Everything I Need, page 12
Anthony gaped at her. “Put down the gin and tonic. I beg you. It’s causing delusions.”
Granny shot him a quelling look. “Your mother hurt him very badly when she asked for the divorce. I hate to say it, or to speak ill of the dead, but I’m not sure she ever gave him a fair shot.”
“What are you saying?”
Granny hesitated, downed the last of her drink and set it down.
“I’m saying that one never knows what goes on in a marriage, but I believe that your mother shut him out. Washed her hands of him when he would probably have been willing to walk to China and back for the chance to work things out.” Long pause. “I’m saying…She was no angel, Anthony. It’s time you realized that.”
Anthony had no idea where all this was coming from, but he didn’t like it. At all.
“Maybe not, but she was my angel,” he snapped, gripping the ring so tightly that it began to cut into his palm.
Granny remained placid. As ever.
“Maybe so. But your father was your father. Only it was hard for him to do much fathering when your mother was determined to shut him out. By bringing you back to London for boarding school, for example.”
“I don’t want to talk about my father,” he said coldly.
“Fair enough. But perhaps you should think about him a bit more. He’s the only father you’ve got and none of us are getting any younger. Don’t look at me like that, Bubba. People have gone to the block for much less than glaring at their monarch.”
Anthony would have smiled, but shock seemed to have knocked most of his senses and muscle memory out of his head.
“Since when do you stick up for my wretched father?”
“Every now and then, I like to step back and look at the big picture. Your wretched father may let his nether regions do far too much of his thinking for him, but in the big picture, both he and I want the very best for you. Which makes us allies. Uneasy allies, but still allies.”
Anthony shrugged. Nodded. Wiped a fingerprint off the ring’s band.
“Do you like the ring?” she asked.
He nodded and, with a heavy heart, started to give it back.
“Thank you for showing me,” he said gruffly.
“Oh, no, dear,” she said, holding her hands up. He saw the mate to his ring on her pinky. “I’m wearing my ring. That ring is yours now. To do with as you will.”
Her gaze was a bit more pointed than usual, kicking off a wave of something that felt suspiciously like joy inside him. The feeling was so unexpected that he lost his head a bit.
He kissed the ring again. Pocketed it. “Love you, Granny.”
Aggrieved sigh as she reached for her bag, stood and smoothed her skirt.
“Do stop indulging that American sentimentality, dear. On this side of the pond, one prefers to wonder whether one is loved or not.”
He burst into laughter, the most heartfelt of the night. “I’ll try to remember that in future.”
“Good. Let’s get back to the party. Uncle Dicky swore he wouldn’t sing his 'Bell’ trilogy until we came back. We might as well get it over with.”
11
Anthony: What’re you wearing?
Melody: Not much.
Anthony: A picture is worth a thousand words.
Melody read his text and stood there for a moment, stuck firmly on the horns of a dilemma.
On the one hand, everyone knew that phones and clouds could be hacked and no one’s pictures were truly safe. Ever.
On the other hand, she really wanted to drive Anthony out of his freaking mind. For several reasons. First, because he’d shown up and showered her with such loving care when she was sick the other week. Second, because it’d been three weeks since they’d had sex.
Third and most importantly, because she lived to drive him wild.
Thinking fast, she stood in front of the open balcony doors, where sunlight shone through, posed with her back arched and her hip out, angled the phone so her face didn’t show and hoped for the best as she took a few pics.
When it was all said and done, she had a workable shot of the front of her body silhouetted through her sheer floral caftan. As she’d hoped, she made a curvy figure eight with her breasts and hips, her skimpy white panties were clearly visible against her skin and a couple of well-placed flowers covered her nipples.
Actually, it was pretty sexy, if she did say so herself.
Suppressing a laugh as she thought about what Samira would say if she could see her now, she hit SEND and waited.
Her phone buzzed. She eagerly checked and saw…
A scowling emoji.
Oh, no.
