Chase hesitated, then pulled her closer and stroked her. The slow sweeps of his hand went from the moon-bright crown of her head to the alluring female curve of hip and thigh. Unconsciously she moved closer, wanting the feel of his skin against hers, hungry for the sweet intimacy he had showed her earlier.
The small movements of her body as she snuggled into his warmth, fitting herself to him with sensual precision, made his breath shorten all over again. He felt the thick, hot thrill of returning urgency, pressure growing with each beat of his heart. He bent over her breast, kissing her, and felt her tighten beneath his touch.
It took only an instant, like the tiny sound she made in her throat when his mouth tugged at her. An instant, and a blazing torrent of hunger leaped to life again.
Fire goddess. She would burn a man alive and never even feel the heat.
When Chase realized that he was on the verge of succumbing all over again to Nicole’s sensual trap, he sat up quickly.
I’ve done what I had to. Dane’s safe from her. Now I’d better get the hell out while I still have the strength to leave.
While I still want to leave.
He looked down at her, his eyes metallic silver in the moonlight.
“Chase?”
A long tendril of her hair had escaped the coils. It fell between her breasts in a soft ribbon that shimmered with subdued fire. He felt a moment of sharp regret that he hadn’t taken down her hair and wrapped it around him, letting its silken strands bind him to her.
“Don’t get up,” he said. “I’ll let myself out.”
She blinked, trying to think of something to say. She had no experience with this sort of thing. “You—you don’t have to leave.”
“Lisa is with Jan and Dane. If something happens and they need me, they’ll call my cottage, not yours.”
The words were true as far as they went. And it kept him from saying the rest of the truth: if he stayed, he would take Nicole again and again, falling deeper and deeper beneath the spell of her cold fire.
She hadn’t wanted him. Not really. Not completely. Not the way he had wanted her—all the fires of Eden raging inside him.
The way he still wanted her.
Swiftly Chase stood and retrieved his lavalava from the bathroom. He wrapped the cloth into place before he went back to the living room.
Nicole was standing by the front door, wearing nothing but moonlight.
Without meaning to, he found his fingertips tracing the length of the single tendril of hair that fell between her breasts and down over the smooth curves of her body. He lifted his hand, opened the cottage door, and stepped through.
As she moved aside to let him by, she held on to the door with both hands. It was the only way she kept herself from clinging to him and begging him to stay and touch her gently for just a few more moments. But that would be stupid. Her marriage had taught her that once a man had what he wanted sexually, he had no further use for the woman.
“Thank you,” she said shyly, looking down because she was suddenly embarrassed.
“For what?” Chase asked from the other side of the doorway. He knew that there had been no release for her. She must know it, too. She certainly hadn’t bothered to hide it.
“For not hurting me.”
The soft words were nearly lost beneath the sound of the latch taking hold as the she shut the door behind him.
For a long moment Chase stood in the silence and shadows, wondering at the sudden uneasiness sweeping through him. He felt like he was standing on the lip of a volcano that was supposed to be dormant, but wasn’t. He could sense the sleeping volcano shuddering deep beneath his feet in ominous harmonic tremors, warning of an explosion to come.
Something was wrong.
Very wrong.
It’s called postcoital depression, you jackass, he snarled silently to himself.
There was no answer but a feeling of unease spreading like cold water through his gut.
With an impatient curse he stalked toward his cottage. Every step of the way he told himself that nothing was wrong. In fact, everything that mattered was finally right.
Dane’s marriage was safe from the fiery temptations of Pele.
17
After a night of broken sleep and the kind of dreams that he hadn’t had since he lost custody of Lisa, Chase’s mood was savage. All he wanted was to get the next few hours over with. Then he would go out on the volcano and hike the desolate, steaming crater until he was too tired to get hard every time he thought about the image of Nicole naked in the moonlight, holding her arms out to him.
He shot out of bed, got up, and showered for the third time since he had left Nicole. No matter, he still could smell her, ginger and heat, and he could feel her soft, hungry hands on his body.
