“Gabriel, Gabriel,” she murmured, shaking her head slowly, feeling the warm, remembered silk of his hair slide between her fingers, her body trembling against his. “Let’s be as honest with each other now as we were seven years ago. If you’d known that I was pregnant, you still would have gone away.”
Once he would have brushed her words aside with the easy assurance of youth. He wanted to brush them aside now, but the attempt died in his throat. He was older, wiser, with the kind of self-knowledge that came from hanging head-down over a void and measuring the depth of his own grave.
“I tried to stay with you,” he said. “Then Dan told me how tight money was, and how much I could help him and Mother with the advance money from the Orinoco assignment. He told me that my career, the career he and Mother had sacrificed for, was just getting started.”
Joy closed her eyes and let herself be held.
“I shouldn’t have let him talk me out of staying with you, knowing you might be pregnant. But I did.”
“You wanted to see all the wild places.”
He closed his eyes against the pain of understanding himself. “Yes. At twenty-three, I was young and eager for the world.”
Joy was surprised by the hurt twisting through her. Despite her calm statement that he would have left no matter what, deep in her heart she’d always hoped that he would have stayed with her if he’d known she was pregnant.
Part of her had always hoped that he loved her as much as she loved him.
When Gabe felt her hands pushing against him, silently asking to be released, his arms tightened for an instant.
“Joy, it was nothing against you. It was simply the wrong time for me . . . too soon, too many other people depending on me.”
She stepped away from him, her face pale. “I understand.”
“It’s not the same now. I’m not the same,” he said, taking her hand.
“I know.”
And even as she agreed she took her hand from his.
“Then why are you turning away from me?” he asked.
“Because you don’t understand.”
“What?” he asked, searching the crystalline shades of darkness in her eyes. “What don’t I understand?”
“Me. I’ve changed too.”
He remembered the black emotions he had seen staring out at him from her eyes. “You don’t really hate me. Don’t try to tell me that. I don’t believe it. You were trembling when you kissed me.”
“I don’t hate you.” Joy looked up at Gabe, her eyes as deep and unflinching as winter.
“Then what is it, sweetheart?”
“It was too soon for you to love seven years ago—and now it’s too late for me.”
He drew a swift breath. “Why?”
“Love requires trust. Trust requires innocence. I’m not innocent anymore.”
“I took that from you when I left,” he said, his voice raw. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes.” Her smile was gentle, accepting, and sadder than tears. “Being left behind is very educational. And it wasn’t just you.” She closed her eyes for a moment, concealing the pain of her own new self-knowledge. “Losing my parents that way, no warning, no chance to prepare . . .” Her eyes opened, clear and certain. “I’m a long way from the girl I was seven years ago.”
He stepped close again, stroked her hair, her cheek, and listened to her words as though his life depended on it.
“Looking back . . .” She hesitated, sighed. “Even if you had stayed, I don’t think it would have worked. Your family was against it and you’re close to your family.”
Gabe couldn’t argue that. When he was able to, he talked to his brother and his mother every few days.
But the next talk he had with Dan wouldn’t be pleasant.
“Instead of simply not loving me,” Joy said quietly, “you would have ended up hating me and resenting the child you never asked for. Bad timing all the way around. Too soon for us, Gabe. Way too soon.”
“And now you think it’s too late.” His voice was as grim as his narrowed eyes.
“Not for you. All you have to do is find someone young and innocent and trusting. Like Maggie.” Joy turned away, her expression tight, hidden, as she added, “And then, of course, you’d have to have the guts to follow through.”
Before Gabe could say anything, the front door of the cottage slammed, warning them that Kati was back.
Joy spun toward him and said softly. “Please, don’t—”
“Tell my daughter who her father is?” His voice was low, challenging.
Joy took a ragged breath and braced for a storm she hadn’t ever thought would come.
Seventeen
“MOMMY? WHAT’S FOR DINNER?” KATI CALLED.
Joy spun toward the kitchen doorway and held out her arms. “Hi, button. Hungry?”
Kati leaped up just as her mother’s arms closed around her wiry little body. Joy settled her daughter’s legs around her waist and looked eye to eye with her.
“Missed you,” Kati said, giving Joy a noisy kiss.
“Even with the whole Childer family around you?”
“Uh-huh. I still want brothers and sisters and a daddy, but no one’s as good as you. Love you.”
“I love you too.”
She hugged her daughter close for a few moments longer, then lowered her to the floor. Though Joy couldn’t see Gabe, she felt his focus like the sun burning her.
“Bath before dinner.” To underline her words, Joy traced the streaks of dust on Kati’s fair skin.
“Fried chicken, huh, please?”
“Tacos and refried beans.”
“Uh-oh, Gravy-bear is cooking again.”
“Yes, but don’t hurt his feelings.”
“Oh, I won’t,” Kati said solemnly. “Gravy-bear is soooo nice. Are you sure he isn’t my daddy?”
Joy struggled to keep her voice light. “I’m sure, button.”
“Do you think he’d like to be?” Kati asked, her eyes and voice wistful.