She frowned down at it, her heart sinking. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Why had she sent it? A person in Anthony’s position always had to worry about being hacked, and here she’d—
Her phone buzzed with another text.
Anthony (with a heart-eyes emoji): Sorry! Cardiac arrest made my hands fumble! Meant to send a million of these.
“Whew!” she said, laughing as a wild swoop of relief zoomed through her. And that was before he sent her a final text:
Anthony: You never stop exceeding my expectations, do you?
Grinning and unexpectedly teary, she swept aside the fluttering white panels and went through the doors to the balcony, where glowing orange lanterns and fairy lights were strung overhead and through the nearby trees. She leaned against the railing. Enjoyed the cooling breeze. Breathed deep. Tried to recognize all the scents (verdant grasses; mysterious flowers; rain; soil; diesel exhaust; wood smoke; grilled meat; cumin; cinnamon) and wondered how and when on earth her life had become this magical.
They were in Tanzania.
Africa, God. She was in Africa.
She stared out at the scenery, trying to process it all and wondering if everything she saw was a hallucinogenic by-product of her twenty-four-plus hours of traveling.
On the far side of the savannah horizon? A shimmering blood-red sunset straight out of The Lion King. In the near distance in front of the horizon? A watering hole. At the edges of the watering hole? A herd of zebra, a herd of elephants, including a crew of raucous teenagers who’d only managed to grow starter tusks, and giraffes who spread their legs into wide triangles in order to sink close enough to the water for a drink. Up in the sky flying off to parts unknown? A flock of gangly white birds with long legs stretched out horizontally behind them.
And the lodge!
It was a fantasia of luxury that made her wonder if she’d mistakenly been shown to Mariah Carey’s suite. If so, that was just too damn bad. The only way anyone was getting her out of here at this point was if they shot her with an elephant tranquilizer dart.
Airy and light, with polished hardwood floors and trim, it had a massive poster bed piled high with pillows and draped with mosquito netting, potted plants, gorgeous rugs in indigenous prints, a drink cart featuring a bucket of champagne on ice and the biggest fruit basket she’d ever seen.
All but giddy with delight, she sat on one of the chairs on the deck and settled in to wait for Anthony, her thoughts reverting to when she’d seen him earlier at the hospital.
* * *
She and the other visiting surgeons, a group of about fifteen, had finished their tour of the small facility, which was in a decommissioned church. Austere with a ward full of wrought iron beds, it was scrupulously clean and run by a collection of some of the most caring and committed professionals she’d ever met. The sight of the operating room had gotten all her doctor’s juices flowing.
The head of surgery, a stately dark-skinned gentleman with cotton fluff hair named Dr. Abdul Katika, had leaned in with a conspiratorial smile as they filed out and started down the hallway.
“You look as though you want to scrub in, Dr. Harrison,” he’d said in his wonderfully cultured accent.
Melody glanced down at her linen shirt and khaki pants with a wry smile, doing her best to rein in her enthusiasm before she began bouncing on the balls of her feet.
“That obvious, eh?”
“That obvious. We will try to generate some hernias and fistulas for you to correct. That will make you deliriously happy—”
A ripple of excitement surged through the crowd as one of the nurses poked her head in the door and said something in Swahili. Melody didn’t need a translator to know what that meant.
“Anthony’s here,” Dr. Katika announced, clapping his hands and beaming at them in turn. “We’d better go. Hurry. Hurry.”
They left the relative cool of the hospital and stepped out into the shade-dappled late morning heat, which was pleasant summer day-ish and nowhere near the roasting alive she’d feared. Evidently they’d been through this drill before, because the hospital staff lined up by group. Staff doctors, with Dr. Katika at the head…visiting doctors…nurses…support staff. A teacher organized her gaggle of chattering local children. The little ones wore green and white school uniforms, shushed each other and launched into an upbeat call and repeat song of greeting (one of the boys thumped out a rhythm on his drum) just as a caravan of rugged Land Rovers appeared at the end of the road, kicking up a cloud of dust as they approached.
