It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t a demand. There was a wary overture in the softness of his name on her lips, and a silent, not quite defiant apology buried in her offer of half-truth and truce.
“Struck sparks.” His smile was off center, hard. “Yeah, I guess you could say that. In bloody spades.” He looked past her to the three people watching them. “The good doctor and I will probably fight like hell on fire from time to time. When we do, just take cover.” He looked directly at Davy. “That way no one else will get hurt.” Gabe held Davy’s eyes for a long, measuring moment before the younger man looked away. “Isn’t that right, Joy.”
She sensed the same ambivalence in Gabe’s soft-voiced offer of truce that there had been in hers, but his eyes were green stone. For some reason he was furious at Davy. She opened her mouth to assure Gabe that Davy hadn’t meant to hurt Maggie with his words, then thought better of it. She didn’t want to embarrass Maggie.
Joy decided to keep Gabe away from Davy until things cooled off. Davy didn’t need to be distracted by the kind of icy male anger Gabe projected so easily, so devastatingly.
“Right, Mr. Venture,” Joy said crisply.
“Gabe. Just Gabe.”
The threat was soft and very clear, as hot as his fingers stroking her captive palm.
“Gabe,” she said, her voice husky.
“That didn’t hurt, did it?”
He caressed the softness of her palm and inner wrist until he felt the wild beating of her pulse beneath his fingertips.
She hated herself for the betraying race of her heartbeat beneath his touch. Part of her pulse rate came from anger, pure and hot. But not all of it. Joy was honest enough to admit it.
“Think of it as a little practice in the fine art of civil intercourse. You need it, Doctor,” he said. “You need it bad.”
She flushed, jerking away from Gabe’s too-knowing touch.
Davy swore and took a quick step forward, only to collide with the even faster Fish.
“I think it’s time to take cover, children,” Fish said, deftly using Davy’s momentum to head him in the direction of the Toyota. “Lots of room to hide in that old cave.” He turned and gave Joy a level look. “Unless you changed your mind, Dr. Joyce?”
Joy knew that Fish was asking if she felt safe with Gabe.
Gabe knew it too, and it infuriated him. He turned on Fish with a poised speed that the combat-trained mechanic noted and understood. Even so, Fish didn’t back up.
“Just take all the blunt instruments with you and we’ll be fine,” Joy said quickly, her voice determined and light. “We’ll catch up with you in the Voices in ninety minutes.”
Fish nodded. “Ninety minutes and counting. Grab your gear, boys and girls. We’re leaving now.”
He herded Maggie and Davy out the door. As he passed Gabe, Fish spoke in a low voice that Joy couldn’t overhear.
“Luck, man. You’ll need it. In the six years I’ve known her, ain’t nothing male been able to get near her. Damn shame, too. That’s a whole lot of woman going to waste.”
Ten
TOO SURPRISED TO DO MORE THAN LET FISH’S PARTING words sink in, Gabe watched the mechanic walk to the Land Cruiser, herding Maggie and Davy ahead of him. When the vehicle drove away in a flurry of dust and grit, Gabe turned to look at Joy, hardly able to believe what Fish had told him.
Six years.
My God. Did I hurt her so badly that she refused to trust anyone after me?
Did she really mean it when she cried out her love in my arms?
Yet even as the questions came, he rejected them. He’d learned long ago that you can only trust what people do, not what they say. A woman in love doesn’t casually have an abortion.
Joy had done just that.
When Joy saw the speculative expression on Gabe’s face give way to contempt, she felt worn thin, exhausted, unable to continue the battle. It was hurting her too much.
She spoke before he could. She knew she couldn’t take any more verbal shots without revealing how very vulnerable she was. All the emotions she thought she’d overcome—love, hate, fear, fury—boiled up with each cutting remark he made. She was a breath away from losing control.
She’d felt like this after her parents died and she discovered that she was pregnant, abandoned by Gabe with no more notice than a check to pay for an abortion. Not even a few gentle lies about how he was sorry he couldn’t be with her to help her. Nothing.
It had nearly destroyed her.
That was when the searing determination and comfort of hatred had come to her, driving out love. Finally she’d forced herself to leave behind the hate, because it threatened to eat away her very soul.
She’d wanted her unborn child to know only love.
Joy had never regretted her choice. Kati was worth every agonizing moment of her mother’s ordeal. Rightly or wrongly, in love or in lust, Gabe had given Joy a beautiful child. If for no other reason than that, she had to stop tearing at him and at herself.
In the end it would be Kati who would lose more than anyone.
“Truce,” Joy said raggedly, rubbing her arms like she was cold. “Either that or go caving with Fish right now. I’m not as cruel as you, Gabe. I can’t survive this kind of battle.”
His face hardened even more. He opened his mouth, a harsh retort on his lips. The words died when he noticed the shadows of exhaustion and lines of strain on her face, a fury of emotions she could no longer conceal. She’d never looked less like the name he had given her—Joy.
“Please,” she said, hating the tremor in her voice but not able to control it. “No more.”
