Perfect Mistake

Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven

Simone had grown up on a piece of ill-managed farmland in South Africa and the dawn noises were part of her internal clock. She loved the chatter of birds that woke her up when she stayed at a Carlevaro tented camp, where the barrier between her and nature was thin. Unzipping the tent, she stepped outside. The promise of first light was in the velvet sky that took on a lighter shade of midnight blue in the east.

Human noises could be discerned for those who cared to listen for them; the hum of the generator, voices, someone laughing.

“Going on the game drive, Simone?” James, already dressed, was coming from the bigger cluster of tents where the permanent staff had more settled housing.

Simone wanted to crawl back into bed. She’d tossed around most of the night, spinning things in her head and overanalyzing. But it had been months since she’d been on a game drive. Few opportunities came her way and she always took up an invitation. Plus it would get her mind off everything else.

“I’d love to go—how much time do I have?”

“Twenty minutes. I’ll send an askari over.”

“Thanks.”

She switched on the light and went to the small bathroom at the back of her tent. The mornings were cooler in June and she blessed the soul who had gotten up even earlier to stoke the boiler for hot water for the staff. She took a quick shower, ran a comb through her curls and dressed in her uniform pants and a clean top Liz had lent her. She grabbed her fleece jacket, for in the wind of the moving safari vehicle she would be cold.

The askari waited outside and escorted her to the deck. A number of guests had already gathered around a long table set with tea, coffee, some fruit and muffins. The Carlevaro brothers weren’t there, and she let her shoulders hitch down a knot. She spotted Dino Viggio talking to Noel Peters and the unknown woman, who stood at Dino’s side.

They called her over.

“I don’t believe you’ve been introduced,” Dino said, turning to the woman next to him. “This is my wife, Natalia. She’s also part of the Carlevaro team.”

Simone smiled and shook Natalia’s warm hand in greeting. “It’s chillier than normal,” she said, not sure what else to say.

“Warm up with some coffee. It’s really good, can I get you some?” asked Natalia, her accent very American. There was unexpected warmth in her voice and Simone met Natalia’s gaze. She looked concerned, as if she knew every inch of turmoil Simone had gone through during the previous day and night.

“Thank you, I…” Before Simone could finish Natalia had stepped up to the table and poured steaming coffee from a silver coffee pot into a mug. The waiter smiled and put the cream and sugar forward.

“Please pour another, Talia.” Carlo spoke behind her, and Simone’s insides quivered upon hearing his voice, her earlier calm evaporating. Their unfinished conversation from the previous evening shot back into her mind, their angry words echoing between her ears.

Carlo came to stand right next to her, his arm brushing her naked elbow. It was a soft, intentional movement, and its effect rippled through her.

“Slept okay?” Carlo asked as he turned and searched her face with a soft gaze. Two days’ worth of beard on his cheeks and his still-rumpled hair made him look as if he’d tumbled from a cloud. She smelled the sleep on him, and her whole body wanted to wrap around him and snuggle up in his long-lost, yet familiar scent. He had forgotten her outburst, or at least had written it off. Clearly, he’d slept better than her.

“Staff quarters can do with new mattresses,” she mumbled as she took the coffee from Natalia. “Thank you.”

Natalia smiled. “Last time Peppe was in Rome he did mention staff accommodation upgrades, didn’t he, Carlo? We mustn’t let that fall through the cracks.”

“Best I come test them out for myself,” Carlo said. “To make sure.” He had a barely perceptible smile and she could kick herself for the nuance she’d introduced.

She broke their locked gazes, heat rising to her cheeks. They’d always hoped, on flying to a lodge, that they would be offered guest accommodation instead of the usual staff quarters. Once settled in their staff rooms Carlo would go off to chat to management about getting guest rooms. He joked that he charmed them into giving them available rooms, telling them they could test the mattresses. He always got what he wanted. Little had she known he could have commanded the most expensive Carlevaro suite on a whim. She couldn’t meet his gaze. Every conversation with him was going to spark a memory. A hot stone, which she’d be dragging with her until Carlo flew back to Rome, settled in her stomach.

