Called by the unique smell of drought and time, memories welled up in him, laughter and smooth skin and the taste of Joy on his lips. He fought the memories reflexively, savagely, as he’d fought them for nearly seven years.
The tension in his body increased until the muscles of his left leg knot. He walked stiffly, cursing the pain and the memories, haunted by desert scents condensing around him as delicately and relentlessly as time itself.
Abruptly he gave in, understanding at last that this was one of the reasons he had come back to Lost River Cave.
To remember . . .
. . . HEAT and a fragrant wind caressing the land, whispering promises of the cool night to come. He and Joy were on their way to Carlsbad. Her father had given Gabe the keys to the Jeep, a warning about the difficult shift into third gear, and a grocery list as long as a driveshaft.
At the last instant Joy had jumped in, saying that if she didn’t get out of Cottonwood Wells she would get cabin fever. In the interests of mental health, Gabe had instantly offered dinner and a show. Sam had ruffled her hair as if she was six instead of twenty and told her to have a good time.
Until that instant Gabe hadn’t realized how hungry he was for Joy’s smile, her laughter, her company. During the weeks that he’d been in Cottonwood Wells, Joy had first entertained, then fascinated, and finally compelled him.
Now, two weeks before he had to leave on another assignment, he knew that he’d never wanted a woman half so much as he wanted Joy. From the way she responded when he’d held her beneath the brilliant desert moon and learned just a few of the secrets of her body, he knew that Joy wanted him too.
As soon as they were beyond sight of Cottonwood Wells he turned and slowly ran his fingertips over her cheek.
“I’m glad you came,” he said.
Color rose beneath her skin. She turned her head quickly, brushing her lips over his palm. “So am I.”
The rest of the day was a kaleidoscope of vivid, sensual images. The sun-colored flash of Joy’s hair beneath the grocery store’s cold lights. Her hand brushing against his fingers when they both reached for salt at the same time during lunch. Her tongue catching a drop of peppermint ice cream that had run onto her knuckle from the rapidly melting cone. Her laughter and sudden breathless silence when he’d neatly licked the minty mustache from her upper lip.
And the swift, hot flood of sensation that came when she returned the favor, licking every trace of ice cream from his lips, sending all the blood in his body rushing toward the flesh that strained suddenly against his jeans.
The movie was an exquisite kind of torture. He put his arm around her and pulled her close, drowning in her fragrance, her warmth burning against him hotter than any desert sun. She was watching him, not the movie, and at some point during the matinee she discovered that she wanted him. He saw it in her eyes, felt it in the infinitely yielding body so close to his.
He’d kissed her then, a kiss that had narrowed the world to the heat and hunger of their joined mouths. The honesty of her response, the small sound she made when his tongue stroked hers, was more exciting to him than any woman’s touch had ever been.
As they left the movie Gabe thought about taking Joy to the motel at the edge of town. The idea of it left a sour taste in his mouth. She wasn’t like the other women he’d known. It wasn’t a matter of the three years difference in their ages. It was something more subtle. More elusive.
There was a transparency in Joy that simply didn’t admit to the possibility of hurried sex in grubby motels. Maybe it was that despite her smoldering sensuality, she wasn’t particularly experienced when it came to sexual play. Whoever her previous boyfriends had been, whether there had been only one lover for her or several, no man had ever truly set her afire and then burned deep inside her.
That was what Gabe wanted to do.
Burn with her.
He took Joy’s hand, threading his fingers deeply through hers, squeezing, feeling her smoothness and warmth even as he let her feel his restraint and strength.
He didn’t want to take her to a restaurant for dinner, to stare across the table at her with a hunger no food could touch. He wanted to be alone with her, away from everyone else. He wanted to feel like they were the only two people on earth, totally removed from all reality, knowing only each other.
Joy watched him with eyes as clear and luminous as rain. “How about a picnic dinner in the desert on the way home?”
“Hot dogs roasted over a salt cedar campfire?”
“If that’s what you want.” She grinned. “Otherwise Señora Lopez packs great tortillas and carne asada to go.”
