Different Dreams (5 page)

She didn't have far to go before she found Jezebel. Approaching from a distance, Malou wondered what the silly creature was doing lying there in the high grass. And why she was ignoring the pitiful whimperings of her baby huddled next to her.

A pulse of urgency suddenly beat through Malou. She dropped her field notebook and ran. Her binoculars pounded against her as she ran faster. She reached the
fallen monkey and dropped to her knees. Jezebel's amber eyes were open, staring blankly. Malou fumbled for her wrist and fought to find a pulse beating through the animal's body. There was none. Malou gently laid poor Jezebel's paw down upon the earth.

Bambi snuggled against his mother's side, trying to rouse her. Malou picked up the baby, cradling him against her. He was a female, Malou could see that clearly now. The newly orphaned baby clung to her soft jersey top, burrowing in its folds for a teat to suckle.

The infant's futile, wordless plea for life was what finally undid Malou, what broke through her shock and unraveled the tight skein of control she'd wound within herself. All of it—the sleepless nights, the missed meals, the broken dreams—returned to haunt her, bringing the tears with it.

With the same feeling of an unreal shift from one scene to another, totally different and unexpected one that had marked her dreams of the past five nights, Malou felt herself being lifted from the ground. Still sheltering Jezebel's baby in her arms and still sobbing uncontrollably, Malou looked up into a face bare inches from her own. For the first few seconds, all that registered were a pair of espresso brown eyes. They reflected back every fiber of the pain she felt. Stronger at that moment than even her dislike of the man whose arms encircled her was Malou's overriding need to be comforted. She
collapsed her head against Cameron's shoulder and wept out the grief in her heart.

“I'm sorry, Malou. I'm really, really sorry,” Cameron whispered soothingly. The feel of the two bodies in his arms—Malou's warm and supple against his own and convulsing with grief, and then this minuscule monkey clinging to his chest and trying to burrow into his shirt—was almost more than he could bear.

The monkey baby looked up at Cameron and searched his face for an answer, an explanation. Those eyes. Its tiny face seemed consumed by nothing but two huge pools of bewilderment. Tears and pain—Cameron could not deal with them. His own pain, certainly—he'd
had
to learn how to deal with that, to save it up and use it to drive himself. But someone else's pain, someone else's tears . . . Cameron was defenseless. He ached inside for both the suffering creatures he carried in his arms.

“It's okay,” he whispered into the golden cap of hair, breathing in the intoxicating scent of clean pink scalp and sun-warmed hair. The baby-fine strands felt like the softest of down against his cheek. He turned his head ever so slightly and the silken mass caressed his lips. Malou, her sobs subsiding, turned her face to him. It was as filled with puzzlement as the little monkey's had been. Her eyes sparkled with tears in the morning sunshine. As he stared into that questioning face, the tears receded, but the sparkle and the questions remained.

A stab of regret plunged through him. How could he have ever been fooled that first day by her games of one-upmanship? She might, as his Google search had revealed, be a world-respected scientist, but she was a child where these damned monkeys were concerned. A child whom he had inadvertently wounded very badly.

“It'll be all right,” Cameron soothed again. “We'll try to work something out.” He would have promised anything to wipe those terrible questions away. But still that look of slightly dazzled wonder remained. Then, in a motion so nearly indetectable that Cameron almost missed it, she moved toward him. For a second, he was sure he'd imagined that slight inclination in his direction, thought he'd brought it into being through the sheer power of wishful thinking. He'd gone several steps before his mind reconfirmed the evidence and produced the stupefying verdict—she wants me to kiss her.

Terrified lest he'd grossly misinterpreted her look and gesture and that he'd unloose the snarling wildcat who'd threatened the other day to tar him in the press, he stopped and leaned tentatively forward, one half of his being anticipating the feel of those deliciously swollen lips beneath his own, the other already wincing from the sting of a slap.

