A Delicious Mistake Read online

  Benjamin’s breathing caught and hitched with every sensuous rise of her thighs against his, and with every luxurious arching of her hips.

  “What have you done to me?” he whispered.

  Or had she had imagined it? Whether he had truly spoken that sentence or not, she didn’t know. Sarah smiled. It felt impossibly exhilarating to know she had so much power over a man—particularly this man.

  Wave after wave, she rode her ecstasy and submerged her body into his—the pressure built inside her, irresistible and unstoppable. Sarah’s moans filled the night. Perhaps she should have worried about being heard, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. In that moment, nothing and no one else mattered. The crackling fire between them rose in a passionate crescendo—fast and faster and high and higher, until it suddenly and somewhat unexpectedly reached its peak.

  The climax hit her, washed through her, charged with such electricity and power that she cried out. She hung onto Benjamin, spent, her heart twisting with emotion. She knew he would break her heart if she wasn’t careful. Sarah had planned on being as careful as humanly possible, but she had the feeling that was already shot to hell. When it was over, she collapsed back against the one pillow on Benjamin’s cot. There was no strength left in her. She felt wonderfully, blissfully spent. Even as Benjamin traced a burning path of passionate kisses along the length of her throat, she couldn’t find the energy to return those gestures. She contented herself with the delicate vibration of pleasure that ran down her spine and settled in her belly.

  Benjamin continued to touch her, his movements languid with a seemingly surfeit-induced slowness. Exhausted, she felt torn between the urge to sob and the desire to laugh. Now it was her turn to wonder what exactly had he done to her? The pleasure brought on by the unexpected sexual experience they had just shared had been as deep, intense, and joyful as she’d always wanted. But as her mind slowly lifted back into her, Sarah gradually returned to her senses. Something else came along. An ache. A strange sense of unfulfilled nostalgia filled her and left a hole inside. She stared up at Benjamin and she thought of other things.

  Her childhood. Luke. Her darling, older brother.

  Sarah wanted nothing more than to find that undying trust she had once felt toward Benjamin again. Where had that gone? She had once trusted him with her life as she followed him around the Serengeti. At first she had wanted to believe in him—but she had had so many doubts. There were so many facts staring at her. Why couldn’t she dismiss the possibility that he was responsible for the crime that had brought her back to Africa all the way from England? Why shouldn’t she find it an absurd notion? She wanted nothing more than to trust him, utterly and completely like she had done in the past, like she had just done with her body. But this was about Luke. She couldn’t betray him or his memory. Too many factors didn’t add up. Too many suspicions still remained. Too many doubts. Too many questions.

  And she might have just fucked herself quite literally out of ever getting an answer to any of them.

  She had tried to resist, really she had. At the very least, Sarah told herself, she had wanted to resist. She had wanted to resist him. But Benjamin’s power hadn’t been that easy to sidestep. His technique had not been outward—it had been subtle, perfidious. He had known just how to tempt her—and just how to touch her. He’d caused her body to go in full mutiny mode right from the heart. As her brain slowly but surely roused itself from the afterglow, Sarah knew this could turn out to be the biggest mistake she had ever made in her life. It could mean her ruin. It could also mean a salvation of all she wanted to believe in. But, just like all mistakes, it could never, ever be undone.

  Sarah knew she would soon have to face the consequences that came with having allowed her body’s hunger—and her desire for Benjamin—to weaken her mind and spirit. Irrational yearning had caused her to betray all of her moral codes. But her inner compass had always been true, spot-on—inescapable. Had her body known what her mind could not accept—that Benjamin was still the boy who had protected her when she’d been a child? Was his brilliant smile honest and not a cover for more devious plans?

  She had never strayed from what was right before. But now she had done so in a spectacular, irreparable way. She thought she knew herself and who and what she was. Right now, however, she wasn’t so sure. Not anymore. And she still had the burden of learning the truth about what had happened to Luke.