“You’d give up the steak dinner I promised you?”
“For a chance to eat in the desert alone with you and the sun and the wind, I’d give up six steak dinners.”
He squeezed her hand and brushed his lips over her hair. “How did you guess that I don’t want to be in a restaurant with everyone else in town?”
Joy’s breath caught with a soft sound. “Because that’s the way I feel too.”
Her husky confession licked over him with tongues of fire. “Let’s see how fast we can get the makings for our picnic.”
Soon they were driving back out into the desert, following the faded road, lured by the thickly slanting rays of the late afternoon sun. Joy gave him directions to a tiny, mossy seep visited only by the wind and wary desert creatures. They parked the Jeep and walked the last hundred yards. There was no sign of other people, not even a faint trail. The land was untouched, trembling with light, newly created—the way he felt the first time he’d kissed Joy.
She made a tablecloth out of a bedroll she’d taken from the collection of camping gear that her parents always left in the back of the Jeep.
He put down the bags containing dinner and watched her small hands smooth the bulky fabric of the bedroll. He wanted nothing more than to feel her hands on his body, easing the hunger that made him ache. When he knelt in front of her, she looked up questioningly. He wanted to reassure her that he would be gentle, that he wouldn’t hurt her, but he couldn’t think of any words. He could think only of touching her.
“A kiss.” His voice was almost hoarse and his hands trembled slightly as they curved around her face. “Just a kiss, sweetheart.”
Her lips were soft, firm, unbearably sweet. He wanted to sink into them, into her. He teased the inside of her lower lip until she gasped. Then he drove his tongue deeply into her mouth, groaning as he felt her fingers dig into the muscles of his upper arm. Her tongue moved against his, caressing and savoring and demanding more, always more.
Without knowing, without thinking, he pulled her down and covered her body with his while hunger raged through him, shaking him, and still the kiss hadn’t ended. He couldn’t force himself to pull away. He wanted to pour himself into her, filling her until she overflowed and turned to him with her own need, her own demand that he be part of her until they were one and that one burned with an endless fire.
Silently Joy told him that she wanted the same thing. She strained against him as her small, surprisingly strong hands searched over his back and shoulders and hips, caressing him, enjoying his strength.
The snaps on her western blouse gave way with a slow certainty that made her moan deep in her throat. It was the only sound she made, the only sound she needed to make. Her fingers dug into his hips as she met his kiss, matched it, and learned the heat and textures of his mouth.
The sensual, searching touches of her tongue excited him, telling him that she enjoyed the feel and intimacy of the deep kiss as much as he did. Her fingers speared beneath his waistband as passion surged through her body. She twisted against him, asking for more. Demanding it.
His hands released the catch on her bra. Despite the hammering of his need, he made himself go slowly, savoring each exquisite shift of her textures and responses. He held the sensitive flesh of her breasts, rubbed over their softness until his skin was on fire and her nipples were hard. S
he twisted against him and he tugged at her nipples with hungry fingertips.
Her response was a sudden, wild arching of her body and a cry that he drank from her mouth, wanting to share her with nothing, not even the desert silence.
Finally, lured by the pouting promise of her breasts, he pulled his mouth away from hers. He wondered if she wanted to know the feel of his tongue on her nipples half so much as he did. His teeth raked lightly over her neck, down the firm swell of a breast, and he nuzzled the peak with a teasing sweetness that brought a husky sound of pleasure from her. The sound quickly changed to a gasp and then a rippling cry of desire as he bent his head over her breast and drank from it as completely as he had drunk from her mouth.
She moaned his name into the silence and moved against him with her whole body, urging him, inciting him. Her response was a wildfire raging through his self-control. While her husky words encouraged him, he took her even deeper, surrounding her breast with his mouth. With each shifting pressure of tongue and lips, he heard his name break on her lips. With each gasp of pleasure, her hands searched over his hips beneath his jeans.