Shocked by the tears she felt closing her throat and burning behind her eyes, she turned away swiftly. She hadn’t cried since she’d looked at the tiny, perfect scrap of life that was her baby and realized that Kati would never have grandparents or a father to tease and love, cherish, and protect her.
“Which is it?” she asked, her voice raw. “Cutting me or going caving?”
“Are you going to stop clawing at me or are you suggesting just a one-way truce?”
“It hasn’t been deliberate.” Unable to meet his eyes, she sorted through her caving gear. “I guess there’s more of the betrayed lover left in me than I realized.”
“Betrayed?” he asked, his voice as harsh as his face. “I never promised you I would stay. And when I found out—”
“You’re right,” she cut in, just wanting the anger to end. Or at least not to be spoken aloud. “You’re right. There was no betrayal. You delivered exactly what you promised me.”
Nothing.
Though neither one spoke, the word hung between them like a water drop suspended from a stalactite, shivering before the moment of release.
Gabe swore softly, violently, a single word that slipped past his control. “Fuck.”
“I’m sorry,” she began, “I didn’t mean—”
“No more,” he interrupted. “Your so-called apologies are worse than your insults.”
Despair darkened Joy’s eyes. It wasn’t going to work. They couldn’t say three words without slashing at each other.
And what would happen when Kati returned? When Kati grew up and Joy told her who her father was, would her daughter’s only memory be of a man who hated her mother?
“Gabriel,” she said desperately, “what do you want from me? What can I do to make you hate me less?”
His first thought was of the hunger that still swept through him, memories of what it had been like to feel Joy moving in his arms. Then he remembered the I-love-you lies, the baby she’d refused to have. He wanted to strike out at her, to wound her as deeply as she’d wounded him by rejecting his child.
Then he saw Joy’s despair and knew that somehow he’d hurt her more than he ever realized.
Just as she’d hurt him.
Even though he’d never said he would stay with her or marry her—in fact hadn’t even said that he loved her—despite the lack of promises, when he’d le
ft Joy he’d cut her to her soul.
Is that why she aborted our baby? Revenge? Did I take a young woman’s love and twist it into hate?
Suddenly he felt old, tarnished, spent. The despair in Joy’s clear eyes was echoed in his own.
“What happened is in the past,” he said, his voice hoarse. “There’s nothing either of us can do about it now. Except live with it.”
She wanted to cry out What have I done to make you hate me? but didn’t have the strength to fight Gabe anymore. It was enough that for a moment he had looked at her with sadness rather than contempt in his eyes.
“Then let’s see if we can’t create something now that’s better than the past,” she said wearily. “No matter what did or didn’t happen between us, I respect your ability to share new worlds with people through your writing.”
Gabe looked into Joy’s bleak gray eyes and felt an impulse to comfort her, even though anguish and anger still made his heart beat hard and fast.
“And I,” he said softly, “respect the expertise that has made New Mexico’s Dr. J. Anderson one of the foremost speleologists in the U.S.”
Surprise showed clearly on Joy’s delicate face.
“Oh yes,” Gabe said. “I finally did what I should have done the instant I accepted the assignment—my homework.”
If he’d done it sooner, he would have guessed who Dr. J. Anderson was, no matter that she had dropped the Smith from her name.
If he’d known ahead of time that Joy was still at Lost River Cave, she wouldn’t have been able to get past his guard so quickly, so painfully. And he wouldn’t have been able to get past hers.
It would have been easier that way. For both of us.
But he didn’t say that aloud, because it would have shredded the fragile threads of the truce they were both trying to weave from the ragged betrayals of the past.
“The package my editor sent me was very impressive,” Gabe said. “You’ve had articles published in the most prestigious scientific journals on two continents, including a monograph on the effects of differing ratios of sulfuric acid and carbon dioxide on solution rates in the limestone of the Guadalupe Mountains.”
Joy waited, too surprised to speak.
“Your work is the scientific cornerstone of a new understanding of how a certain type of cave is formed,” he continued, “and how long it might take similar caves to develop. Then there’s the treatise you did on deducing paleoclimates in the Southwest through analysis of Lost River Cave’s formations. I’m told that is fast becoming known as the definitive work on cave formations and ancient climates.”
She allowed herself to breathe. “I’ve been fortunate to work with dedicated people.”
“And they’ve been fortunate to work with you.”
She moved uncomfortably. “You’re looking at me like you don’t know me.”
“In many ways, I don’t.” The Joy of Gabe’s memories had been very intelligent; that was a big part of her fascination for him. She’d loved the cave, loved exploring and learning, but she hadn’t had the drive or unflinching discipline the last seven years had brought out in her. “What you’ve done is very impressive,” he said simply. “Your parents must be proud of you.”
The pain that darkened Joy’s eyes lasted only an instant, but it was long enough for Gabe to see it.
“My parents are dead.” She turned back to her caving equipment.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
He hesitated, wondering if their deaths had been recent, if that was what had taken the laughter from her. The death of his own father had shaken Gabe. He still missed him. He always would. So much of childhood died with a parent. Joy had no brothers or sisters to share memories of those early years with. Gabe had his older brother, his port in many storms, and his mother’s welcoming hugs whenever he managed to get home.
