“Keep your arm inside the jeep,” he ordered as one of the tree branches scraped down the side of the jeep. “Those thorns will shred skin to ribbons.”
Dalilah removed her elbow from where she’d been resting it on the door.
“You didn’t say where we were actually going after we get up to the plateau,” she said, wiping sweat from her brow with the back of her hand.
“A safe place.”
“Like, where?”
“Like, you don’t need to worry about it.”
Exasperation flushed through her. “Anyone ever tell you you were short on both words and manners?”
“Get down!” He swerved as a branch whipped inside the jeep, and Dalilah flung herself onto his lap.
He grinned as she looked up at him in shock.
“You did that on purpose!” Dalilah snapped as she shoved herself back into a sitting position. The brackets around his mouth creased and fine lines fanned out from his eyes, but he said nothing.
“I know what you’re doing, Brandt! You’re being a cantankerous boor to keep me all worked up. You think if I’m angry, I’ll focus on survival and won’t wimp out on you!”
“If you’ve shown me one thing, Princess, it’s that you don’t do wimpy.”
She glowered at him. “Is that a compliment or insult?”
“Fact.” He chuckled low and throaty, but without the sound of real mirth. “And you got that right. I am a Boer—come from good old Dutch-Afrikaner farming stock.”
“I said boor, not Boer.”
He chuckled again and she muttered a curse in Arabic, grabbed the bottle of water and took a big angry swig as she turned her body away from him and sat in simmering silence.
The veldt stretched endlessly to the horizon, just rocky outcrops, thorny trees, dry, dead grass, dun soil. The wind died, and heat began to shimmer in oscillating waves off the land. Dalilah lifted her thick hair off her neck, wishing she had something to tie it up with, but there was no way she was going to ask Brandt Stryker for help.
Abruptly Dalilah felt the jeep slow, then stop. She swung round in the seat, instantly worried.
“Look...over there,” he said softly, pointing into the distance.
About a hundred yards out, as if materializing from the interplay of shadow and light in the trees, two graceful giraffes stood side by side, looping their necks around each other. Brandt cut the engine.
Heat pressed down, the engine ticking as it cooled. The sounds of the bush seemed to rise from nowhere to envelop them—the slight rustle of grasses, the clicking of grasshoppers. The faint chorus of a million birds that exploded suddenly into the sky, swarming in unison, alighting on a tree, then bursting up from the branches in a riot of movement as the flock moved to another tree.
Dalilah shaded her eyes, and as she watched the towering animals swinging their necks, everything else seemed to slip into the far reaches of her mind. No Manhattan. No Haroun. No looming wedding. She felt a shift in Brandt’s energy, too, and glanced up into his face. He met her gaze for a brief moment, and Dalilah saw something dark and hungry. But his eyes narrowed abruptly and he turned away. That’s when it really hit Dalilah—Brandt was fighting an attraction to her. He was angry with himself for overstepping the line, and with her for enabling him.
“Two males,” he said, nodding toward the animals. “You can tell by the lack of hair on top of their horns—they rub them smooth by fighting. And see over there?” He pointed, and Dalilah was conscious of the golden hairs on his strong, tanned forearm. “In the trees to the right—there’s the female they’re fighting over.”
“That’s fighting?”
He nodded.
They watched for a few seconds longer as the giraffes, torsos pressed together, did a sidestepping movement, like a dance, gangly legs moving in perfect choreography. Then suddenly, the giraffe with the darker markings swung his neck down low then slammed it hard up into the other male’s neck. A slapping sound carried over the veldt.
Dalilah’s stomach clenched. The light-colored giraffe seemed stunned by the blow and stumbled as it tried to sidestep away from the aggressor. But the larger, darker giraffe stepped in time with him, keeping his torso pressed against his opponent.
“The one on the left, the lighter-colored, younger male is trying to get away now,” Brandt explained as the older one looped his neck down again and swung it hard up against the other animal with another resounding crack.
Dalilah gritted her teeth, her hand fisting.
The younger giraffe staggered and its long legs buckled slowly under its body. It hit the ground in a puff of red dust, the tawny rise of its torso just visible through the gold grasses. The older giraffe hovered above the fallen animal, leg raised, hoof poised to kick, his head held high. When the fallen animal struggled to stand, the old male kicked hard, and its opponent went back down.