A Puppy for Christmas Read online

  She rounded the thickly planted corner which opened out onto the viewing area for the African wild dogs. They were doing much what they had been when she’d left: lounging around with just one or two trying hard to goad the others back into play.

  Two of them dashed back and forth, dodging and weaving in their version of a game of tag, splashing through the waterhole, skidding in the red earth and vocalising madly the whole time.

  Ingrid’s eyes lifted to the rear of the exhibit, where it backed onto the night quarters. She imagined Gabe in there, beyond the thick concrete wall, his intense eyes concentrating on the monitor. You could see the visitors’ viewing bay on the camera that captured the whole exhibit, but she’d be a tiny khaki-coloured speck in the background. There was something dangerously appealing about imagining him hard at work while he didn’t know she was watching. It was a little bit like watching him sleep.

  It wasn’t real if he didn’t know.

  One dog darted left to avoid its pack-mate and sprinted up the earth mounded against the night quarters. It spun to a halt right atop the dens and stood panting, waiting for the game to continue.

  As she watched the dog lurched where it stood, braced its legs wide and looked sharply at the earth beneath its feet. It lurched again and leapt backwards, closer to the building.

  Ingrid’s stomach dropped the way the dog had and her feet started to move.

  B-den was collapsing...

  As she rounded the end of the exhibit pathway at full speed her mobile phone vibrated in her back pocket. She dragged it to her ear and uttered a breathless hello into the mouthpiece as she ran.

  ‘Ingrid?’ Gabe’s deep, distressed voice barked. ‘I need you.’

  * * *

  SHE FOUND HIM as she skidded around the corner of the night quarters. He tossed the last of several juicy carcass pieces into the holding area. ‘We have to break through. Now.’

  Oh, God...

  ‘I’ve blocked the entrance to A-den. You get ready by the hatch. I’ll get the pack in.’

  Blocking the entrance was a risk. If Mjawi tried to move the pups using the entrance and found it blocked she might take them back into the collapsing den.

  ‘What if she won’t come in?’ Ingrid couldn’t safely break through to B-den with Mjawi still in it. She’d take her head off.

  ‘I’ll get her out.’

  That sounded dangerously determined. ‘Wait, Gabe...’

  ‘I’ll get her out,’ he said, hard and certain.

  It took only ten minutes to get the bulk of the pack into the night quarters. The very food-motivated wild dogs did everything as a pack, so once the first one caught wind of the carcass pieces it followed its nose into the holding area and fell on the sheep’s leg. Its excited vocalisation immediately drew the others.

  Ingrid had the hatch open and her digging tools in hand, ready to go the moment Mjawi was out of range. The monitors showed sprays of dirt being flung from the entrance to B-den as Mjawi tried to dig out some of the earth that had fallen.

  Gabe swung around the doorway and leaned in. ‘Everyone but Mjawi is in. I’m going to lure her out long enough for you to break through.’

  ‘What? How?’ Luring was a mile from approved protocol, and it would mean he was technically in the exhibit with uncontained dogs. Wild dogs. Her chest squeezed down into a tight fist.

  ‘If we do our jobs right it’ll be too fast to be dangerous. Mjawi will be distracted and the pups will be too startled to respond when you break through.’

  If we do our jobs right...

  Her uncertainty must have shown on her face. Gabe crossed straight over to her and curled one hand behind her neck. ‘If we wait for other staff to arrive it could collapse.’

  Concern mixed freely with the urgency in his eyes. He didn’t want to do it, either. But her mind whizzed through every other option and there really were none that would mean the safety of the pups.

  ‘You can’t go in with her,’ she whispered, staring up at him. He was strong, but not that strong, and a mother protecting her pups was capable of anything.

  ‘I can’t not. Besides, she likes me—remember?’ He pulled her closer and pressed his lips to her clammy forehead. His brave smile died. ‘Just be fast, cherie.’

  If her speed reduced the danger for him, she’d dig like a demon.

