Eden Burning / Fires of Eden

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “I’m glad for you, honey,” Nicole said in a husky voice. “I know how much you wanted to be with him.”

  For a moment Nicole was tempted to send Lisa back home before Chase woke up, missed her, and started searching. The first place he would look for his daughter was the last place he had told her not to go: Nicole’s cottage.

  But when Nicole opened her mouth to tell Lisa she should go back to Chase’s cottage before she was missed, she couldn’t do it. Without saying a word, she closed her mouth.

  I’m hiding again. But this time Lisa would be the one hurt.

  The little girl was hypersensitive to adult rejection, especially a woman’s.

  “Have you eaten?” Nicole asked, taking Lisa’s hand.

  The girl shook her head

  “Good-good.” Nicole smiled. “We can have breakfast together. Just give me time to shower, okay?”

  “I’ll get Daddy up so he can—”

  “No,” Nicole interrupted sharply. Then, much more gently, “No, honey. Let him sleep. Why don’t you try drawing the garden path while I shower? Remember what I told you last night about shadows all coming from the same angle and how things get smaller the farther they are away from you?”

  Lisa nodded, her gray eyes serious.

  With an encouraging smile and a wave in the direction of the drawing supplies, Nicole went to the shower.

  And every step of the way she wished she could get her hands on the bitch who had made a seven-year-old child as serious as an adult. Lisa didn’t smile often enough and rarely laughed. She simply vanished at the first sign of disapproval, as though she had no defenses against it, no sense of her own worth.

  Nicole knew how painful and damaging it was to feel that kind of personal failure. It infuriated her that a child as gentle, bright, and loving as Lisa had been driven so far into a protective shell by a woman who wasn’t worthy of the name.

  The shower cooled Nicole off some, but she still got angry at the thought of Lisa’s mother. When she went back to the living room, Lisa was drawing quietly. Every few seconds she would look unhappily at the lines she had drawn and the pencil in her hand.

  Nicole knew that Lisa didn’t have a tenth the natural talent Benny had, but it shouldn’t prevent her from enjoying drawing. It was the pleasure, not the sketch itself, that was important.

  “I like that,” Nicole said, stroking Lisa’s black hair. It was shiny and clean, silky and wild because it hadn’t seen a comb for at least twelve hours. “I can feel the coolness of the shadows.”

  Lisa looked up at Nicole, smiled shyly, and returned to her drawing. She was less hesitant now, less critical of the result. After a few minutes she began humming quietly, totally unaware of the rest of the world.

  Smiling, Nicole started slicing fresh fruit for breakfast. Before she was finished, Benny appeared at the cottage’s garden door.

  “Eat?” he asked.

  Nicole smiled. “Sure-sure. But if you want eggs, you’ll have to beg them from your mother. I’m out.”

  “Fruit.” Benny managed to get a world of approval into the single word, telling Nicole that eggs weren’t necessary.

  He stepped into the room, graceful and surefooted despite his limp. When he spotted Lisa, he broke into a beguiling smile.

  “Li-sa,” he said, accenting her name oddly, musically.

  Her smile came and went so quickly that it was like a shadow of light chasing across her serious face. The two children had met on one of Nicole’s picnics. Benny had been fascinated by the fragile little girl. It was a fascination Lisa returned in full.

  “Hi, Benny,” Lisa said. “How did you get here?”

  “Home.” He gestured with his hand toward the big house on top of the hill.

  Lisa’s smile came again and stayed. “Yours?”

  Benny nodded.

  “The garden, too?” she asked.

  He nodded again.

  “And the beach?”

  “All.”

  Then he smiled and held out his hand to Lisa in a gesture that reminded Nicole of the time his grandmother had extended her hand and drawn Nicole into another world.

  “Share all with you, Li-sa,” Benny said. “Come.”

  Forgetting about her drawing, Lisa jumped to her feet.

  Nicole was too startled at hearing six consecutive words out of Benny to protest when the two children ran through the French doors and into the beckoning Eden.

