Proper Care and Maintenance of Friendship (9781609417291) Page 7

  “This is about Rachel again, isn’t it? If she’s got you mountain-climbing or BASE jumping—”

  “This has nothing to do with Rachel. I’m doing this for us.” Grinding a foot in the dirt, she turned around and strode right up to the fence. She stopped inches from the links, inches from his angry face, inches from all that powerful muscle, close enough to feel his heat. “Listen to me. Sarah’s not going to need me the whole time we’re there—she’s either going to be very busy or on a quick plane back to Burundi. But I’m staying the whole time. And I want you to join me.” She met his angry blue gaze and held it steady. “But this time, Paul, I’m not making the plans. This time, you have to make it happen.”

  He curled his fingers into the links, staring at her as if he’d never seen her before in his life.

  “On Tuesday,” she said, “Sarah and I are flying to India.”

  chapter six

  After telling a bald-faced lie to a Customs officer, Sarah confirmed what she’d begun to suspect during the twenty-hour trip to Bangalore: Bringing Kate to India was a mistake.

  “Kate, walk straight.” Sarah stumbled, unbalanced by Kate’s weight and the drag of Kate’s overstuffed suitcase. She shoved her taller friend upright. “Fake it for a few more minutes. We’re almost out of Customs.”

  “It’s so hot.”

  “Yeah, well, say a couple of grateful prayers for that.” Sarah resisted the urge to glance over her shoulder, to the officers whose gazes she felt boring into their sweaty backs. “If the air conditioning in this airport was working, you’d be the only one drenched in sweat, and we’d still be back there, arguing with the viceroys.”

  “Yeah, but couldn’t you think up a better lie than telling them I’m drunk?”

  “Better they think you a drunken tourist rather than a diseased one.” Sarah gave Kate’s gigantic suitcase a yank. “I just saved your ass from Indian quarantine. Keep walking.”

  “I’m not sick.”

  Sarah closed her gritty eyes and willed one more drop of patience. Her back ached from so many uncomfortable hours on a cramped, stinking airplane. “Kate, how many shots did you take last week? Diphtheria and tetanus? Polio? Hep A? Meningitis?”

  “Gotta take the typhoid capsules—”

  “Oh, no. The only pills you’re taking are aspirin. Stop grabbing my backpack. You’re pulling me down.”

  “Which door?”

  Sarah looked at the single door leading from Customs to the main area of the airport. Then she looked at Kate, shiny with sweat, her face flushed right up to the hairline, her gaze unfocused, drunkenly trying to put one foot in front of the other. Her nurse’s eye told her: a hundred and one, maybe a hundred and two. Starting to get delirious. The doctor who’d given her all those shots in such a short time should be flogged. Kate could be out of it for days.

  Days. Days when Sarah would have to nurse Kate to health, cocooned in the cushy Western hotel Kate’s husband had insisted they book, the same hotel where Colin’s conference was taking place. How easy it would be to hide herself in an air-conditioned room and let the opportunity of seeing Colin… just slip right by.

  Rachel’s voice, clear as a gunshot.

  Coward.

  An image of Rachel bloomed in Sarah’s mind: Rachel, in full climbing regalia, grinning from the top of a craggy rock face, watching Sarah—sweaty and exhausted—struggle at a tricky pass.

  Hurts like hell, doesn’t it, Pollard? Push through it, kid, because heaven’s all the way up here.

  Sarah shifted Kate’s weight and plowed forward, following the signs to ground transportation. Well, Sarah knew that finding Colin was going to hurt like hell. She’d done nothing but think about him, staring out the airplane window as the world flew by. He was here, now, somewhere in Bangalore. Walking within the same ten square miles. Flesh and blood. No longer just a shimmering memory.

  As she plunged herself, and Kate, and Kate’s ridiculous suitcase into the chaotic terminal, she wondered if he was passing through this very crowd. Strolling amid the bright-sari-clad women. Dodging the same laughing children who swarmed around them. Perhaps picking up a colleague from the airport, another speaker in the panel on “Team Management of Cleft and Craniofacial Anomalies.” Or maybe he was perusing the wares of the kiosks—like the one she dragged Kate past, fragrant with incense. Or the next, piled high with sandalwood sculptures. Maybe he was at the spice seller’s just across the way, purchasing cumin, coriander, or saffron.

