Eden Burning (24 page)

Tuesday, Chase and Nicole were hiking together again as they had every day since the picnic. It was the only time he saw her. His bruised hands wouldn’t let him play the drums, and he hadn’t trusted himself to watch her dance to Bobby’s beat.

But during the long hours of daylight, he was with her. She led him to various kipukas, both well known and unknown. He surveyed the different islands of life, choosing the locations that would be best for his book. And over the many rough spots on the trails, he slowly, slowly, had accustomed her to his touch.

Now, as he helped her down a very rough portion of the path, he silently congratulated himself on his choice of kipuka for today’s work.

The worse the trail, the more he got to touch her.

Until yesterday morning, when he introduced light hugs after really hard parts of the trail, he had made sure the touching seemed all very ordinary. Even the hugs he gave her were casual, not sexual. He had no intention of doing anything that would make her rethink the promise he had given to her almost a week ago.

I’ll never hurt you like that again.

It was the exact truth.

But not the whole truth.

He meant to make love to her, only this time there would be pleasure instead of pain.

Nicole had taken his words to mean that he would never try to seduce her again. What she hadn’t figured out yet was that Chase simply couldn’t walk away from her and what they could share as a man and a woman. He wanted her more with each day, each smile, each thought they shared, each silence, each touch, all of it adding up to a complex hunger that made him ache.

He had been very careful not to let her know the depth of his need for her. He didn’t want to frighten her. He wanted her to come to him like the butterfly in the glen.

And like the butterfly, she kept coming closer, then retreating in a velvet flurry.

He sensed that she wanted him more with every touch, every easy silence, every conversation, every moment they spent together. He saw her yearning in the way her eyes followed him, in the softening of her mouth when she watched him, in the visible shivers that sometimes moved over her golden skin when he touched her casually.

It was driving him crazy.

The only thing that kept him from reaching out and grabbing her was an emotion that was even greater than his hunger for her. He
needed
to be certain that making love with her wouldn’t hurt her. He couldn’t bear hurting her again.

If that meant never making love to her, so be it. Somehow he would find a way to live without having her in his bed.

And each day he lived, he would curse himself for the unspeakable fool he had been eight days ago, when he had closed his hand and crushed the fragile wings of her trust in him.

It will work out,
he told himself silently.

It had to. He couldn’t live with himself otherwise.

Yesterday he and Nicole had hiked from Kilauea’s caldera past the cone called Kilauea Iki, where in 1959 fountains of lava nearly two thousand feet high had showered ash, pumice, and globs of cooling stone over an ohia forest. The trees had lost their leaves, their bark, and their lives to the volcano, but their trunks hadn’t burned completely. Their graceful skeletons lingered on, rising from the black, devastated land like ghosts of a greener yesterday frozen in time.

Chase felt the same way. Frozen in time.

He could control the physical ache of wanting Nicole. He couldn’t control the agony of having had her and then destroying her, leaving behind a mental landscape more bleak than any volcanic devastation he had ever seen.

What made it worse was that she still didn’t understand. She blamed herself.

He put the blame where it belonged. On him.

“Need a break?” Nicole asked, sensing that Chase had stopped on the rough trail behind her. When she looked over her shoulder, his clear, beautiful eyes were measuring the black rivers of lava twisting down to the turquoise sea.

“Just taking in the landmarks. You sure there’s a kipuka between here and the ocean?”

For an instant she looked almost guilty. “It’s not a true kipuka,” she admitted. “But it’s very special. It’s the only place I’ve seen on this lava flow where anything more than Hawaiian snow grows.”

He smiled crookedly. “Hawaiian snow,” he said, shaking his head at her reference to the plant that was always the first to colonize cooled lava flows. “White lichen.”

“Hey, when you’re hungry for a white Christmas, you take what you can get,” she pointed out. “Besides, from a distance the stuff really does look like snow.”

“Um” was the most tactful thing he could think of to say. As far as he was concerned, the lichen looked like milk that had been tossed out and left to curdle in the sun.

Nicole paused on the margin between an old lava flow and a newer one. The aa ahead was intimidating, even to someone who was accustomed to walking on a jagged black jumble of stone.

Chase came up and stood beside Nicole. Close beside her.

She didn’t flinch away. If anything, she might have leaned closer to him, but he couldn’t be sure. He could only hope.

“Bad patch?” he asked.

She nodded and waited while he looked over the landscape for himself.

“You could go down that way,” she said, pointing toward a thrusting ridge of rock only a few feet away. “It’s shorter, but it’s too big a drop for me.”

“Okay. Wait here, and I’ll try something.”

He scrambled down a particularly nasty stretch of aa lava, muttering when pieces crumbled and broke off beneath his feet. Newly made or as old as the flow itself, the lava edges were sharp. They gnawed happily on his heavy leather hiking boots. While he would have preferred the lighter, cooler high-tech boots he had often used for hiking, the modern materials just couldn’t take the punishment that aa ladled out the way leather could.

When Chase found secure footing, he turned around and held out his arms to Nicole. She came into them without hesitation, enjoying his strength and the tingling currents that spread through her when she was held against his body.

Gently he set her on her feet but didn’t release her.