It was all happening with the same inevitability as in her dream, Malou realized, with the one difference that, this time, she had started it. This and a dozen other
thoughts darted through her mind as Cameron stopped, bent his head down to bring his lips a scant few inches from hers, then halted, almost as if he were deliberately tantalizing her. Malou's lips parted as her pulse and breathing accelerated. She inhaled his warm, sweet breath and pleaded silently for his lips to continue their journey downward. His eyes, so hard and cutting five days before, were clouded and soft now with questions.

The questions were banished as Cameron held his lips above Malou's. They hovered there stealing breath, antagonism, and all sense from Malou. This kiss she hadn't yet tasted, that she could almost feel, was already more devastating than any she had ever received.

Like a plant drawn to sunlight, Malou lifted her lips up to meet his.

Cameron's heart lurched as he felt Malou shift within his arms. After that, no power on earth could have halted the descent of his lips, could have stilled him until he had known the feel and taste of those lips.

Held secure in his arms, the kiss had the same weightless quality as in her dream. His lips seemed to suck all her secrets from her. They seemed to touch her in a thousand delirious places at once, but in fact, they only touched her lips and that one virgin spot within her soul that no man, no matter how ardent, had ever gained access to before. And Cameron Landell had reached it with one gentle, almost chaste kiss.

For a long moment after their lips had parted they stared into one another's eyes trying to figure out what had happened and why on earth it had happened to them in, of all places, the middle of a monkey ranch.

“I'd kiss you properly if I weren't scared of crushing junior here.”

Malou laughed her first real laugh in five days as her hand went to pat the frail monkey clinging to Cameron's shirt. The tiny creature was glancing from him to her, trying to figure out the strange human ritual she'd just witnessed.

“I can walk now,” Malou said.

With her feet firmly planted on the earth, she removed the monkey from Cameron's shirtfront and let the baby attach herself to her shoulder. Suddenly Malou began to doubt the wisdom of her command to be placed on her feet. She swayed forward and was caught within the steadying bonds of Cameron's arms. She leaned gratefully against his chest. His great, strong heart pounded against her ear, her pulse beating back with the same impassioned rhythm.

The sun beat down on her back, warming her just as Cameron's body warmed hers. Off in the distance, three young monkeys scampered across the prairie, chasing each other in an endless game of tag. They seemed very far away.

“I could get to like holding women with monkeys on their shoulders. What's the little nipper's name?”

Malou was disconcerted by Cameron's jocular tone. The kiss that had so undone her had obviously not had any measurable effect on him. She pulled away from his embrace and felt for the baby's featherlight weight on her shoulder. With an effort, she steadied her breathing and answered in an even voice, attempting to match his joking lightness.

“I named her Bambi for the big eyes.”

“Bambi,” Cameron repeated, reaching out for the newly christened baby. Bambi went to him with an eagerness that surprised Malou, wrapping her tiny arms around Cameron's wrist. Cameron held her up and grinned into the little monkey's face.

Malou told herself that, objectively, she had known men technically more handsome than Cameron Landell, but she had never known another who made her feel as if her insides were a sandbar dissolving beneath the course of some current, a current that flowed out of a place within her, a current that she hadn't suspected and certainly couldn't control. She didn't like any of this. Not the feeling of being out of control, not the inexplicable yearning that had made her lean toward Cameron for that one mistake of a kiss, not the awkward, adolescent discomfort that was gnawing at her now. She didn't know what to say, to do.

Abruptly she turned away from Cameron and strode back toward the research station. Escape, that was the
one solution that never failed her. She'd learned early that tangling in the morass of human complications was something that she was simply not suited to handle. How could she have forgotten that essential fact long enough for Cameron's lips to find hers, to find that one unguarded spot within her that no man before had ever found?

“Mary Louise, you want to slow down a minute and tell me what's happening?”

Cameron easily kept pace with her blistering stride. Cursing herself for ever revealing her full name, Malou kept right on striding.

“Okay then, let me guess. One, this is the first leg of a new Olympic event—speed-walking with small monkey perched on your shoulder. Two, I've offended you. Now which is it?”

