Read Online Nothing Lasts Forever by Sidney Sheldon - Free Book Online

thatched roofs. Someday, Paige vowed to herself, I’m going to live in a real house, a beautiful cottage with a green lawn and a white picket fence.
    To the doctors and nurses, it was a difficult, frustrating life. But to the two children, it was a constant adventure, living in the land of lions, giraffes, and elephants. They went to primitive cinder-block schoolhouses, and when none was available, they had tutors.
    Paige was a bright child, and her mind was a sponge, absorbing everything. Alfred adored her.
    “I’m going to marry you one day, Paige,” he said when she was twelve, he fourteen.
    “I’m going to marry you, too, Alfred.”
    They were two serious children, determined to spend the rest of their lives together.
    The doctors from WHO were selfless, dedicated men and women who devoted their lives to their work. They often worked under nearly impossible circumstances. In Africa, they had to compete with wogesha —the native medical practitioners whose primitive remedies were passed on from father to son, and often had deadly effects. The Masai’s traditional remedy for flesh wounds was olkilorite, a mixture of cattle blood, raw meat, and essence of a mysterious root.
    The Kikuyu remedy for smallpox was to have children drive out the sickness with sticks.
    “You must stop that,” Dr. Taylor would tell them. “It doesn’t help.”
    “Better than having you stick sharp needles in our skin,” they would reply.
    The dispensaries were tables lined up under the trees, for surgery. The doctors saw hundreds of patients a day, and there was always a long line waiting to see them—lepers, natives with tubercular lungs, whooping cough, smallpox, dysentery.
    Paige and Alfred were inseparable. As they grew older, they would walk to the market together, to a village miles away. And they would talk about their plans for the future.
    Medicine was a part of Paige’s early life. She learned to care for patients, to give shots and dispense medications, and she anticipated ways to help her father.
    Paige loved her father. Curt Taylor was the most caring, selfless man she had ever known. He genuinely liked people, dedicating his life to helping those who needed him, and he instilled that passion in Paige. In spite of the long hours he worked, he managed to find time to spend with his daughter. He made the discomfort of the primitive places they lived in fun.
    Paige’s relationship with her mother was something else. Her mother was a beauty from a wealthy social background. Her cool aloofness kept Paige at a distance. Marrying a doctor who was going to work in far-off exotic places had seemed romantic to her, but the harsh reality had embittered her. She was not a warm, loving woman, and she seemed to Paige always to be complaining.
    “Why did we ever have to come to this godforsaken place, Curt?”
    “The people here live like animals. We’re going to catch some of their awful diseases.”
    “Why can’t you practice medicine in the United States and make money like other doctors?”
    And on and on it went.
    The more her mother criticized him, the more Paige adored her father.
    When Paige was fifteen years old, her mother disappeared with the owner of a large cocoa plantation in Brazil.
    “She’s not coming back, is she?” Paige asked.
    “No, darling. I’m sorry.”
    “I’m glad!” She had not meant to say that. She was hurt that her mother had cared so little for her and her father that she had abandoned them.
    The experience made Paige draw even closer to Alfred Turner. They played games together and went on expeditions together, and shared their dreams.
    “I’m going to be a doctor, too, when I grow up,” Alfred confided. “We’ll get married, and we’ll work together.”
    “And we’ll have lots of children!”
    “Sure. If you like.”
    On the night of Paige’s sixteenth birthday, their lifelong emotional intimacy exploded into a new dimension. At a little village in East Africa, the doctors had