her away, for her own good, but in doing so, he’d damaged her so badly that he’d turned her into little better than a call girl.
He remembered her in Barrera, her blouse soaked in blood that even a washing hadn’t removed, the stitches just above one of her perfect small breasts where that animal, Miguel, had cut her trying to extract information about General Emilio Machado’s invasion of the country.
Rourke had killed Miguel. He’d done it coldly, efficiently. Then he and Carson, a fellow merc in the group that helped Machado liberate Barrera, had carried the body to a river filled with crocodiles and tossed it in. He hadn’t felt a twinge of remorse. The man had tortured Tat. He would probably have raped her if another of Arturo Sapara’s men hadn’t intervened. Tat, with scars like the ones he carried, with memories of torture. He closed his eyes and shuddered. He’d protected her most of her life. But he’d let that happen to her. It was almost beyond bearing.
He got up, nude, and poured himself another whiskey. He almost never drank hard liquor, but it wasn’t every day that a man faced the ruin of his own life. He’d been protecting Tat from a relationship that was impossible, because he’d been told that there was blood between them, that Tat was really his half sister. And it was a lie.
He’d never even questioned her mother’s revelation. He’d never dreamed that the religious, upright Mrs. Maria Carrington would lie to him. She loved Tat, though. Loved her dearly, deeply, possibly even more than she loved Matilda, her second child. The woman had been a pillar of the local church, never missing Mass, always there when anyone needed help, quick with a check when charity was required. She was almost a saint.
So when she told him that K.C. had seduced her in a drunken stupor, he’d believed her. Because he believed her, he pushed Tat away, taunted her, humiliated her, made her hate him. Or tried to.
But she wouldn’t hate him. Perhaps she couldn’t. He put the whiskey glass against his forehead, the cold ice comforting somehow. When he’d gone with the others to invade the capital in Barrera, Tat had pulled him to one side and linked the cross she always wore around his neck, asking him to wear it for luck. The gesture had hurt him. He wanted to pull her against him, bury his hard mouth in hers, let her feel the anguish of his arousal, show her how much he wanted her, needed her, cared for her. But that was impossible. They were too closely related. So he’d worn the necklace, but when he’d given it back, he was deliberately cold, impersonal.
When he’d left Barrera, what he’d said to her had shuttered her face, made her turn away, hurting. He’d hurt her more with his venomous comments at the airport in Johannesburg after he’d taken her out of Ngawa.
And that, all that, was for nothing. Because there was no blood between them. Because her mother had lied. Damn her mother!
He barely resisted the urge to slam the glass of whiskey through his bedroom window. That would arouse all the animals in the park, terrify the workers. It would bring back memories of another night when he got drunk, the night after Maria Carrington’s revelation. He’d gone on a week-long bender. He’d trashed bars, been in fights, outraged the small community near Nairobi where he lived. Even K.C. hadn’t been able to calm him, or get near him. Rourke in a temper was even worse than K.C. They’d stood back and let him get it out of his system.
Except that it wasn’t out. It would never be out. He finished off the whiskey and put the glass down on the bureau. The tinkle of ice against glass was loud in the quiet room. Outside a lion roared softly. He smiled sadly. He’d raised the lion from a cub. It would let him do anything with it. When he was home, it followed him around like a small puppy. But let anyone else approach him, and it became dangerous. K.C. had said he needed to give it to a zoo, but Rourke refused. He had so few amusements. The lion was his friend. There had been two of them, but a fellow game park owner had wanted it so desperately that Rourke had given it to him. Now he had just the one. He called it Lou—a play on words from the Afrikaans word for lion, leeu.
He closed his eyes and drew in a long breath. Tat would never forgive him. He didn’t even know how to approach her. He imagined Tat’s mouth under his, her soft body pressed to his hardness, her hands in his thick hair as he loved her on crisp, white sheets. He groaned aloud at the arousal the images produced.
And just as quickly as they flashed through his mind, he knew how impossible they were. He’d spent eight years pushing her away, making her hate him. He wasn’t going to be able to walk into her home and pick her up in his arms. She’d never let him close enough. She backed away now if he even approached her.
He thought of her with other men, with the scores of them he’d accused her of sleeping with. His fault. It was his fault. Tat would never have let another man touch her if she’d ever really belonged to Rourke; he knew that instinctively. But he’d pushed her into affairs. Her name had been linked with several millionaires, even a congressman. He’d seen photos of her in the media, seen her laughing up into other men’s faces, her body exquisite in couture gowns. He’d pretended that she was only playacting. But she wasn’t. She was twenty-five years old. No woman remained a virgin at that age. Certainly not Tat, whom he’d baited and tormented and rejected and humiliated.
But he had to get near her. He had to know if there was any slight chance that she might not hate him, that he could coax her back into his life. She’d never let him in the door in Maryland, where her home in the US was located. She had security cameras—he’d insisted on them—placed all around the house she owned there, the house that had belonged to her father.
Tat’s father had worked for the US Embassy. His people had been wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. He’d married Maria Cortes of Manaus, a woman who had Dutch and highborn Spanish heritage who was also an heiress. It had been a marriage of true love. They had houses in Africa and Manaus and Maryland. Tat had inherited the lot, and their combined fortunes. Tat had loved her mother. It had devastated her when Maria died of a fever she caught nursing a friend.
He knew how Tat revered her mother. How could he tell her what the woman had done? It would shatter her illusions. But he would have to tell her something, to try and explain his behavior.
How to get near her, near enough to make her listen, that was the problem. His eye fell on an invitation on top of the stack of mail one of the workers had left on the bureau for him to go through. He frowned.
He picked it up and opened it. Inside was a formal invitation to a gala awards ceremony in Barrera. It was a personal invitation from General Machado himself. Now that his country was secure once more, all the loose ends tied up, it was time to reward the people who had helped him wrest control away from the usurper, Sapara. Machado hoped that Rourke could come, because he was one of several people who would be so honored. He went down the list of names on the engraved invitation listing the honorees. Just above his name was that of Clarisse Carrington.
His heart jumped. Machado had promised that she would be recognized for her bravery in leading two captured college professors to safety and giving the insurgents intel that helped them recapture Barrera’s capital city and apprehend Sapara.
Tat was going to be in Barrera, in Medina, the capital city. She would certainly go to the awards ceremony. It was a neutral place, where he might have the opportunity to mend fences. Certainly he was going to go. The date was a week away.
He took the invitation back to bed with him, scanning it once more. Tat would be in Medina. He put the invitation on the bedside table and stretched out, his hands behind his head, his body arching softly as it relived the exquisite memory of Tat half-naked in his arms, so many years ago, moaning as he touched her soft breasts and made the pretty pink nipples go hard as little rocks.
The memories aroused him and he moaned. Tat in his