“I think your Gravy-bear couldn’t love you any more if he was your very own daddy.” Joy’s voice was teasing but her hands shook.
“Yeah,” Kati said matter-of-factly, chewing on her lower lip. “That’s what he told me. But then why doesn’t my own daddy love me?”
Joy felt her control slipping away. She swept up Kati in her arms and turned so that her daughter’s back was to Gabe. She desperately wished that Kati had chosen a better moment to talk about her ongoing search for a father. It was a conversation Joy was used to, along with her daughter’s wheedling, teasing pleas for siblings.
But Joy wasn’t used to having the conversation with Kati’s father standing two feet away, his body taut, his eyes like green ice, his face fierce with a truth that no one had spoken aloud.
Oh, God, don’t say it, Gabe, Joy pleaded silently, giving him a look as fierce as his own. Please! Don’t let Kati find out like this. She isn’t ready for it.
I’m not ready for it.
And you’re not ready either. Don’t you see? She can handle the reality she knows. But if you tell her you’re her father, when you leave she’ll feel rejected all her life.
Don’t do that to her.
Please. Don’t.
Gabe didn’t have to be a mind reader to understand the unspoken appeal in Joy’s eyes. And to feel it cutting through his defenses into his soul.
He’d never meant to hurt Joy by leaving. He’d never dreamed even in his worst nightmares that he’d hurt his own child, this lively, bright-faced little girl with yearning gray eyes.
“I’m sure your father loves you,” Gabe said, while his face ached with the strain of controlling his expression.
Kati turned toward him so fast that her hair flew out in a fiery cloud. “Really-for-sure sure?”
“Really for sure.”
There was a certainty in his voice that intrigued Kati. She looked at him with transparent eagerness. “Do you know my father?”
Joy closed her eyes and waited for Kati’s innocent world to be shattered.
“I don’t know any man who deserves a little girl as special as you,” he said honestly, his voice husky.
For a moment Kati measured Gabe with unflinching gray eyes that reminded him very much of Joy’s.
Then Kati gave him a breathtaking smile. “You want to help me make tacos with Gravy-bear?”
“Bath, young lady,” Joy said quickly, carrying her daughter out of the kitchen.
“But Mommy—” Kati began.
“Mr. Venture has a lot of work to do,” Joy said, overriding Kati’s objections. “Say goodbye.”
“Gabe,” Kati retorted, pouting at her mother. “He said I could call him Gabe.”
Joy’s lips flattened as she opened her daughter’s bedroom door. “Bath.”
Kati read the danger signals from her mother and resigned herself to losing this round. But not without getting something in return. “Then I get to help with tacos.”
“Depends on how fast you take your bath, doesn’t it?”
The little girl frowned. She loved taking long baths.
Gabe listened to the voices floating back from the bathroom, followed by the muted thunder of water filling the ancient claw-footed tub, and then Kati’s peals of uninhibited laughter when her mother tickled her. He visualized the bath ritual from his own childhood, his mother bent over the tub, washing him and his brother while they did their best to splash water over everything in the room.
Sometimes things had gotten out of hand. Then his father would come into the bathroom, lift his wife out of the mess, and begin washing squealing, splashing young bodies with equal parts determination and resignation. Whenever that happened, the brothers had looked at each other and laughed secretly, glorying in their power over their parents.
Gabe’s smile faded when he realized that Kati had never known that delicious childish conspiracy with a sibling against a parent. She’d never had the sweet certainty that if one parent got fed up, there was a fresh one just down the hall. And if both parents were out of sorts, the siblings could ride out the storm together, secure in their attachment to a co-conspirator.
Kati couldn’t do that. Except for her mother, she was alone.
Joy was alone, period.
No one to lean on. No one to take her place when her child’s needs were greater than a single parent’s energy. No one to relax and curl up with at night. No one to reassure her that she was doing a fine job under difficult circumstances. No one at all.
And she wasn’t looking for anyone.
Kati might be searching for a father in the males around her, but clearly Joy wasn’t looking for any man for any purpose at all. She’d meant exactly what she’d said to Gabe. She loved no man because love required trust and she no longer trusted.
It hadn’t stopped with simply not loving any man. Her reaction when Gabe touched her—the automatic flinch, the surprise in her eyes—told him that she rarely allowed anyone physically close to her but Kati.
Yet Joy had trembled when he held her, shivered when his lips brushed over her mouth, sighed when her hands had sought and found the warm thickness of his hair. He might have killed her ability to love, but her body still responded to him. The shimmering sensuality he’d once discovered in her was still there, waiting to be released. All he had to do was get past her anger and distrust.
He could start by not telling Kati who her father was until her mother was ready to handle it.
Aching, Gabe turned and let himself out the back door of Joy’s cottage. As he did, he hoped that he wasn’t making another mistake, hurting people when all he wanted to do was make up for the wrongs of the past.
Eighteen
TEN DAYS LATER THE VOICES CLOSED AROUND GABE. THEY murmured softly, endlessly, haunting him with phrases from his past and his present. He pushed forward into the cave anyway, following Joy’s lead, knowing that there wasn’t any help for any of it.
