Chase levered himself from the car and held out his hand to help her. After a moment she took it. Smiling, he watched her supple body uncoil from the cage of the backseat.
Most people would have looked awkward scrambling out of the Porsche’s tiny compartment, but Nicole’s dance-trained body had both strength and grace. Even when he tugged her forward unexpectedly, pulling her off balance and into his arms, she caught herself with catlike speed and flexibility.
She felt like Eden burning against him, a resilient warmth that went from throat to toe. As his arms closed around her, he wondered why he had always thought he preferred small women. What a waste. No matter how close a man his size held a tiny woman, part of him always went begging.
But not with Nicole. She filled his arms the same way she filled his senses. Completely.
“Chase, I—” Nicole began.
His head tilted toward hers and he bent over her, a potent shadow closing out the night sky.
“Shhhh,” he interrupted softly, nuzzling her lips. “It’s all right. I just realized that all my life I’ve wanted to kiss a tall woman wearing moonlight and fragile golden bells. One kiss, and I’ll let you go.”
For tonight, he added silently. But not for long.
The memory of Chase’s kiss was still tingling in Nicole the next morning. When he had kissed her, warmth and pleasure quivered through her, expanding with every heartbeat as they had the first moment she heard the drums speak beneath his hard and caressing hands. He hadn’t been put off by her size or the subtle hesitations that came from her fear of not pleasing him. He had taken her mouth smoothly, hotly, completely, as though it had always been his.
The sense of rightness had swept her in a warm, silky wind. She had never felt anything like the delicate tremors of heat singing throughout her body. She had wondered if the feelings were proof that there was a chance for her as a woman, a possibility that this man could touch the passion she had always hoped lay inside her.
But she hadn’t been certain last night that the kiss was proof of her own passion. She couldn’t be certain this morning, no matter how much she yearned to have it be true.
Yet she was certain that she had felt sleek and soft and very feminine held against Chase’s powerful body.
A passing car had reminded them that they were standing locked together beneath a streetlight in front of Dane’s house. Chase’s eyes had been narrowed, nearly silver, and he had released her very reluctantly.
Once out of his arms, she had hadn’t known whether to kiss him again or run like hell. Part of her insisted that she barely knew him. Another part, the same instinctive part of her that kept insisting she could be a passionate woman with the right man, told her that she had always known him. It just had taken years to find him.
The tension between the two feelings had been unnerving, like walking across a newly congealed flow of lava and sensing the dangerous warmth welling up beneath the ground, waves of heat that betrayed the seething, barely contained molten rock just below the cool surface of reality.
Each step was a risk.
Each step was exhilarating.
When Chase had parked his car at the Kamehameha estate, she had smiled, whispered her thanks for the ride, and slipped away into the darkness of the overgrown trails before he could touch her again.
Risk. Exhilaration. Heart pounding like a drum.
She still felt the same way this morning. She wanted to rush through Saturday so that she could go to the Kipuka Club tonight and dance to the dark, rhythmic thunder of Chase Wilcox’s drums. She wanted to run away and hide. She wanted to see him.
She wanted, period.
Maybe she would see him this afternoon, when she took the present she had made for Dr. Vic to the volcano lab. If not then, surely tonight, when she danced . . .
But there were a lot of hours between now and dancing. She had discovered long ago that the best way to make time disappear was to concentrate on something else.
She grabbed her sketchbook and headed for the door of the small cottage that had become her home. Outside, the endlessly busy trade winds were piling mounds of clouds against the gentle swell of the volcano, hiding its dark, lifeless peak.
In the higher forests, ohia trees and the native koa that survived the mainland hunger for koa wood grew a startling green against the black tongues of recent lava flows. Scarlet-feathered i’iwi and apapane flicked like exclamation points through the mist-drenched silence, feeding on equally scarlet ohia flowers.
