Page 16 of Duty Preserved

I looked at the rest of them again. The one sleeping on the bench. The too-large boots. The one with the clubfoot. As Cole said, they needed someone to teach them the basics.

I could do this. This, I could carry. There was no danger to them here—except for maybe shooting out their own eye.

“All right,” Cole said. “Let’s get you two settled. Dinner’s in about an hour. There’s a few cooks onsite who provide meals for the camp in the mess tent. We need to discuss our training plans.”

We headed back toward the main buildings. The light had shifted while we’d been walking, the sun dropping lower and turning everything amber. The camp looked different in that glow. The dust that had seemed harsh when we arrived had settled, and without the direct sun, the temperature dropped to much cooler levels.

Cole was talking logistics. Sleeping arrangements. The schedule he’d been running. Andrew was asking questions about the outposts, the rotation. I was listening, but part of me was just taking in my surroundings. The open land. The quiet. The fact that the biggest threat on this reserve right now was boredom and bad habits.

I rounded the corner of the dining tent, and something hit me in the chest.

It was a tray of food. The impact was sudden and wet, and whatever had been on that tray went down my shirt in a warm rush. Rice, some kind of stew, and something that might have been fruit was now a stain spreading across my chest and dripping onto my boots.

I looked down at myself.

Then I looked up.

Green eyes. Auburn hair pulled back in a braid that had mostly come undone. A face I hadn’t seen since a hotel hallway four thousand miles from here, right before she’d thrown up on me.

Sarah.

She was staring up at me with her mouth open and the empty tray still in her hands. Rice on her forearms. I watched the recognition hit her the same way it had hit me, and for a second, neither of us moved.

A piece of rice slid off my chest and landed on my boot.

“Oh my God,” she said.

“I’m starting to think you don’t own enough shirts,” Andrew said behind me.

Chapter 5

Sarah

Stew was running down his shirt. The empty tray was still in my hands, and I was standing in the middle of the dining tent trying to form words when reality hit.

Donovan. His name was there before I reached for it, and everything that came with it crashed in behind. The nightclub, the hotel hallway, all of it ending with me throwing up on his shirt. I’d spent three weeks trying to forget that night, and now the man at the center of that memory was standing in front of me wearing my dinner.

“What are you doing here?”

He asked the question at the same time.

We both stopped. Stared.

The man behind him had red hair and broad shoulders, and he was the one who’d said the thing about shirts. He looked between us with his eyebrows climbing. A third man stood farther back, arms crossed, watching all of this with the patience of someone who had learned to let situations develop before stepping into them.

“I work here,” I said finally. “I’m one of the veterinary fellows. I’ve been here for a year.”

Something shifted in Donovan’s expression. He was running through the same impossibility I was and coming up equally empty.

“We’re here for work too,” he said. “Just arrived today.”

“Work?” I looked at the three of them. “What kind of work?”

Before he could answer, Zayn came through from behind the serving area, and his face lit up when he saw the three men.

“Sarah. You’ve met them.” He said it like this was a good thing, like I hadn’t just launched a full plate of food into one of them. “These are the trainers I told you about.”

Zayn had mentioned them two weeks ago. He had said something about specialists coming in to work with the rangers, help them get organized, give them some real structure. I’d pictured Kenyan Wildlife Service officers. Maybe someone from an international conservation group. Older men with clipboards and polo shirts with organizational logos on the chest.