  “No swimming until I get there!” she called after them.

  Benny’s answer was a wave that somehow managed to tell Nicole that she was being foolish—he would never do anything that might hurt the delicate, gray-eyed little girl.

  Quickly Nicole packed fruit and honey muffins into a wicker basket, changed into her bathing suit, and gathered up her sketchbook. As an afterthought she grabbed a handful of towels. She stepped into the garden and hesitated, wondering if she should get a bathing suit for Lisa.

  The thought of waking Chase stopped Nicole cold. She decided that Lisa could swim just fine in the cotton shorts and tank top she was wearing. As for Benny, he usually swam in whatever he happened to be wearing when the mood took him.

  Although it was barely eight o’clock, the black-sand beach was already warm. So was the water. It was a warmth that varied only a few degrees throughout the year.

  One of the hardest things for Nicole to get used to in Hawaii had been not only the lack of seasons but the lack of any real change in the weather at all from sunrise to midnight. On the wet side of the island, where most natives had always lived, the sun came up, the clouds came up, and the trade winds pushed them against the mountains for the afternoon rain.

  The Hawaiian language didn’t even have a word for weather. The closest it came was a word describing the rare days when the trade winds died and the southern winds blew, bringing a muggy, stifling heat to the islands. Then natives spoke of “volcano weather” and left Pele offerings of food and fiery drink on the dark, steaming floor of Kilauea’s crater.

  Nicole glanced up toward the direction where Kilauea rose. Automatically she looked for signs of an eruption with the same casual eye that mainlanders used to measure thunderheads as a potential birthplace of tornadoes.

  Today there were no visible signals of the seething magma that always waited beneath the island’s volcanic skin. The surface of the land was quiet instead of restless with the rhythmic quivering of molten stone. That faint shivering was the only outward sign of the magma relentlessly testing the hardened lid of former eruptions, seeking the fractures and fissures that would become channels for the birth of yet more land.

  But despite its long period of quiet, Kilauea showed no signs of revving up for a big show. Neither did any of the smaller craters that ran in a chain down the mountain’s flank.

  Looks like the hotshot pool is going for a record, Nicole thought as she settled cross-legged onto a towel.

  For several weeks rumors of a coming eruption had been racing like juicy gossip through the observatory. So far they were just rumors. Other than the patterns of tremors that the scientists argued about every night in the Kipuka Club, nothing had happened.

  In any case she knew that the volcano wasn’t on the edge of eruption, because all of the active rift zones were still open to tourists. When that changed, the road up to Kilauea would be lined with cars driven by expectant natives and tourists waiting for the big show. On Hawaii, volcanic eruptions were usually predictable and polite, and always awesomely beautiful. As a spectator sport they had no equal.

  “Niiicolllle!”

  She glanced up from her idle sketch pad in time to see Benny and Lisa burst from a clump of coconut palms and race over the sand toward her. Benny had a huge green nut in his hands. His uneven legs weren’t a problem when it came to climbing. He shinnied up and down coconut palms quicker than a mainland cat.

  The first few times Nicole had watched Benny climb a tall palm, she had held her breath with fear that he would hurt himself in a fall.
Now she just licked her lips in anticipation of the fruit he would bring down. Raw coconut milk and meat was a taste she had quickly acquired on the Big Island, right along with macadamia nuts and pit-roasted pig. She had even tried poi. Once.

  Benny pulled out a pocketknife and went to work on his prize. Nicole had never figured out how he got into the coconut with such a small tool. It took her a hammer and a hard stone to get the job done, or a cleaver as long as her arm.

  The three of them ate in a companionable silence punctuated by tiny giggles from Lisa when various kinds of fruit juices trickled between her fingers and down her arms. Watching her, Nicole had the feeling that getting grubby was a relatively new delight to the girl.

  “C’mon,” Nicole said after they finished the snack. Standing, she held out her hand. “Time to wash up.”

  Disappointment clouded Lisa’s transparent eyes as she looked at the path leading back to the cottages.