James ambled up to their group. “If you’re ready to go, the vehicle is waiting.”

The regular guests had left and their excited chatter faded in the distance. Damn. She couldn’t extract herself from the Carlevaros’ company without being extremely rude.

As they got to the vehicles Angelo took the front seat next to the ranger. By the time Dino, Natalia and Noel got into the Land Rover only the last row at the back was open. Simone climbed up and sat down, hoping James would sit between her and Carlo. But James stood back as Carlo got into the Land Rover and waved them off. As Carlo dropped down next to her, he inhaled deeply. He threw his arms back over the seat and grinned at her. “I really missed this. All of it.”

She edged away from him, not knowing what to make of his statement. It was bordering on flirting and was definitely in the no-go zone. She prayed that Carlo wouldn’t turn on the charm because she wouldn’t be able to resist him if he carried on like that for three long weeks.

****

Carlo lifted his face to the sun that rose in an orange glow. The air was nippier than he remembered, smelling of earth and bush, a raw freshness that had long disappeared in built-up Europe. As he took another deep breath he regretted that he hadn’t come sooner. He’d spent time on safari often enough, but in the two years he’d flown for Carlevaro Air something in him had taken root in the African soil. He’d always felt he’d left a part of him behind and he’d been haunted by an intense desire to come back. If he hadn’t been so busy, he would have made time. But four years had passed in the blink of an eye and work had always interfered with any plans. As soon as he thought he’d be able to travel, another meeting had been scheduled, or another crisis had erupted. Instead of flying to Nairobi or Dar es Salaam he invariably found himself on a plane to Southeast Asia where Carlevaro had the bulk of their hotels.

Those last few weeks with Simone before his father’s illness, while he’d still had the luxury of choice, had been the happiest of his life. When the universally dreaded phone call came, yanking him from his chosen life, he’d had no clue what had waited for him on the other side. Ten weeks later his father was dead, and he had lost a part of his past forever. Little had he known at the time that he’d also lost a part of his future. The future he’d envisioned for himself with Simone. He’d never thought that far ahead, but with Simone it had been a case of not knowing what he’d had until it had been lost.

When he’d come back for a short business meeting six months later, Simone had resigned from Carlevaro Air, and nobody had known where she’d gone. By then he’d understood that she’d moved on and he’d let go, if only by pure mental force.

Simone shifted, and not for the first time he wished he could reverse the clock and go back to those weeks he’d spent with her.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me your real name?” Simone asked softly, her voice hardly audible as the vehicle droned off into the dawn.

He sighed at his singular most stupid mistake, but he’d done so on his father’s and Peppe’s insistence. A spate of high-profile kidnappings in Kenya had threatened to cross the border, and his uncle wasn’t taking any risks with him flying around East Africa, visible bait with such a recognizable name as Carlevaro. The ransom money hadn’t been the problem, but the opportunity to pay it over rarely presented itself before a body surfaced. “I did tell you my name, just not all of it.”

“Carlo Fabbri di Laurentia Carlevaro. I found you on some business profile websites yesterday. It’s quite a mouthful,” she said. “You’re on no social sites, but with a name like that—” She broke off, and took a breath. “No wonder I couldn’t find you years ago.”

His heart skipped a beat at her last words. “You looked for me?” He’d never heard from her again, had never imagined that she might be searching for him. She leaned in to avoid a few branches that stretched into the open vehicle and blood rushed south to his groin as her arm brushed against his.

“I wanted to know how you were doing…if you were going to renew your contract with Carlevaro Air. I didn’t know that you were going to…” She made a halfhearted wave with her hand. “Inherit…this.”

He sensed that his answer was important. If the decision had been up to him he would’ve stayed another year, at least.