  Without thinking she reached up, pressed both her hands to his cheeks, and pulled him down to meet her lips halfway. If he was going to risk his life, she wasn’t having him do it thinking she still hated him.

  Because she didn’t—and they both knew it.

  Courage flowed from his lips into hers and warmed her enough to move again. ‘Good luck.’

  He smiled as he pulled away, hit redial on his phone, held it up and said, ‘Put me on speaker.’

  And then he was gone. Off to do something dangerous and against all rules. There was some hope that Mjawi’s surprise at his unprecedented appearance inside the fence would stall her just long enough for him to stay safe.

  She answered her ringing phone.

  ‘Get in the tunnel.’ Gabe’s voice came through the tinny speaker. ‘And get ready to break through. Don’t make a sound. The moment you hear me call you, do it.’

  He lowered the phone then, but she could hear him clanking and clanging as he opened the access door to the exhibit—intentionally loud, perhaps, to draw Mjawi’s attention—and then he paused.

  She paused, too, halfway through the hatch. Listening.

  ‘Okay, I’m going in.’

  A wave of anxiety washed through her that he was risking himself like this for them. For her. But being paralysed with fear wasn’t going to help Gabe. Only her speed and accuracy would. She commando-crawled fully into A-den, and then beyond it into her hand-dug adjoining tunnel, and got herself positioned with her right arm tightly bent ahead of her.

  And then she waited.

  Through the speaker on her phone she could hear the sound of Gabe running—out into the exhibit, presumably—and then calling out to Mjawi in French.

  ‘Viens ici, la chienne!’

  She pressed her thumb over her phone’s speaker to muffle it and the words became a tingle against her flesh. She thought she heard a scrabbling from beyond the thin sandy membrane between the dens, and then a moment later her phone cried out in Gabe’s voice.

  ‘Now, Ingrid!’

  She dropped her mobile, punched forward with her trowel, and pushed her fist straight through what little dirt remained packed between the dens. High-pitched surprise greeted her, and a split-second glimpse of several pairs of blackcurrant eyes glinting back at her from a dark, stinky mass of furry bodies.

  Ingrid pulled her fist back towards her and in the same moment started to reverse crawl out of the tunnel. She spidered backwards, breathing erratically, flung her legs through the hatch and used the point of the trowel to pierce the inflatable block sealing A-den entrance, then dragged that back with her out of the hatch.

  She heard the repeat clanging of the exhibit gate as her feet hit the floor and she slammed the door shut.

  Gabe was safe.

  She was safe.

  Now if only the pups could be safe.

  ‘What happened?’ He burst around the corner, pale and sweaty. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I’m fine. I’m fine.’

  He pulled her hard against him and curled his arms around her head. She felt inelegant and uncomfortable with her face pressed into his armpit, but she wasn’t moving for all the wine in France. He just stood there. Holding her hard.

  As if he was never going to let go.

  An odd noise finally drew both of them out of their adrenalin-fuelled embrace. A shoving. A rustling.

  A snuffling.

  They both looked at the phone hel
d in Gabe’s fist, still set to speaker phone. Ingrid looked at her empty left hand. Then at the hatch.

  ‘I dropped my phone,’ she mouthed.

  The snuffling continued and resolved into a gentle mewling, some licking—the sounds of a mother comforting her babies. Together, Ingrid and Gabe sank into the chairs in front of the monitoring station and listened to the unexpected audio-feed while staring intently at the entrance to B-den on the monitors, which lost increasing amounts of earth clods with every minute that passed. The babies scrambled for Mjawi’s reassurance. She gave it. Then they heard the sound of big paws scraping at the earth, heavy, doggy breath chuffing hard up against Ingrid’s phone and experimenting with its taste.

  At one stage Mjawi must have pushed it with her nose, because it seemed to slide away from them and land with a thunk on the floor of the slightly echoey, slightly lower A-den. They both looked straight at the hatch.

  Silence.

  Silence and then...a hint of something else. The snuffling resumed. Very small snuffling. Very inquisitive snuffling.

