different way. I’d never really had the will to add to that short list. My emotional real estate was rather limited. Did I have any room in my shriveled up heart to fit anyone else?

“So you don’t trust men in general,” he said. “I get that, given your background. But you trust Joseph Romo, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” I said, tentatively. “He’s a jewel.”

“He served as a marine,” Matthias said. “You served as a marine.”

“I followed him into the Corps, what’s wrong with that?”

“Absolutely nothing wrong,” he said. “You also chose to be his daughter.”

“Yeah, so?”

“There’s the proof.”

“Proof of what?”

“You don’t have bad genes.” His perfectly formed lips turned up at the ends. “You’re able to make good choices for yourself. You did, when you chose Joseph Romo as your dad.”

Was he right?

I tried to wrap my head around everything he was saying. “Why would you even want to get together with someone like me?”

“You need reasons? Okay, I’ll give you reasons. You’re brave, gutsy, brainy, and gorgeous.” He lifted one finger after the other. “You care, I saw you with the kids at the orphanage. You can run like a cheetah, shoot like a sniper, and you’ve got the heart of a lioness. You don’t take shit from anybody. You stood up to a grizzly sow in Montana, for Christ’s sake. By the way, I looked that up. If all of that wasn’t enough, you kicked Kumbuyo in the nuts. You’re like my definition of the perfect woman, custom tailored for me. I’ll admit, you’re a little on the surly side of sweet, but I’m hooked on you, so what the hell.”

“But—”

“Give it up, babe.” His eyes sparkled. “Let’s get this thing going.”

“This is nuts.” I groaned in frustration. “You may have gotten the lowdown from my mother, but I don’t know squat about you.”

“The name’s Hawking, but you know that. My father’s a veterinarian in Helena, my mother’s a social worker. Four brothers. They raise dogs in Montana. The rest we can figure out along the way. Any questions?”

The father’s profession might explain Matthias’s love for wildlife and conservation. Maybe the mother’s occupation offered a hint of why he’d consider hanging out with someone like me. God help me. Why was I thinking like this?

Because I’d never, ever, met a guy quite as bold, straightforward, and determined as Matthias Hawking.

Much to my relief, his radio came alive. He listened, gave some commands, and lifted his hand in the air when his two original rangers came into view.

“Anything?” I said.

“Nothing.” He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Doctor Valdez?”

“Negative for cyanide,” the doctor shouted back.

I let out the breath I’d been holding. “That’s good news, right?”

“Excellent news,” he said. “The entire ecosystem suffers when a waterhole is poisoned.”

And there I saw it again, how much he cared, not just for his people and the elephants, but for the land, for all the creatures small and large. And now he was kind of, sort of saying that he cared about me too?

Internal meltdown. I needed to get the hell out of here.

The team began to pack up their samples and equipment. Matthias put his hand over his brow to cut down the glare and observed the approaching vehicle. He scrambled down the Land Rover, offered me a hand, and helped me off the hood as if I were some dainty princess.

“We’re gonna have to finish this conversation later,” he said before he stepped onto the road and signaled for the truck to stop.

Later? He had grit, I gave him that. But this conversation had been earth shattering enough for me as it was. I was terrified about everything he’d said, about the way he was looking at me right now, about the way I felt about him. He was right. I teetered at the very edge of my stampede mode.

The newly arrived open-sided 4WD came to a stop next to Matthias. “Papers please?” he said to the driver, who quickly produced the permits. “You do realize that you’re in a restricted area?”

“Matthias, darling, it’s me.” The woman sitting behind the driver took off her wide-rim hat and gave Matthias a smile that iced my spine. “Surprise!”

“Mei.” Matthias’s back straightened. His gaze shifted briefly to my face, before he returned his attention to the woman. “What are you doing out here and why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”

“I came to show off the reserve to my guests,” she said. “I thought you’d be happy to see me.”

Matthias cleared his throat. “You know this area is not authorized for tourists.”

“We must have missed our turn.” The woman batted her long lashes. “Meet Tao Sun Lei, CEO of China Railroad Construction.” She shifted to Chinese and introduced Matthias to the man and his companions. “It is Mister Lei’s first time to Africa.”

“Me, down,” the man said, pointing to himself and then to the waterhole.

“I’m sorry, sir, but stepping out of the vehicle is forbidden to all visitors.”

“Me, like them,” the man said with a touch of bluster, pointing to me and the research team packing the truck.

“I’m afraid Mister Lei’s English is not the best.” Mei flashed an apologetic smile.

