chapter twelve

What the fuck is going on?”

The words slid out of Sarah’s mouth like slivers of steel.

“Easy, Sarah,” Sam said. “Kate is having a hard time of it.”

Sarah glared at them. Why didn’t he loosen his grip? Kate looked pale, but perfectly capable of standing on her own. “Hard time of what?”

“She can’t take it all in. She’s a green recruit. She’s not like you.”

What the hell did that mean? Not dreamy and disconnected? Not short and frizzy-haired and socially awkward? Not fashion-challenged or blithely ignorant of important details? No, Kate was the fierce and capable one; all tasks done impeccably with taste and style; even her kids turned out flawless. She never did anything half assed or by the seat of her pants, like Sarah was trying to do right now, searching for candy to give to a kid with late-stage lymphoma because she had nothing to offer that would really help.

Sarah glared at Kate. To think she’d been worried about Blondie during the drive. To think she’d been worried that, in spite of the vaccinations, Kate had come down with malaria or typhoid or some other tropical malady. Instead, Kate had succumbed to a different kind of fever—with the strapping black Brit who had the irritating ability to unnerve Sarah with nothing more than his tall and brooding presence.

Kate ducked away, muttering something about finding a bathroom. Sarah didn’t bother warning her that the only bathrooms were the squat-toilet kind and not a place for lingering. She’d find out soon enough, and Sarah was still reeling over the vision of Kate and Sam embracing. A red haze threatened the edges of her vision, even as Sarah told herself that Kate hadn’t been herself in weeks, not since the first skydive. The angry haze lingered even as the softer part of her nature argued that Kate was crashing, finally, to earth.

But Sam should know better.

Sam stepped closer, then leaned in the doorway, crossing his arms. “What are you more angry at, Sarah? That I might have kissed Kate? Or that I might have kissed her instead of you?”

“Stop.” Sarah pushed the memory deep, deep inside. She thought she’d made it clear to him: What had happened on the trip to the mountains was irrelevant—just a lapse of judgment in a time of stress. “Kate is a married woman.”

“And vulnerable,” Sam added. “And missing her husband. A heart is a fragile thing.”

Sarah drew in a tight breath as a thought assaulted her. “Did you two have crusader sex in the jungle?”

“Only one of us is indulging in crusader sex,” he retorted, “and it’s not me.”

If her face got any hotter, her skin would sizzle right off her bones. Surely it must be written all over her body, Colin’s kisses like bruises on her throat, the imprint of Colin’s hands all over her skin, and, mostly, the guilt she felt, and the shame.

“Don’t change the subject. This is about you taking advantage of my friend—”

“Oh, no, Sarah-belle, it’s about a lot more than that.” Sam pushed away from the doorway. He took one step too close. Close enough for her to see his bitter chocolate eyes, and the intensity brewing in them. “It’s about getting entangled with someone you hardly knew, at a time when you were lonely and vulnerable—”

“Exactly. You know better than to do that to Kate.”

“—and then dreaming that experience into some great bloody opera-love, dreaming it bigger with each passing year, until the weight of it suffocates you. Blinds you so much you can’t even see what’s right in front of your eyes—”

“You’re wrong, Sam.”

“You should have put him up on a shelf. You should have labeled the relationship for what it really was: a great shag overseas. But, no, not you, Sarah, not the minister’s daughter who has only one heart to give, one big heart, who made the terrible mistake of giving that heart to a man who took advantage of you when you were vulnerable and lonely—”

“Enough.”

She swung the clipboard as if she could strike the words right out of the air. A pen shot out, clattered against the wall, and slid down the hall. The red haze dimmed her vision, thankfully, because she didn’t want to see Sam’s face and look into those fierce eyes. This Sam unnerved her. She’d encountered him once before, under an acacia tree on the border of Lake Tanganyika, when he’d seized her rain-wet face in his hands and kissed her until she couldn’t think straight.

She seized the clipboard to her chest, shielding her heart. “I should expect no better,” she said, hating the husk in her voice, “from you.”

His nostrils flared. “Someday you will forgive me for those rifles.”

“It’s a hard thing to forgive, when a gunshot patient bleeds out on the table—”

“I was given two choices: The guns go through, you get your medical equipment, and I survive—or the guns go through, your equipment is sold on the black market, and I’m dead in a ditch. Tell me, which moral choice is the better?”

