unpack my lab supplies first. I’m only planning to be here a couple of days, and I have some samples to collect.” He started walking away, acting as if she was nothing more than a forgotten acquaintance. Of all the—
“Dr. Bekker.” Ahron stuck his head out of the clinic to their left. “I caught a snake in one of the pens. I put it in a jar for you.”
Jack stopped in his tracks and turned, looking at Anna with raised brows. Ahron noticed the newcomer and looked at Anna apologetically.
“Don’t worry. It’s not like it’s a black mamba,” he added, for Jack’s benefit.
Anna smiled and shrugged. Not a mamba, maybe, but the area’s pythons were deadly, too. Snakes were fairly shy about venturing through their camp, but anything could happen, which was why Niara never left the children alone. Ever. If she wasn’t with them, then Anna or another responsible person was. Plus, the kids were kept, for the most part, in screened-in areas. Jack wouldn’t be able to use that against her. She knew how to run a safe operation.
Jack cranked his neck to the side and ran a finger along the collar of the short-sleeved button-down he wore untucked, then wiped his palm on his jeans. He adjusted his backpack again. He didn’t look too comfortable and she was pretty sure it wasn’t the heat.
Perfect. A distraction.
Anna mimicked Kamau’s earlier grin. “Would you like to go see it? It’s in a jar,” she said.
“Mama! Niara said we could see the babies!”
Anna looked past Jack and her heart sank into the hot dirt. Niara came out of the mess tent with Pippa perched on her hip and Haki holding her hand. Jack turned his head to follow her gaze and almost turned back. Almost. He did a double take, zeroed in on Pippa and froze. His shoulders tensed visibly. Anna closed her eyes, but didn’t dare imagine what was going through his head.
“It’s okay with you, Anna? We didn’t mean to interrupt,” Niara said, glancing shyly at Jack.
“It’s...it’s fine.” Her voice came out weak, even to her own ears. She opened her eyes slowly. “Just stay to the outside of the enclosures, on this side.”
Niara passed with the kids, giving Anna a subtle frown. Jack’s gaze stayed trained on them. Kamau looked at Anna and cocked his head. He couldn’t know, but clearly no one had missed the uncanny resemblance—auburn curls, green eyes—between Pippa and Jack. Anna could see suspicion shading their glances. Only suspicion, she reminded herself. She hadn’t said or explained or admitted to anything. She still had some control over the situation and she needed to use it to keep Jack from closing himself off to reason. She knew firsthand how single-minded he could be.
Look where it had gotten them.
Jack stared right at Anna and she fought to hold his gaze with equal frost. She couldn’t let him win this. He narrowed his eyes and brushed the corner of his mouth against his sleeve. She tucked back a strand of hair that had escaped her ponytail and forced a smile as she set her hands on her hips, challenging him, though she felt as if she’d crawled under the bones in an elephant graveyard and died. She’d never felt so hopeless or as alienated from him as she did right now.
Poached by a single look.
* * *
JACK GLANCED AT the kids peering into the wooden pens before turning back to face Anna. Gone was the innocent, trusting smile he remembered from their college days. Instead, her skin glowed with the same kiss of sun that had lightened her tawny hair, and the expression in her burned-sugar eyes was knowing and determined.
She reached up and scratched her high cheekbone, then pushed the hair back at her temple, a habit she apparently hadn’t broken. Nervous? Maybe it was his imagination. But one thing wasn’t. The little girl who’d just called her “Mama” didn’t look a thing like her.
Jack’s head pounded and his throat felt dry. The sun. The heat. Man, he wished he was hallucinating, but no way were the indecipherable emotions ratcheting through him fake. And Anna stood before him as real as he’d ever hoped, and as disappointed as when he’d last seen her.
Disappointment. Apparently that was the one thing they had in common.
Jack shook his head and adjusted his grip on his bags. Anna scratched her elbow, then her neck, and shrugged, as if his standing there was a daily routine and she had no secrets. Nothing to hide. She’d forgotten what an open book her face was to him. She never could put on an act. Not with him.
She gestured toward his load. “I guess it makes sense to put your stuff away first. I could give you a tour after that. Not afraid of snakes, are you?” she asked.
Her attempt at a lighthearted tone was pathetic. He shook his head.
“I’m not the person who looks like they stepped on one,” he said, then walked off.
Anna Bekker had it coming.
CHAPTER TWO
JACK SET HIS BELONGINGS on the cot adjacent to where Dr. Odaba said he slept, glad that the doctor had been called off as soon as they’d reached the framed tent. Jack regretted displacing whoever the cot belonged to, but had been told that the keepers usually ended up sleeping with the baby elephants. It improved survival rates. In any case, he needed a minute to digest what had just happened outside. What he’d seen. He sat on the edge of the cot and braced his forearms on his legs, trying to run some calculations. Jet lag and lack of sleep weren’t helping. He pinched the bridge of his nose.
That little girl had to be, what, four or five? She spoke better than his three-year-old nephew, was a bit taller, too. He rubbed at the tightness in his chest. No way. The Anna he knew would have said something. The Anna he knew, who’d worn a promise ring through high school and veterinary school, who’d always valued family, would have said something. Maybe he was jumping to conclusions.
He fished out his bottle and took a swig of warm water, then got up and paced, trying to remember the details of what had happened that day after her graduation, when everything she’d ever believed in had shattered.
And she’d turned to him.
Big mistake.
He’d tried to do the right thing, tried to be there for her. As much as he’d hoped to be, he knew he wasn’t good enough for her then, and she’d apparently agreed. Her choice had said it all. Nothing had changed.
Two abrupt taps at the screen door had him looking up. Anna. A mixture of fury and longing for what might have been smacked him in the gut. No. Never look back. “We need to talk, Jack,” Anna said through the screen. She waited with her hands tucked in her front pockets, eyes on the floor. Couldn’t face him, could she?
He got up and took two easy strides to the door. He opened it wide and turned his palm to the room. “Mi casa es su casa. How would they say that in Swahili? But wait, I’m guessing you don’t need an invitation, since you seem to run things as you see fit.”
“Jack, even with the canvas rolled down, voices carry. We need to talk in private. Please.”
He stepped closer to her, deliberately breaching her personal space. She looked up at him with doelike innocence. He folded his arms and lowered his voice.
“If you want to talk in private, guess I can assume she’s mine.”
Anna looked away, but not before he saw her eyes glisten with moisture that she swallowed hard against. He watched the tense movement of her neck and the grinding of her jaw. He remembered how she would grind her teeth while studying for an exam. He used to stay in the library with her, long after the research labs sequestered in the top floors of the vet school were locked up. He’d spend half the time working on his master’s thesis and half watching over her. Waiting to make sure she got back to her apartment safely. Didn’t seem as if she needed help anymore.
“Well, there’s my answer. You think you could spare me a few words to go along with that?