Eden Burning

by Elizabeth Lowell

  But she had survived.

  She had even conquered her rocky shell enough to grow again, putting out tentative leaves and flowers of friendship, soaking up the affection that came in return like a plant soaking up warm rain and tropical sunshine.

  “As far as I can tell,” Chase continued gently, relentlessly, “you haven’t slept with any other man in the whole state of Hawaii, so why did you sleep with me?”

  Nicole shuddered and turned her face away from him to look at the tiny enclosed garden. “I’ve asked myself that at least a hundred times a day,” she whispered, telling him as much of the truth as she knew.

  “And?”

  “It’s pretty simple. I have a real talent for trusting bastards. You’re my second, you see.”

  His breath came in sharply. Eyes the color of rain probed her drawn face. Pain accentuated her cheekbones and darkened her eyes. Her lips were moving again, but she was speaking so softly that he could barely hear. He leaned toward her intently.

  “No, that’s not quite true,” she whispered, listening to her own thoughts, learning from them even as she spoke.

  And it was anger she was learning. She had been wrong to trust Chase, but that didn’t give him the right to destroy her.

  “You’re different from my former husband,” she said. “Next to you, Ted was a legitimate son of gentle society. He was merely impatient with me and unkind about my shortcomings as a woman. You have a cruelty in you that cuts all the way to my soul.”

  She looked at Chase again, her face as calm as her words were bitter. “I hope that cruelty cuts both ways.”

  “Nicole,” he whispered, understanding only her pain and the knowledge that being his lover had cost her much more than she could afford. Unconsciously he caressed the softness of her inner arm, wanting to reassure, to soothe, to pleasure her.

  “No,” she whispered, shivering.

  Her body had come alive with the female certainty of Chase so close to her, reaching out to her. Burning her. His hand was strong and hard, gentle with her softer flesh in spite of the intensity that came off him in waves, like heat.

  “Don’t tease me with what I can’t deliver,” she said, her voice shaking. “Despite my past performances, I’ve just discovered I’m not a masochist.”

  “I know. You were made for pleasure, not pain.”

  As he spoke, he slowly stroked the length of her arm again. He saw her eyes widen in shock and felt the ripple of response racing through her so clearly it could have been his own body trembling, not hers.

  She’s turned away all men for years, yet she shivers at my touch.

  The realization sent a shock wave of desire slamming through Chase. The force of it surprised him. He had felt nothing like it except the night he had been driven by his own need to take her too quickly, before he knew her.

  Before he knew himself.

  He wouldn’t make that mistake again. She had been hurt too many times, yet against all odds, all cruel experience, she had turned to him for healing. He would never hurt her again. It was like hurting himself. The next time he held her in his arms, it would be a healing thing. For both of them.

  Slowly Chase bent his head and at the same time lifted Nicole’s wrist to his mouth. Her skin was silky, cool despite the frantic pulse beating just beneath her skin. As if she were a flower brought to his lips for a taste of honey, he touched his tongue to her pulse and delicately closed his teeth over her inner wrist.

  Nicole’s breath stopped. She wanted to run from his sensuality. She wanted to drench herself in his sensuality. Trembling, she swayed, caught between her own warring needs.

  “This time I’ll be good to you when we make love,” he said huskily. “This time I’ll give you the pleasure you deserve.”

  Desire and fear fought for control of her. Fear won. She tried to jerk her wrist from his grasp. He was too quick, too strong.

  “Make love?” she asked in disbelief, her voice shaking. “Are you crazy?”

  “Not anymore.” Chase traced the shadow network of her wrist veins with the tip of his tongue, licking up raindrops and the indefinable taste of woman. “Give me another chance, sweet dancer. There’s so much that we can share with each other.”

  “I don’t have anything to give a man. Ask my ex-husband. Oh, God, why bother? Ask yourself!”

  Nicole wrenched free and bolted back into the club.

  Chase could have stopped her, but he was too shocked by what she had said. For long minutes he stood without moving, not noticing the rain pressing his shirt against his chest and making his lavalava cling wetly to his hips.

