Excerpt

“Stop running, Jack.” I took his beautiful face in my hands as lightning flashed in the distance. “Stop running away from us. I want you. I’m not asking you for forever. Yes, it’s what I wanted—it’s what I was waiting for. But then I took a trip. And I realized I’d been living in a delicate, made-up world. No, not living. Hibernating. Crossing off the days, one after the other. So what I want—what I really want, is this one rainy afternoon. I want to go back home drunk and intoxicated, filled with ecstasy and white heat. So love me tenderly, Jack. Or love me recklessly. I don’t care which. But do it now. You never know if we’ll be passing this way again.” His expression was so galvanizing, my heart fluttered wildly in my chest. “Your words. Remember?”
“I was talking about a trip to the crater, not—”
“Not this?” I tossed off my wet top in a passionate challenge.
My invitation pushed him over the edge. Something intense flared through him—instant, electric, as if I had just unleashed him.
Shit. I’m in for it now. My pulse pounded with a dizzy cocktail of desire, rimmed in gritty bits of trepidation. He gazed at me intently, cranking up the anticipation until it was almost unbearable.
“Take it off,” he said, his command thick with longing.
My fingers faltered as I slid off one strap, and then the other. He didn’t wait for me to unclasp my bra. He was done waiting. His tongue flicked my nipple through the wet fabric before he latched on, sucking it into his mouth, rasping the edges with his teeth.
“Ohhh.” My breath escaped as he brought my untried senses to life, pulling down the lace on the other cup and flicking the puckered peak with his thumb.
He lifted me into his lap, straddling my legs on either side of him. He was hard, and he wanted me to know it. “Last chance, sweetness. I’ve never wanted anyone the way I want you. So if you’re having second thoughts, now’s the time, because in a little while I’m going to take you, gently at first, and then to all kinds of dark, delicious places.”
His breath left hot, phantom kisses between my breasts, his words making me squirm. My insides jangled with excitement. Without breaking the intense gaze we were locked in, I tugged at the hem of his T-shirt. He lifted his arms and let me peel it off. His skin was slick with rainwater, but the heat coming off his body was palpable. Our breaths came in unison as we paused at the edge, that exquisite swell of silence between the crack of lightning and the roar of thunder.
And then the space between us exploded.
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Once in Africa, I kissed a king…
“And just like that, in an old red barn at the foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro, I discovered the elusive magic I had only ever glimpsed between the pages of great love stories. It fluttered around me like a newborn butterfly and settled in a corner of my heart. I held my breath, afraid to exhale for fear it would slip out, never to be found again.”
When a bomb explodes in a mall in East Africa, its aftershocks send two strangers on a collision course that neither one sees coming.
Jack Warden, a divorced coffee farmer in Tanzania, loses his only daughter. An ocean away, in the English countryside, Rodel Emerson loses her only sibling.
Two ordinary people, bound by a tragic afternoon, set out to achieve the extraordinary, as they make three stops to rescue three children across the vast plains of the Serengeti—children who are worth more dead than alive.
But even if they beat the odds, another challenge looms at the end of the line. Can they survive yet another loss—this time of a love that’s bound to slip through their fingers, like the mists that dissipate in the light of the sun?
“Sometimes you come across a rainbow story—one that spans your heart. You might not be able to grasp it or hold on to it, but you can never be sorry for the color and magic it brought.”
A blend of romance and women’s fiction, Mists of The Serengeti is inspired by true events and contains emotional triggers, including the death of a child. Not recommended for sensitive readers. Standalone, contemporary fiction.
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