She shut her eyes. She didn’t want to hear it. Didn’t want to argue the point. The world she lived in was riddled with ugly moral compromises. You want the bags of flour driven inland? Pay a bribe at the port, bribe the driver, bribe the sentinels at every one-mile-marker checkpoint, and don’t forget the armed rebels greeting you at the end, who’ll take all the food for their own soldiers. A harsh world chipped away at her hopes and expectations. A harsh world bred impossible compromises.

“And since we’re speaking of moral compromises,” Sam said, leaning in, “why don’t you tell me, Sarah-belle, which is worse: me kissing a married woman, or you banging an engaged man?”

Hours later, Sarah found Kate crouched behind the clinic with her head between her knees. The face she lifted to Sarah was blotched with misery.

Sarah absorbed the jolt of guilt like a quick shot of bitter medicine. She hadn’t been very forgiving this afternoon. When she’d turned on her heel and left Sam, she’d made no effort to find Kate. Instead, she’d stepped right back into work, losing herself in the much larger problems of patient after patient after patient. Now she meandered to Kate’s side and leaned against the wall.

The plaster exuded heat; Sarah felt the burn through her shirt. “You’ve been here all day?”

“Pretty much.”

Sarah gestured to the edge of the jungle, not ten feet away. “See any tigers?”

“Saw a couple of monkeys.” Kate scraped her hands through her tangled hair. “That’s all the wildlife back here. A couple of monkeys and a big blue jackass.”

Sarah slid down the wall. The rough surface of the plaster caught the fibers of her shirt. She rifled through her skirt pocket, then pulled out a lighter and a thin hand-rolled cigarette, tied at both ends with colorful string. Licking the tip, she put it between her lips and flicked the lighter.

Kate managed to cock a brow. “Hard day, huh?”

“Not really.” Sarah blew a stream of sweet-smelling smoke. “Not any harder than most.”

“You’re smoking a joint.”

“It’s a bidi. A poor man’s cigarette.” The fragrance of cloves curled around her. “They spice it to mask the taste of cheap tobacco. The patients kept foisting them on me. It’s rude to refuse. Want one?”

“Will it make me forget the day?”

“No. But it’ll keep away the flies.”

Kate reached for it. “That’ll do.”

They sat in silence, enjoying the perfume of the clove cigarette. Sarah made a smoke ring and watched it wobble and widen as it rose into the canopy. “So,” she said, feeling low and unworthy, but unable to help herself as the mild narcotic hit her system, “Kate Jansen’s got a thing for Samuel Roger Tremayne.”

“Oh, no, no, no.” Kate covered her face and then just as quickly lifted it from the cradle of her hands. “I’m an idiot. Sam just caught me as I fell.”

“Yeah,” Sarah said, eyeing her through a smoky drag, “he caught you with his lips.”

“Lips? No! We didn’t kiss. Sarah! We didn’t kiss! He just held me. It was a nonevent—really.”

Relief was a wicked, treacherous thing.

“Listen, I’m a mess.” Kate grasped her hair in two fistfuls. “I’ve jetted off and abandoned my husband and kids. I’m the most reviled creature in the world. I’m the Bad Mommy.”

“That’s a little harsh.”

“I’ve got to go home. I’ve got to make things right.”

“Kate, I’m sure they’ve adapted.”

“You don’t understand.” Kate crossed her arms, grasped her shoulders, and squeezed. “Everyone thinks I spend my time at home watching soap operas and whipping up gourmet meals… but I’m usually draining pots of pasta and tossing in bottled sauce, or I’m racing around town looking for poster board and the right kind of cleats, or I’m patching the crumbling walls, or managing a fever while I’m on the phone planning the next school fund-raiser. I’m always on the edge of losing it. I came here thinking I could revitalize my marriage, and all I’ve done is dump all that on Paul.”

“Finally, you’re crashing.”

“I’m changing my flight when we get back to the hotel. I want to leave tomorrow morning.”

“Frankly,” Sarah said, twirling the bidi between her fingers, “I thought you’d have crashed long before now.”

“What are you talking about?”

“After finals, your junior year of college, you rented that beach house on your father’s credit card. Invited half the dorm. Introduced mosh-pit diving at the local bar.” Sarah adjusted her unwinding ball of hair so it lay in a pile on one shoulder. “You partied like an animal for four days. Two of them on a sprained ankle.”

“I just blew off a little steam. I had finals and GMATs practically the same week.”

