Proper Care and Maintenance of Friendship (9781609417291)

by Verge Higgins, Lisa

  Seeing his name in bold black letters brought back, in full force, the surging pride she’d experienced when she’d first searched for his name on the Internet. Oh, what he’d accomplished since he’d left Paraguay. Five hard years of general-surgery training, followed by a two-year residency in plastic surgery, and then yet another year specializing in craniofacial surgery. Double board certification. Then years of world travel, associated with an organization that specialized in correcting severe cleft-palate abnormalities and misshapen heads of children who would otherwise never live an ordinary life.

  And what all this meant to her was that Colin hadn’t changed. He was the same dedicated, determined man he’d been when he’d swept into that hut in Paraguay and, despite the risks, saved Werai’s battered leg. She had imagined—expected—hoped—dreamed of—great things from him. Fourteen years of wild expectations. She was sure no man—no human—could meet her ridiculously inflated imaginings. Yet, on paper, he’d exceeded every one of them.

  And tomorrow, she thought, pulling documents out of her backpack to hand to the man behind the registration desk—tomorrow, after she’d scrubbed off twenty hours of airplane grit, slept her mind clean, and braced herself with a high-protein breakfast—tomorrow, when she wouldn’t feel lightheaded just at the sight of his name on a placard, she’d hunt him down.

  When she finished registering, she turned around with a key card in hand and glanced to where she’d left Kate and Sam and saw, instead, three men, bent in obvious concern over Kate’s limp form, and Sam standing stiffly apart.

  Oh, God. Sarah crossed the lobby as her mind raced. Had Kate lost consciousness? She hadn’t seemed hot enough for febrile convulsions. The side effects of so many shots could be serious—had Kate taken the live polio vaccine rather than the genetically engineered one? Sarah mentally flipped through the vaccinations, their known side effects, and their more rare complications. I never should have brought her here; she’s not herself. She hasn’t been acting right since she jumped out of an airplane—

  “Sam,” she gasped, “what happened?”

  He looked tight-faced. His eyes were strangely blank.

  “Sam?!”

  “She’s fine, Sarah,” he said curtly. “These men are doctors.”

  Sarah crouched next to the chair and noticed with relief that Kate was conscious. In fact, Kate was grinning up at the doctor gripping her wrist in his hand, searching for a pulse.

  “Look, Sarah-belle,” Kate said, with a strange giggle, “I’m being examined by Indiana Jones.”

  The doctor rumbled a low, earthy laugh. “Clearly she’s delirious.”

  Maybe it was the laugh. Maybe it was the broad American accent. Or maybe it was the sight of those tanned, tapered fingers, probing Kate’s wrist. Deft, limber fingers. Knowing hands. A surgeon’s hands.

  Colin.

  Things like this happened only in dreams. She had no weight; she had no substance. His gaze was her only anchor. It fixed her in place. Around him, the world receded.

  Time had slipped a few strands of white into his hair, and he’d clipped it to his collar rather than let it grow shaggy. She noted the shadow of his clavicle visible through the opening of his crisp white shirt, the faint throb of a vein in the column of his throat, and the V-shaped scar just below his ear. In a heartbeat he’d been yanked from the midst of her fantasies and poured into the flesh-and-blood creature looming only inches from her face.

  Colin. The skin at the corners of his eyes crinkled. That webbing hadn’t been there when she’d known him in Paraguay. Certainly, he’d spent the last fourteen years laughing to earn those merry creases. She could almost hear that laughter: through the long stretch of his surgical residency, while he gently teased sweet-tempered children in the hours before he stitched their faces back to normal.

  As recognition flickered in his gray gaze, she noticed the amber nimbus around his pupils, those whiskey-colored rings that set his eyes apart from all others. He swayed back in disbelief, and then his face warmed with a bright, growing realization. She watched him. She watched fourteen years, like water flowing between them, pass like a flash flood. And then they were staring at one another as if no time had passed at all.

  “Sarah?” He shook his head, a quick and almost imperceptible shake. “Sarah Pollard?”

  “Colin.”