“I hardly inherited this.” He cut short a deep sigh. It had been foisted onto him at a time when he couldn’t have been less prepared. “The decision to stop flying was made for me when my dad fell ill.”

“Really?”

“I had my chance to get hands-on experience. I had to manage some of our hotels in Thailand and Vietnam before I got to fly for Carlevaro Air. When my dad fell ill, my years of freedom, as he liked to call it, were over.”

“Poor you.”

“I apologize for deceiving you.” He grunted inwardly. He regretted not coming clean with her within the first few weeks of their relationship. Somehow the opportunity had never come up, probably because he’d consciously avoided finding one. He hadn’t wanted to ruin what they’d had by tagging himself and bringing the business into the mix. “Understand that working for Carlevaro under my full name would’ve infringed the work experience I was aiming to get.” Dio, it sounded weak.

“Yes, to be one of the boys is key to flying a plane and making sure passengers get there safely. I get you.” Her tone was bitter and it made him wince. His lie had put the bitterness there.

But what was in a name? It had never defined him with her. Which was maybe why it had been so different. “Simone—”

She shook her head. “I feel like…I never knew you. As if everything was fake.”

Her words sent a chill down his spine. He’d never imagined she would feel this way. He leaned toward her, close to her ear. “It wasn’t fake,” he whispered. “Deep down you know more of me than anybody else.”

He glanced at her but she stared into the bush. The vehicle’s headlights caught the dark bulk of a hippo in the road and the vehicle slowed to a stop. Everybody quieted upon sighting the animal, and whispered conversations were put on hold. The hippo stomped further down the road, then paused to give them a quizzical look before disappearing into the foliage.

They drove on, and the front rows fell back into their companionable chatter. Carlo stroked his chin, uncertain how to bridge this gap with her. When Simone tugged on her fleece jacket he leaned over to help her, but she shook her head and struggled on. Still, he couldn’t stop himself from turning up the collar as she zipped it up, so it protected her neck from the wind. His knuckles brushed her cheek and she flinched. His heart raced faster at touching her and his fingers itched to caress the soft line of her cheek, but the look she gave him chilled him to the bone.

After a moment of silence, he breathed out heavily. “Would you had been with me if you’d known I was the owner’s son? Peppe’s nephew?” It was a soft-spoken challenge. The wind carried his question away from the people sitting in front of them. It was a recurring question he wanted answered by every woman who crossed his path. Were they in it for him or for his money? Would they still be interested in him if it all went belly-up and he was stripped of his status? He’d come to read the female mind quite well. He was no longer interested in digging deep in the hope of finding a heart.

She turned to him, then lowered her gaze, licking her lips. “It was all just you. There was never anything else. I thought you knew that.”

Yes, he’d known. That was why it had been different…real, with her. There had been no ulterior motive, no long-term plan to ensnare him. For the first and only time in his life he’d truly been himself with a woman.

“And now?” He couldn’t stop himself. He had to know what she was thinking. In his own mind everything was drifting out of focus. His physical attraction to her was overwhelming—it was even stronger than when they’d first met. He told himself it was because their physical attraction had never satiated itself, but he hadn’t expected feeling like this. Being separated for years had done nothing to change his intense primal desire for her. He wanted to touch her all the time. He craved her warmth, her breath on his skin. He wanted to possess her, to have her right there, on the Land Rover’s bonnet, and nothing he told his head or nether anatomy would change that.

“I won’t come close to you with a ten-foot pole,” Simone said as she inched away to make even more space between them. “There’s the fleet management position up for grabs. The other pilots will spread the poison that I got the promotion because I ogled you or worse. So keep your distance.”

She was right; he should stay as far away from her as possible. Yet in her eyes there was something unresolved. He saw it in her gaze when she looked at him, sensed it in the way she edged away from him. Their relationship had been short, but intense. Every woman before and after her had become a weightless fog burnt away by memories of her.