Farther down the slopes, nonnative species grew freely alongside native trees. The result was a thriving, mixed forest filled with life, including feral pigs and Kamehameha butterflies that were bigger than a man’s hand.
Where ancient lava flows met salt water, the huge, flower-splashed grounds of the Kamehameha family estate tumbled down to a black-sand beach and the turquoise sea beyond. Like the Kipuka Club, the estate was a thriving combination of native and introduced species. Each plant had been cultivated for its flowers, its startling grace, its fragrance, or any combination of the three. Paths wound gently among ohia and jacaranda, coral and rainbow shower trees, with more ferns underfoot than Nicole could name.
No matter the time of year, regardless of mainland seasons, something in Hawaii bloomed next to one of its own kind whose spent blooms had already been transformed into food by the simple miracles of sun and rain.
Of all the beautiful trees on the Kamehamehas’ sprawling estate, the jacaranda had always been Nicole’s favorite. Unlike most tropical plants, all jacarandas shared a definite season for blooming, for fruiting, and for waiting. Today it was still the time of waiting. The first vivid rush of their blossoms would stay wrapped within the living silence of the trees, until just the right moment for coming undone in the sun. When that moment came, the buds would throw off their concealing shroud and burn like lavender flames against the intense green of the forest canopy.
Even now, while she watched, tender petals were swelling inside their dark wrappings. This was what she wanted to capture in a sketch—the tender, terrifying moment when the virgin bud came apart and offered itself to the sun.
And with every stroke of her pencil, she would pray that some of the jacaranda buds’ innocent, terrifying courage would become her own.
Nicole . . .
Abruptly she stopped and looked over her shoulder, down the overgrown path, wondering if she really had heard someone call her name. She couldn’t see much behind her. The path leading toward the big house was almost buried by lush foliage. So were the small cottages that circled the central house like wayward moons. Nothing to see but green on green and golden spears of sunlight.
In Hawaii’s tropical rain forest, hearing was often more reliable than sight. Intently she listened as she peered toward the almost invisible openings in the greenery. These often were the only sign of the paths connecting the cottages. The cottages themselves were very private, reserved for family members and friends of the sprawling Kamehameha clan.
Nicole’s cottage was the one closest to the sea. She had been given the run of the Kamehameha estate ever since she had discovered a very young, sweaty, scratched, and visibly defiant Benny Kamehameha up on Kilauea’s rough slope. He was fighting tears while he stood at the edge of a frozen black-lava river overlooking a kipuka.
She had lived in Hilo and worked part-time at the national park long enough to hear of the Kamehamehas and the Kipuka Club, so she knew where Benny belonged. She also could tell that he wasn’t ready to go home yet. Instead of arguing about it, she opened her drawing pad and began talking quietly about the land and the bright native birds.
At first Benny hadn’t responded. Then he had shared a few one-word comments about the birds and plants. After a while she discovered that he had run away from home after his first day of kindergarten and was never going back, because the other children had teased him about his limp.
Sketching as she talked, Nicole had worked quickly to capture the anger and hur
t and intelligence she saw on his thin face as he stood and brooded over the green land falling away at his feet. When she finished drawing, she talked him into walking back down the mountain with her by telling him that she wasn’t quite sure of the trail and needed someone to guide her.
Benny’s ease with and understanding of the land had astonished her. The child was uncanny in his knowledge and agility. She told him so, pointing out that none of the kids who teased him could have matched his pace on that rough and broken ground.
By the time she returned Benny to his worried parents, he was thoughtful rather than defiant. When she gave him the sketch of himself standing like a prince on black-lava ramparts, he had been transfixed by the drawing.
So had his parents. They had also been dismayed to learn that Nicole was still living in a motel, waiting for an apartment she could afford to come up for rent in Hilo. Bobby’s wife took Nicole’s hand and led her to the three unoccupied cottages on the Kamehameha estate. She was told to take her pick of the cottages. Whichever one she wanted was hers for as long as she wanted it.