  I don’t have anything to give a man. Ask my ex-husband. Ask yourself!

  Chase wished he could forget his cruel summary of Nicole as a woman. He couldn’t. It ate at him like acid.

  Even worse, it ate at her. She believed him.

  A wave of pain went through him, making him grimace. Christ Jesus, she believed it.

  If she had been a courtesan, his words would have been as true as they were brutal. But she wasn’t a professional toy. She was a woman who had been taught to believe that she had nothing to offer a man.

  Now that he knew that, everything about that night changed. Her responses to him had been generous and sweet and trembling with her potential for intense sensuality. A potential he had first ignored, then scorned.

  A potential he would kill to have offered to him again.

  “She dropped this,” Bobby said laconically.

  Slowly Chase focused on the rain-wet exterior of the club.

  Bobby stood in the doorway, a dripping windbreaker in his huge hand, watching while pain pulled Chase’s face into bleak lines.

  Automatically Chase reached for his jacket.

  Bobby jerked his hand, taking the jacket out of reach. “Stay away from her, haole son of a bitch.”

  “No.” He took a sharp breath and said harshly, “I can’t. Don’t get in my way, Bobby. Two people hurting is enough.”

  After a moment the other man smiled oddly and lobbed the windbreaker at Chase, letting him push past the doorway into the club’s dimly lit interior.

  The room was full of refugees from the university and the observatory. Chase nodded to the people he knew but didn’t stop to talk with anyone. Bobby hadn’t delayed him for long, but it had been enough: Nicole had already slipped behind the stage curtain.

  Savagely Chase threw his windbreaker into an empty chair. With angry motions he stripped off his dripping shirt, dumped it over the back of the chair, and went to the rear of the stage. Behind the curtain he took his position at the drums and waited motionlessly, his mind churning.

  She’s afraid of men, afraid of sex, yet she slept with me a few days after we met.

  Why did she trust me?

  Even as he began to drum, calling the dancers onstage, the question ate at him. It gave a hard edge to his playing, as though the drums themselves were asking questions of the night.

  When the curtain rose and students stepped onto the stage, no glorious flame stood in the wings, waiting to burn. Nicole’s absence drove into Chase, making him want to cry out at the pain he had given in place of the pleasure she deserved.

  Why didn’t I trust her?

  The memory of a snapshot of Nicole came to him, a woman standing on a black-sand beach, her hair a glorious swirl of fire around her, and Lisa laughing among the flames. He had held that snapshot in his hand and stared at it until he was raw with hunger.

  He wanted Nicole before he even knew her name.

  He wanted her before he ever saw her lush body.

  He wanted her before he saw her fiery dance.

  A single look at a snapshot and he had turned his life upside down and flown to Hawaii. He had told himself that he was worried about Dane, that no man could stand against the temptation of Nicole.

  Was that how it was for her? Did she look at me and want me enough to come to me despite her fear?

  There was no answer but the primal beat of th
e drums speaking darkly beneath his hands.

  I was so certain that Dane was in danger. Why?

  That answer was simple. Chase didn’t believe any man could look at Nicole and not want her enough to throw over everything to have her. If he had sat down and thought about it rationally, he would have known that no woman could affect every man the same way.

  But he hadn’t thought. He had looked, wanted, and been certain in his gut that every man would feel the way he did.

  One look.

  Consuming desire.

  The rhythms of the dance radiated from the drums, but beneath the complex beats the shadow of Chase’s barely restrained emotions prowled through the darkened room. He had been in such a rush to taste the honey that he had crushed the blossom, and in the end had tasted only bitterness, given only injury.

  Christ, if I’d only known . . . !

  Sound poured out of the drums in a relentless thunder that pounded through the night, calling up a darkness that had nothing to do with a lack of light.

  The students couldn’t keep up with the furious rhythms. One by one, dancers sank to the stage floor, completely spent. They didn’t even try to chant encouragement to the remaining dancers, for they didn’t have words or legends to equal the drums’ raging soliloquy of injury and regret.