He didn’t bother shaving. He just yanked on underwear, khaki shorts, and an old cotton shirt that once had been as dark as his hair but now was closer to the color of his eyes. With swift movements he rolled up the sleeves. He was impatient to see Dane so that he could get on with his real work in Hawaii—volcano crawling—rather than showing his younger brother how close an escape he had had from a sexy redheaded gold digger.
Sexy. God. What a pale word for Pele’s physical impact.
No matter how Chase tried, the reality of his own nearly uncontrollable lust scraped at him. He kept reliving scattered moments—the silky fire of her hair, the odd hesitancy and heat of her mouth, her tiny cry when his tongue first touched her nipple, and the hot, tight, incredibly intense pleasure of sheathing himself deep inside her.
He had had sex with more beautiful women, and certainly more passionate or skillful ones, but Nicole was a fire in his memory and they were not.
She was also a fire in his body. He burned, and he didn’t know why, but the evidence was hard and hot in front of him. He wanted her. Needed her.
Disgusted with his uncontrollable sexual response to even the memory of last night, Chase slammed out of the cottage. While he drove, the Porsche snarled for him, an oddly soothing noise. He pulled into Dane’s long, curving driveway and parked at the rear of the house alongside Jan’s zippy little car.
He hoped Jan was sleeping in and Dane was his usual bright-eyed, dawn-loving self.
Bougainvillea overgrew the detached garage and carport, shedding drifts of shocking pink flowers over everything. Chase picked his way through the greenery with respect for its weapons. As a recent arrival to Eden, bougainvillea still had plenty of wicked, inch-long thorns.
As usual, the back door of the house was unlocked. The front door was, too, but the back was closer. The smell of coffee greeted Chase when he entered. After a hellish night, coffee smelled like heaven. From the instant he woke up, he had been too impatient to make coffee or eat anything at his cottage. He just wanted to get the whole mess over with.
Dane sat alone at the kitchen table, reading the newspaper and sipping coffee. Chase let out a small sigh of relief. He didn’t want Jan ever to know about Nicole and Dane. After all, nothing had really happened. And nothing ever would.
Now.
Chase wished he felt better about it, but he didn’t. All he could do was put it behind him.
Dane gave him a shrewd look. “You’re early. Lisa isn’t up yet. Besides, I think this is the morning Nicole gives her drawing lessons.” He grimaced and smacked himself on the forehead. “Damn, there I go again! Give me a bag and a cat and I’ll let it out every time. You didn’t hear anything about drawing from me. Again.”
“Hear what?” Chase agreed automatically. He hesitated, wondering how to bring up the subject of the bet he had won and Dane had lost. “Where’s Jan?”
“Sleeping. She was up until three polishing the proposal.”
“Good.” Chase felt a bit less savage. He had been worried that Jan might come downstairs and overhear a brotherly discussion about rich, gullible men and poor, shrewd women.
“Jan will be sorry you’re sorry you missed her,” Dane said ironically.
/> Chase shot his brother a hard look and decided that there was no civilized, gentlemanly way to open this conversation. After all, what had been done wasn’t very civilized, and as for gentlemanly . . . His mouth turned down in a grimace of distaste.
On the other hand, women like Nicole could hardly expect to find a world full of gentlemen competing to pay the rent.
Rather warily Dane watched Chase pour himself a cup of coffee. His brother radiated anger or frustration. Given his knowledge of Nicole, Dane was betting on frustration. It would be good for his big brother to come up against a woman who didn’t trip him and beat him to the floor after knowing him for five minutes. Abstinence built character, right?
With the smug amusement of a man who made love to a woman he loved as often as they both pleased, Dane was grateful that it was Chase who was suffering and building character thanks to sexual frustration. Dane was really out of practice at that sort of thing.
That didn’t mean he wouldn’t enjoy needling his older brother about it. In the kindest, most supportive way possible, of course.
