Eden Burning (10 page)

By the time the Hilo bus finally arrived at the rim of the volcano, Nicole was sure she would miss Dr. Vic. Then she spotted him hurrying toward his car like a man with a mission.

“Dr. Vic! Wait!”

Carrying a big envelope, she ran across the parking lot toward the small, white-haired man who was one of her favorite people in Hawaii. He ran the lab with a quiet iron fist that kept the scientific prima donnas from turning the place upside down, yet he always made time to answer any questions she had. If he confused her more often than not with the depth and detail of his answers, she would just ask a different, related question until she understood.

“I have a drawing for you to look at,” she said as she came up to him. “For your wife’s birthday.”

“Excellent.” He smiled up at Nicole like a happy leprechaun. “I was afraid I’d missed you.”

Unlike most men, Dr. Vic didn’t care if Nicole was inches taller than he was. He just liked having someone to talk to besides scientists who were interested in only three things: volcanoes, sports, and sex, not necessarily in that order.

“So was I,” she admitted. “I was drawing, and I forgot the time.”

“Let’s see,” he said eagerly, standing on tiptoe as she eased the sheet from the stiff envelope.

Against a backdrop of misty blue, a jacaranda lifted its arms to the sun. The tree’s bark was clean, smooth, as sensuous as the sunlight bathing its tightly budded branches.

“Oh, my.” Dr. Vic touched the edge of the sheet with a hesitant fingertip. “Exquisite. Simply exquisite. Ettie will be thrilled.”

Nicole smiled almost shyly as she slid the sketch back into its protective envelope. “I’m glad. A fortieth wedding anniversary should have a special gift. If you like, I’ll frame it for you.”

“No, no. I’ve imposed on you quite enough. How much do I owe you?”

“Don’t be silly. It’s just a sketch and you’ve spent hours explaining—”

“Nonsense,” he interrupted, reaching into his shirt pocket for the check he had written earlier. “I thought this might happen, so I went to the gift shop at the national park and priced your drawings that are for sale there. Here you are.”

“But—”

He gave her a smacking kiss on her chin, pressed the check into her hand, and took the envelope. “Thank you, my dear. Oh, before I forget it—Dr. Chase Wilcox was looking for you a minute ago. Something about a kipuka project.” He smiled slyly. “I understand you met him last night. Wish I’d seen it. Must have set the stage on fire.”

“She sure did.”

Nicole spun around at the sound of Chase’s voice. For an instant his eyes were cold with something like contempt. Then he smiled at Dr. Vic.

“I’m asking for a rematch tonight,” Chase said. “Come to the club and see for yourself.”

“I’ll bring Ettie. She loves the way Nicole dances.” He gave Nicole a pat on her arm. “Thanks again, dear.”

Chase watched the little man hurry to his car and wondered at the effect Nicole had on anything with a Y chromosome, no matter what age. He hadn’t missed the swift, smacking kiss and the check changing hands. He even knew how much it was, because he had been at Dr. Vic’s desk while he wrote it.

He had to take off his hat to the hula dancer—she wasn’t afraid to ask a good price for her services.

With quick, sideways glances, Nicole measured Chase’s tight stance. She half expected him to reach for her and finish what they had started last night. When he didn’t do more than give her mouth the kind of look that raised her heartbeat, she was grateful.

At least the part of her that believed in logic, rationality, and such things was relieved. The rest of her simply yearned. But she kept her hands by her side. She needed some sign from him that he felt the same sense of rightness she did when they were together, a rightness that was based on far more than just physical attraction.

She needed to know more about Chase in a rational way as well as in the instinctive, almost overwhelming way that only he had ever made her experience.

“Anyone else waiting around in the lab to kiss and pat you?” Chase asked in a tone that wasn’t quite humorous.

She blinked. “Er, no. It was just that Dr. Vic needed a present for his wife, and I—”

“Needed the money.” Angrily Chase wondered what else she had done to earn the nine-hundred-dollar check that was dangling from her fingers. “Going to fix your car now?”
Or are you going to keep on flashing those golden eyes at Dane and offering rides?