No matter how many times he heard the Voices, they would always pluck at his soul.
At least now an unborn child no longer called to him through the cool darkness. He heard cries, yes, but they were a little girl’s innocent questions as she tried to understand why a father she’d never known didn’t love her.
Using knees, elbows, heels, and toes for leverage, he pushed deeper into Gotcha. There was no way for him to tell the Voices to be still, that he regretted the past as he’d never expected to regret anything in his life. There was no way to tell Kati that it wasn’t her fault she didn’t have a father. There was no way to explain that he hadn’t even suspected Joy was a virgin until he was too gripped by passion to believe that any moment would ever exist except the one consuming moment when he found himself locked deep inside her.
The fact that Joy had wanted him as much as he’d wanted her, the fact that he hadn’t known her innocence, the fact that he’d accepted the Orinoco assignment before he ever came to Lost River Cave, the fact that he’d done all he could for Joy by leaving her every bit of money he had—those facts described but didn’t relieve him of his responsibility to her.
And to himself.
Love requires trust. Trust requires innocence.
Grimly he pushed against stone and wondered what forgiveness required.
Whatever it was, he needed it. Underneath the last ten days of professional questions and note-taking and cautious camaraderie, he was a single raw ache. He didn’t know the way out of the trap he’d built in the past. He only knew that life lived like this, in silence and waiting and pain, wasn’t life at all.
Does Joy ever wake up in the bleak hours before dawn and wish to hell that she could live the past all over again?
Like him. Aching.
Asking questions that had no answers.
Feeling loneliness and regret like a cold, hidden river dissolving away his soul while darkness closed around him in a seamless shroud.
Not once in the past ten days had Joy said or done anything to him that said he was the least bit different from the other cavers to her. Unfailingly polite and professional with each other, they could have been complete strangers.
Such bitterly intimate strangers.
With a whispered curse, he shoved free of Gotcha and stood again to plug in his helmet leads.
“Gabe?” Joy asked softly, seeing the unmistakable lines of pain on his face. “Are you all right?”
She touched his shoulder in the instant before she controlled herself and snatched back her hand. Since she’d found herself trembling in Gabe’s arms, she’d been very, very careful not to touch him.
He simply looked at her, saying nothing.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “Did you hurt yourself coming through Gotcha?”
His brief smile tore at her. It revealed a defenseless agony that she knew too well from her own experience. She made a protesting sound and touched him.
“Gabe?” she whispered, one voice among the Voices swirling around them in darkness. “What is it?”
“Have you ever been lonely?”
His words echoed in his mind as though someone else had spoken them. He heard the pain and the emptiness and the searching hunger. Then, even as his words sank beneath the murmurous sounds of the room, he flinched away from them.
“Christ, listen to me asking you about loneliness.”
His bleak laughter stabbed through the Voices as he walked past Joy into the huge room.
She made a small sound and turned away, shaking with a sudden storm of emotions, torn apart by discovery.
And by anger.
What right does he have to be lonely? He’s gotten everything he ever wanted—fame, respect, adventure, discovery. He’s the Great Gabriel Venture. He explored the world while I explored abandonment.
It cost me too much to care about him in the past. I won’t make the same mistake again.
I can’t afford to.
Even though I sense loneliness in him, a hunger and a need that are like mine.
Hunger and need aren’t enough. Gabe hasn’t changed in the most important way. He still cares more about his career than about anything else, including his loneliness.
He proved it when he agreed without arguing to leave the past alone so that he could do what he came here to do—another article about Lost River Cave.
He proves it again and again every day with his cool, relentless professionalism.
He hasn’t changed, not really.
I have. I’m immune to love, to him.
Be as lonely as you like, Gabriel Venture. It won’t touch me.
“Coming through,” Davy called. “I think. Damn, this last one’s a real bitch.”
Joy realized that she was blocking Gotcha’s exit. Hastily she stepped aside.
Davy wriggled out of the impossibly small opening, pushing his wadded-up clothes and helmet ahead of him and dragging a string of equipment from his ankle. And cursing fit to blister stone.
Wearing only his underwear—and that just barely—he kicked free of Gotcha, stood, and stretched thankfully.
Joy nudged his clothes with the toe of her muddy boot. “Gonna freeze, boy.”
“Nah.” Davy whacked himself on his stomach with a broad palm. “Too much natural insulation.”
Maggie emerged from the hole in time to hear Davy’s words. “Gravy-bear, you don’t have a spare ounce of fat on you and you know it.”
“Do tell,” he said. He bent over and pulled Maggie to her feet as if she was no bigger than Kati. “Can’t say the same about you, can we? You got a license for that trailer?” He swatted Maggie on the butt as he reached past her for his clothes.
Joy didn’t need to see Maggie’s face to know that Davy’s casual comment stung.
“Tell you what,” Joy said to Maggie. “You hold him and I’ll cut his throat.”
“Sold,” Maggie said with enough emphasis to get through Davy’s thick hide.
This Time Love Page 16