“I thought after the performance at the club last night, you’d be tired enough to sleep for a week,” Dane said blandly, turning to another page in the small newspaper.
Paper rustled loudly in the silence as he made a production of folding the sheets just so. He scanned the columns without interest, waiting for Chase to respond.
“Were you at the club?” Chase finally asked, sipping the scalding coffee. “I didn’t see you.”
“I came in later.” Dane looked up at his brother with a mixture of curiosity and humor. “Must have had ten people tell me about your hot drumming, Nicole’s hotter dancing, and the magic act.”
Chase’s black eyebrows lifted in surprise. “Magic act?”
“Yeah,” Dane said dryly, bending over the newspaper again. “Now you see them, now you don’t.”
Chase took a deep breath. There would never be a better moment. “You lost the bet,” he said bluntly, his voice rough.
Dane’s head snapped up. There was shock in every handsome line of his face. “What?”
“We went back to Nicole’s place. I stayed there long enough to make sure that she’d never go after you again—or if she did, that you wouldn’t have her.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Fucking,” Chase said brutally.
An image of Nicole’s softness and beauty rose in his mind. Ruthlessly he shoved aside the memory. He was old enough to know there was hell of a lot more to a book than its cover. The proof was definitely in the reading. Or in this case, in the sheets. Nicole had gone to bed with him for reasons other than passion, because she had shown him damned little of that.
Just enough of it to make him crazy, in fact. But that was his problem.
“You and Nicole?”
Dane’s chair scraped across the floor as he came to his feet with a jerk that sent his empty coffee mug rolling to the floor. Crockery smashed on the tile with an unhappy sound. Both men ignored the broken mug. They were too focused on each other to have attention left over for anything else. They heard nothing except their own words.
Not even the sound of a soft knock followed by the front door opening.
“Of course it was her,” Chase said impatiently. “Who else would I be fucking but Nicole? Or is some other gold digger after you, dazzling you with smiles and sweet lies while visions of bank accounts dance in her dear little head?”
For a stunned second, then two, Dane tried to understand what his brother was saying. It didn’t make sense. None of it.
“You’re crazy!” he said, shaking his head sharply.
Motionless in the middle of the living room, Nicole heard the male voices erupting from the kitchen. With each word she flinched. She felt like splashes of boiling lava were landing all around her.
On her.
But it wasn’t hot. It was cold, freezing cold.
This can’t be happening. I’m dreaming. I’ll wake up soon, and it will be over. Just another bad dream.
The voices came again.
It wasn’t a dream, and it kept on happening, words freezing her until she bit her lips against the cries clawing at her throat.
“She slept with you?” Dane demanded.
“Don’t look so surprised. It happens all the time.” Chase’s voice was rough, impatient.
“Not with Nicole!”
“Oh, bullshit. She really had you going, didn’t she, little brother? Well, if it makes you feel better, you didn’t miss much. Like a lot of women with a good body, she thinks that it’s enough for a man just to be in bed with her.”
“What?”
The word wasn’t a question. It was a measure of Dane’s confusion.
Chase answered anyway. He had come to strip his brother of any male fantasies about Nicole, and that was exactly what he would do—even though he would rather shovel out campground pit toilets on the fifth of July.
“Women like Nicole can’t believe that a man wants more in bed than a sexy body,” Chase said in a clipped voice. “Most of them at least take the trouble to substitute skill for passion. Not her. Nicole is about as skillful in the sheets as a corpse.”
“Shut up, damn you!” Dane’s voice was hoarse, shocked. He was afraid that he understood too much. “I don’t want to hear any more!”
“Tough shit.” Chase’s mouth thinned in violent disgust for the whole situation. But it was almost finished.
He couldn’t wait for it to be over with so he could go to the clean slopes of the volcano. That was where he belonged. Not here, telling his brother what he should have been able to figure out for himself.
“You lost the bet,” Chase said savagely, “but that’s all you lost. You still have Jan, and she’s a better woman than Nicole will ever be.”