  I must be out of my mind.

  Kate groaned, “Are we there yet?”

  Sarah had stopped cold, right in the middle of the terminal. Men with suitcases shouldered past, bumping them without apology. A woman in a blue sari muttered something as she shepherded her flock of children past them.

  She couldn’t think about Colin right now: She had to triage. The first priority was getting through the phalanx of porters and touts and rickshaw drivers clustered by the doors to the pre-paid taxi booth, where she was sure they wouldn’t be cheated—and then to the hotel, to get Kate hydrated, medicated, and in bed.

  A tug on Kate’s suitcase informed her that they were already under attack.

  “Let me take this for you, madame, I have a very, very good taxi—”

  “Thank you, but no,” Sarah said, giving the suitcase a firm yank. “We’ve got a metered taxi waiting—”

  “A metered taxi will cheat you,” he said, and the purity of his English accent put her on alert. “Me, I’ll take you into Bangalore for free.”

  She blinked up into a pair of laughing brown eyes in a face as dark as mahogany. Her heart made a strange little leap as she recognized his growing smile. He wore his usual battered cotton shirt and a pair of well-worn khakis. In Africa, even at a distance of five kilometers or more as he bounced along in his jeep, she’d recognize him by the silhouette of his finely shaped head. But Sarah didn’t believe what she was seeing, because there was no reason for Samuel Roger Tremayne, the British/Nigerian supplies coordinator for the Burundi refugee camp, to be standing in front of her in a Bangalore airport.

  “It’s good to see you, too,” Sam said, gently tugging the handle of the suitcase. “But we’d best stop the chatter and get to the car. I’m parked double, and the bobbies around here don’t like that much.”

  He disappeared into the crowd.

  Kate asked, “Did that hunk of man just steal my luggage?”

  “What? No.” Sarah readjusted Kate’s weight, her mind racing but not quite catching up. “No, he’s a friend—a colleague.”

  “You’re unbelievable. You’ve got agents of the Sarah Survival Network even in India.”

  Sarah ducked around a cluster of travelers huddled over a guidebook, straining her neck to keep Sam and the battleship of a suitcase in sight. “Sarah Survival… who?”

  “SSN.” Kate aimlessly waved her hand, narrowly missing Sarah’s cheek. “It’s the way you get from one end of the earth to another with empty pockets and maxed-out credit cards.”

  “He shouldn’t be here.” Sarah shouldered through the doors of the terminal into a dense wall of humidity. She muscled Kate through a line of cab drivers. Sam unlocked the trunk of a white car, a far cleaner model than he usually drove. “He’s supposed to be in Burundi,” she said pointedly, as they got within earshot, “watching over the camp while I’m gone.”

  “Dr. Mwami is well stocked for the time being,” Sam said, hurling the suitcase effortlessly into the trunk of the car. “And I needed a holiday.”

  “Sarah, are you going to introduce m—”

  “A holiday, Sam? In Bangalore?”

  “Let me tell you about the beaches in Goa, Sarah-belle.” He swung the back door open and gestured for Kate to slip in. “They’re within driving distance from here. They’re dotted with shacks that serve icy beer and food spicy enough, even for me. I found a clean place to sleep for three dollars a day. And the beaches are full of white sand, as soft as a woman’s skin.”

  Sarah felt h
er fair skin flush. She dipped her head to avoid Sam’s eye, protecting Kate as she helped her into the backseat. “Last time I spoke to you,” Sarah argued, swinging her own backpack into the car, “all you could talk about was quitting the business, telling me how you were dying for bangers and mash and cricket on television.”

  “The Indian Cricket Squad will be training on the outskirts of the city today, there’ll be matches later in the week—”

  “Dr. Mwami told you I’d be here, didn’t he?”

  She looked up too fast. He’d slung one arm over the door and braced his other hand on the roof of the car, trapping her in the circle of his heat. She could see the faint ridge of the scar on his cheek, the one he’d gotten as a boy, the one that made Rachel confess, after she’d met him last year, that Sam had the sleek, exotic look of the singer Seal and twice the sensuality.

  But she and Rachel judged people differently.