  Chapter Two: Akin to a Brother

  Three weeks ago…

  Luke Hutton believed that man was drawn to nature by some inner, ancestral bond—that he searched for communion with nature because he was nature, even though mankind tended to forget this. Some men could live all their life never looking for themselves in the mountains, or by the ocean, while others simply could not stand to ignore the wild that called to their inner self. Luke Hutton knew he was such a man. All his life he had longed to feel at one with nature, and he had found that the place where he could do that—the one place on Earth where his inner self truly responded to the call, were the endless plains of the Serengeti. He thought it was no coincidence the Maasai had dubbed the area “siringet—or the place where the land runs on forever. That sense of infinity gave Luke everything he longed for in life.

  He smiled as he drove his favorite Ranger Jeep over the rough terrain of the plains, heading toward the foothills of the National Park. The heat was dry and intense, but it didn’t faze him. Luke had grown used to it. He had been at ease in the sweltering temperatures ever since he could remember. He felt way more like himself under the scorching African sun then at the mercy of the cold rain in London.

  “Thomas and I found another pitfall trap yesterday,” he said as he kept his eyes trained on the treacherous terrain ahead. “That’s the second one this month. These poachers are showing no signs of slowing down. They’re getting cockier and bolder.”

  It worried him. It worried him immensely, and, quite frankly, it pissed him off. The poaching had been going on for quite a while now, and Luke was rapidly becoming fed up.

  Benjamin frowned and kept his eyes on the road. Beneath Luke’s careless, casual tone, Benjamin could sense his friend’s tension. Luke’s anger was a palpable entity—Benjamin could see it in his fists curled tightly around the wheel, so tight that his knuckles had gone pale, on his, taut, tanned features, and in the sharpness of his pale blue eyes.

  Luke wasn’t the only one who was troubled by the recent events.

  Benjamin had spent quite a few sleepless nights himself. He tried to make sure he kept a positive attitude, especially around their youngest rangers, such as young Thomas Blake, but at night his fears leaked out. Benjamin had been a ranger at the Huttons’ game farm for years. He had done such a good job that he had been promoted to Ranger Manager and now he got to face scenes of poaching almost on a daily basis.

  There was no getting used to it. It saddened and angered him that in recent years the poachers had gotten more dangerous and desperate. Fighting poaching and other unlawful activities in the Game Lodge had changed drastically from the early years when the most they had to worry about was the occasional starving man armed with a bow and arrows. Those were the good old days. Now wildlife crime was a massive business with a network spanning continents. It made for brutal adversaries who were truly capable of anything—against beasts and men.

  Benjamin and Luke’s daily routine consisted in commuting from dawn till dusk, bouncing a Jeep over bad roads and risking constant tire puncturing from jagged rocks. Then again, a flat tire was the least of their worries. The real threat to the animals came in the form of soulless, heavily-armed rural poaching gangs, which made their job a life-and-death predicament.

  “You’re right,” Benjamin finally said, turning to look at the tense form of his best friend. “They are getting bolder. Even worse, they’re increasing their ranks. I went into town yesterday and rumor has it there might be the chance of new poachers having recently moved into our territory.” The words tasted bitt
er on his tongue. If the stories were indeed true, that made for a very bleak scenario indeed.

  “I heard that, too,” Luke said. “I’m thinking about going back to the area where we found the pitfall trap yesterday. They’re bound to have left some tracks. There’s no way they could have just vanished. Perhaps a more accurate examination of the area will lead somewhere.”

  Benjamin nodded. “I’ll follow up on the leads I got from the locals. We’re bound to come up with something. Someone’s got to make a misstep sooner or later.”

  Truth be told, he was beginning to despair that any of these poachers would ever betray themselves. He would never admit that out loud. Not even—and especially not—to Luke Hutton.

  “Do you really think they’ll talk?” Luke asked. He glanced over, worry and skepticism in his eyes.

