Eden Burning (20 page)

“That’s okay. You’re only in one part of it at a time.”

The sound of male laughter froze Nicole in place for an instant. When she looked over her shoulder, she saw Chase standing in the shadow of the coconut palms. He was almost close enough to touch, wearing nothing but black swim trunks, his own potent masculinity, and a smile.

The sight of him was like a blow. She nearly went down beneath a sensual tide of memories. She had touched the rippling male power of this man, held him, felt him move inside her.

And failed to please him in any way at all.

Nicole flushed, then went pale. Silently she prayed that she was the only one to notice. She glanced around almost frantically. There was no subtle way to escape.

Chase ignored her panic. He had expected it. What he hadn’t expected was her beauty in full sunlight, smeared with fruit juice and sand. His crystalline gray eyes admired the braided fire of her hair, her golden skin, and most of all the smooth, flexible strength of her body. Though her two-piece bathing suit was modest by tropical beach standards, it revealed a lush amount of curves. He wanted to run his hands and then his mouth over every bit of them.

He had seen the instant of sensual awareness and approval in her eyes when she’d looked at him.

He had also seen the color wash from her in the next instant as she searched for a way to avoid him.

“Daddy!” Lisa jumped up and threw herself into Chase’s arms. Then her smile faded. “Oh, I forgot. I’m too dirty for hugging.”

She pushed away from his chest and looked at him with wide eyes, obviously expecting him to be unhappy with her.

“Are you? Where?” he asked, making a big deal out of looking her over and not seeing the food and the less identifiable stains that had come from racing through Eden down an overgrown path. “You look like perfect hugging material to me.” Smiling, he cuddled her close and kissed her sticky cheek. “Mmmmm,” he said, licking his lips. “Got any more of that coconut for me?”

Lisa’s whole face brightened. Grinning, she turned her other cheek up to be kissed.

He gave it smacking approval.

With a secret smile she burrowed against her father’s furry chest, confident again.

“Mother always got mad at me if I was dirty,” Lisa confessed.

Chase spoke calmly in spite of the lash of fury that went through him. “Did she? Well, I’m not your mother. I think kids should play hard, get dirty, and take baths.”

Over his daughter’s head Chase watched Nicole kneel with a dancer’s fluid grace and begin gathering up the remains of breakfast. Saying nothing, she tucked fruit and napkins into the wicker basket. After a few moments she stood with the heart-stopping grace he had to see each time to truly believe. When she shook out the towel, it became clear to the children that Nicole was leaving.

“Aren’t you going to teach me how to swim?” Lisa asked Nicole plaintively, unwrapping her arms from her daddy.

Nicole forced a smile. “That’s what fathers are for.”

“Me,” Benny said. He stepped close to Lisa, silently saying that he would help Lisa learn to swim.

Smiling brightly, emptily, Nicole eased back toward the path up the hill. “You couldn’t have a better teacher than Benny, Lisa. He taught every fish in the lagoon how to swim.”

Lisa’s eyes widened as she looked into Benny’s clear dark gaze. “True-true?”

Wisely, he smiled and said nothing.

Chase set Lisa on the coarse black sand and said to Benny, “Take her down to the water and get her feet wet. Just her feet.”

Solemnly Benny nodded. “Feet.”

Chase ruffled Benny’s hair and squeezed his lean shoulder approvingly. “I’ll be right with you after Nicole and I work out some scheduling problems on the book.”

The kids didn’t wait to hear any more. Hand in hand, they raced toward the warm, softly foaming water.

“Just her feet!” Chase called again.

“Sure-sure!” both children said together without looking back.

Chase watched long enough to see Benny pull Lisa to a stop, then stand in front of her so that she would have to walk through him to get more than her feet wet.

“I like that boy’s style,” Chase said as he turned toward Nicole.

He was impatient to get the first, awkward words behind them. Somehow he had to make her understand that there had been nothing wrong with her. He had been the one at fault. Completely.

But when he turned around, there was nothing behind him except an empty garden path and palm trees swaying beneath the caressing wind.

It was Thursday night before Chase managed to corner Nicole again.

“Are you going to run forever?” he asked quietly.

She turned toward him so fast that she almost lost her balance. For an instant she felt like there were iron bands around her lungs, squeezing out her breath. Air returned in a gasp, and with it came a surging blush that she was helpless to control.

Conversations around the Kipuka Club paused as people turned curiously toward Nicole and Chase. Though neither one of them had said anything to anyone except Dane, somehow people had concluded that something had happened between the untouchable Pele and the mainland lady-killer.

Rumors linking Nicole to a newcomer had been spread before, but she had put an end to them with a quip and a shrug. She hadn’t been able to pull that off this time around. She knew she looked as pale and tense as she felt.

“Exercise is good for you,” she said, shrugging, avoiding Chase’s eyes, refusing to really look at him.