“Pay the toll,” he said.

She smiled almost shyly.

He gathered her even closer, savoring the supple, feminine curves pressed against him. What had begun early yesterday as a joke had become the highlight of the hikes for him, and the reason that he chose the most rugged trails he could find. With each rough spot on the trail Nicole was becoming more accustomed to his hands, to the feel of his body close to hers, to being held and holding him in return.

She no longer flinched when he touched her.

It was a small thing, but it was balm for both their wounds.

Laughing softly, she hugged Chase, savoring how carefully he arranged her length along his body, matching curve to hollow, strength to softness. This was new to their hiking hugs, a closeness that had begun when he pulled her up a steep part of the trail.

She enjoyed the new way of hugging all the way to the soles of her feet.

After a few moments she knew that she should pull away and continue the hike as she had done just a few minutes back up the trail. But she didn’t. When she had seen the rugged patch of aa coming up, shivers of anticipation had gone through her.

She had known that soon Chase would turn to her and hold her. Soon she would feel the hard muscles of his body shift and move beneath her hands as though he was savoring every bit of the casual embrace as much as she did. She felt the same about touching him. She memorized every instant of it.

And she wanted more.

Slowly she turned her head against his throat, unconsciously nuzzling aside the open collar of his shirt. She wanted to feel her cheek against his naked skin.

Chase felt the glide of skin against skin and was afraid the sudden hammering of his heart would scare her away. When she didn’t withdraw, he let out a long breath. He spread his fingers until they all but spanned her back. Gently he shifted her from side to side, slowly rubbing her breasts across his chest. After an instant of stiffening, she sighed and softened in his hands, letting him lead her into an embrace that was more intimate than a friendly hug.

Closing her eyes, Nicole floated on the sensations Chase was creating with the slow, slow stroking of her body over his. Her breasts tingled and tightened, sending currents of heat streaking through her. Suddenly, vividly, she remembered the feel of his mouth on her swollen nipples and the sweet, rhythmic tugging that had made fire spiral through her.

“Chase?”

The catch in her voice was as exciting to him as the feel of her nipples hardening beneath her flowered halter.

“Yes?” he said, keeping his voice normal with an effort.

“I don’t think this is a good idea.”

“I thought we agreed that you liked being hugged.”

“I do. It’s just—” Her voice caught again as his hands shifted, somehow increasing the delicious friction on her breasts. “This is different.”

“Is it? How?”

She tried to think of a way of explaining that avoided raising the subject of sex.

There was a long silence.

“You can touch me if you like,” he said huskily, twisting slightly, subtly against her. “I’m not like your husband was. I won’t fall on you like a starving dog on a lamb chop.”

She made a choked sound that could have been a gasp of surprise or laughter or both together.

And she didn’t withdraw. In the last few days she had gotten used to more than Chase’s touch. She had also learned to enjoy his unexpected, sometimes outrageous, always reassuring, conversations about her past experience with her husband.

“Don’t believe me?” Chase asked quietly. “Think about it. Even when I didn’t know how badly you’d been hurt, I still didn’t attack you when you touched me. Remember?”

What she remembered was how much she had wanted to run her hands over him that night in the shower. Even the harsh lessons of her marriage hadn’t kept her from giving in to the point of stroking his chest with its fascinating patterns of hair and the muscles that shifted and slid so intriguingly beneath his skin.

His eyes had changed at her touch, becoming smoky rather than clear, dark rather than light. But he hadn’t dragged her out of the shower and hammered her into the bathroom floor, which her husband had done once when he came home early and found her in the shower.

“Yes.” She nuzzled again at the V of tan skin revealed by Chase’s unbuttoned shirt. “I remember.”

He waited, holding her so skillfully that every way she turned increased the sensuous pressure of two bodies discovering each other. He shifted his stance slightly, savoring the delicious hardness of her nipples rubbing against him.

“Are you afraid if you touch me the holding will stop and the sex will start?”

His voice was as gentle as the hands holding her close, shifting her, tantalizing her. She turned her face away from his skin long enough to look at the unforgiving black lava heaped around them. She smiled crookedly.

“Despite all the unlikely positions detailed in the sex manuals my husband gave me—no, I’m not afraid you have sex on your do-it-now list. With this aa for a bed, we’d bleed to death long before anything else happened.”

Wisely Chase didn’t tell her that if she was willing, he could lift her, wrap her legs around his waist, and have her right here, right now, with never a scratch on her beautiful golden skin. All it took was a man with unusual strength and a hunger to match.

He had both.

“Then you’re safe,” he said, smiling. “So go ahead, touch me however you want.”

“But . . .”

He waited, watching the rise of color in her cheeks.

“Wouldn’t that . . . that wouldn’t be . . .” She made a sound that was halfway between frustration and embarrassment.

“Say it,” he coaxed, moving against her again, tensing the muscles of his chest, increasing the sensuous pressure on her nipples.

“Won’t that be hard on you?” she asked in a rush.

Then she heard her own words and blushed to the roots of her hair.

Amusement flickered in Chase’s clear eyes as he smiled down at her. “No matter what your husband might have told you, having a woody and not having a woman isn’t a fatal condition for a man.”