“Then you completely popped your cork senior year. Remember when you climbed that ridge topless, and those two rangers—”

“Hey, it was a tough semester.”

“Kate, I don’t know much about your home life, but something tells me that this breakdown was inevitable. And a long time coming.”

A crease deepened between Kate’s brows. She plucked a thread loose on the hem of her Punjabi suit, now wrinkled and sweat-stained.

Sarah nudged her with a fist. “For what it’s worth, when you go off the deep end, you’re a hell of a lot of fun.”

Kate laughed in a way that was half a sob. Then she sank her head on Sarah’s shoulder. The sun dipped in the sky, taking the keen edge off the day’s heat. The tops of the trees danced with a rogue breeze, shifting the dappled light, and the air was charged with the threat of a late-season rain shower.

Kate asked softly, “How do you do it, Sarah? How can you be so calm, so unruffled… doing this?”

Sarah rolled her eyes and avoided answering by filling her lungs with smoke. After her conversation with Sam, this was the last thing she wanted to discuss. Right now, she didn’t feel very much like a stouthearted, self-sacrificing, morally incorruptible relief worker.

She released a long fragrant plume of smoke. “I get paid.”

“In cigarettes,” Kate muttered, reaching for the flaking remnant. “Nasty ones, too.”

“Kate, I tell you about this stuff all the time.”

“No, you don’t. You just ask for money.”

“For food, for supplies, for bribes. If I actually talked about this,” she said, waving a circle in the air, “I’d spoil everyone’s appetite for Pinot Grigio and bacon-wrapped dates.”

“Ouch.”

“Look.” Sarah rubbed her eyes with the butt of her hand. Her lower back ached. Even crouched against the wall, she couldn’t stretch out the pain. “You and I look at the world with very different eyes.”

Kate jerked with a humorless laugh. “Hey, I don’t think rose-colored glasses could filter out any of this.”

“That’s not what I mean.” Sarah took back the cigarette and rolled its wet tip between her fingers. “Do you remember when I stayed with you and Paul one year, over Thanksgiving?”

“Sure. Your parents were overseas doing a missionary stint.”

“Tess was only a few years old. I think you were pregnant again.” Sarah pushed her skirt between her knees and slipped so she was fully seated on the ground. “You had this incredible centerpiece. You filled a bowl with wheatgrass, and evergreens you’d clipped from the neighborhood, then piled on blue-and-silver ornaments.”

“To match the chair covers. Saw it in Family Circle.”

“All weekend I kept looking at the thing.” Sarah took a final deep draw on the cigarette and pressed out the butt as she exhaled the last of the smoke. “I kept thinking: How much time did you spend on it? And where in the name of God do you find wheatgrass? And why were you trying so hard to make your house look like the cover of some magazine?”

Kate shrugged, bewildered.

“Do you know what Jo once said to me? She confessed that her job in this world is to set up impossible ideals. To create an image so powerful that even good, honest, striving people—people like you, Kate—will do anything to attain that unreachable expectation.”

Kate went very still. Her lips parted, and she searched some place well beyond the jungle.

“That’s what I meant when I said that you and I look at the world differently.” Sarah patted the wall over her head. “This clinic, this place—just imagine how crazy I’d be if I thought all the problems here could actually be solved.”

In Sarah’s mind rose the memory of that sweet little girl with the crooked braids, lying bloody on a pallet in the clinic.

“But,” Kate muttered, “that’s different. I just want what’s best, for Paul, for the kids—”

“What you think is best? Or what Michael’s teacher thinks is best, setting up that ridiculous log-cabin project? Or what those magazines think is best?” She nudged her with a shoulder. “You have to trust your instincts more or you’ll sacrifice your sanity. You’ll be trapped chasing rainbows.”

“Geez, Sarah. Where the heck did this come from?”

The memory struck Sarah like a fist.

Rachel sprawled against a mud wall in Burundi, blowing a smoke ring in the blue light of the moon.

For a girl elbow-deep in all the world’s muck, Sarah, when it comes to love you waste a lot of time chasing rainbows.

Rachel, when you’ve spent three hours digging shrapnel out of the leg of an eight-year-old, then we’ll talk, okay? Until then, let me keep my hot, handsome rainbow.

Kiddo, there’s this thing about rainbows. They’re perfect from afar. But when you get real close to them they just disappear.