  “No. This way,” Nicole said. She pointed toward the turquoise sea.

  Lisa looked down at her juice-smeared shorts. “Can’t.”

  “It won’t hurt your clothes,” Nicole said.

  Lisa shook her head.

  Benny touched her thin shoulder. “Swim with me.”

  “Can’t. Daddy said.” She took a breath so big her shoulders strained, then spit out the awful truth and waited for the worst. “Don’t know how.”

  Benny was too surprised to say a word. The idea of someone not knowing how to swim was as astonishing to him as not knowing how to walk.

  Nicole knelt next to the tightly waiting Lisa, whose little body was clenched against the disapproval she feared. “Swimming is like drawing, honey. Nobody is born knowing how to do it. But you can learn, if you want to. Do you?”

  Lisa looked at the ocean and said slowly, doubtfully, “It looks awful big.”

  “That’s okay. You’re only in one part of it at a time.”

  The sound of male laughter froze Nicole in place for an instant. When she looked over her shoulder, she saw Chase standing in the shadow of the coconut palms. He was almost close enough to touch, wearing nothing but black swim trunks, his own potent masculinity, and a smile.

  The sight of him was like a blow. She nearly went down beneath a sensual tide of memories. She had touched the rippling male power of this man, held him, felt him move inside her.

  And failed to please him in any way at all.

  Nicole flushed, then went pale. Silently she prayed that she was the only one to notice. She glanced around almost frantically. There was no subtle way to escape.

  Chase ignored her panic. He had expected it. What he hadn’t expected was her beauty in full sunlight, smeared with fruit juice and sand. His crystalline gray eyes admired the braided fire of her hair, her golden skin, and most of all the smooth, flexible strength of her body. Though her two-piece bathing suit was modest by tropical beach standards, it revealed a lush amount of curves. He wanted to run his hands and then his mouth over every bit of them.

  He had seen the instant of sensual awareness and approval in her eyes when she’d looked at him.

  He had also seen the color wash from her in the next instant as she searched for a way to avoid him.

  “Daddy!” Lisa jumped up and threw herself into Chase’s arms. Then her smile faded. “Oh, I forgot. I’m too dirty for hugging.”

  She pushed away from his chest and looked at him with wide eyes, obviously expecting him to be unhappy with her.

  “Are you? Where?” he asked, making a big deal out of looking her over and not seeing the food and the less identifiable stains that had come from racing through Eden down an overgrown path. “You look like perfect hugging material to me.” Smiling, he cuddled her close and kissed her sticky cheek. “Mmmmm,” he said, licking his lips. “Got any more of that coconut for me?”

  Lisa’s whole face brightened. Grinning, she turned her other cheek up to be kissed.

  He gave it smacking approval.

  With a secret smile she burrowed against her father’s furry chest, confident again.

  “Mother always got mad at me if I was dirty,” Lisa confessed.

  Chase spoke calmly in spite of the lash of fury that went through him. “Did she? Well, I’m not your mother. I think kids should play hard, get dirty, and take baths.”

  Over his daughter’s head Chase watched Nicole kneel with a dancer’s fluid grace and begin gathering up the remains of breakfast. Saying nothing, she tucked fruit and napkins into the wicker basket. After a few moments she stood with the heart-stopping grace he had to see each time to truly believe. When she shook out the towel, it became clear to the children that Nicole was leaving.

  “Aren’t you going to teach me how to swim?” Lisa asked Nicole plaintively, unwrapping her arms from her daddy.

  Nicole forced a smile. “That’s what fathers are for.”

  “Me,” Benny said. He stepped close to Lisa, silently saying that he would help Lisa learn to swim.

  Smiling brightly, emptily, Nicole eased back toward the path up the hill. “You couldn’t have a better teacher than Benny, Lisa. He taught every fish in the lagoon how to swim.”

  Lisa’s eyes widened as she looked into Benny’s clear dark gaze. “True-true?”

  Wisely, he smiled and said nothing.

  Chase set Lisa on the coarse black sand and said to Benny, “Take her down to the water and get her feet wet. Just her feet.”

