Eden Burning / Fires of Eden

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “There must have been one hell of a blast when it all came together,” he said quietly.

  “I thought lava flows, especially pahoehoe, were slow, not explosive.” She frowned, thinking about what she had seen. “I mean, sure, there’s some steam when the lava creeps down to the sea, but it’s more like backyard firecrackers than real explosions.”

  He smiled slightly. “You ever throw a few drops of water on a really hot griddle?”

  “Every time I make pancakes.”

  “Well, that lava was once hell’s own griddle with a whole ocean pouring over it. I’ll bet tons of water and stone met and instantly vaporized with a sound like bombs going off.”

  She looked at the water and the lava and tried to imagine the wild clash of fire and water.

  “That was what it was like at Surtsey,” he said. “We have film in the archives. A river of molten stone running down to an icy sea. The shock waves from the explosions made it sound like a battlefield. And in a way that’s what it was. A natural war zone.”

  “What was it like to be there, to see and hear it?”

  “Like watching God at work. Awesome.”

  Chase glanced to the left, away from the solid lava flow. There was a black-sand beach. After the lava cooled, a fringe of graceful coconut palms had taken root along the upper margin of the beach.

  “Look,” he said, pointing. “That’s where the black sand came from. The explosive meeting of ocean and lava.”

  “I thought it came from old lava crumbling.”

  “A little probably does. But a whole lot of black sand comes from the moment when red-hot stone and seawater explode on contact.”

  Nicole looked at the peaceful sand curving out to embrace the sea. “I’m glad everything has cooled off.”

  Not quite everything, he thought ruefully, feeling the heaviness of his erection with every heartbeat. But there’s no danger of an explosion either.

  I hope.

  Together they left behind the wild jumble of lava where the boiling blood of the volcano had once met the sea. As they walked toward a grove of palms, Chase took Nicole’s hand. When they reached the grove, he kissed her palm, tasted it once with a lingering touch of his tongue, released her, and reached for the fastenings of his hiking boots. Bracing his butt against a tree trunk, he took off one boot and stuffed a sock into it.

  She watched and thought about stripping naked in full sunlight with him. She doubted that she had the nerve.

  “There are three ways we can do this,” he said matter-of-factly, working on the other boot.

  “Do what?”

  “Go skinny-dipping. We can pretend we aren’t—” he began.

  She made a strangled sound and tried not to laugh out loud.

  “Yeah, that’s the way it strikes me, too.” He looked at her with a wry smile. “The second way is we sneak sideways looks at each other and trip all over our own feet on the way to the water.”

  This time she gave up and laughed out loud. “What’s the third choice?”

  “We just take a good look and get over it.”

  With a single quick, twisting motion he stripped off his shirt. Then he pulled off his shorts and underwear and stood in front of her, naked.

  “Of course, a man is at a real disadvantage in this situation,” he said.

  “He is?” she asked in an odd voice. Her glance traveled helplessly down his hard male body. Very male. Very hard. “Oh,” she said, understanding what he meant about being at a disadvantage. “I see.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure you do,” he agreed wryly. “I want you, and there’s no damn way on earth I can disguise it when I’m naked. But I’m a man, not a baby. I don’t expect to get everything I want the second I want it.” He waited until her golden eyes came up to meet his. “Don’t be frightened, butterfly. This is just my body’s way of saying that, as a woman, you please me very much. Is that so bad?”

  She let out the breath she hadn’t been aware of holding. And she waited for fear to come.

  She was still waiting several breaths later, looking at him, when she realized that the thought of pleasing Chase as a woman was not frightening in the least. She cleared her throat and tried to be as honest with him as he was being with her.

  “No. It’s good. I like the idea of . . . well, exciting you.”

  “Do you?” he asked with a slow smile.

  She closed her eyes and spoke quickly, painfully, forcing out the words. “You won’t be angry with me? Ted always was. He expected me to want him instantly, constantly. I’m not like that.”

