Page 29 of Duty Preserved

She turned to face me, arms still crossed, jaw set.

“They are practically kids, Donovan. You marched them until they couldn’t stand and then made them build an obstacle course. Jomo could barely walk by the end of it.”

“They’re not kids, Sarah. They’re young men, and they need to be treated as young men. Every one of them volunteered to be here. They chose this.”

“I know that. But there’s a difference between training them and grinding them down.”

“I know what I’m doing. You wouldn’t tell someone in my profession how to treat a sick rhino.”

She held my eyes. I held hers. The giraffe pulled at another branch behind us.

“You’re right,” she said. “I wouldn’t.”

The way she said it, easy, agreeable, the kind of agreement that has nothing to do with actually agreeing, told me I’d stepped in it. She pushed off the wall, gave me a nod that was polite and nothing else, and walked back toward her cabin.

I stood there and listened to her footsteps fade.

The giraffe was gone. It probably left out of secondhand embarrassment of what an ass I had been.

She’d come to me with something real. About people she cared about, people she’d worked alongside for a year, and I’d compared her work to mine like hers was the one that didn’t matter.

I sat back down in the chair, and the quiet that had felt good ten minutes ago felt a lot lonelier now. Should I have stayed the strong, silent type and just shut the fuck up?

I thought about her face when she’d said their names. Zayn. Baraka. She knew the parts of them I hadn’t bothered to learn yet, and instead of hearing that, I’d told her she wasn’t qualified to have an opinion.

I sat there a long time, and what I thought about wasn’t whether I was right. I thought about the look on her face right before she decided I wasn’t worth the argument.

Chapter 8

Sarah

Three days had changed everything I thought I knew about Donovan Hughes.

I hadn’t meant to watch the training. My mornings belonged to the animals, and the muster yard was on the other side of camp from the vet facility. But the camp was small and sound carried, and by the second morning, I’d started finding reasons to cross through on my way to the supply shed.

What I’d braced for hadn’t come.

The rangers showed up before anyone called them. They were there at first light, formed up, boots laced, rifles cleaned. Zayn stood straighter than I’d seen him in the year I’d known him, and something in his bearing had shifted from willing to proud. Baraka carried equipment without being asked and kept his mouth shut while his hands were full. Even the ones who’d coasted through every day I’d worked alongside them moved with a purpose that hadn’t existed a week ago.

They handled their weapons with a care that looked almost tender, checking and rechecking. They ran the obstacle course they’d built without anyone standing over them, and when one of them struggled at the wall, two others pulled him over without a word.

“They’re different,” I said to Alyson at the rail of the vet pen that morning, watching Zayn lead the group through drills across the yard. “All of them.”

“You mean the guys who couldn’t find their own canteens last week?” She didn’t look up from her chart. “Yeah, I noticed.”

The aggression I’d feared wasn’t happening. The opposite was.

And underneath that shift, underneath the grudging respect I couldn’t pretend away anymore, was the thing that had never been in question. I was attracted to Donovan Hughes, and I had been since Paris. Since the dance floor, the rescue, the walk back to the hotel. Since all of it.

I treated it as a fact about myself. A private one. He was here to do his job and I was here to do mine, and whatever my pulse did when he crossed the yard was mine to manage. It was one-sided, and that was the end of it.

The day’s work was a collar check. One of the rhinos I monitored carried a tracking collar that needed a scheduled assessment, routine and on the calendar, vet-specific, and nothing a ranger would have any reason to come along for. The animal ranged in a remote corner of the reserve, three hours out and three hours back, and the drive was mine.

Cole and Andrew were running the rangers through a patrolling exercise that would take all day. Which left exactly one person free to ride along.

Donovan was already at the truck when I came around the vehicle bay with my field kit. He had one boot on the running board and was scanning the eastern horizon, his eyes moving across the tree line before they came back to me.

“Morning,” I said.