“That’s fine, my Chinese sucks.” Matthias spoke slowly, deliberately. “These individuals have special permission to step out of their vehicle for the purpose of scientific research. Mei, perhaps you’d like to guide Mr. Lei to the eastern border, where he can see the herds of Cape buffalo and wildebeest crossing the river from the safety of his vehicle.”

“Cape buffalo?” The man’s sour face lit up. “Good to eat?”

“I guess,” Matthias said reluctantly.

“Wildebeest?” the man said. “Good to eat?”

“In a pinch.”

“Giraffe?” the man said. “Good to eat?”

“For God’s sake,” Matthias muttered under his breath. “Mei, tell your visitor that we don’t eat our national treasure. And do me a favor. Get him and his friends out of here.”

“Sure, Matt-eese.” The way she said his name rankled me, sweet and overly familiar. Then Mei’s eyes fell on me. “Oh, hi, Mission Protect. Have you seen the elephants yet?”

Mei said something else in Chinese and the men in the back of the truck lifted up their cameras and aimed them at me. They began to click as if I were some rare wildlife species who’d stepped out of my kopje for the exclusive purpose of gracing their photographic collection.

Matthias must have sensed my outrage or else the steam blowing from my top gave me away. “I think it’s time for you to get out of here.”

“Sure,” Mei said sweetly. “We’re staying at the Canyon Side Lodge. See you tonight?”

Matthias glanced at me then returned his gaze to Mei. “Maybe.”

Her smile widened. “Dinner?”

“We’ll see.”

I gnawed on my lips. My not so tepid blood had gone from hot to boil. And to think a moment ago he’d been calling me “babe” and I’d remotely considered that maybe he’d be a good candidate for…what?

I sure knew how to pick them.

“Run along, Mei,” Matthias said. “You need to go.” He sent her and her friends on their way with a wave.

“What?” he said, when he turned and met my glare.

“Does Mei come out here often?”

“She likes to escort Chinese bigwigs on safari,” he said. “She also patronizes the reserve every once in a while.”

“She likes to patronize the reserve or you?”

He eyed me cautiously. “Jade…”

“Oh, please, don’t you Jade me.”

“I need you to go with me on this one.”

“Right.” I crossed my arms. “Why would I do that?”

“Because of everything I told you today?”

I lifted my hands in the air. “And then…this?”

“Jesus, Jade, give me a break here.”

“A break?” I scoffed. “Is that what Mei is? Is Claudette a break too? Who else? Am I another break in your break collection?”

He clenched so hard that his jaw flinched. “You need to trust me.”

“Ha!” I laughed.

“There’s a lot that we don’t know about each other.”

“No kidding.”

“Things are never exactly the way they look.”

“Amen to that, buddy.”

I stomped over to the truck and helped pack the last of the gear. He waited until the rest of the team went back for the last load then stalked over to where I stood next to the Land Rover.

“My life is not nice and tidy. So what?” he muttered, his tone clipped, his eyes copper dark. “I can’t lay it all out for you right now. No excuses. This is who I am. Hell, Jade, a saint I’ve never been.”

“Good for you.” I grabbed my backpack from the front seat and threw it on the backseat.

I was about to climb into the truck when his arm came around my waist—strong, muscular and paralyzing. He held me in place, body pressed hard against my back. The bulk of his erection rubbed against my ass. His hot breath blustered over the back of my neck.

“You don’t know what this thing with Mei is, but you’re using it as an excuse.” His proximity rattled my resolve. “You’re scared and you’re running. Don’t run Jade. Not from me.”

I was stung, because he was right, although this time around I was running for the right reasons. I took a deep breath, disentangled myself from his arms, and climbed to the very back of the Land Rover. “I don’t need an excuse to say no to you. Leave me alone.”

Matthias launched a scathing look in my direction but he didn’t say anything else, because the rest of the crew arrived with their stuff and began to climb into the truck. I didn’t feel an ounce of compassion for him. I sat with Sarah in the very back of the truck and didn’t spare him so much as another word.

“Something wrong?” Sarah asked as we sped back to the station.

“Not a thing.”

Mei and Matthias had something going on. She was hot for him and he catered to her whims in a way that erased anything sweet he’d ever said to me and confirmed he was one of those mistakes I’d been avoiding for the last year.

We drove straight back to the lodge. Matthias didn’t show up for dinner. I congratulated myself for recognizing the signs of disaster when I saw them. I locked my door that night and every night for the rest of the week.