  His name came out as a whisper. So insubstantial, yet she heard it, saturated with promise.

  From a distant place came another voice. And yet another. Awkward laughter, muffled to her ears. She tried to force the distractions away, but Colin eased himself up and broke the spell.

  The world rushed in upon her. She heard the chatter of a crowd. Small groups of men and women flowed in through the hotel doors. The elevators rang as they slid open. Kate hummed in the chair. Colin’s companions watched her with avid curiosity. Just beyond them, Sam also watched—with an expression both fierce and stiff.

  “I’m surprised speechless,” Colin said to his colleagues, not taking his eyes off her. “Gentlemen, this is Sarah Pollard, an old friend of mine. We were in the Peace Corps together, in South America. Along with Sam here. About, what, fifteen years ago?”

  She straightened up. She had weight again; she had substance. The throbbing in her back intensified. She became achingly aware of her finger-combed hair and wrinkled muslin shirt as Colin introduced her to his colleagues, whose names she didn’t register and thus immediately forgot.

  Kate stopped humming long enough to moan.

  Colin the doctor leaned in, all concern.

  “It’s the vaccinations,” Sarah explained, trying to clear the fog from her senses. “She took five of them, practically all at once.”

  “Which ones?”

  Like a good nurse in an emergency, Sarah rattled them off. “All within the past week,” she added. “She started feeling sick on the airplane. We arrived only a few hours ago.”

  I came for you.

  Sam stepped in. “If you have your room, Sarah, let’s get her to bed.”

  “I’ll help.” Colin took Kate’s hand and coaxed her to her feet. “I can examine her more thoroughly in private.”

  Colin’s colleagues made polite noises and then melted away. Slipping an arm around her back, Colin guided Kate’s uncertain steps toward the bank of elevators. Sarah trailed behind, trying not to stare. He wasn’t as taut and lean as he’d been in Paraguay—but the bulk he’d put on in the interim was clearly muscle. He had an athletic trimness, an un-self-conscious physique that spoke of occasional mountain biking, weekend pickup basketball, even rock-climbing.

  This is not how she had envisioned their first meeting. On the way up to her room, he chatted easily with a semi-responsive Kate. He coaxed her upright. He expressed his surprise at seeing both Sam and Sarah here, his gaze traveling between them. He asked what relief group they were working for, how long they’d be staying, and whether they’d come for the conference. Sarah answered in vague generalities—she worked for Doctors Without Borders now. She hadn’t come for the conference. When she fell silent, Sam filled the void. Sam told Colin that he’d been assigned to Burundi about a year ago, supplying Sarah’s refugee camp as well as several others. That’s how he and Sarah had connected again.

  Not for the first time, Sarah suffered under the blight of her fair skin, which mortified her with every flush.

  In the room, after getting Kate settled in the bed, Sarah stole some privacy by slipping into the bathroom with her own backpack to scour her face, put a comb through her hair, and try to stop her heart from pounding.

  I came for you.

  “She should be fine,” Colin said when Sarah re-emerged. Kate had fallen asleep. “I’ll check her again tomorrow morning, before the conference sessions begin.” Then he tilted his head in a way so familiar that Sarah flattened a palm against the wall in a sudden attack of vertigo. “I had to dig through her luggage for the aspirin,” he said, sheepishly, gesturing to Kate’s open suitcase. “It was tightly pack
ed, so—”

  “I’m sure she won’t mind.”

  “She doesn’t travel light, or often, I suspect.”

  Sarah shook her head. Her earrings, clusters of amber beads, clattered. “It’s a very long story.”

  “Then have a drink with me.” His gaze lingered on her for just a fraction of a second, before he added, glancing at Sam, “Both of you. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

  Kind Colin. Always inclusive, always generous, always doing the polite thing, though she knew by the way his gaze clung that he wanted to talk to her, and her alone. That knowledge was enough to start a slow, lazy swirl of heat low in her abdomen. But timing was everything. She needed to breathe, collect herself, even for just a few minutes.

  “Perhaps tomorrow,” she said. “We just arrived, and I really should stay with Kate—”

  “Go with Dr. O’Rourke, Sarah,” Sam said suddenly. “You two have much to talk about.”