  Nicole came and watched from the wings, and her heart beat as wildly as the drums. Before Chase began to play, she had told Bobby that she wasn’t going to dance, that she was going home.

  Then the drums had spoken to her from the darkness, telling her things mere words couldn’t describe.

  She hadn’t been able to refuse the seething rhythms of anger and isolation and regret. They spoke to her so exactly, so perfectly. She could no more turn away from their dark, syncopated violence than Kilauea could turn away from its own searing heart of molten stone.

  With quick motions she took down her hair and stepped onto the stage. A murmuring swept through the room, a low wave of sound that was her other name.

  “Pele.”

  From the first step, the first thud of bare heel on wooden floor, the dance was different. There were no flashing smiles, no teasing, flirting hips, no graceful fingers describing languid invitations. Tonight Pele’s body described an anger that equaled the drums’ wild discontent. She wasn’t a laughing girl dancing her suitors into the ground. She was a goddess scorned, and every quick movement she made shouted her raging emotion.

  Quick, graceful, dangerous, untamed as all fire is untamed, Pele claimed the stage, burning fiercely within the violent lament of the drums.

  Neither drummer nor dancer noticed when the last student got up and slipped away from the stage. They didn’t see Bobby lift his pipes to his lips once, then put his hands down before he blew a single note.

  Though Nicole refused to look at Chase, had refused since the first instant of the dance, she knew nothing but him. She didn’t have to look at him. He lived in the blazing center of her soul. He was the blood hammering wildly in her veins. He was the fire turning her body to shimmering gold.

  Chase felt, understood, and accepted the transformation from wounded Nicole to furious Pele. He watched her intently, his glittering eyes reflecting both the savage regret of the drums and the searing accusations of the woman who called to him with every movement of her body.

  He had wanted her.

  He had taken her.

  He had lost her.

  He knew it, all of it. Knowledge was a torrent of lava pouring over his soul. Emotions he had no words to describe beat wildly within him, tearing at him, seeking a release that had no name . . . finally finding that release in the sweet violence of the drums and the dancer burning just beyond his reach.

  The dance raged on, the rhythms quickening and then quickening again, separate pulses and movements compressed into impossibly small bits of time.

  Distantly Chase realized that his hands had gone from aching to numbness to sudden, slicing pain. He knew that he should stop beating the drums, knew that with the next impact, or the next, his skin would split beneath the relentless demands of the dance.

  He kept drumming. He needed to give something to the woman who had given him too much. This was her dance, her moment, her time to burn. Deliberately he stepped up the rhythm yet again, building thunder into a savage, rolling crescendo, knowing that she could meet the elemental challenge.

  Yet even knowing it, he was stunned by the unleashed fury of her dance. He held the violent drumroll as long as he could, then threw up his hands with a cry.

  In the instant before the lights went out, Nicole saw blood bright on his hands, on the drums, blood welling in silent apology between her and the man who had hurt her as no other man had, not even her husband.

  “Chase.”

  Her single involuntary cry was buried beneath an explosion of applause from the audience.

  In the darkness Nicole shuddered wrenchingly and let go of the dance’s savage, hypnotic fascination. She waited to feel Chase’s arms coming around her, his mouth claiming her, the hot, powerful length of him pressing against her until she arched like a drawn bow.

  She didn’t know whether she feared or wanted him—she knew only that she was trembling like the mountain just before all the fires of Eden were unleashed, destroying and creating in the same instant.

  The lights came on in a dazzling rush.

  The stage was empty except for a woman with blazing hair and blind golden eyes.

  The next morning Nicole had a houseful of kids trying to get one another ready for a hike while at the same time not being ready themselves.

  “Watch it!” Nicole said.

  The warning was barely out of her mouth before Mark Wilcox grabbed the open, tottering jar of pickles and put it back on the counter, away from the edge. Not a drop spilled.