  Benjamin shrugged. “Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. It’s worth a try.”

  A few months ago one of the locals had tipped them off about a location where they could catch poachers who were removing tusks from the carcass of an African elephant they had just killed. But such events were rare. Locals didn’t want to expose themselves to reprisals or arrest, and so would only give out vague information, and sometimes Benjamin didn’t really know what to make of the clues they had been given.

  “I hope we get something,” Luke said. “Someone,” he said correcting himself with a frustrated breath. “They’re decimating our wildlife and the government is doing nothing to help us.”

  It was true. They were on their own. They didn’t necessarily have all the resources or the expertise to fight this threat alone. But that did not mean they wouldn’t try. Benjamin was glad in a way that Sarah, Luke’s sister, had stayed in London and had not returned to Africa. This was not the Serengeti she had known as a girl. But sometimes he thought of her— she with her burnished red hair which seemed as warm as the earth and her pale skin that took on a golden hue from the sun. He thought of her often and wondered if she had married—had she found herself a man? What did she look like now that she was fully grown? He had known when she was a girl that she would be beautiful. But as the daughter of the Huttons, she had been as far above him as the sun in the sky—or so his father and his mother had told him. And so he had become a brother to Luke, and a guardian to Sarah. At least until her and her family had left. But Luke had returned, and Benjamin had again settled into his spot at the side of the man who was closer to him than any blood relative.

  As they drove on, they passed a group of excited tourists being treated to a view of the wildlife in the northern regions of the Serengeti—the regions Benjamin and Luke tried so hard to watch over. Zebras, dik diks, lions, and of course, the buckling wildebeests—the animals brought these vast plains to life. They were the plains. Benjamin never waned to imagine a world where these animals and landscapes simply didn’t exist anymore. The Serengeti was a part of him, and he was a creature of the Serengeti. He would do anything to save it, despite the government’s lack of assistance, and he wouldn’t be alone.

  He knew that Luke felt exactly the same way and was hell bent in fighting as fiercely and tenaciously as he was. After all, wasn’t that the reason why Luke had come back to the family estate? Wasn’t that the reason why he was back for good? Yes, the Game Lodge had been in need of attention, too, but they all knew it could almost run itself.

  No, Luke hadn’t returned just to take care of his father’s business. He had come back because he had felt the pull of the wild. He had it in his veins as much and Benjamin did, and it didn’t matter one bit that he was a white man. The savannah didn’t distinguish the color of a man’s skin—just his heart. Luke’s heart belonged to Africa, as it had since the very first day he had set foot on it as a very small child. Luke might not have been born in Tanzania—not like his little sister Sarah who had been born here, a child of Africa. But Luke had a love of the land burning inside him. Anyone could see that.

  As their drive progressed, Benjamin watched as Luke gradually began to relax. The wildlife and plains always had that calming effect on him, and Benjamin had to smile fondly. Not for the first time he thanked whatever powers may be above to have blessed him with such a man in his life that he could call a friend. More than that, one he could call a brother. It was impossible for him to forget that the man driving next to him had been a best friend all his life. Over time, their bond had grown stronger, so much so that even Luke’s forced and prolonged absence from Tanzania after his father’s stroke and subsequent permanent relocation of the family in their native England had really changed anything. When Luke returned, Benjamin had found that they were closer than ever. They weren’t just childhood friends. They were brothers in the truest, deepest sense of the word.

  As a boy Benjamin had thought his world had just come to an end when the Huttons announced that they would no longer be spending half of the year in the Serengeti, as they had done for decades. The stays had become too strenuous for David Hutton, who had recently suffered a stroke that had left his left hand and leg partly paralyzed. For as far back as Benjamin could remember, the Huttons had visited their Game Lodge in Tanzania once a year, staying for a period of four to six months to escape the gray winters of England. To know they wouldn’t return had been heartbreaking and earth-shattering for Benjamin, and he had thought Luke felt the same. Benjamin had even found little Sarah crying out near the gates. He had sat with her, not touching her, merely watching out for her and guarding her as he had always done. But he had known that for Sarah and Luke—and for him—the end of those visits had seemed like the ending of the world. At the very least, it was the end of their world, and there was no denying that.

