Mackenzie Ford - The Clouds Beneath the Sun

He wetted the towel with the ammonia a second time and again laid it on her knee.

She made a soft sound, somewhere between a sigh and a groan.

He wetted the towel a third time, pressed it to her knee and left it there.

“The worst of the pain is over,” he said. “Your knee will be sore for two or three days and it will hurt to touch. In a minute I am going to use these tweezers to pull out those spikes that I can—that will help your recovery. The rest will be rejected by your body over the next two to four weeks.”

“Have you got a Ph.D. in this as well?”

“It happened to me once. Never again. It’s not the sort of mistake you make twice.” He took the towel away. “Kenya has a shortage of doctors, outside Nairobi. You’re lucky I know what I’m doing.” He grinned. “Now, let’s see how many of these little monsters I can operate on.”

He took the tweezers and knelt in front of her.

She winced as he prodded her flesh with the tweezers. “Are those what you pluck your eyebrows with?”

“Careful. I only have to press—just here—and you’ll be in agony all over again.”

“Can’t you take a joke?”

“If you can take the pain, I can take a joke.” He bent to get a closer look at Natalie’s knee. “There,” he said after a moment. “That’s one gone. Lie back if you want. This could take a while.”

She lay back in the sand.

“Two.” He held up the black spike in the tweezers, then threw it away.

“Turtles apart, how did you enjoy the swim?”

“Wonderful. I’ve never seen such colors. Turtles apart, what a good idea this was. Thank you.”

“Three. You are not maimed for life. Your knees will regain their former glory.”

“Leave my knees alone. They have never done you any harm.”

“Four. You look very good in a bathing costume, Dr. Nelson.”

“So do you.”

“Five. Have you never tried one of these new bikini things?”

“I might have.”

“You don’t have one with you, on this trip?”

“I might have.”

“Six. You could risk it tomorrow. It could be your Christmas gift to me.”

“You’re easily pleased. What are you giving me?”

“It’s a surprise. Seven—and I think that’s it. Two others broke off and if I fiddle with them any more I’ll make matters worse. But I’ve got about half of them out, meaning you’ll have half the soreness and recover in half the time.” He put the tweezers in his bag. “Think you can walk back to the hotel, or shall I send for an express donkey?”

She lifted herself up from where she’d been lying. “How do I know I can afford a donkey until I know how much this treatment has cost?”

“True enough. I’m not cheap.”

“If I promise to wear a bikini tomorrow, will that affect the price?”

“Are you haggling with me?”

“You taught me, in Nairobi, remember?”

“And I taught you too well.”

“You haven’t seen anything yet. How will this affect the price?”

She leaned forward and kissed him.

“In … seven minutes it will no longer be Christmas day.”

“Over there, beyond the horizon, it already isn’t.”

They were sitting on the balcony that ran the length of the hotel and served both their rooms, side by side. They’d had dinner, strolled by the beach, and now sat in wicker chairs looking out at the black nothingness of the ocean.

“Sorry you didn’t get through to your father.”

“Mmm.” Natalie sipped her whiskey. “What is your mother doing right now, do you think?”

“I don’t know how to answer that. She’s known Maxwell Sandys forever, for as long as I can remember, anyway. Are they lovers—that’s what you’re asking, right? They must be but I’ve never seen any real … tenderness between them. Whatever exists between them, it’s locked away.” He looked at her. “I don’t really like talking about my mother in this way, do you mind?”

She shook her head. She had been going to tell him that she had seen Sandys enter his mother’s tent on the evening when Sandys and Jeavons had been in the camp, but she decided against it. “What will Christopher be doing now?”

“That’s not so difficult. He’ll certainly have called Beth. Since we are all scattered this Christmas, she doesn’t know where to contact us, as she loves to do, so he will have been in touch with her and brought her up to speed. I think that today he’s had the first of the flying lessons mother gave him for Christmas, so he’ll have been reading some of his manuals, and he will probably have gone last night for a Christmas Eve dinner at the Karibu Club—they always do something, a dinner dance probably, with carols, black tie, the works.”

“So you’re missing out.”

He looked at her. “Am I?” He drank some of his whiskey. “Don’t get me wrong. I don’t enjoy the Karibu scene anywhere near as much as Christopher but I don’t dismiss it. He’ll have heard things last night, people will have had a few drinks and said things they might not otherwise have said. A lot of it will be trivial gossip but you never know—he may pick up valuable information. And it’s good for him to be seen there. We can’t afford to seem standoffish, or to look stuck up. It will be good PR, good politics. My brother has a talent for that—better than my mother or me.”

He leaned over his chair and held his face very close to Natalie’s. He looked at his watch. “It is now two minutes to midnight. I think it only fair to warn you that at midnight I intend to kiss you—and not a measly peck on the cheek, either, but the real thing, a proper Hollywood-style, no-holds-barred, all-guns-blazing, fully orchestrated, fifteen-rounds affair.”

“I think I’d rather be stung by a sea urchin.”

“In that case, I won’t wait.”

His mouth was on hers. He smelled of whiskey. He could have shaved more closely. But he knew how to kiss, he knew how to hold her, he knew where to put his hands so she would respond.

And she was ready to respond, she wanted to respond, it had been months since she had responded, and her body suddenly seemed alive as it hadn’t been for ages. She had all but forgotten that feeling. With Russell it had been over before it started, with Christopher there had been no spark of any kind. She pressed herself against Jack and held him tight. She recalled his hands on her breasts when he had rescued her from the wildebeest in the Mara River.

There were no lights on the balcony. There was one dim street light about fifty yards away; apart from that the only illumination came from the stars.

Jack was a mass of shadows; so was she.

She felt his hands moving over her. That was what she wanted and she cried out softly. But not yet. She had let Dominic make love to her on their first real evening together, but that was after how many lunches and dinners, how many concerts, how many weeks?

She gripped Jack’s wrist with one hand, to stop him going where he was going, but pulled him closer with her other arm, kissing his neck, biting his ear with her lips.

He stopped and put his arms around her, holding her tight. He kissed her again.

He rolled her off the chair she was on and they slid to the floor, the wooden boards of the balcony. The smell of polish was not unpleasant and the boards were almost warm to the touch. It had been a hot day.

He lay on top of her as he kissed her again and again. She felt him stir as he placed his mouth on her breast.

Her body said one thing, her mind another. She squirmed free from under him.

“Sorry,” she said after a moment.

He took her hand and kissed it. He rolled away from her and they lay, on their backs, on the warm boards, breathing heavily, then less heavily. When they were both more or less calm, he whispered, “Let’s get some sleep. We’ve got a big day tomorrow—”