“I don’t know. I’ll have to take it up with my bank balance.”

Chase changed the subject before he lost his temper and set back the seduction he had planned. “Do you have a few hours free now? I’d like to see some of the kipukas Dane said you knew how to find. Sounds like at least one of them might be perfect for the
Islands of Life
project.”

Relief and eagerness gave Nicole’s smile unusual brilliance. Exploring the kipukas would give them the time they needed to learn about each other. Time alone with Chase would let them talk about anything and everything, to ask questions, to answer them.

She needed to reassure herself that his interest in her was real, that she hadn’t dreamed him up from the depths of her own need, that he wanted to know her on as many levels as she wanted to know him.

“I have as many hours as you need,” she said quickly, “as long as I get back to Hilo in time to get ready for work tonight.”

“Work?”

“Dancing at the club. It’s as close as the Kamehamehas come to allowing me to pay rent.”

Remembering the casual intimacy of Bobby’s kiss last night, Chase doubted that dancing was all she did for the handsome giant. But thinking about it wouldn’t do anything for his already raw temper. “Great. Let’s go kipuka crawling. Do we start here or do we need the car?”

She looked at what he was wearing—shorts, hiking boots that looked new despite some gouges here and there, and a short-sleeved shirt. “If you’re sure that’s what you want to do. The kipuka I’m thinking of is kind of a hike. Lots of aa.”

“How do you think these boots got scarred?”

About every five minutes Nicole glanced over her shoulder to reassure herself that Chase wasn’t having any trouble keeping up with her. The trail she had chosen was little more than a series of twists and turns and small cairns set out across a piece of Kilauea’s stony side. While the trail could be quite rough, the volcano itself rose very gently, almost secretly, from sea to summit.

As with all of Hawaii’s volcanoes, Kilauea was shaped like a slightly curved battle shield. It was very different from the steep-sided, cone-shaped volcanoes of California, Italy, Mexico, or Japan. Hawaii’s volcanoes were created by gentle, repeated lava flows, especially of the thicker aa lava, which lay like massive, carelessly thrown ropes across the Hawaiian landscape. Chunks of lava that once had floated on liquid rivers of stone like ice floes on the sea now were frozen in place. Jagged edges of aa stuck out like knives, ready to slash any careless hiker.

Not much grew on the part of the trail Nicole and Chase were walking over at the moment. The lava flow was largely pahoehoe. Its smooth, bright surface was easy on hiking shoes, but it broke down into soil very slowly. Seeds and roots just didn’t have anywhere to take hold. Because of that, the trail was little more than a slightly scuffed thread twisting over the shiny surface of the land. The lava itself was black, smooth, and reflected the tropical sunlight almost like a mirror, redoubling the tropical heat.

Sweat gathered on Nicole’s forehead, down her spine, and in the shadowed valley between her breasts. The hot slide of drops didn’t bother her. Between Tahitian dancing and all the hours she spent climbing lava slopes, she was very much at home with the result of physical effort. As far as she was concerned, sweat wasn’t a big deal. It was just the way bodies tried to cool themselves in the humid, wraparound heat on the wet side of the Big Island.

Chase wasn’t bothered by sweat either, and for much the same reason—he was used to it. At the moment he was more interested in watching the deceptively slim legs ahead of him than in worrying about his increasingly wet shirt. Nicole’s legs might be slender, but they were strong. She was hiking over the rough land at a pace that would have left a lot of men gasping and looking for a place to sit in the shade.

At first Chase had thought she was trying to walk him into the ground, and he had smiled to himself at the thought of disappointing her. But as the hike continued, she didn’t give any of the subtle signals of a woman challenging a man. Then he had wondered if she was simply showing off her own well-conditioned body. Again, none of the signals were present. She glanced back to check on him from time to time, but she didn’t linger or pose, inviting his approval.

Finally he decided that the brisk pace was her normal one. It showed in the regularity of her breathing and the grace of her stride. That got him to thinking about some other ways to test a woman’s endurance and flexibility and balance. His breath quickened as he pictured the sensual possibilities.