  “Neither am I. I don’t walk around ready to fuck anything female that will hold still for it.”

  Her eyes flew open at his bluntness.

  “I know that might be hard for you to believe,” he said, “considering the evidence in front of me. But it’s true all the same. You have a potent effect on me. And it’s you I want, not just sex. Hell, if it was just sex, I’d be in town right now, riding some faceless body. Sex isn’t hard to find.”

  She watched as he turned and walked into the waves, leaving her to admire the fact that his tan was the same even shade of brown all over. Everywhere. When she realized she was staring, she flushed—and kept right on staring. Despite his size, his body wasn’t bulky. He was simply powerful, coordinated, and male.

  With fingers that trembled, she went to work on her boots. Then her clothes. Then she gathered her courage in both hands and walked into the water. Naked.

  Chase stood waist-deep in the jeweled blue sea.

  So did Nicole, but she was still half uncovered.

  “Women,” she said, her voice desperately normal, “are at a disadvantage in this case.”

  Accepting that as the invitation it was, he turned and looked at her. Slowly. Very thoroughly.

  “Beautiful,” he said simply.

  And she was, with her wide amber eyes and the slanting line of her cheekbones stained with red. Long, elegant neck, as smooth as the shadow in the hollow of her throat. Her nipples were taut and deep pink and her breasts were the same smooth golden brown as her arms.

  “I see you don’t like bathing suits any better than I do,” he said.

  “I hate them. I like—” Her voice broke. She cleared her throat and admitted to him what she had never told anyone before. “I like to feel the sun on my breasts, and the breeze and the warm rain everywhere.”

  Her words undid whatever cooling effect the ocean had had on Chase’s erection.

  “Someday you’ll feel me like that,” he said, running his fingertips from her forehead to her thighs hidden beneath a bright surge of water. “I’ll be all over you like a warm rain. I won’t even take you. I’ll just pleasure you.” He lifted his hand. His wet fingertip touched first one nipple, then the other, leaving a diamond drop of water behind. “Think about it, butterfly. All you have to do is ask.”

  She couldn’t help thinking about it. Ripples of sensual response coursed through her, making her nipples tighten even more.

  He saw, and wished with savage urgency that he could simply pull her into his arms and seduce her.

  But he couldn’t. If she got afraid all over again and backed away, she would blame herself, not him. That would hurt her more than anything he had done to her.

  He let a quiet breath out through his clenched teeth. He had to be the way he had been in the clearing—motionless, offering himself while she spiraled closer and closer to him on velvet wings. She had to come and drink the sweetness from him. Only then would she lose her fear of being crushed and thrown aside.

  Even knowing that, he couldn’t stop himself from bending down and licking the drop of seawater from one of her nipples.

  “Salt is bad for the skin,” he said almost roughly. “And you have such beautiful skin.”

  She watched with a shivering feeling of inevitability while his head moved to her other breast and his tongue flicked out, touching her far too briefly.

  “Chase.” Her voice was tight, ragged.
<
br />   He straightened, expecting her to retreat. “Yes?”

  “I—I like that. I really like it. Would you do it again?”

  Slowly he touched each of her nipples with a wet fingertip, leaving behind a drop of glittering water. This time he removed the drop with exquisite care before he took the taut peak into his mouth and tugged at it.

  Heat shot out from the core of her body, fire snaking through every pore, molten need racing through her. Long before he turned to her other breast, her hands were clinging to him for support. His mustache stroked her like a silk brush before he drew her deeply into his mouth. She made a tiny sound in the back of her throat and arched her back, offering herself to him as she never had to any man.

  By the time Chase finally released Nicole, she was trembling and breathing brokenly. Somehow he scraped up the determination to stop before it was too late.

  And the next breath would be too late.

  Closing his eyes, locking his jaw, he held her in his arms, just held her, letting the warm surge and retreat of the water bring her against him and then take her away.