Rent? Please, don’t insult your hosts. Can you put a price on a boy’s smile?
That had been more than three years ago, and nothing had changed. Bobby and his wife refused to discuss rent. Benny smiled a lot. And Nicole fell in love with the spacious, sometimes overgrown grounds of the estate and the tiny cottage that was tucked just up the slope from the beach. Most of the year the cottage was private to the point of isolation, perfect for uninterrupted time to work on her dancing or her sketching.
Most of the year. But not when school was out. Then the place was alive with the shouts and arguments and laughter of children.
The sound came to Nicole again, a high cry like the wind rushing through a steep lava canyon.
“Niiii-colllle! Waaaiiit!”
Benny’s thin, wiry body catapulted out of the undergrowth. He ran down the path toward her with an uneven gait that was blindingly quick. Sketch pad and pencils were clutched in his right hand.
“Slow down,” she called out, laughing. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Barefoot, nut brown, with a flashing smile that rarely failed to soothe Nicole’s impatience at being interrupted, Benny was one of her favorites—though it was hard for her to choose among the island children who gathered around her like clouds around the mountain whenever they spotted her alone.
“Picnic?” he asked, excitement making his dark eyes shine with life.
“Not today, honey.”
His eyes shifted to her sketch pad. “Watch?”
“Quiet?” she retorted.
He grinned and said not one word.
“Good-good,” she said.
She enjoyed the coded exchanges and meaningful silences that were Benny’s conversation. He acted like there wasn’t enough time in life for him to waste it on anything as ordinary as speech.
He fell in line behind her on the path. He knew the rules when she was working. The first time he interrupted her was “free.” Sometimes other interruptions might be tolerated, but only if they were very few and the questions he had were about painting or sketching or the plants themselves.
After that, any interruption had better mean something really urgent, like Kilauea splitting a new seam and pouring liquid fire over the face of the land. If it was anything less important, the chatty child was invited to go talk to the honeycreepers flitting brightly through the trees five thousand feet up the lava slopes.
The rules had never bothered Benny the way they did some of the other children. Silence came more easily to him than words.
Mouth shut, eyes wide open, he followed Nicole. She went to her favorite place, a little point of land where lava had licked out into the ocean at one end of a crescent-shaped beach. At the upper edge of the coarse black sand, coconut palms swayed and dipped in the breeze like stately dancers. The ocean was radiant with every tint, tone, shade, and combination of blue and green. Surf smiled, curled, and laughed whitely over the lava beach.
Though Nicole enjoyed the beach, it wasn’t the isolation or beauty that kept bringing her back. It was the flowering trees that had been planted just up from the beach by Benny’s great-grandmother when she was only nine. All of the trees except the scarlet-blossomed ohia came from other continents, yet each tree seemed to reach a peak in Hawaii’s gentle Eden.
Coral trees blazed with color, their clusters of red flowers rising from each naked branch tip like a fistful of flame. Next to them, shower trees lived up to their name, producing fantastic cascades of blossoms that covered their branches. In other lands shower trees came in single colors—white or yellow or pink or pale orange. In Hawaii the trees had cross-pollinated until they transformed themselves into what the natives called a rainbow shower, a tree that produced flowers of all colors in soft-petaled rainbow drifts that had no equal anywhere else on earth.
Yet even the rainbow shower trees couldn’t draw Nicole’s eye away from the cluster of jacarandas that rose above all others. With their smooth, dark trunks, fernlike leaves, and delicate lavender flowers, the jacarandas pleased her in ways she couldn’t describe, only feel. She loved to lie beneath the trees at the height of their bloom, to see sunlight glowing through thousands of pale purple blossoms, and to have sweet, spent petals swirl down around her in a fantastic amethyst snow.
But that particular glory was in the future. Today the jacaranda branches were naked of leaves and gleaming in the moist air. The trees were smooth-barked and had a dancer’s grace. At the tip of every twig, buds were swelling almost secretly against the sun-washed sky.