How the hell can a woman look sexy in sawed-off hiking shoes, ragged khaki shorts, and a faded halter top with frayed ties?
he asked himself half whimsically, half angrily.

The only answer was the elegant swaying of her hips as she walked up the trail.

With a mental kick to his own butt, Chase brought his attention back to the faint trail. As a vulcanologist he was accustomed to rough-country hiking, but Kilauea’s slopes had some rather special traps for a careless walker. Sometimes ground that looked literally rock solid turned out to be a thin roof left by a fast-moving stream of molten lava long ago. Sometimes the ground underfoot was an even thinner bubble of cooled lava with nothing but air inside the fragile, now-cold shell. If a foot broke through the top of the bubble, the hiker stood a good chance of getting everything from a few cuts to a broken ankle.

Despite its built-in dangers, and perhaps even because of them, Chase enjoyed hiking Kilauea. The landscape was magnificent, a powerful statement of the living force of the earth itself.

Nicole stopped next to a particularly shiny formation of pahoehoe and bent down. “Have you ever seen Pele’s hair?”

“A few nights ago.” Chase looked at the braided red blaze that was almost concealed beneath the white scarf she wore Gypsy style on her head. “It was beautiful. Like fire.”

She accepted the compliment with a quick, almost shy smile. Every time someone mentioned her hair, she remembered her ex-husband’s repeated complaint.

The only thing hot about you is your hair.

“I meant the volcanic rock that’s called Pele’s hair.” She pointed to a fist-size hole in the lava. Inside was something that looked like a flattened tangle of silver-gold hairs. “Look in the pukas—the holes in the lava.”

Chase squatted on his heels next to Nicole and touched the shining hairs with a gentle fingertip, careful not to disturb their fragile beauty.

“I haven’t seen this outside a specimen drawer or the pages of a textbook,” he said reverently. “It’s a miracle that something this delicate can come from, and then survive, such a violent event as the earth splitting open and bleeding rivers of molten stone.”

For a moment he looked away from the shining hairs to the unusually clear sky. Against the horizon the massive, gently curved slope of Mauna Loa far overshadowed Kilauea’s smaller mass. As he measured the bigger volcano, his eyes were unfocused yet clear, the look of a man appreciating something within the silence of his mind.

“What are you thinking about?” Nicole asked softly, hoping he would answer.

She needed to know more about Chase than his desire for her. Other men had wanted her—or at least wanted sex with her—but she had never wanted them in return, never wanted to explore them mind and body. Because of that, she kept wondering what it was about Chase that made him seem so different to her, what it was that made her want him body and mind.

She couldn’t answer that question, yet she kept returning to it again and again, like a tongue pressing against a sore tooth. Maybe if she asked him enough questions, it would somehow let her answer the only important one.

Could she trust herself to him?

“What am I thinking about?” Half smiling, Chase gestured toward the smooth, brooding mass of Mauna Loa. When he spoke, his voice was husky, slow, the tone of a man thinking aloud. “Did you know that if you measure Mauna Loa from its base to its summit, it’s the biggest mountain on earth?”

“But Mauna Loa isn’t even fourteen thousand feet high, and Mount Everest is twice that,” she objected.

He pinned her with his clear gray eyes. “Mauna Loa’s true base is three miles below sea level. Its summit is more than thirteen thousand feet above sea level. That’s nearly thirty thousand feet total. Taller than Everest.”

She glanced out to the ocean as though she could see the submerged base of the volcano beneath the restless blue water.

“If you’re talking about mass,” he continued, “Mauna Loa is still the giant. Everest rises from the Himalayan Plateau, which is already about two miles high. Mauna Loa starts from the bottom of the ocean and takes up ten thousand cubic miles of the island. For all its fire and smoke and drama, Kilauea is little more than a boil on Mauna Loa’s side, and the other small volcanoes on the Big Island are eroding away while we talk. But Mauna Loa is still alive, still growing, still the reigning queen of earth.”

He looked away from Nicole’s amber eyes to the indigo curve of the huge volcano. “The only mountain we know that’s bigger than Mauna Loa is on Mars. Olympus Mons.” He smiled briefly. “Roughly translated from Latin, that means ‘God’s own mountain.’ It’s fifteen miles high. And it, too, is a volcano.”

