Free Proud Hearts (Wild Hearts Romance Book 2) by Phoenix Sullivan

encouraged him up, and he limped after her toward the escarpment and the rest of his waiting family.
    We followed them, and though it couldn’t have been a quarter of a mile, Caesar stopped to rest three times, and each time his mom had to encourage him up again.
    As we came up on the escarpment, Caesar’s sister bounded over to them. She sniffed the blood, then butted her head into his neck in sympathy. Exhausted, Caesar lay down, with Portia and Cleo stretching out to either side next to him, dutifully licking his wounds.
    After a few minutes, Sheba and Nana left together, each with a determined look on her face.
    “How bad off is he?” Chris asked. I noted he still held the .38, although he had thumbed the safety back on. He wasn’t a stranger to guns.
    “I can’t tell.”
    “That was his aunt with Nana going off together, wasn’t it? Where are they going?”
    “To hunt food for Caesar, I imagine.”
    “Not after the leopard?”
    “Revenge? That’s really more of a human thing.”
    “Oh,” He didn’t sound convinced, though, and the look he threw me dared me to believe all bets were off where vengeance was concerned.
    I shouldn’t have bet against him. About an hour later Sheba and Nana reappeared. Neck firmly clutched in Sheba’s jaws, its graceful body dragging the ground between her massive paws, hung the unfortunate leopard. Sheba laid it on the ground in front of the cubs with a satisfied whuff and left it there for them to eat.

CHAPTER 13

Chris
    It was the flies that bothered me the most. Thick swarms that settled over Caesar, feasting on the caked, black blood where the leopard had mauled him. They seemed worse than the wounds themselves.
    “Disgusting,” I grumbled. “Spreading disease.”
    “Only if there’s disease to be spread,” Dee pointed out. “If the animals and land are healthy, flies can be beneficial. Here’s what you can tell your audience: Flies don’t feed on live tissue. They snack on the dead stuff. They’ll lay their eggs in the deeper wounds and, if the lions don’t lick those eggs out, they’ll hatch into maggots, which will feed on dead tissue under the skin until the maggots turn into flies. They do naturally what a doctor would do with a scalpel.”
    A few minutes later, Dee swapped out the telephoto lens trained on the cub and framed me instead saying just those words. When we were done, Dee laughed—two, maybe three notes only with an accompanying shake of her head. It wasn’t a smirking laugh nor did it go on long enough to be a demeaning one either.
    “What? Did I screw it up?”
    No. No, you were perfect.”
    “Aren’t I always?”
    She blew a pfft sound my way.
    “Then what?”
    I expected ridicule; what I didn’t expect was the way her face turned sober, her green eyes serious and darkening deeper and deeper the longer she stared at me. “That was foolish, you know,” she said at last. “Running after the cub like that.”
    I shrugged. “Good television.”
    “No. That wasn’t television. That was you.”
    “So now you’re calling me a fool.”
    “Yes. And stupid.”
    “And you’re doing it on camera.” The studio editors were going to love this.
    She flipped the off switch and crossed the short distance over to me. Funny, I knew she was coming to berate me face-to-face. Yet instead of whipping up a froth of righteous indignation, I just sort of relaxed into the inevitable. Maybe a part of me believed her. I hadn’t thought, I’d simply reacted. There had been no right or wrong, only that moment and only time for a single decision. Maybe it hadn’t been the right one. But at the time, for me, it had been the only one.
    Now Dee stood before me, not even an arm’s length away, the closest she and I had intentionally been to one another. Even this close, her skin was still as flawless, her eyes as clear, her lips as full. Like a prisoner, I waited for her condemnation.
    “What you did, Chris Corsair, was foolish and stupid—and very,