“Then let’s exercise together.”

Nicole went white.

“On the mountain,” he said with false calm.

He hated the way she flinched from him. After nearly five days of stalking her, only to have her slide like fire through his fingers, his temper was more than a little raw. The fact that it was his own fault that she was running away didn’t make him feel any better. It simply put an edge on his temper.

He hadn’t known just how sharply memories could haunt, both the bad memories and the good.

Nicole haunted him.

And ran from him.

“Illustrations, remember?” he prodded. “Or have you decided to back out of the
Islands of Life
project?”

“No.”

Her voice, like her face, was strained. Right now she was wishing she had resigned from the project no matter how much she needed the work. She hadn’t realized how painful it would be to finally see Chase up close. It had been bad enough turning around time and again to find him watching her with his bleak gray eyes and then to know that sooner or later she wouldn’t be able to escape.

Like tonight. She was trapped, forced to trade empty social words with Chase while humiliation twisted her heart and her stomach. And she had to endure it all under the very interested eyes of her co-workers.

They knew. All of them. She might as well have hung signs from every one of the Kipuka Club’s ceiling beams.

“In that case, let’s get going,” Chase said neutrally. “I’ve made a provisional list of places, starting with the fire pit and going all the way to the sea. I figure it will take at least two weeks, more likely four, just to visit each area and select the various microenvironments that should be dealt with in detail.”

Nicole nodded stiffly.

“With luck, we’ll find everything we need on Kilauea,” he continued. “Otherwise we’ll have to shift to Mauna Loa. That would mean overnight camping.” His eyes narrowed at the appalled look that came to Nicole’s face.

“I thought you’d feel like that,” he said, leaning toward her, his voice so soft that only she could hear. “Don’t you know that the last thing I’d do is touch you again?”

Her eyelids flinched with helpless pain. She hadn’t guessed that he would be so cruel as to bring up her sexual shortcomings again, and in such a public place.

When Chase saw her lips go pale, he heard the echo of his own words and realized that she had taken them wrong. Afraid that she would flee again, he put his hand on her arm and fought to keep his voice too low for anyone to overhear.

“I didn’t mean— Damn it, there’s nothing wrong with you as a woman,” he said. “All I meant was—”

She turned away, cutting off his words.

“Nicole.”

When she stopped and turned around slowly, Chase felt the curious stares of the people in the club like bugs crawling on his skin. It had been the same since Monday—people acting as though he and Nicole were living on center stage acting out their lives to a standing-room-only crowd.

What really bothered him was that Nicole was suffering the most from the scrutiny. Before their one-night affair she had joked with the people she met and turned aside any man who didn’t get the hint with a quip and a smile. From her friends—men and women alike—she had received welcoming smiles, a friendly pat, even a quick hug if she hadn’t seen the person for a while.

It was different now.

Every man who had been to the Kipuka Club last Sunday seemed to know that Nicole had joined the pool of sexually available women. To most men it made little difference beyond a certain speculative quality to their look, as if they were rearranging their mental landscape, putting her in a new category, and then forgetting about it.

Some men didn’t forget. They acted like she had been stripped naked and thrown into an invisible sexual arena. Because they expected to be successful eventually, they pursued her more openly and relentlessly than they ever had before.

Chase understood exactly what had happened, and why. As long as the prowling males were sure that Nicole wasn’t sleeping with any man, they took her rejection with reasonably good humor, especially when she made a witty joke of their attempts. But that had changed. Now the men sensed that she had been in bed with Chase Wilcox.

Chastity and humor had been Nicole’s shield and weapon against the most persistent men. Though Chase hadn’t meant to, Sunday night he had stripped those defenses from her. Now she was exposed. Vulnerable. What had once been humorous advances were now anything but a joke.

Knowing it made Chase furious, but there was nothing he could do about the men, no way he could protect Nicole. Not when she ran from him at every opportunity.

He couldn’t decide which made him feel most like a piece of shit—her running, the men who pursued her like greyhounds going after a bleeding rabbit, or the male friends whose touch she now avoided.

For Nicole there were no more friendly pats on the arm, no small talk, no sense of being a friend among friends. Dane had mentioned her withdrawal to Chase more than once. Other people certainly must have noticed.

Chase didn’t know whether she simply couldn’t bear being touched anymore or if she was afraid of appearing to invite more than friendship from the men around her. The cause didn’t really matter because the result was the same. She had cut herself off from the very people who might have reined in the more predatory men.

Nothing in the situation made Chase feel better about himself. The more he knew about Nicole, the more he understood how completely, and how cruelly, he had misjudged her.

This running away had to stop. It wasn’t doing either of them any good.

“We need to decide on the drawings,” he said.

“Make a list of plants you want illustrated and in which stages of development,” she said tonelessly. “Tell me when and where you need me. I’ll be there.”

“Here. Now. We have to talk. This can’t go on any longer.”