  Sam? His face was unreadable; his hands were fists in his pockets.

  “Don’t worry about Kate.” Sam shrugged a tight shoulder. He picked up the television remote, then sprawled on the second bed. “I’ll keep an eye on her. I’m sure she’ll be thrilled to wake up in a strange hotel room with a Nigerian gunrunner.”

  Colin laughed.

  And Sarah was lost.

  Moments later, on the first floor, in one of the hotel’s two restaurants, Colin slipped onto a barstool and ordered a sherry. She ordered the same, because it was easier to say, “I’ll have what he’s having,” than to actually think up something for herself. She felt as if someone had severed the connection between her mind and her tongue.

  “Here’s to old friends.” He lifted his glass. “And good times.”

  She took a sip. Powerful, sweet, burning. She felt his eyes upon her, like hot roaming hands.

  “You haven’t changed a bit.” He reached up and brushed a thumb over her nose. “Maybe a few more freckles.”

  Her drink clattered against the bar. She gripped it more firmly. He must remember. He’d tried to count those freckles once. The ones on her legs. He’d played connect-the-dots with his tongue until—

  He cleared his throat and slid the drink onto the bar. “Funny seeing you and Sam here.”

  “Yes.”

  “One or the other, maybe. The world is small, and there are only so many relief organizations. But both of you. Together.”

  “Mmm.”

  She thought, So was this what it was going to be? The two of them, sitting so close, talking about nothing. Chattering away, filling the silence with small talk, after all that had passed between them?

  “Sarah?” He settled his gaze on her and waited a moment. “Well?”

  “Hmm?”

  “You and Sam—are you a couple?”

  “A couple?!”

  “The way he looked at you in the hotel room, I thought maybe you were. But then he let you come here with me.”

  “No, no, we’re not… Sam and I are just”—a flash of memory, of the lake in the rain—“we’re just colleagues.”

  “Vacationing together,” he mused. “In Bangalore.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She left it at that. She didn’t need to complicate an already complicated situation by detailing the unnerving relationship she’d developed with Sam this past year, a turmoil of unbidden emotions and, yes, she supposed, some plain old-fashioned physical attraction. It had absolutely nothing to do with what was going on right here, right now, in this bar, across a stool from Colin.

  Sarah peered into the amber liquid of her drink and wished for one moment she could be like Jo. Free and easy with men, knowing the secret language of barstool chatter and body language. Knowing how to telegraph her own deepest desires with the flick of her eyelashes, the twitch of a smile, the gape of her shirt, or the swing of a bare leg. But though Sarah could speak English and Spanish and Guaraní and a few words of passable Bantu, in this, she was as ignorant as a Tutsi virgin given over to her husband in exchange for some cattle, goats, and hoes.

  Get him talking about himself, sugar. Nothing a man likes better.

  “Tell me,” she said, with Jo’s voice still ringing in her ears, “what this conference is about.”

  Colin began talking about his work. He was presenting and demonstrating some advanced surgical techniques, in the hopes that the junior doctors could use them for the more severely deformed craniofacial abnormalities they faced in the poorer sections of India. The more he talked, the more Sarah realized that he’d been nervous, too. His shoulders relaxed. He used his hands, and he sipped more freely on his drink. He talked about the week he’d already spent traveling the countryside; he talked about the work they’d be doing in the days to come. He told a story about a boy he’d operated on last year at a similar meeting, a boy he’d visited, a boy now thriving because for the first time he could eat solid food without the risk of choking.

  When he paused, she said, “You’ve come a long way from stitching together Werai’s leg in the backwaters of Paraguay.”

  He laughed, even flushed a little, and her heart turned over, for he was always modest about having saved not only the boy’s life but also his leg. Without touching upon why he’d left, he talked about what he did after—the surgical residency, the specialties, the board certifications, all that résumé fodder she’d managed to dig up on the Internet. He leaned toward her, using his hands, his shoulders, his head, the whole of his body, and she watched him with her heart swelling in her chest, because this was the Colin she remembered best. The man whose work was his passion, the man who lived his ideals.