  Ingrid opened her mouth to speak. Gabe pressed dirty fingers against her lips with one hand and set his phone to mute with the other. Then he lowered his fingers—but not far. He rested them on her cheek.

  ‘A pup has moved over,’ she whispered, excited.

  He nodded and concentrated even harder on the sounds coming from her phone. More mewling. More pawing. And then the phone was muffled, as though someone had sat on it.

  She’s in A-den!

  Gabe’s wide eyes echoed her thought.

  A flurry of rearrangement followed, and the high-pitched chatter from the pups continued. They rediscovered the phone and mouthed it and smothered it, generally explored the new toy.

  And then—just when they’d begun to rely on it—something rolled on it and the signal was disconnected.

  Ingrid stared at Gabe. ‘They hung up on us.’

  He laughed first, quiet and low now that the pups were just a few feet away, and that only made it all the funnier. Ingrid joined him, trying hard not to let it out. His hazel eyes sparkled with a mix of emotion as the adrenalin faded away, but he kept them locked on her.

  They stared at each other for a dangerously long time.

  ‘Five? Maybe six?’ she whispered.

  His dark brows folded.

  She sat back. ‘The number of pups I saw.’

  His eyes widened. ‘You saw them?’

  ‘I saw fur and eyes. Just for a moment. It was hard to distinguish individual shapes, but I’m playing it back in my head and I’m sure there were five or six pairs of eyes.’

  ‘How did they look?’

  ‘Scared.’

  He snorted. ‘I think we all were. Mjawi looked terrified, but she ran me down anyway.’

  There was something engagingly attractive about a man who was perfectly willing to admit when he was frightened out of his skin. ‘Show me?’ she said.

  They played the footage back and Ingrid mentally followed what was on screen with what she’d been doing and hearing underground. The moment Gabe entered the exhibit and started calling out Mjawi shot like a bullet out of the den, paused and crouched low as she spotted him, and then pelted straight for him.

  Brave, given her pack was entirely absent, but determined to protect her babies. Ingrid could only imagine the pressing conflict of having a predator so close to her litter but knowing the den was crumbling around them, too. Wild animals were nothing if not outstanding prioritisers.

  On screen, Gabe flung himself back into the night quarters and slammed the door shut. Mjawi skidded up against it bodily. Then she turned and jogged straight back to her litter.

  ‘Just seconds,’ Ingrid mused. ‘It felt like eternity.’

  Gabe snorted again. ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘We’re going to get in such trouble.’

  He shook his head and locked eyes with her. ‘I don’t care. Do you?’

  Did she? Breaching procedure like that and putting themselves at risk was technically a dismissible offence. She’d just poised the career—the organisation—that meant so much to her right on the edge of the toilet bowl and pressed flush. Everything she’d worked for. Everything she’d planned for.

  Did she care?

  ‘No.’

  They’d done the right thing. They’d saved the pups. If they got drummed out of the zoo for that it would be a pretty good way to go.

  His smile just amplified the reward of what they’d done. ‘Thought not.’

  And then, before she could do more than take a hasty breath, he leaned in and breached the short distance between their seats and kissed her. Hard. Hot. All that nervous energy had to go somewhere, and Ingrid gladly let it flow straight into her. Deep down into that place that had been cold and empty ever since she’d last let it be filled with Gabe’s energy.

  His fingers forked up into her hair, closed gently around the strands and eased her head back so that their mouths could fit together better. Ingrid curled her fingers in the two halves of his shirt to pull herself closer to him. One of them was officially on shift, so one of them was being highly unprofessional, but she didn’t know who and, as his lips moved over her skin, she really didn’t care.

  Her usual standards didn’t stand a chance when Gabe was around.

  ‘I’ve missed you,’ he whispered when finally they had to breathe.

  Sensual haze robbed her of speech. His words swam, lost, around her mind, looking for somewhere to connect and form meaning. He stroked the hair from her face and snared her gaze with his. She was as slow as a newborn babe to focus on him. When she did, she saw the uncertainty there, mingling with the desire.