“It came from Rachel.” Sarah turned her face away, toward the patients still milling on the road, and toward a slow-dawning realization about her own impossible expectations of one particular man. “When she visited me in Burundi, she had a lot to say about rainbows.”

“Sarah-belle.” Kate wrapped her hands around Sarah’s arm and pressed her cheek against her shoulder. “For what it’s worth, I think you might be the most incredible woman I know.”

Kate and Sarah were still sitting like that sometime later, when the back door to the clinic squealed open.

Colin poked his head around the edge. “There you two are. I’ve been looking for you. We’re just finishing up.” He squinted through the trees. “We need to pack up. If we don’t get on the road soon, we won’t reach Bangalore by dark.”

Sarah gently shifted Kate off her shoulder. “That last boy, is he out of surgery?”

“They’re closing him up now.” Colin’s shirt, once pressed and pristine, now hung limply from his broad shoulders. Sweat stained the collar. He walked toward them, unrolling the sleeves, buttoning them around his strong-boned wrists. “Incredibly complicated case. We had to balance the muscle forces on the lip and nose without repositioning the nasal septum. Kid’s going to need a rhinoplasty in a few years, but at least he won’t be aspirating milk into his lungs anymore.” He shook his head. “Don’t see many cases like that in L.A. You know, Sarah, you were absolutely incredible in there. I never understood why you didn’t study to be a doctor.”

“Not her calling.” Kate pushed herself to her feet. “I’ll go help Sam pack.” Kate ran her hands down her wrinkled suit and gave Sarah a meaningful look that said, I’ll leave you two alone.

Not that it mattered, Sarah thought. With his hair tousled, sweat gleaming on his forehead, and his face bright with excitement, Colin looked, more than ever, like the young man she’d loved in Paraguay. But even as her heart moved in that familiar, painful way, she told herself to stop. Now, as he had all day, he’d fixed his professional expression tight on his face, the one she’d come to dread. Despite his bright, affable voice and plenty of harmless talk, his eyes warned, Stay back.

Colin gestured to Kate with his thumb as she slipped inside the clinic. “Is she all right? She looks wrung out.”

“It’s complicated. It has to do with another of Rachel’s letters.”

“Ah.”

Down came the wall. The subject of Rachel’s letters was rife with treacherous emotional currents—involving him, and her, and this strange, tense relationship—and, as usual, Colin avoided, quite deftly, swimming in those waters.

Sarah plunged on. “Kate’s going to change her flight plans when we get back to the hotel. She wants to leave Bangalore as soon as possible—even as early as tomorrow morning.” Her throat tightened, but the words came out before she could stop them. “Colin, I’m going to leave with her.”

She lifted her chin and faced him. She tried to modulate her heartbeat and the rate of her breathing. She had to leave. They couldn’t go on like this. She couldn’t go on like this.

Physically, she wanted him. Even now, she couldn’t help noticing how light dappled his skin and cast in shadow the vale by his sturdy collarbone. The collarbone she’d bitten last night, just before he’d seized her hips to stop her from doing what they both wanted.

But emotionally, they were still continents apart.

He took a few steps back, then thrust his hands in his pockets. He swiveled away and found interest in the jungle canopy, rustling in the breeze above their heads.

She hadn’t expected him to protest. Nor had she expected him to plead with her to stay. But as the silence stretched, disappointment came anyway. She swayed slightly where she stood. She’d known since she’d received Rachel’s letter that this day would come. She’d imagined the scenario in a dozen different ways. But no imagining could brace her against the sudden unhinging, and the deepening sense of vertigo.

“Ah, Sarah.” He’d lost the affable voice. “I haven’t been much of a superhero this time around.”

“You were a superhero today, to the kid whose face you just reconfigured.” She credited the huskiness of her voice to the lingering effect of the clove cigarette. “And you were a superhero to those medical students who hardly breathed while you taught. You’re still the best surgeon I’ve ever seen.”

That wasn’t the absolute truth. Dr. Mwami in Burundi could work miracles under the light of a flashlight, with gunfire in the distance. But it was different. Sometime during his years away, Colin had developed a skill so specific and so fine-tuned that it was a sort of magic.

“I’m not talking about work.” He crossed his arms and glanced around, taking in the dirt road, the rough plaster of the clinic, the shivering greenery of the jungle—anything but her, standing still in the shade. “I intended to handle this better. Every morning I told myself I’d be straight with you. But then you’d look at me with that wonderful expression on your face. You seduced me with that look, Sarah. Back in Paraguay. And here.” He shrugged, then shoved his fists in his pockets. “What can I say? I let myself be seduced by my exotic, adoring nurse.”