  She wanted him.

  It wasn’t the sherry, though she was on her second, and she’d always been an easy touch with the booze. It was him, in all his clean, strong glory, resurrected from her dreams.

  “… and I’ve spent all this time talking about me, and I still don’t know a thing about you.”

  She met his gaze. A fierce yearning shot through her. The shock bolted between them, swift and hot, leaving in its wake an aching need for well-remembered pleasures.

  Then, abruptly, Colin leaned back in his chair. Leaned away from her, from the sizzle that remained. Uncertainty rippled over his features. He traced his chin with one hand. “Sarah,” he began, on a half-sigh, “there is one more thing—”

  “No.”

  Sarah slid her hand over his, where he gripped his knee. She slid her fingers between his. She felt his frisson of uncertainty, but she willed it away. Forced it away. She would summon the great lusty will of Jo in this. She hadn’t come halfway across the world to whimper and cave. She hadn’t come halfway across the world on Rachel’s urging to pay lip service to Rachel’s last wishes. She hadn’t come halfway across the world just to say good-bye.

  “Don’t you want to know,” she said softly, feeling her lips swell under his gaze, “why I’m here?”

  He looked dazed, almost dazzled. “I had wondered.”

  “I came for you.”

  She lifted herself out of her seat. She aimed for his mouth, that strong, curved bottom lip. She lifted herself and caught him by surprise. Caught his mouth and pressed hers on his, not caring that the bartender hovered nearby, not caring that many of his own colleagues were also having drinks in the room, not caring about anything but the heat of his breath and the moistness of his mouth as he responded.

  Now it was his turn to have a voice full of husky promise.

  “Sarah.”

  She pressed her forehead against his and slid her fingers behind his neck, feeling the crisp curl of his hair against her fingers. “Do you have a room?”

  Breathlessly, “Yes.”

  “Take me there.”

  He sat still, just for a moment longer. Just a moment’s hesitation. She felt how solidly he fixed himself on that chair, even as he breathed hoarsely against her cheek, even as his fingers flexed on her waist. He wanted her. He resisted her. She ignored it—just as she ignored that feeling at the
back of her neck, that tingling of guilt, that knowledge that she was not playing by the rules.

  He had been her lover first.

  She pressed closer, and let her breasts oh-so-lightly brush his chest. He’d always loved her breasts, small as they were—closer to the bone, he’d said, dense with nerve endings, he’d said. Exquisitely sensitive.

  He slid off the chair. His body scraped against hers. She felt his spine soften, right under the grip of her fingers.

  Then she knew. She would have him tonight. And maybe, in the course of time, it would be she herself—Sarah Elizabeth Pollard—who’d be Colin’s beloved fiancée. Instead of that distant California woman—the one he was due to marry in three short months.

  chapter seven

  “Okay, okay, okay, get this,” Hector said. “It’s a puzzle, but the pieces are all mixed up so you can’t see who it is, but you can see enough to know it’s someone young and hip, because they’re wearing designer, but we haven’t decided on who yet—”

  “I got it, Hector.” Jo adjusted the earpiece to her phone just as her laptop beeped the arrival of a new e-mail. “But—”

  “Hold on, hold on, I haven’t got to the good part yet. Here’s the thing: The whole puzzle? It’s in the shape of a puzzle piece. It’s a puzzle in a puzzle piece. Isn’t that brilliant?”

  “Nice.”

  “In the magazine ads we’ll add at the bottom, ‘Who’s the face of Mystery?’ Or ‘Can you guess the face of Mystery?’ We haven’t come up with anything really banging yet. Casey’s talking about having a sweepstakes to guess the winner. You know, one of those things where everyone sends in a postcard with a guess and then we randomly pick one winner from the group that guesses right. We can give them swag, some kind of product case—”

  “Nix that.” Jo shifted forward on her couch and scanned the rough draft of the project proposal, scrolling down the page. “Too Family Circle. We’re aiming at soccer moms hiding navel rings, and teenagers with tongue studs.”