  ‘I didn’t understand why you walked away,’ he whispered.

  She made herself find speech. ‘The job...’

  His eyes narrowed just slightly. ‘That’s all?’

  A sudden tension washed through her. She nodded.

  ‘It wasn’t because I was staying?’

  Thump, thump... Her heart got in on the conversation. ‘Why would it be?’

  His brows dipped. ‘Just a pattern in my life. Women back home didn’t last long once they realised I wasn’t going to gild their future with Marque euros.’

  She matched his frown. ‘You thought that was what I was doing?’

  A shadow flickered across his gaze. ‘I thought it was similar. I’ve never had problems getting women—’

  I’ll bet...

  ‘—just keeping them for more than a few weeks. One night, in your case. A personal best.’

  She shook her head. ‘That was—’

  ‘The job. I know.’ His eyes grew darker. ‘It finally dawned on me that I was never going to find my kindred spirit amongst my family’s world. And women of any kind were in short supply in the field in Africa. Then I came here.’

  ‘Where you had no trouble sampling the local wares.’

  His brows dipped again and he shrugged. ‘I’ve had a couple of dates in Australia, but you won’t find anyone in the zoo who can say they were one of them.’

  Anyone else. ‘Why?’

  He thought about that. ‘Because I wasn’t looking for just anyone. I wasn’t really looking at all.’

  ‘Then what...?’ Warmth flooded her cheeks.

  ‘What happened that night?’ He dropped his hand away from hers and sat back.

  She felt the little loss to her core.

  ‘You finally noticed me.’

  It was all she could do not to gape at him. Finally? She’d noticed him long before he’d even been introduced. And the fact he didn’t know that made her inexplicably angry. ‘False modesty doesn’t sit well on you, Gabe.’

  He straightened, and it put a few more necessary inches between them. ‘Why do
you think we ended up together?’

  She shrugged. ‘I assumed I was a challenge.’

  He stared at her. ‘No, you didn’t. The woman I took home that night didn’t have doubts about herself. You felt it as much as I did.’

  Her skin shrank against her bones, constricting and limiting. Every part of her wanted to run. She couldn’t let him know how deep her emotions ran. ‘Felt what?’

  ‘The thing that we had between us. That we still have.’

  One by one Gabe had stripped back her layers, the barriers between them. But she wasn’t going that easily. ‘We just risked our lives together. That’s a powerful aphrodisiac.’

  ‘It has nothing to do with just now. I’ve wanted to kiss you since I walked in here on Christmas morning. And you twitch if I so much as brush against you.’ He leaned back in, extra close, and breathed the challenge against her lips. ‘You still feel it.’

  She lifted her chin. ‘Maybe I just don’t like being touched.’

  His eyes darkened, but this time it wasn’t a mysterious shadow. ‘Oh, cherie. Don’t ask me to believe that.’

  She had liked being touched. She’d practically bloomed in his hands.

  ‘You kissed me back just now,’ he pointed out.

  She tossed her head. ‘Maybe you’re just a really good kisser.’

  His smile said he knew exactly what she was doing. Exposure didn’t sit comfortably on her. ‘Let’s take that as a given. So why are we wasting time? We could be kissing right now.’

  They almost were. So she sat back. ‘The moment’s passed. I don’t just kiss on command.’

  He locked eyes again. ‘What if I asked nicely? What if I begged?’

  Breath escaped from her throat, leaving her speech tight and strained. ‘You’re too proud to beg. Besides, if it was just kisses you wanted you could walk into the staffroom and find a dozen willing participants.’

  He shrugged. ‘I only want your kisses.’

  Her sigh physically hurt. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they fit me.’

  She stared at him.

  ‘Because they haunt me.’

  Every word he spoke cut her straight to the heart. They were words she’d always wanted to hear. And they were words she could not accept. But returning them like an unwanted gift...where did she even begin to do that?