  After a few minutes of quiet holding, he trusted himself not to lift her up and fit her over his rigid, aching flesh, to feel again the satin heat and tightness of her surrounding him, tugging at him with every breath, every caress.

  When he felt her stir in his arms, he reluctantly loosened his hold. Her cheek rubbed against his chest. Slowly she turned her head from side to side, openly enjoying his male textures.

  “If I touched you the same way,” she said softly, “would you enjoy it?”

  “Yes, but you don’t have to. I don’t expect—”

  The rest of his words shattered in a ripping intake of breath. Her tongue had found one nipple beneath the curling black hair on his chest. Even as he told himself he shouldn’t react so much to an innocent little lick, he had to bite back a groan of sheer pleasure.

  While she transformed his flat nipple into a tiny, hard nub, his whole body went taut, shivering.

  She felt it, understood its source. The certainty that she was pleasing him was almost dizzying. So was his taste, his scent, the heat and power of his body radiating beneath her hands. Letting her explore him. Letting her taste.

  Letting her.

  In breathless silence she discovered how sensitive her tongue could be to textures as well as tastes, how good it felt to twist her body slowly against his, how much she liked pleasuring him as thoroughly as he had pleasured her. Finally she lifted her mouth, only to return to his nipple again and then again in sexy little forays, licking, biting lightly, wholly lost in the sensual instant.

  Hard fingers slid beneath her chin, tilting her head back. When she started to ask what was wrong, his mouth claimed hers, leaving no room for anything except the hot, deep completion of his kiss.

  A wave tumbled in, washing over them in a warm surge of water that went up to her collarbone and threatened to pull her from his arms. Even as her arms tightened to hold on to him, he lifted her beyond the reach of the wave.

  “One of us,” he said hoarsely against her mouth, “has to watch for the big ones. That would be you.”

  With that he turned her in his arms until she faced the open ocean. Slowly he pulled her back against his chest, fitting her hips into the cradle of his thighs. When he nudged against her, aroused and hard, he expected her to retreat.

  She didn’t.

  “But now I can’t touch you,” she protested, looking at him over her shoulder.

  The movement shifted her so that his erection ended up captured between her sleek thighs. He bit back a groan of outrageous pleasure. And need. The kind of need he had never known.

  “You’re touching me,” he said almost roughly.

  She flushed. “But not—not with my hands. Or my mouth.”

  Silently he admitted that it was just as well he was out of reach of her mouth and hands for the moment. The pleasure she took in his body was dangerously exciting. It made him forget all the reasons he had to be patient.

  “Then I’ll just have to touch you twice as much to make up for it, won’t I?” he said.

  “Are you sure?” she asked hesitantly.

  “Yes.”

  “Sure-sure?” she pressed.

  “Sure-sure,” he said against her hair. “Let me show you, butterfly.”

  With one hand between her breasts and the other flattened over the blazing triangle just above her thighs, he pressed her even closer to his hungry body.

  “Tell me what you like.” He nuzzled her ear, then traced it with the tip of his tongue. “This?”

  Slowly he thrust his tongue into her ear, withdrew, and thrust again.

  Her breathing stopped.

  He nibbled not quite softly around the rim of her ear until he felt her arch into the caress, demanding more. Smiling, nipping lightly, he continued along her hairline to her neck. There he stopped. With exquisite gentleness he used his teeth on the sensitive bundle of nerves at her nape.

  The currents of heat that had been gathering in Nicole suddenly shot through her with a force that made her weak. She trembled and leaned against him.

  “Yes?” he asked, repeating the caress, feeling her body soften even more in his arms.

  “Y-yes,” she said, her voice catching.

  He bent over her nape again, and the trembling of her body rippled through him. His hands found the smooth weight of her breasts, caught the hard peaks between his fingers, and tugged the nipples exactly when his teeth closed on her nape.

  She made a tearing sound of sheer pleasure.

  Tenderly, relentlessly, he caressed her until she was crying with each breath and her hips were moving over him in slow, instinctive rhythms, seeking something more satisfying than his simple presence pressed between her thighs.