  “The good doctor,” he said, as a muscle moved the scar in his cheek, “may have mentioned your plans.”

  “And on the strength of that, you came to Bangalore.”

  “India is not Burundi, Sarah-belle. Who is going to save you from the cons of the big, gritty city? Who else will bail you out,” he said, as his gaze flickered past her, “after you’re thrown in jail for parking double in a restricted zone?”

  Sarah picked up the hint. An officer approached, gesturing with his baton to move the car. She closed Kate in and swiftly slipped into the passenger’s seat as Sam raised his hands, feigning ignorance. He folded himself into the driver’s seat and stepped on the gas.

  Sam swung the car into the flood of traffic. Sarah gripped the dashboard and felt a familiar tingle of anger. Sam had the unique ability to do this to her—make her feel prickly, unnerved. Off-balance.

  “You shouldn’t have come, Sam,” she said. “I don’t need to be rescued.”

  “Who said anything about rescuing you?” Sam swerved to avoid a rickshaw jerking too quickly into the flow. “I need a vacation, you need a driver, and here I am.”

  “I could have hired one.”

  “You’d be cheated.”

  “A native driver would know more about these roads than you do.” A light loomed at an intersection. “It’s green.”

  “I know enough about the roads,” he said, cutting off a battered taxi to get through the light, “and I won’t have my hand out for baksheesh, nor will I be driving you to some uncle’s incense shop when it’s a temple you want to see—”

  “Did Dr. Mwami tell you why I was coming?”

  Sam took his eyes off the road for only a minute, but the steady look he gave her informed her he knew everything.

  Her insides went liquid. It wasn’t possible. Sam couldn’t know. She’d told Dr. Mwami where she was going, but not why—she wasn’t about to admit to her boss that she was chasing down an old flame. Yet Sarah felt the heat of Sam’s knowledge, and it melted her into utter mortification. Sam was a man who carried, in his head, a map of ever-shifting, critical information about three government and six rebel movements that made him indispensable in supplying their isolated and often beleaguered refugee camp with food, fuel, and medical necessities. What Sam didn’t know, Sam would—and apparently did—discover.

  Sarah turned away from those all-seeing eyes. She pressed her head against the glass, gazing at the Bollywood posters plastered on the auto-rickshaw speeding beside them. Her throat ached from thirst; her body ached from lack of sleep; grit scoured her eyes with every blink. Kate started singing in the backseat, a strange jumping melody that only she understood. And now there was Sam to contend with—Sam, an unnerving complication in her life, and a man who also happened to have been in Paraguay when she and Colin were lovers.

  Kate’s fingers curled over the front seat, and she hauled herself up so she could rest her chin on the edge. “Sarah, are you going to introduce me, or do I have to puke all over the back of this car to get your attention?”

  “Sam, this is Kate, an old friend of mine.” Sarah eyed the oncoming light. “Yellow, but you can make it.”

  “Pleasure’s mine, Kate,” he said, flashing his I’ll-charm-a-goat-from-a-Hutu grin in the rearview mirror as he powered past a lumbering truck. “You are the one with all the children?”

  “Just three. How many do you have?”

  “Oooh, none. That I know of.” He leaned on his horn as a rickshaw driver made a dangerous swerve into what most Westerners would consider Sam’s lane. “Did the flight do you in, or did Air France fill you with wine?”

  “Kate’s suffering from idiocy,” Sarah interjected, as the bleary Kate melted to his charm—literally, her head slipping so she rested her cheek on the edge of the front seat. “She took too many vaccinations in too short a time.”

  “Ah, well,” Sam said, “Nurse Sarah will have you up and touring the maharaja’s palace in a day or two. I’ve seen her work. There’s none better.”

  “Red, Sam. Red.”

  Sam slammed on the brakes and skidded, coming to a stop with the nose of the car poking into the intersection. “You’ve got to be quicker than that, Sarah. We’ll end up in some Indian hospital—”

  “—which will have some of the best doctors in the world. And it’ll be my punishment for getting in the car with a color-blind driver.”

  The slumped Kate emitted a high-pitched squeal.

  “Mostly blue-green,” Sam explained quickly. “But yellow-red gets me on cloudy days. But it’s only eight kilometers to the hotel, and most of it highway from here, so don’t you worry.”