For the first time Nicole met Chase’s eyes. They were cold, metallic, like hammered silver. Her stomach twisted as she understood that there was no place left for her to run.

“Hey, my little jalapeño,” Fred called cheerfully from a few tables away. He came up behind Nicole and slid an arm around her rib cage, just beneath her breasts. Just barely. “I’ve been looking for you.”

She tried to step beyond Fred’s reach.

His arm tightened, crowding her closer to him. He bumped his hip rapidly against her. “When are you going to teach me how to dance sexy?”

“On the thirtieth of February, just like I promised,” she said, hoping that she was the only one who heard the strain in her voice.

Once Fred would have let go of her with a laugh and a shake of his head. Now he simply nudged intimately against her again.

She tried to pry his arm off without making a scene. He didn’t budge, except to give her the hip shot again.

“Jalapeño, the moves I’ve got in me can’t wait that long,” he said. “Know what I mean?”

She sensed the savage tension in Chase’s body as though her nerves were connected to his. She felt trapped, half wild. She couldn’t bear being touched by the overconfident, overeager scientist one second longer.

“Joke’s over,” she said between her teeth. “Let go of me.”

“Do I look crazy? The fun’s just beginning.” Fred trailed his hand from her ribs to her waist and back up again. “I’m going to teach you a few horizontal moves that will blow your hot little—”

Chase’s hand shot out.

Fred’s words stopped in a gasp of surprise and pain.

Chase yanked the man’s hand off Nicole with a ruthless twisting motion that stopped just short of breaking bones.

Instantly she backed out of reach.

With a cold smile Chase closed his hand around Fred’s and squeezed until the man’s face was as pale as Nicole’s had been.

“You know,” Chase said casually, watching Fred with frankly lethal intent, “in the last few days I’ve had a bellyful of your blue comedy routine. Clean up your act or I’ll put it on the hospital charity circuit.”

Fred’s breath came out in a rush when Chase released his fingers. Warily Fred flexed his hand and looked from Chase to Nicole and back.

“I thought you were through with her,” Fred muttered.

“You thought wrong,” Chase said softly, his voice vibrating with anger. “Any man who wants to touch her better wait for an engraved invitation.
From her.
Pass the word, pal, or there’s going to be a rash of broken hands on the mountain.”

Fred hesitated, flexed his hand again, and shrugged. “February thirtieth it is,” he said, glancing at Nicole.

“Sure,” she said, her voice faint.

When Fred turned away, she shuddered, unable to control her emotions any longer.

“Are you all right?” Chase asked in a low voice.

“I’m fine,” she said, the words too quick, too brittle. Then she whispered helplessly, “Oh, God, I hate being a
thing!
”

Chase remembered what she had said about marriage, about being a man’s
thing.
It made him sick and angry at the same time. For two cents he would have cut loose and trashed the club, just for the bitter physical joy of it. But the club hadn’t earned his anger any more than Nicole had.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said, his mouth grim. “You look like you could use some air.”

Nicole stumbled as she turned toward the door. Her normal grace had deserted her.

“I’m going to take your arm,” Chase warned, his voice low.

“I—” She stumbled again.

As he caught her to support her, he saw Dr. Vic close in from across the room.

“Nicole?” Dr. Vic asked earnestly. “Are you all right?”

She forced a smile onto her face. “Just a little tired.”

The scientist gave Chase a hard look.

Chase gave it right back, too angry to be politic with the elderly professor. “Excuse us, sir. I thought some fresh air would help Nicole. The club is a little close tonight.”

“Umm, yes. Fred is one of our best and brightest scientists, but he can be a little, er, cloying. I’ll speak to him about it. I can put a stop to this sort of thing at work, but . . .”

“Bobby and I will take care of the club,” Chase said flatly. “You just pass the word to the crotch hounds at the lab that sexual harassment is still a crime.”

“Who else besides Fred?” Dr. Vic asked, looking unhappily at Nicole.

“Oh, you’ll recognize them,” Chase said with a narrow smile. “They’ll be the ones in body casts.”

Despite the danger that fairly radiated from Chase, his grip on Nicole’s arm was gentle as he led her toward the club’s side door. Gentle but unbreakable. He had waited as long as he was going to wait before they talked.

Running wasn’t helping her, and it sure as hell wasn’t doing him any good either.

In darkness and silence Nicole and Chase stood just beyond the partially open side door of the club. They were in a small fenced yard that ended at the alley. There was very little chance that anyone would bother them. The side door was the service entrance to the club, and everyone who worked inside was already there.

A curtain of mist lowered from the clouds and swept across the tiny yard. Nicole felt the rain as through glass, a coolness more sensed than experienced. Now that the running was over, she was oddly relieved, almost light-headed. She felt no need to go back inside out of the rain. She preferred wet privacy to a dry, crowded, avidly curious club.