from up on the plateau.” He reached into the giant cooler on the seat behind him as he spoke, his eyes fixed on the terrain ahead. He came out with another apple and a bottle of water.
“Breakfast,” he said, dumping them in her lap. “I’ll make you some tea later.”
“Tea?” A sudden craving for the strong, warm sweet liquid filled her with a kind of desperation. “How?”
“Found a gas burner and kettle in the back with the shovel. Tea bags come from the bush camp.”
She positioned the water bottle between her knees and unscrewed the cap with her good hand. “I’m impressed that you got all this stuff,” she said, raising the bottle to her lips. “We could go for days—”
“Hope not,” he said crisply.
She paused, bottle midair. “Me, too. I was just—”
“Eat,” he said brusquely. “Drink.”
Dalilah glared at him, something immediately resisting inside her. She wasn’t accustomed to being ordered around. Her brothers tried, but she fought them every step of the way. It had become a reflex—her life was dominated by too many alpha men trying to push her around for her own damn good.
In spite of her thirst, Dalilah’s mouth flattened and she recapped the water bottle. She set the bottle and apple on the seat next to her.
He cast her a sideways glance, the sun’s rays filtering through the trees making his eyes an even paler blue.
“You really should eat.”
“I will when I’m hungry.” She was drawing her own little line in the sand, for whatever that was worth. But it made her feel stronger.
He was about to argue, but stopped himself, a whisper of another wry smile ghosting his lips. He found her rebellion amusing. Her blood began to boil.
As the sun climbed higher into the sky, the air grew humid and blisteringly hot. The jeep bumped and bounced over increasingly rocky terrain. Trees went from green to a blackish-gray, leafless, sharp. Strips of bark hung from trunks. Surprise rippled through Dalilah as she became suddenly aware of silvery monkeys in the branches around them. The troop was watching them pass. Silent. Menacing.
Qua-waaaaee—Go awaaaay. Qua-waaaaee—Go awaaaay. The sad call of a gray lorie again.
Brandt glanced up into the trees, and she could sense a renewed tension in him. In spite of the heat, a ripple of coolness trickled down Dalilah’s neck.
Soon they were out on a plain again, this one dotted with the iconic acacia trees of Africa. White thorns as long as her middle finger and fat as a pencil stuck out from the branches.
“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