  Solemnly Benny nodded. “Feet.”

  Chase ruffled Benny’s hair and squeezed his lean shoulder approvingly. “I’ll be right with you after Nicole and I work out some scheduling problems on the book.”

  The kids didn’t wait to hear any more. Hand in hand, they raced toward the warm, softly foaming water.

  “Just her feet!” Chase called again.

  “Sure-sure!” both children said together without looking back.

  Chase watched long enough to see Benny pull Lisa to a stop, then stand in front of her so that she would have to walk through him to get more than her feet wet.

  “I like that boy’s style,” Chase said as he turned toward Nicole.

  He was impatient to get the first, awkward words behind them. Somehow he had to make her understand that there had been nothing wrong with her. He had been the one at fault. Completely.

  But when he turned around, there was nothing behind him except an empty garden path and palm trees swaying beneath the caressing wind.

  25

  It was Thursday night before Chase managed to corner Nicole again.

  “Are you going to run forever?” he asked quietly.

  She turned toward him so fast that she almost lost her balance. For an instant she felt like there were iron bands around her lungs, squeezing out her breath. Air returned in a gasp, and with it came a surging blush that she was helpless to control.

  Conversations around the Kipuka Club paused as people turned curiously toward Nicole and Chase. Though neither one of them had said anything to anyone except Dane, somehow people had concluded that something had happened between the untouchable Pele and the mainland lady-killer.

  Rumors linking Nicole to a newcomer had been spread before, but she had put an end to them with a quip and a shrug. She hadn’t been able to pull that off this time around. She knew she looked as pale and tense as she felt.

  “Exercise is good for you,” she said, shrugging, avoiding Chase’s eyes, refusing to really look at him.

  “Then let’s exercise together.”

  Nicole went white.

  “On the mountain,” he said with false calm.

  He hated the way she flinched from him. After nearly five days of stalking her, only to have her slide like fire through his fingers, his temper was more than a little raw. The fact that it was his own fault that she was running away didn’t make him feel any better. It simply put an edge on his temper.

  He hadn’t known just how sharply memories could haunt, both the bad memories and the good.

  Nicole haunted hi
m.

  And ran from him.

  “Illustrations, remember?” he prodded. “Or have you decided to back out of the Islands of Life project?”

  “No.”

  Her voice, like her face, was strained. Right now she was wishing she had resigned from the project no matter how much she needed the work. She hadn’t realized how painful it would be to finally see Chase up close. It had been bad enough turning around time and again to find him watching her with his bleak gray eyes and then to know that sooner or later she wouldn’t be able to escape.

  Like tonight. She was trapped, forced to trade empty social words with Chase while humiliation twisted her heart and her stomach. And she had to endure it all under the very interested eyes of her co-workers.

  They knew. All of them. She might as well have hung signs from every one of the Kipuka Club’s ceiling beams.

  “In that case, let’s get going,” Chase said neutrally. “I’ve made a provisional list of places, starting with the fire pit and going all the way to the sea. I figure it will take at least two weeks, more likely four, just to visit each area and select the various microenvironments that should be dealt with in detail.”

  Nicole nodded stiffly.

  “With luck, we’ll find everything we need on Kilauea,” he continued. “Otherwise we’ll have to shift to Mauna Loa. That would mean overnight camping.” His eyes narrowed at the appalled look that came to Nicole’s face.

  “I thought you’d feel like that,” he said, leaning toward her, his voice so soft that only she could hear. “Don’t you know that the last thing I’d do is touch you again?”

  Her eyelids flinched with helpless pain. She hadn’t guessed that he would be so cruel as to bring up her sexual shortcomings again, and in such a public place.

  When Chase saw her lips go pale, he heard the echo of his own words and realized that she had taken them wrong. Afraid that she would flee again, he put his hand on her arm and fought to keep his voice too low for anyone to overhear.

  “I didn’t mean— Damn it, there’s nothing wrong with you as a woman,” he said. “All I meant was—”