Once, when she was much younger, Nicole had thought of herself like that: a bud swelling in silence, waiting only for the right conditions to bloom. Once, but not for a long time. She had learned that, for her, the sensual flowering was simply an aching dream.
For her, the years from thirteen to seventeen had been a nightmare. Other girls had budded and bloomed all around her, while she had simply grown tall and then taller still, with no more curves than a slat fence. She hadn’t been pretty in the way of other girls, petite, blond, and blue-eyed or dark-haired and curvy with mystery lurking in even darker eyes. The final insult had been delivered by the whims of fashion. Her light golden-brown eyes, pale skin, and fiery hair didn’t blend at all with the pastels that were popular with the popular girls.
Other girls had boyfriends and admiring glances and bathing suits that revealed an intriguing feminine flowering. Nicole had simply kept on growing taller and taller, until she felt like a redheaded clown on stilts.
Then her body had begun to change in a wild rush, as though it realized that the blooming season was almost over. She was far too intelligent not to understand the connection between her increasing bra size and the increasing male attention.
Unfortunately, boys were no more interested in her as a person than they had been before her breasts grew. After the novelty of attracting whistles wore off, she decided that having a well-filled bra was as bad as being flat. Either way, she felt like an unwelcome passenger in her own body. The boys who noticed her breasts weren’t interested in anything about her but how it would feel to get their hands under her clothes. When she refused to wrestle in the backseat of a car—or the front—they called her a tease. And that was the polite name.
Cynicism had come early to Nicole. It had stayed. She learned to fend off blunt male advances with the same breezy humor that she had previously used to hide her hurt at being ignored by the opposite sex.
Then she had met Ted. He didn’t act like a starving octopus. He kept his hands to himself. He seemed interested in her thoughts and dreams. Later she realized it was her family’s money that had attracted Ted, not herself. But that was later. In the beginning she had been thrilled that such a handsome, popular man would notice her, much less pursue her and beg her to marry him.
Dazzled, she had agreed. He wasn’t a gentle lover. Her virginity had been an unhappy surprise. He had dumped a few state-of-the-a
rt sex manuals in her lap and told her to study up on what men liked—there would be a test later.
She failed that test, and all the others he gave her.
Sixteen months into the marriage, her father went bankrupt. Ted cast an accountant’s eye over the financial disaster, concluded that the money was gone and wouldn’t ever come back, and walked out on his wife. To prevent the professional and personal contacts he had made since his marriage from seeing him as the cold fortune hunter he was, he announced that the marriage had failed because his so-called wife was a closet lesbian who refused even to have children.
That was the worst insult of all. She had wanted children. He had been the one who insisted there was plenty of time, they should grab what they could while they were young enough to enjoy it.
Nicole hadn’t hung around California to see who believed her husband’s lies and who didn’t; everybody, even her own father, thought Ted was a warm, charming, loving man. So she had fled as far as she could, as fast as she could, leaving behind her girlish dreams and a broken marriage.
She knew flight was cowardly. She didn’t care. There was nothing to stick around for but more of the bitter taste of humiliation and failure.
The instant she had stepped off the plane at Hilo, she felt a sense of homecoming that staggered her. It was as if the island itself had reached out to wrap her in a warm, welcoming hug. The island didn’t care that she was too tall to be really feminine or that she was too cold to respond to a man sexually. Hawaii simply pulled her into its fragrance and warmth, asking nothing in return.
“Sad?”
The soft word slipped through Nicole’s unhappy thoughts about the past. She blinked and realized that she was standing with her sketch pad tucked under her arm, staring at nothing. Automatically her free hand went out to stroke the smooth hair of the child who stood beside her.
“Mainland sad,” she said huskily. “But I’m in Hawaii now.”
Hawaii, where a stranger had kissed her and made her believe that maybe, just maybe, there was hope for her as a woman.