It was the anger and resentment that bounced off her that he couldn’t place.

“I phoned you as soon as I got things under control,” he said at last, knowing what her response was going to be. That it had been too little, too late.

“Did you now?” She sounded so skeptical her words might just as well have been nails scraping at his face.

“For the first weeks of my father’s illness time stood still, Simone. I didn’t realize that it had been—” Dio, in his mind it sounded pathetically selfish. He understood that it was hard to forgive. “A whole ten weeks had flown by before I got my mind around my dad’s illness and was able to think.” Purely because by that time he’d realized there was nothing they could do to save his dad. The world he’d been plummeted into had been so warped that everything else had become unreal. Accepting that his dad would die had come just days before he had passed away.

She didn’t react immediately, but after a good half minute she laughed joylessly. “By then I was long gone.”

“I tried to track you down, but you’d disappeared.”

She’d turned her face completely from him; he had difficulty hearing her last words. “I learned from the best.”

The ranger slowed the vehicle and changed gears. “We’re going off road so hold on. The first one’s down here.”

As the Land Rover crawled forward he felt Simone’s gaze on him. He glanced at her. She stared at him with eyebrows raised, her head tilted in question.

“If you wanted the tourist safari you should have gone with the guests. We’re going to see two sites of poaching.” He wasn’t in the mood for it. The only thing that could possibly get him into a better mood right now was to have a release of the tension with Simone. Since that wasn’t an option it would have to be a half-marathon sprint, or a bottle or two of Chianti.

She swallowed, shoving her hands into the pockets of her fleece. “That would’ve been nice to know beforehand,” she said, staring straight ahead.

“You would’ve stayed at the lodge?”

“Yes.”

If she were involved in the poaching she wouldn’t want to see her handiwork. He deleted the thought but knew it would leave a trace in his mind. The group quieted now that they realized where they were headed.

After the rainy season the grass was long and thick, making the off-road driving more difficult. Some patches of grass were drier and shorter, but there were the shrubs and trees to navigate. The vehicle bumped its way across the veldt, making franklins scatter and guinea fowl chatter their discontent.

The ranger didn’t seem to drive in any specific direction but was confident of where he was going. After a good ten minutes’ drive, the stench of rot hit them and then they saw the carcass of an elephant. Scavengers had pecked at it here and there, and a few vultures perched in nearby trees. A hyena slinked away, hovering close to some shrubs, turning to see what the intruders were going to do.

“I’ll turn the vehicle upwind,” the ranger said to the group. As he drove around the carcass everyone gasped in horror on seeing the remains of the slaughter. The face was hacked away; there was no trunk and the tusks were missing. The carcass was a few days old and carrion, covered with flies, gleamed in the morning sun.

Carlo got up as the vehicle slowed to a standstill a few meters away, then jumped down with Noel, Dino, and Angelo. The ranger followed, rifle in hand. Natalia wanted to get down, but Carlo raised his hand to stop her. He glanced at Simone; she hadn’t moved but had paled.

“This was a head shot with a .458 rifle, or something similar,” said Noel Peters as the men came full circle to the front of the carcass.

As he circled the carcass, Carlo’s stomach curdled and he forced his fists to relax. “How did you find this?”

“Usual way, following the vulture trail,” the ranger answered.

“We always follow up on all kills,” Noel said, “to see which ones are natural predator kills and which ones are poaching.”

“And how old is this one?” Angelo asked.

“Four days.”

Carlo met Angelo’s gaze and saw him repress the same anger. He pursed his lips, shaking his head. Did Angelo finally grasp the weight of the responsibility that was now his?

“You never hear them firing the shots?” Carlo asked.

“They use silencers. They have very modern equipment and they poach with the wind, so the gunfire is carried away from the lodges.”

Carlo started climbing back into the vehicle with the others following.

“Where’s the next one?” Angelo asked.

“About one kilometer from here.”

