Guarding the Princess - By Loreth Anne White Page 0,40

attention shifted to the animal’s tusks, then to the moisture tracking through gray dust on the inside of the bull’s back legs. His penis arced almost to the ground.

The bull flapped his ears in and out, swayed his tusks.

Slowly, carefully, Brandt shifted the gears into Reverse.

But before he could even touch the gas, the bull’s ears suddenly flattened against his head and he curled up in his trunk, lowering his head.

“Oh, hell,” Brandt whispered, hitting the gas. “He’s coming!”

Chapter 8

The elephant charged in a thundering cloud of boiling dust. Brandt floored the accelerator, one hand gripping the steering wheel, his other arm over the backseat as he tried to keep an eye on both the advancing bull while blasting the jeep backward at full throttle through thick sand. He swerved round a clump of trees, tires whirring up dirt, brush catching under the chassis.

Bang!

The jeep jarred as something hit underneath. Crap. And the bloody bull was still coming. Swinging the wheel hard, sweat drenching his shirt, blood pounding in his ears, he fishtailed backward around an outcrop of red rock.

The bull slowed near the outcrop, then stopped, his ears fanning in and out from his head. Brandt kept going, engine whining—he wasn’t certain the charge was over—but his heart sank as, in the sand in front of the jeep, trailed a black swath that was pouring out from under their vehicle like blood from a severed artery.

He brought the jeep to a stop in soft sand, his attention riveted on the animal as he carefully read the bull’s body language, the position of his ears, trunk. The elephant’s ears flared slowly out then in once more, as if deciding whether to charge again, then he turned and loped slowly into a copse of trees in the distance. Leaves began to shiver as the bull took out his grievance against the trunk of the tallest tree.

Brandt turned off the ignition, furious with himself. This entire area was populated with Mopani that had been eaten uniformly squat by elephants—he should’ve been on the lookout for the giant pachyderms. Instead, his blood had been raging and his brain clouded by this fiercely intriguing—and damn sexy—princess he was supposed be saving, not getting stomped to death by a sexually frustrated bull in musth.

Like the goddamn situation with Carla—he’d let himself get sucked in, and it could have gotten Dalilah killed.

They sat for a while, dust settling around them, on them. Heat pressed down, the sounds and scents of the bush filtering back into their consciousness as they watched the dusty gray giant in the distance.

“Jesus, that’s one mean-ass, sexually frustrated bastard.” Brandt turned to Dalilah. Her black eyes were huge, her face bloodless and streaked with dust. “You all right?”

She nodded, her gaze flicking nervously to where the beast was uprooting his tree as she reached up to wipe sweat from her brow with a trembling hand. The gesture smudged a gray streak of dirt across her face.

Brandt stared at the streak, adrenaline still slamming through his body.

“How did you know it was going to charge?” she whispered. “Usually it’s a mock charge.”

“Usually?”

“I...I’ve been on a safari before. Sometimes the game-viewing vehicles get too close, and the elephant does a little run, but it never ends in a full-blown charge.”

“Did you see the moisture down the sides of his face?”

“The tears?”

“Not tears. Temporin from glands behind his eyes. And the urine dribbling down the insides of his leg—” Brandt nodded toward the shuddering tree. “That young bull is in full musth—high as a kite on sex hormones. That sharp, bitter odor was a dead giveaway. Humans can usually pick up that scent from a few hundred meters away.” He paused. “I should’ve noticed before we even got into that situation.”

“I didn’t notice anything.”

“Not your job to.” He dragged his hand over hair thick with dust, then he swore softly. “You could see he meant business the instant he tucked his trunk under and his ears back out of harm’s way. Musth bulls, especially the young ones, can be extremely aggressive and unpredictable. You need to give them a wide berth.”

“Like someone else I know.”

He looked at her in surprise, then threw his head back and laughed. The release felt damn good. Talk about sexual frustration—this woman could read him like a book and had the nerve to say so.

“I get the impression you only smile or laugh when everything around you is going to hell in a handbasket,” she said, a glimmer of amusement