‘That’s sudden.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Business or pleasure?’

‘Business,’ he replied truthfully, even though he wished he could’ve said ‘pleasure’ and made her think he was the kind of guy who’d pop across the world for a week on a whim.

There was silence at her end, then a muffled voice. Tom wondered if it was her boyfriend. Wondered what it took to keep a woman like Ness Franklin by your side and in your bed.

Then she was back with him, saying words he’d never expected to hear. ‘You want company?’

16

THE ROAD TO Oudtshoorn through the Karoo desert possessed a brutal, stark beauty for the first twenty-five minutes of the drive. After that it was just tedious. Tedious and dusty.

Between hazy mountainous horizons, the flat plains of pale brown dust were spotted uniformly with tufts of coarse, reed-like grass, and dusty pale brown Merino sheep that did not look up as the rented Honda kicked up a trail that hung behind it for miles in the still, baked-dry air.

The only radio channel they could find and keep, played what he imagined was South African country dance music, all squeezeboxes, plucking and reedy old men – ‘Duelling Banjos’ meets German oompah – punctuated by bursts of guttural Afrikaans.

After a particularly ugly interlude between songs, Tom glanced at Ness. ‘Hardly the language of love, is it?’

She raised a single amused eyebrow, then turned her gaze back to the interminable flat strip of dirt ahead of them.

For the hundredth time since they’d met at LAX, Tom wondered what the hell she was doing with him. It was an almost indignant feeling – like he was her father. ‘What the hell are you doing with him, girl?’ That was how he sounded in his own head. Was she crazy? Was her boyfriend crazy? Of course, he wasn’t going to ask her any of those questions. He didn’t want to give her a chance to tell him the truth.

She’d shown up looking a million dollars, with a set of matching Louis Vuitton luggage that looked real to his untrained eye. Beside her in the check-in line, with his flyaway slung over his shoulder, he felt like some kind of Skid Row junkie. As they approached the counter she’d taken his ticket and passport from him and had walked ahead. She took the lead in checking them in while he skulked behind her and – lo and behold – found himself upgraded to first class on her beautiful coattails.

‘That’s good,’ was her matter-of-fact reaction. ‘It’s a long flight.’

Evidently Ness was so beautiful and elegant that she more than compensated for his tatty presence.

They’d spent the night in a hotel on the waterfront at Cape Town. She’d paid for another room, even though he’d offered to sleep on the couch in his. When they were told they could have one room with twin beds, she still went ahead and paid for the second.

He tried hard to take it as good practice for the subjugation of his ego.

*

They’d driven through the most beautiful countryside Tom had ever seen – or could ever imagine seeing. He wasn’t one for noticing that kind of crap, but it was breathtaking. Once she’d asked him to stop so she could take a photo of purple mountains looming over striped vineyards under an azure sky. She snapped away, then put the camera on the roof of the car and insisted that he join her in a second picture. As he stood awkwardly on the dusty shoulder, she slipped a slender arm around him, resting her hand easily on his hipbone. He could feel the press of her fingers through his jeans and still couldn’t speak when she showed him the picture. Just nodded.

They’d stopped for gas on the outskirts of Somerset West – a single-pump shed where an ancient, weathered attendant had spoken slowly so Tom could almost understand his strange English, with its clipped vowels and odd, choked rs, as he gave him directions. Thank God, those directions consisted of staying on this one road for the forty-mile journey.

As the Honda bottomed out in yet another pothole, Tom wondered idly how bad a back road to Oudtshoorn could be. He glanced at his watch and pushed the Honda up to 65 m.p.h. This wasn’t his car, and if Avis were dumb enough to rent out in a country where this kind of infrastructure existed, then he would take full advantage of it.

‘What’s your boyfriend’s name?’ he asked, without knowing why – or how he should respond to the possible answer.

‘Why do you want to know?’ She was staring out of the window at the flat Karoo, her voice expressionless.

‘Just making conversation.’ If she said she didn’t want to talk about her boyfriend, then she was thinking about sleeping with him, he thought. Make it so, he chanted in his head. Make it so make it so make it so …

‘Richard.’

Whatever. Richard was ten thousand miles away and Richard’s girlfriend was here with him. More fool Richard. He still had a chance.

Tom glanced to his right and hit the brakes hard.

The car slewed sideways before he caught it, corrected, and came to a tight halt in a cloud of dust. Ness looked round at him and he grinned. He hadn’t needed to brake so hard, but it was fun to do it, out here in the bundu, with nothing more than knee-high tufts and the occasional sheep to hit.

‘What was that about?’

He nodded into the desert. ‘Look.’

The ostrich strutted fifty feet from the road. Tom could see its beady black eyes, and the sun glinting off its jet feathers. It picked up its dinosaur feet jerkily, as if pulling them out of mud each time. It was hard to tell, but the bird might have been limping.

He noticed something hanging from its head. A string, maybe. He opened the door and got out, shielding his eyes from the sun, and the bird immediately spooked and ran, its neck stretched upwards, its feathers a bustling pom-pom, its feet hitting the ground so hard that Tom could hear them from where he was standing. It scattered a half-dozen Merinos, which bolted all of ten yards, then went back to yanking at the grass while the ostrich kept going, leaving dust in its wake.

Tom grinned back into the car at Ness. ‘Cool, huh?’

‘Cool,’ she agreed, but something in her tone made him feel stupid for stopping.

Within half an hour that feeling was compounded as they started to pass farms where ostriches were as numerous as cattle. Maybe she’d known.

‘They race them, you know,’ he said, trying to claw back an advantage.

‘Race ostriches?’

‘Sure. With kids as jockeys.’

‘Are you teasing me?’

Tom looked at her and saw the smile hovering tentatively at the corners of her mouth. She was unbearably beautiful and, for the first time, he saw vulnerability in her uncertainty, and was surprised by a jolt of affection divorced from lust. He shook it off almost physically but it had knocked any kind of snappy answer clear out of him.

‘No,’ he said simply. ‘I’m not teasing.’

*

Pam Mashamaete in the flesh was even better than she was on the phone.

The moment Tom shut the car door, a big woman in her thirties emerged from the shade of a ramshackle half-barn, let out a high cry of pleasure and broke into a grin he could’ve seen from space. She jogged to him like he was the Prodigal Son, testing her cream pantsuit to the outer limits, then ignored his outstretched hand and enveloped him in a bear-hug of epic proportions.

‘Tom! You’re here! I’m Pam!’

She released him so he could breathe again and he grinned, despite his embarrassment. ‘Well, that’s a relief.’

She shouted with laughter, her gleaming teeth framed by lips painted fire-engine red.

He turned to see Ness sporting a friendly smile. She gave him an expectant look and he realized she was waiting for him to introduce them. How did that go again? He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘This is Ness.’

Pam laughed another greeting and shook Ness’s hand, then took his arm. ‘Come meet the team.’