Her eyes widened with interest and surprise. “Is it alive?”

“So far as we know, it’s extinct and has been for millions and millions of years. What we see now is what time and whatever passes for Martian weather have left of an incredible, once-living mountain whose base would have stretched from Los Angeles to San Francisco.”

She sighed. “I wonder what an eruption would have been like.”

He opened his mouth and then closed it without saying a word. He was trying to imagine what it would have been like to see Olympus Mons in action.

“How do you describe a mountain fifteen miles high blowing out immense rivers of fire while the surface of the planet itself trembled and shook?” he said slowly. “Maybe vapor condensed on the volcano’s slopes, turning into rain that ran in wild torrents seven miles straight down to an empty ocean. Or maybe there was water on the surface of Mars back then, clouds and streams and rivers, even life swimming in a doomed sea.”

Nicole closed her eyes and tried to imagine a mountain nearly eighty thousand feet high and four hundred miles across at the base. Dreamily she wondered what it would be like to stand on the lip of its awesome crater today and see Mars spread out below like a painting done in infinite tones of rust.

And then she heard Chase’s deep voice say, “I’d sell my soul to have seen that mountain erupt. I’d sell my future for a chance to stand on its slopes even now.” With a rough sound that could have been a laugh, he straightened and stood beside her. “But I was born far too late for the eruption and too soon for the exploration. I’ll be dead long before man stands on any part of Mars.”

The buried yearning in his voice made emotion thicken in her throat. Suddenly, fiercely, she wished that she could give Chase his impossible dream, could see his face as he stood on a mountain fifteen miles high and saw an alien planet spread at his feet.

“You have Hawaii,” she said in a husky, intense voice. “It’s not as high as the volcano you’ll never see, but it’s alive. You can hear its breath in the deep cracks of the lava, feel its warmth, sense its heartbeat beneath your feet. And sometimes you can see Hawaii’s living blood pouring out, setting fire to everything, even stone.”

Chase looked into her golden eyes and saw himself reflected, his own buried dreams and acceptance of what could not be.

I’ll never stand on Mars. But I’ll stand on a living mountain with the goddess of the volcano at my side.

I’m standing there now, and she is here, burning.

Making me burn.

“Yes,” he said, his voice deep, “I have Hawaii, and Pele is my guide. What more could any man ask?”

Silently the answer came to him. He could ask to trust his guide.

Oh, but you can,
he assured himself sardonically.
You can trust her to be like other women—selfish to the core.

Hawaiians worshiped Pele, but they didn’t love her. Those men weren’t fools. They knew that a woman is as tricky and dangerous as a living volcano.

“How much farther is the kipuka?” he asked briskly, breaking the intimacy of the instant when he had believed that he saw his dreams reflected in a woman’s eyes.

“Twenty minutes, maybe a bit more.”

Chase looked dubiously over the rumpled, furrowed landscape. There was nothing in all directions but lava, lava, and more lava.

“It’s there,” she said, pointing across the black, stony land. “See? It looks like a tiny smudge of green on the far side of that aa flow.”

“Green smudge,” he muttered, shading his eyes and looking.

“Yes. The green is the tops of the tallest ohia trees.”

“You’re hallucinating.”

Nicole laughed. Then she set out across the landscape that had been born in liquid fire. After a moment Chase followed, shaking his head. He was afraid he was being led on a long hike to nowhere.

Without so much as a look over her shoulder to see if he was coming, she walked at a clean, ground-eating pace until she came to a broad stream of aa rising like a black wall on top of an earlier flow of pahoehoe. The wall of aa was why she rarely came to this kipuka. It was a tough scramble up and across the lava, and tougher still to get down into the kipuka floor. She had never tried the descent, because she didn’t want to risk injury when she was hiking alone or with Benny.

Unconsciously rubbing her hands on her shorts as though to assure a good grip, she headed for the six-foot-high wall of cold lava.

“You’re kidding,” Chase said, catching up to her.