He couldn’t imagine how it would feel to be totally alone.
“It must be very hard for you,” he said slowly. “Was it . . . recent?”
“They died ten days after you left Cottonwood Wells.” Joy hoped she kept her voice even, but doubted it. “Helicopter crash. Afterward . . . I changed my name. I wasn’t the same person.”
The sound of Gabe’s quick intake of breath was clear in the silence. Without thinking, he touched Joy’s cheek with gentle fingertips, but his emotions were reeling. My God, to lose your first lover one week and your parents the next.
No wonder she felt abandoned, betrayed. Life had turned on her and knocked her flat—and then had rolled over her again for good measure with a pregnancy she wasn’t emotionally or financially equipped to survive.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered, regretting more than the death of two people he’d respected and liked. “Why didn’t you write me? I would have helped you.”
Yet even as he heard his own words, he wondered what else he could have done beyond what he’d already done—leave a check with his brother and Dan’s telephone number with Joy. By the time mail would have caught up with him on the Orinoco, Joy’s parents would have been dead for months and the abortion an accomplished fact.
“Somehow,” he whispered as much to himself as to her, “I would have helped you.”
Her only answer was a short, harsh laugh as she remembered the check for an abortion. “No thanks. I’d had all of your ‘help’ that I could survive.”
She sensed Gabe’s anger in the sudden clenching of his hand and the stiffening of his body. She looked up and saw rage darkening his face and making his eyes glitter like cut glass.
“The truce won’t work if we talk about the past,” she said painfully. “Somehow we both feel we were wronged. Well, too bad, how sad, life’s a bitch and then you die. We’ll just have to pull up our socks and get over it. Or we’ll have to call it quits on Lost River Cave. Take your pick, Gabe. I won’t talk about the past if you won’t.”
“Just a mutual professional love feast? I admire your work and you admire mine?”
“Love feast? Love? The Great Gabriel Venture? Ain’t hardly likely, cowboy,” she drawled. “Would you believe an armed truce?”
“Would you believe a bridle on the bitchy repartee? Or are you pushing me to put on the bridle for you?” he asked coolly, looking at her mouth.
A recent memory quivered between them—Joy trembling with something more than anger as he stroked her soft wrist and palm.
She flinched away from both the memory and the man. Taking a deep breath, she worked to damp down the rage that had come when Gabe used the word love.
The sensual threat in him was vivid, as hot as her own fury.
Too many memories whispering to her, telling her that she’d responded to this man before. He’d been the man who explored the secrets of her virginal body.
Perhaps she could still respond to him.
Perhaps she could finally escape the numbness in her core, the utter absence of sexuality that had made it impossible to love another man, and had ensured that Kati would always be what her mother had been—a lonely-only child.
The possibility of another child was as dazzling as it was terrifying to Joy, because it meant being Gabe’s lover again. She didn’t think she could survive his sensuality any better than she could his contempt.
Yet, somehow, she had to get along with him. She’d endured too much to get where she was today. She wouldn’t let it all go to hell simply because she couldn’t control either her antagonism or her sexual response to her former lover.
“You don’t want me, so please don’t play this kind of power game.” Her voice was quiet, ragged, as she looked into the green eyes that were too close, too familiar, dreams and memories combined. “No matter what you do to me, or I do to you, it won’t change what happened when you left Cottonwood Wells. What we do can only affect this instant, now, and the future of a place that is very special to me.”
She drew a long, jerky breath and made the only offer she could to appease Gabe, even though the thought of missing out on the last weeks
of Lost River Cave made tears gather in her eyes.
“I’ll leave Cottonwood Wells,” she said huskily, “and I won’t come back until you’re gone.”
He saw the tears that she fought so hard to hide and knew how much the offer had cost her.
“Christ, you really hate me, don’t you?” he asked hoarsely. “Lost River Cave is your life, yet you’ll walk away from your last chance to explore it just to avoid being around me.”
“And you can’t look at me without wanting to hurt me.”
Her voice was as empty as her eyes. Too spent to say or do anything more, she waited for his decision.
He saw the soul-deep weariness in her that mirrored his own. Whatever he’d hoped for when he flogged himself halfway around the world to rush back to Cottonwood Wells, it hadn’t been what he’d found.
Fury. Hatred. Despair.
Anguish.
Well, fool, what now? And don’t bother bitching about life’s little surprises. The men who screamed for two thousand feet before hitting bottom would be glad to trade surprises with you.
Besides, look at it from her point of view. You made love to a virgin and left without knowing if she was pregnant. Ten days later her parents died. Then she found out she was pregnant and you were way beyond reach. For this you expected her to throw roses at you when she saw you again? What would you have done in her place—pregnant, twenty, parents dead, nowhere to go, no one to turn to, no money and no way to earn any?
It wasn’t a question Gabe wanted to answer. It cut him in places he didn’t know could bleed.
He hadn’t meant it to turn out this way. He hadn’t meant to leave her alone in a world that didn’t give a shit whether Joy survived or went under.
He hadn’t known her parents would die.
He hadn’t meant to hurt her like that.
This Time Love Page 9