Carlo turned to Simone. Her hand trembled against her mouth, covering her nostrils. “Can you stomach more?”

Simone shrugged, the nausea rising up her throat. How could she feel like this—relieved that seeing and smelling the dreadful sites of poaching disguised her inner turmoil? Ever since Carlo had said that he’d searched for her, even if only ten weeks after he’d left Tanzania, there had been a slow churn in her stomach.

As they continued in silence across the veldt back to the road, she clamped her fists to her stomach, breathing in the fresh air, trying to focus on everything except Carlo’s words.

The vehicle swayed over the two dirt tracks for a while until the ranger turned it into the bush. This carcass was closer to the road and nobody got out of the vehicle. She couldn’t take it in. That it was an elephant was hardly clear, the head was so mutilated. Shreds of skin kept the form of the body together, hanging on the giant ribcage like a gray winter coat.

Simone glanced at the eerie scene. A carcass rotted in the sun, but the surrounding noise of birds and flies, the scuttle of franklins in the long grass, belied the murder that had taken place. Life in the bush carried on regardless.

A vulture, sitting in a nearby tree, spread its wings and dropped off the branch, seeming too heavy for flight.

“When the vultures are no longer interested then you know there’s too much killing going around,” the ranger said as he put the vehicle in reverse.

She wouldn’t be able to contain the meager contents of her stomach. Not with the bumpy driving, the stench invading her every sense, and the notion that there could have been a chance for them had she been able to stick around for his call. Ten weeks.

Ten weeks after he’d left she’d already been nearly four months pregnant. She must have fallen pregnant within the first few days of being with him, despite using protection. She had been too stupid to know the signs, too out of tune with her own body to notice that her period had been late.

She reached for Carlo, but stopped short of grabbing his arm. “Stop the car, I’m going to be sick.”

Carlo called for the ranger to stop, but he was too late; she convulsed. The ranger braked and Simone jumped down, just in time to retch up her morning coffee behind the vehicle.

“Are you okay?” Carlo was there, his hand on her back, warm, stroking.

Did he have to touch her? It made her feel a hundred times worse. “Yes.” She straightened, forcing his hand off her back. But instead of letting go he caressed her arm as he searched her face. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, blinking with a sniff.

She stepped away from him, closer to the thicket, conscious of the heavy silence from the vehicle. Everybody waited for her to hurl again.

“We can’t stop here,” the ranger called to them. “The bush is too dense.”

Carlo cursed. “Come. Anything can be hiding in these bushes.”

He grabbed her hand and pulled her back to the side of the car. “Up with you.”

She followed the instruction of his hands, which circled her waist, nudging her up. She stepped on the tire, grabbed the railing, and heaved. His hand was on her behind, shoving her not so gently, but a final stroke traveled down her leg. A second later he leaned over her to get into the back seat. With fire burning to the roots of her hair, she scuttled to her side.

“Sorry,” he mouthed, the concern in his eyes merging with what could only be consternation.

He had stroked her leg in a most loving, possessive, caring way. And he’d clearly been unable to stop himself.

She glanced at the others in the car, her heart thudding in her ears. Natalia rummaged through her handbag; Dino was engaged with Noel, who pointed to something in the road ahead. Only Angelo met her gaze for an instant, before he closed his door. He had been ready to jump out…to witness her vomiting and then usher her back into the vehicle. Had he seen how Carlo had touched her? God, what if anyone saw?

Natalia turned and handed her a tissue and a bottle of water.

“Thank you,” she murmured, having to grab onto the railing as the ranger got the vehicle back on the road.

“I’ll take us to the lookout point,” called the ranger above the droning of the Land Rover. “It’s a safe spot to regroup and have coffee.”

She didn’t have to look Carlo’s way—his gaze was on her, hot, simmering with hundreds of unsaid words. She could regroup; she’d been regrouping every five minutes since landing in this mess yesterday.