Melody, who found herself at the end of the row of visiting doctors, gave herself a stern mental warning. Now was not the time to act like a giddy eighth-grader meeting her boyfriend by the lockers after drill team practice. She was a professional in a professional setting. As such, squealing was out. Jumping up and down was out. Kissing and hugging were out. Blushing and grinning were probably also out, but probably also unavoidable.
A polite smile and handshake. She could manage that.
And she meant to. She really did. She kept all her enthusiasm on lockdown as the SUVs rolled up and stopped about fifty feet away, as doors opened and security swarmed. She even kept it dialed back as Anthony’s door opened and his foot, clad in a hiking boot, emerged.
But then the rest of his tall frame appeared, forcing her to stifle a gasp of feminine appreciation.
He wore baggy olive pants with a linen shirt like hers. Dark aviator glasses that made him seem sexy and mysterious. That golden hair, catching the sun from every angle and glinting like a halo. His ruddy skin, already beginning to deepen with a tan.
She knew him well enough now to detect nervousness in his tight jaw and squared shoulders. She’d thought, back home when she first looked him up online, that he must be used to this sort of thing by this point in his life, but now she had a whole new perspective on what he must go through. The music. The throngs of grinning and cheering people and their palpable excitement. The clump of photographers and the relentless clicking of the shutters from their long-lensed cameras. The videographers. The security personnel.
This may be the life he led, but it wasn’t normal.
This could never be normal.
Funny, wasn’t it? Strangers stared at her because of her scar. Strangers stared at him because of his looks and status. Two entirely different reasons, yet staring was staring. It made her pretty freaking uncomfortable. Him, too.
She felt a stab of empathy for him. She also felt the thrill of understanding a bit more about him and his world. The excitement of knowing they had something else in common.
But mostly she felt breathless anticipation.
Especially when he took off his sunglasses, hooked them into his breast pocket, quickly scanned the scene and settled on her. Their gazes locked for a quick beat or two. She gave herself another stern reminder—don’t act a fool in front of all these people, girl!—but she couldn’t regulate her exploding grin any more than he could. When the joy of seeing him again threatened to topple her over backward and the rising heat in her cheeks became unbearable, she ducked her head and tucked her windswept curls behind her ear.
“Hello, everyone,” he called, playing it off like a champ by quickly looking around and including everyone in his smile. “Hujambo! Habari za asubuhi! I’m so glad you decided not to make that fuss for my visit. Wouldn’t want you to go to any trouble.”
The crowd loved this and launched into a round of laughter and return greetings. Evidently the only thing better than a handsome prince was a handsome and charming prince who also spoke a little Swahili.
Melody decided to be grateful for the camouflage. Her unstoppable grin wasn’t so glaring if it matched everyone else’s, right? She was grinning, clapping and swaying to the music, watching as Dr. Katika led Anthony to the beginning of the receiving line and began the introductions, when she saw them.
A group of five or six small kids, too young for the school uniforms just yet, standing off to her left.
They stared at her. Pointed. One of the kids said something to the others and gestured at her own throat and cheek. The kids nodded, then looked back at Melody, their eyes wide.
Melody’s heart sank.
They can’t hurt you, Mel, she reminded herself. Nothing can hurt you if you don’t let it.
But she sure felt hurt.
Funny how her scar couldn’t let her have a fun moment without crashing the party.
Funny how these little moments always popped up to remind her that she was an oddity.
She hesitated and sighed, wishing that she was the type of person who could let it go, just this once, and knowing that she wasn’t.
Sparing a quick glance at Anthony, who was now about halfway done meeting the staff doctors, she edged out of her own line and over to the little kids, plastering a bright smile on her face as she went.
The kids all started and exchanged guilty looks.
“Hujambo!” She bent at the waist and held out a hand to the pointing boy, who seemed to be the little ringleader. “I’m Dr. Melody. Who are you?”