  But Luke hadn’t been able to stay away. As soon as he was old enough and out of college, he had moved back to Africa and the Serengeti in order to take over the management of the Game Lodge his family had owned for generations. But Sarah and her family had remained in England. Benjamin tried to be happy with what he had with Luke. The tough, often frustrating, and always demanding job of protecting their land and its cultural and natural treasures from adversity and threat—whatever those may be—had become a lighter load just because they were blessed with the chance of working side by side.

  Feeding off his friend’s returning serenity, Benjamin sat back in the passenger’s seat and relaxed. He allowed the green of the Serengeti plains to give him peace as it seeped into his eyes and skin and blood.

  Luke suddenly broke the silence. “I think we should go now.” Benjamin looked sideways over to him. “Back to the area where I found the trap yesterday, and you can head back into town to check out those rumors.”

  Benjamin sat up. “What about the rest of our morning patrol?”

  “I dare say, this calls for our immediate attention.”

  Rubbing the back of his neck, Benjamin mulled this over for a few moments. He didn’t like the thought of leaving some of the areas unchecked for the day. But their patrol was meant to find any trouble and deal with it. They had found trouble, and it needed to be dealt with.

  Finally, he nodded. “All right then. Let’s go back to base camp and I’ll take another Jeep.”

  Luke flashed him a grateful smile. “We’ll take care of what we saw the day before. That’ll be good.” Benjamin nodded. He didn’t particularly like delaying action, either.

  Luke drove back to the garage that hosted all of the ranger vehicles. Benjamin took his rifle from the back of Luke’s Jeep and jumped into another Jeep. They met right outside the garage, their vehicles side by side, each ready to drive in opposite directions that would hopefully lead somewhere useful to their cause.

  “I’ll meet you back here at dusk,” Luke said. “We’ll regroup then.”

  “Be careful,” Benjamin advised.

  Luke nodded and gave him a wink. “Always, brother.”

  Reaching out, Luke stretched out his hand to grab Benjamin’s forearm in a brotherly hold. He held the grasp for a moment, then let go and gave a wave. A moment l
ater, he drove off, his face set in a firm, unforgiving expression. He looked like a man with a mission.

  Benjamin hoped one of them—well, ideally, both of them, but he didn’t dare hope for that much—would come up with something. A small worry nagged at him that perhaps he should stay with Luke. But Luke knew this area as well as he did. Luke had grown up here. So what was he to worry over? It was not like this would be the last time he would ever see Luke Hutton alive.

  * * *

  Benjamin paced the ranger camp. Something was not right. He always had that uncanny sense of intuition, the infamous “sixth sense.” He hoped, for once, he was wrong and there was actually nothing to worry about. It turned out, however, that he was horribly, painfully right.

  He had returned to the Lodge a little earlier than expected, his hands empty and his heart heavy. Luke had been right. No one seemed to really know anything. If they did, they weren’t willing to expose themselves. Dusk came and nightfall followed…and Luke hadn’t returned. Benjamin did his best not to worry, but eventually, after hours had passed, he could no longer ignore the foreboding that had taken residence in the pit of his stomach. He waited for his best friend to show up for as long as it was reasonable and then he snapped into action.

  Unable to shake the awful feeling that his brother must be in some kind of terrible danger, Benjamin quickly rounded up a search posse. The team consisted of a few rangers and other staff of the Game Lodge. They had all offered to help. Soon enough, they were heading off on their search, holding torches to fend off the overwhelming darkness of the African night. Normally, Benjamin welcomed that darkness, but not tonight. He needed to see clearly, and the light of the almost-full moon simply wasn’t enough.