  “Nice catch,” she said, giving him a thumbs-up. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  He gave her a quick, pleased smile. At thirteen, he was already taller than Nicole, although he hadn’t begun to fill out the raw promise of his bones. He had a long way to go to equal his father’s build or the even more powerful one of his Uncle Chase.

  “Hey, short stuff,” Mark said to his sister. “You gonna play with that peanut butter or give it to someone who knows how to make a real sandwich?”

  Sandi made a face at her brother and passed over the jar of brown goo. She knew what was coming next. As far as she was concerned, what her brother did with peanut butter shouldn’t be allowed to happen in public.

  With serene indifference to his sister’s disgust, Mark built himself a sandwich of alternating layers of peanut butter, pickles, and mayonnaise. He piled the layers on until the bread sagged and flattened beneath the load.

  Sandi made retching sounds. Her friend Judy went off in a storm of giggles. No sooner had she settled down than Benny came pelting through the garden. Normally he would have been followed by anywhere between two and ten of his cousins and siblings, but today the rest of the family was off to Oahu. Knowing that a kipuka picnic was on the schedule, Benny had stayed home.

  Mark’s best friend, Tim, was missing from the expedition due to a sore throat and a mother who couldn’t be persuaded that her son’s hoarse voice was the result of ragging on other players during a baseball game. Steve, the last third of the traumatic teenage trio, was running late as usual. They would meet him at the bus stop, if he made it at all.

  “Ponchos?” Nicole asked.

  A ragged chorus of words answered her query. The bottom line was that everyone who wanted a poncho had one.

  “Canteens?” she asked. “Bus fare?”

  Another ragged chorus.

  “Okay, troops. Pack up your lunches.”

  “Li-sa?” Benny asked plaintively.

  Nicole couldn’t think of Lisa without thinking of Chase. As a result, her fingers clenched into the tough nylon of her knapsack. She forced herself to let go and hoped that no one noticed the small jerk of her hand that had marked t
he sudden hammering of her heart.

  Last night, in the long hours before she fell asleep, the image of Chase’s bleeding hands had haunted her. Knowing that he was in a cottage only a few hundred feet from her was a slow fire burning in the silences of her mind. She sensed that something had changed between them during her raging dance, but she didn’t know what.

  Whatever it was, it hadn’t been enough to hold Chase onstage after the lights went out.

  “Lisa is living with her father now,” Nicole said carefully. “He may not want her to come with us today.”

  Though Benny said not one word, his disappointment tugged at her heart. She bent over and hugged him.

  “Go ahead, honey,” she said, smiling into Benny’s black eyes. “Run up and ask if it’s okay for Lisa to come with us.”

  “It’s fine for her to come,” Chase said from just beyond the open garden door. “As long as I’m invited, too.”

  “Uncle Chase!” Mark crowed, obviously delighted by Chase’s unexpected arrival. “Want a PBP and mayo to go?”

  “Do I have a choice?” Chase retorted dryly. But it was Nicole he looked at. She was standing frozen in the center of her small kitchen. “May I come along?”

  There was no way Nicole could refuse, even if she wanted to. And she wasn’t sure she did.

  “Of course,” she said, turning away and stuffing her sandwich into the knapsack.

  “Hold the mayo,” Chase said to Mark. He looked down at his daughter. “You didn’t tell me we should bring lunch.”

  “Don’t have to. Benny’s here.”

  The boy grinned and held out his knapsack. “Share.”

  “Are you sure there’s enough for three of us?” Chase asked. “I get pretty hungry.”

  “See,” Benny commanded.

  Chase opened the bag and saw fried chicken and fresh fruit, scones and raw vegetables, enough food to feed four grown men. He gave the boy a grateful smile.

  “Hold the PBP,” he said to Mark. Then he turned to Nicole. “Ready when you are.”

  She didn’t say anything. She couldn’t. She was still frozen in the moment when he had reached toward Benny’s knapsack and saw Chase’s hands for the first time. His fingers were tightly bandaged and his palms had shadow bruises beneath layers of callus.