  Kate’s voice went up an octave. “Sarah?”

  “Sam is our logistics man in Burundi,” Sarah explained. “He sees that our camp is properly supplied. Occasionally, he runs guns through checkpoints by stashing them inside medical machinery.”

  “Now, Sarah,” Sam said, his voice full of warning, “don’t be giving Kate the wrong impression.”

  “Am I?”

  Kate popped up. “You’re a gunrunner?”

  “Sarah is like a princess in a tower. She wraps herself up in a nice, safe fantasy about how things should be done, without taking a good hard look at the situation on the ground. By the way, Sarah, how is that dialysis machine working?”

  “Fine.”

  “And the mobile sonogram?”

  “Just peachy.” Sarah winced as the light changed and Sam surged left, cutting off another truck, slamming her into the door. “How’s the last batch of Kalashnikov assault rifles working, Sam? I thought I heard a whole bunch of them, just before I left, over the Rwandan border.”

  “I’m in a car,” a swooning Kate murmured, “with an African gunrunner.”

  “I don’t run guns. And I’m English, Kate, English. My mother is Nigerian, my father English. Raised in Sussex—”

  “—and trained at Oxford,” Sarah added, “and thus should know better.”

  “I’m speeding through the streets of Bangalore with a Nigerian renegade.” Kate melted into the backseat. “Now I can die happy.”

  Sam let out a slow, long whistle as he pulled up to the front entrance of The Chancery, the finest hotel in Bangalore. “I’m going to have to talk with the regional department head,” Sam said. “Clearly, he’s paying you a lot more than he’s paying me.”

  “Paul’s idea.” Sarah nearly tumbled out of her seat as a white-gloved attendant opened her door. “Paul is Kate’s husband. He wouldn’t let me make any arrangements other than giving him the name of this hotel. He’s even paying for it.”

  “He said,” Kate muttered, hauling herself up, “that Sarah would put us in a cheap hostel with iron beds and squat toilets—”

  And I probably would have, Sarah thought, retrieving her backpack from an attendant’s hands.

  “—and I’d wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of a rat chewing on my toothpaste.”

  Sam met Sarah’s gaze across the hood of the car, and his mouth twitched. “You won’t be having trouble like that here, Kate, you can
be sure.”

  “I suppose,” Sarah asked pointedly, “that you’re booked here, too, Sam?”

  He jerked his head toward the teeming street. “I’m down the road a bit. In a place with more local color.”

  “Thanks for the ride, then.” With a tingle of relief, Sarah pulled Kate’s arm across her shoulders and shifted her until she held the bulk of her weight. “We’ll be seeing you—”

  “Now, what kind of gentleman would I be,” Sam said, tossing the keys to the attendant, “if I didn’t stay and see you both settled?”

  Sarah set her jaw. She turned away and dragged herself and Kate through the front doors of the hotel. She didn’t want Sam here. Not now. But it would take a lot more energy than she currently had to convince Sam to leave her alone. It was useless to argue with him when he got like this. He’d been just as cheerfully stubborn when she’d insisted on making that trip into the mountains six months ago to deliver the meningitis vaccine. Sam argued that the trip was too dangerous to do alone; there’d been skirmishes between armed groups from both the Hutu and the Tutsi. Worn down by his cheery insistence, they’d gone together. The trip had been uneventful.

  Except for that kiss by the lake.

  To hide her sudden flush, Sarah poured a limp and sweaty Kate into one of the lobby chairs. “Watch Kate for me,” she mumbled, turning on her heel. “I’ll check in.”

  She crossed the cool, brightly lit lobby, her sneakers squeaking on the polished floor. Western Muzak played through hidden speakers. Surrounded by smoked glass and gleaming, rosy wood, Sarah thought that, but for the few exquisite handloom rugs hanging on the walls behind the registration desk, she could be in a Sheraton in Topeka, or a Hilton in Berlin. All local color remained firmly outside the doors.

  Then she came to an abrupt stop. Near the registration desk stood a placard welcoming all attendees to the International Conference on Craniofacial Surgery. The placard listed, among the speakers, a surgeon by the name of Dr. Colin O’Rourke.