Malou stopped and pivoted toward Cameron. What on earth did women say to men in this kind of situation? She wished she had a clue. Under no circumstances, deep instinct told her, must Cameron Landell learn of the devastating effect he had upon her.

“Offended?” she asked as if unfamiliar with the meaning of the word. “How could you have offended me?” Good, she liked that. She'd struck exactly the right note of casual indifference. Or had she? Why then was Cameron grinning?

Fortunately, she was saved from pondering that mystery by Ernie bolting out of the research station and
calling to them, “Why do you have the baby?” The rays of the sun caught his thick glasses and turned them into two silver orbs blocking out his eyes.

Malou closed the distance between them. “Jezebel,” she said softly, her grief welling up within her again as she pronounced the name, “she's dead.”

“Dead,” Ernie echoed dully, his eyes still unreadable behind his glasses.

Malou placed a comforting hand on Ernie's shoulder. Jezebel had been one of the three or four monkeys he'd worked with most closely.

“Any idea what caused it?”

Malou shook her head no.

“Guess I'd better bring her into the lab and find out. Where did you find her?”

Malou described the spot where she'd left Jezebel, and Ernie set off. Inside the research station, with Cameron watching her every move, she mixed up a batch of infant formula and poured it into a tiny bottle. Bambi resisted the rubber nipple until enough of the formula had trickled between her lips to convince her that the stuff was edible; then she put every ounce of her fragile being into sucking out the nourishment she needed.

“Such a gigantic will to live for such a tiny creature,” Cameron said, as the infant drained the miniature bottle with a loud slurping noise.

Malou debated within herself whether or not to press
her advantage. She decided to take the risk. “Yes,” she answered. “Wouldn't it be a shame to subvert that will?”

Cameron caught her eye and arched a brow in her direction to indicate that her meaning had not been lost on him. “I promised you that I'd try to work something out.”

Malou smiled.

With the furry baby cradled in her arms, its lids fluttering closed sleepily, Cameron reflected on what an odd sort of madonna she made. She was so at peace, so serene and happily in her element with monkeys and so prickly and unpredictable with humans. At least with him. Cameron wondered why. More important, he wondered why he cared so blasted much. She placed the monkey gently onto a nest of terry cloth towels that she transferred into a clean cage along with a softly ticking alarm clock.

“That'll make her think she's lying next to her mother's heart,” Malou explained. For a few quiet seconds, they watched the baby sleep.

“I wonder what monkeys dream about,” Cameron asked.

“Storm Mountain,” Malou guessed, but had no chance to theorize further because Ernie burst in carrying a dried piece of a shrubby bush with a few bright berries still attached.

“Look what I found not ten yards from where Jezebel was lying.”

“Coyotillo,” Cameron identified the plant.

“Not a bad botanical analysis for a businessman,” Ernie said, eyeing Cameron sharply.

“The stuff's a plague to livestock,” Cameron elaborated. “The berries are deadly poison. Costs me a fortune to keep it off property where I run cattle.”

“Unless I'm seriously mistaken, this is what killed Jezebel,” Ernie went on.

“But how?” Malou asked. “We've been over every acre inside the enclosure, wiping the weed out. Not only that, but the monkeys learned long ago not to eat that plant.”

Ernie shrugged, turning the bit of brush over in his hand. “Beats me, but here's the evidence. What's odd is, look here.” He indicated the broken end of the branch. “This is how I found it. Obviously ripped off the plant.”

“What's so odd about that?” Cameron questioned.

“That's something you wouldn't know about,” Ernie answered in what Malou felt was an unnecessarily snide tone. “Macaques rarely uproot plants. They feed on the sprouts, buds, and berries and leave the plant itself intact.”

“No, I wasn't aware of that,” Cameron admitted.

“I didn't think you would be.”

There was a peculiar intensity in Ernie's comment. It infected Malou with unhealthy suspicions that rankled
beneath the surface. She was certain that she had not left any coyotillo plants within the enclosure.

Ernie was strafing Cameron now with unconcealed dislike. Cameron was returning the hostility in full measure. His eyes had hardened again until they reflected nothing but frozen glints of steely determination.