  One of his hands slid down her body into the warm ocean, needing what she needed—to discover the even warmer woman waiting within her softness. He caressed the smooth skin of her thighs and the tangled silk of her red triangle as he gently bit her shoulder.

  The combination of sensations made her gasp and press against him hungrily. His rubbed his erection between her thighs, holding her in a sensual vise that increased with each small, involuntary movement of her hips. Slowly, languidly, his fingertips found and stroked her soft folds.

  “Yes?” he asked.

  Her answer was a moan and a slow, rhythmic roll of her hips, as though the muted thunder of the breaking waves was the opening drumbeat of a sensuous dance.

  The feel of her softness opening hotly over him made his whole body clench with a hunger that was more fierce than any he had ever known.

  Pele—God, woman, you’ll burn us both to ash.

  With a throaty sound he closed his teeth on her nape again and pressed two fingers deeply into her softness. She cried out and shivered helplessly against his hand, utterly in thrall to sensations she never wanted to end. He stroked her repeatedly, felt every bit of the clench and tug of her satin body clinging to his probing touch.

  Then he felt the shivering take her again, felt the liquid silk of her response flowing over him. Raw need ripped through him, tearing away his control, making him shake with the force of his hunger.

  Another big wave came, pressing her against him in a warm surge of power, pushing him over a hidden edge. He turned her in his arms and lifted her.

  “Wrap your legs around me,” he said hoarsely.

  His urgency and the sudden change of position caught her by surprise. She stiffened in his arms. “What . . . ?”

  When he heard her uncertainty, he froze. Despite his promise, he was taking her, not waiting for her to come to him.

  “I’m sorry, butterfly,” he said painfully. “It won’t happen again.”

  With the last shred of his control he let her slide back down his body into the warm sea. Gently he turned her and pushed her toward the black-sand crescent and the fringe of palms.

  “Go back up on the beach,” he said. “You won’t have
any problem with sudden waves there.”

  Automatically Nicole waded ashore. When she reached it, she discovered that Chase hadn’t followed her. His absence made her feel empty, dazed. Lost.

  She turned back to see where Chase was.

  The sea was empty.

  “Chase?” she called, looking around wildly.

  No one answered.

  Moments later a dark body broke the surface of the ocean out where the waves were coming apart. Chase swam smoothly, powerfully, spearing beneath the breaking waves and reappearing on their far side.

  Nicole watched him with an aching in her throat that she didn’t understand. It seemed like forever before he turned and began swimming back to her, riding the wild whiteness of breaking waves.

  It won’t happen again.

  She trembled, and tears flowed hotly down her cheeks, and she didn’t know why she cried.

  32

  Ten days later Nicole sat cross-legged on the oversize garden lounge and wondered if Chase would call tonight as he had for the last nine nights. From the mainland.

  Three time zones and thousands of miles away.

  Sorry, butterfly. Something came unstuck. I have to go for a while. Lisa is coming with me.

  Nicole envied Chase’s daughter. Talking on the phone with him was wonderful, hearing the husky burr in his voice, making him laugh, laughing in turn; but talking wasn’t enough. It wasn’t the same as feeling his strength when he hugged her, smelling the unique scent of him on her hands, seeing his eyes go smoky when she tasted him.

  Every night he told her about the quivers and burps of Mount Saint Helens that continued decades after the major eruption, and the pile of paperwork that threatened to bury him alive. She told him about the sketches she was doing and that dancing at the Kipuka Club just wasn’t the same without him. He put Lisa on the line, and she asked about Benny and kipuka picnics.

  They weren’t the same either.

  Lisa sent kisses and hugs and put her daddy back on the line. He and Nicole talked a while longer, a lot longer, more every time. They talked about anything and everything and nothing at all. Even though it made her ache to hear his voice and not be able to see him, to touch him, she didn’t want the connection to end. Neither did he. They talked until long past midnight in his time zone.