To his credit, he stood a little straighter, stuck out his chest and had a firm grip and good eye contact. “Darweshi.”
“Jambo, Darweshi. Did you notice my scar?” She pulled her hair aside so he could see it better. “It’s okay to be curious. I got burned when I was younger. That’s why you shouldn’t run and play in the kitchen.”
He nodded solemnly. “You shouldn’t run by the fire, either. That’s how my sister got burned.”
With that, he gestured to a little girl in the back who wore her bandaged arm in a sling and had a bouquet of wildflowers in her free hand. Melody smiled encouragingly at her, but the girl just stared at her with her liquid brown eyes, the apparent victim of stage fright. Until one of her cronies whispered something in her ear and nudged her forward a couple of reluctant steps.
“Jambo,” Melody said. “What’s your name?”
“Bupe,” the girl said, her attention riveted on Melody’s scar. “Does it hurt?”
“Not anymore,” Melody said, her heart melting at the sight of this worried little cutie with her braids, pink dress and dusty feet in her sandals. “And yours won’t always hurt, either. Not once it heals.”
“Will it be ugly?” Bupe asked.
Melody kept her smile firmly in place. She decided not to focus on the unspoken rest of Bupe’s sentence (Will it be ugly like yours?) and instead drill down on the lesson she’d walked over here to teach.
“How could anything be ugly on a smart and beautiful girl like you?” she asked.
Bupe gasped. Exchanged a shy smile and sidelong looks with her friends and brother, who laughed and thumped her on the back. Then, with no further warning, she launched herself at Melody for a hug.
“Thank you!” Melody cried, squeezing her around the shoulders and taking great care not to touch her wounded arm or smash the flowers. “I love hugs!”
“These are for you,” Bupe said, flashing a gap-toothed and dimpled smile as she thrust the flowers at Melody. “In case your scar starts hurting again.”
Melody pressed a hand to her heart and tried not to get teary. Moments like this reminded her why she’d happily dedicated her life to helping children.
“Thank you, sweetheart,” she said, turning Bupe loose after a final squeeze. “They’re beautiful.”
Which was right about the time a pair of dark hiking boots and olive cargo pants came into Melody’s field of vision. Her heart skittered to a stop.
“What’s all this?” Anthony asked in that thrilling voice of his. “Where are my flowers? I’m the special guest today.”
“You don’t get any flowers, silly,” Bupe said with childish delight at putting him in his place. “You’re a boy!”
There was a round of shrieking laughter as the kids raced off, leaving Melody to straighten and work on her acting skills as she greeted Anthony in front of Dr. Katika.
Anthony didn’t make it easy. His face flushed and his eyes seemed especially luminous at the sight of her, a blazing indigo that was the most beautiful color she’d ever seen.
“Hello,” he said with a glimmer of wicked amusement as he shook her hand. “Dr. Harrison, isn’t it? Thank you for that warm welcome. What a graceful curtsy.”
She raised a brow and felt her internal temperature rise another ten degrees or so as the electrical current from that point of contact zinged through her body. Somehow she lassoed her smile and tugged it down into rueful territory.
“Oh, no. I hate to tell you, but that was not a curtsy. I bent over to speak to the little kids.”
“I see.” He made a show of frowning after the kids, then back at her. His lips twitched with poorly repressed laughter. “But you would have, surely. Once you saw my regal approach. In fact, there’s still time, if you hurry.”
Not bursting into laughter damn near killed her. But if he wasn’t going to break character, neither was she.
She made a pained face and sucked in a breath.
“Ooops. Sorry again. This is awkward but, as an American, I’m not in the habit of curtsying. And I may be mistaken, but I thought you were sort of a junior royal who didn’t require all the formalities. Almost like a civilian. Am I wrong?”
That almost broke Anthony up. He pressed his lips together, crossed his arms and tapped an index finger against his lips in a valiant effort to maintain a stern expression. But there was no hiding his dimples.