Nicole tried to turn away, to flee from the damning words, but her body didn’t respond. She swayed slowly in place, fighting for balance, trying to understand what had happened, why it had happened.
It was devastating to know that Chase had seduced her as part of a cruel game. But knowing she had failed him so completely as a woman destroyed her in a way she couldn’t comprehend. She simply felt it all the way to her soul in a single, tearing stroke that took the breath from her body.
The room dimmed to gray and started to spin around her. Instinctively she bent over and fought against fainting. Blindly clinging to an armchair, she willed her body not to betray her. She had to leave before anyone discovered her and knew that she had overheard. What had happened was bad enough. Seeing Chase, knowing that he knew, that Dane knew, having them look at her—no, never. It must not happen.
Only raw desperation kept her on her feet, and the silent screams in her mind demanding that she get out! run! hide!
Other words poured out of the kitchen, slicing into her in burning shards of ice, echoing in her mind as she fought for control of her body.
“What do you mean, I still have Jan?” Dane asked.
“Nicole was after you, little brother. Or, to be precise, after marriage and your bank account.”
“You’re wrong. Dead wrong.”
“Don’t give me that shit,” Chase snarled. “I’ve seen how you look at her.”
“Just like you look at Jan?” Dane asked, measuring his brother with cold eyes. “Just like Jan looks at you?”
18
There was a moment of charged silence between the two brothers.
“You don’t think—” Chase began, shocked.
“No,” Dane cut in impatiently, “I don’t. I know both of you too well. I know Nicole in the same way. Yes, I care for Nicole a great deal, just as you care for Jan. Nicole is a very appealing woman, and not just physically. I’d have to be blind and a liar to say otherwise. But if I’d been so butt-stupid as to make a pass at Nicole, she would have ducked. She’s not like the females you’ve had since your divorce. And she most definitely isn’t another home wrecker like Lynette, out for what she can
get from men and to hell with anything else.”
“Christ,” Chase said, disgusted. “Nicole really has you going, doesn’t she? If she’s such a snow-white saint, why did she have sex with me after we’d known each other only a few days? Hardly the act of a virtuous paragon of womanhood, is it?”
“If she went to bed with you—”
“She did,” Chase cut in impatiently. “Don’t kid yourself about that.”
“Then it happened because she wanted you enough to overcome—”
The rest of Dane’s words were buried beneath Chase’s sardonic laughter. Nicole’s lack of real passion still grated on his pride. He had been so hot, nearly wild for her, and she had been controlled down to the last breath.
“She’s cold to the core,” Chase said. “She doesn’t know the meaning of the word passion.”
A wave of nausea hit Nicole. Icy sweat broke out and a salty taste filled her mouth. No longer caring if she made any noise, she shoved away from the chair’s support and bolted for the downstairs bathroom.
She barely reached it in time. She was blindly, wrenchingly sick, as though the convulsions of her body could somehow wipe out the last terrible minutes when she had overheard herself being dissected as a woman and coldly dismissed by the very man she had trusted herself to, believing he was so right for her.
“What the hell?” Dane said, turning toward the sounds.
Chase turned and headed out of the kitchen at a run. “One of the kids must be sick.”
He beat Dane to the bathroom. As he reached the closed door, he heard the toilet flush and the sound of water running in the sink. He yanked the door open, expecting to find one of the children.
What he saw shocked him.
Nicole was pale as salt, her eyes closed, and her forearms were supporting her on the sink. Her hands were shaking so hard that the water she was trying to splash on her face was pouring down the front of her bright blue muumuu. Thin cloth stuck to her body in great dark welts of color.
Chase reached past her for a washcloth. He wet it and began to wipe her face as though she was a child.
When the cloth touched Nicole’s skin, her eyes opened. Slowly she focused on Chase. With a broken cry she pushed away from him so violently that her back slammed against the shower door. The glass shivered but didn’t break.