Exotic? With her pale, freckled skin and mouse-brown hair, she considered herself perfectly ordinary. Certainly not an instrument of seduction. Overseas, she always felt like plain vanilla next to rocky road or marble swirl or butter pecan or almond mocha.

Or rich, dark chocolate.

“Tell me, my Vermont-bred minister’s daughter,” he said, tracing a pattern in the dirt with his foot, “what kind of sin is it, to want to be the man you think I am?”

She shook her head, uncomprehending.

“Is it vanity? Or is it pride?”

“It isn’t a sin to want to be a good man.”

“That’s the real reason I didn’t come back to Paraguay. I’d made choices you wouldn’t approve of. If I had come back, you would have been disillusioned completely. It’s pretty hard to keep the cape on, Sarah-belle. It weighs a ton. Rather than destroy what we had… it was easier to just put your memory away.”

On a shelf, she thought, flinching. Labeled “Passionate Affair in the South American Jungle.”

“And now, of all times, now, when I’m halfway around the world; when back home I’m starting a new business, and my entire life is in flux—”

And, Sarah added silently for him, you’re about to marry another woman, by the name of Victoria Lee, the toast of southern-California society.

“—and here you appear. Out of nowhere. Reminding me of the life I once had, and the better man I used to be.”

“You’re too hard on yourself.” It was true. Colin still could work magic on the operating table. He still gave his time to international relief. He still hated petty annoyances like broken equipment, rickety cars, or ignored schedules. He still counted strokes when he brushed his teeth. And he still had the terrible habit of ignoring—and avoiding for as long as he could—an uncomfortable emotional situation. She didn’t think any less of him for these all-so-human faults. “Honestly, Colin, you haven’t changed a bit since Paraguay.”

“Oh, I have.” He pulled a strange smile. “Superheroes don’t lie, Sarah. And they certainly don’t cheat on a fiancée.”

And there it was, acknowledged. The engagement that had been announced at such length in the Los Angeles Times. He and his fiancée had registered for silver and crystal at Tiffany’s. Sarah had considered saying good-bye to Colin by sending him a gravy boat from their china pattern, but the piece cost more than four months of rice for the camp.

Which is worse, Sarah-belle, me kissing a married woman, or you banging an engaged man?

Sarah shook the dust from her skirt. “I should go.” Permanently. Crawl back to the States and find a way to forgive herself for tempting a man away from his promise to another woman. “Sam may need help with the equipment—”

“Don’t go.”

Suddenly he stood before her. He reached out and cupped her tangled mop of hair in his palm.

“Colin, don’t.”

She curled a hand around his wrist. It was a strong wrist, a surgeon’s skillful hand. His touch made her ashamed of herself and oddly disappointed in him. She didn’t want him to kiss her. Not now. Not anymore. Something had shifted in her heart, something fundamental. The change was still too fresh to bear examining. Jo would understand, if she were here. Jo would handle this just the right way. Jo would say her good-bye and kiss him off and walk away, letting the velvet chains of commitment fall into the dirt behind her.

All Sarah knew was honesty. “It was wrong of me to chase you down like this, Colin, when I knew your heart was committed elsewhere.”

“You wanted to find me.” He tugged gently on her hair. “I know you did.”

“Had Rachel not sent me that deathbed letter, I would have kept your memory on the shelf, too.”

Pristine. Perfect. And forever unchallenged.

That would have hurt a whole lot less.

“Maybe.” His gaze drifted to her throat. “But in your heart, you wanted to find me.”

“And I’m glad I did.” That was a platitude, but she let it stand. She didn’t know how she felt right now, with Colin more intense than he’d been all week, more open and intimate than she wanted him to be. “But it’s time for me to leave. What I really want—the only thing I should have ever expected from you in the first place—is a proper good-bye.”

The amber rings around his pupils contracted. “You don’t mean that. We made love.”

“Yes,” she said, damning her voice for breaking. “We did. It was sweet, but it was wrong.”

“No. No.” He shook his head, working up the words. “It was not wrong.”

“Colin—”

“I’m not ready, Sarah Pollard.” He stepped in to her. “Damn me for a fool, but I’m not ready to let you go.”