Hungrily his hands swept from her shoulders to her waist to her thighs. She moaned and blindly sought more. His hand moved underneath her denim skirt and slid between her thighs. She shifted, easing his way, until he felt the steamy urgency of her against his palm and groaned.
So did she.
He caught her mouth beneath his again and thrust his tongue rhythmically against hers while his fingers slid beneath her silky pants to caress even silkier skin. She made a ragged sound and shifted again, asking and demanding in the slow movements of her body against his, giving him the sultry warmth he sought.
Fingers caressed, searched, sank into the incredible softness between her thighs. His thumb dipped, circled, rubbed the sleek button that rose to meet his touches. She answered with a twisting, sexy seeking of her hips that demanded more.
He hooked his fingers in her panties and pulled them to her ankles in a single motion. Kneeling, he lifted first one foot and then the other, removing her underwear.
“Gabe?” Her voice was ragged, like her heartbeat, like her breathing.
“I won’t hurt you, sweetheart.” As he spoke, he pushed up her skirt and kissed the skin around her belly button.
“I know. It’s just that—” Words became a gasp as he bit her gently, sucked less gently, licked her.
“I’ve never—you’re the first—oh, God—again.”
Her fragmented words penetrated Gabe’s hungry, urgent exploration of her secrets. He looked up and saw her flushed lips, her eyes dilated with passion until there was only a tiny rim of clear gray surrounding the black pupil, her blouse hanging open, her nipples hard and glistening from his mouth.
“Don’t worry,” he said, bending to her again. “I’ve never done this with a woman either.”
She made a sound that could have been laughter and certainly was pleasure. “Not this. I mean, God, it feels—” She shivered, pushing against him as he teased her navel with his tongue and explored the hard bud hidden in her softness with his fingertips.
“Do you want me to stop?” he asked.
“No.” She took a broken breath and moved slowly against his mouth, his fingers, giving and demanding and enjoying. “Gabe, I’ve never made love before. Not completely. That’s all I was trying to say.”
He went still. “You’re a virgin?”
She smiled down at him as he knelt between her legs. “Not for much longer.”
“Jesus.”
He let out a breath that was another caress against her violently sensitive flesh. He saw the telltale shiver, the helpless seeking of her hips. She shared the desire that had claimed him as fiercely as the summer sun claimed the sky.
“I should stop,” he said roughly. “I should put your clothes back on and—”
“No!” Her hands tugged at his T-shirt, opened his jeans, dove beneath, sought the living heat of him.
“You’re sure?” he asked.
While he waited for her answer, he tasted her on his lips, felt her passionate heat sliding against his fingers, and prayed that she wouldn’t change her mind. His fingertips traced her layered softness with maddening delicacy.
“Yes,” she said hoarsely, twisting against his knowing touch. “Don’t you dare stop, Gabe. I want you.”
Smiling, he watched Joy in the pouring golden sunlight, savoring her abandoned movements as she responded to his touch. Every breath she took was his name, her need, her demand that he keep caressing her, learning her desires, teaching her his own.
A wild kind of calm came to Gabe, a certainty that was like nothing he had ever experienced. He would touch Joy in ways he had touched no other woman. He would equal her generous sensuality. He would melt her to her bones, and when she came back to herself in the aftermath of ecstasy, she would never again be touched by anyone without remembering her first time, and him.
“Gabe?” she whispered, eyes closed, body shivering with the intensity of her response.
“I won’t stop.”
He peeled away their remaining clothes until they wore only the shimmering gold light of late afternoon. Then he sank down to the bedroll, kneeling between her legs, asking her once again.
“You sure?”
“As sure as you are,” she said, stroking his erection.
His breath hissed in.
She lay back and held out her arms in silent demand. As he bent over her, he hesitated, wondering if his caresses would shock her; and then knew that it would be all right, that despite her innocence she would understand, accept, glory in her own sensuality as he did. She was a lover to match his dreams.
“I have to show you how perfect you are,” he whispered, kissing her lips, the frantic pulse in her throat, the nipples thrusting against his tongue, the shadowed navel, the triangle of molten gold hair. His tongue flicked over her, tasting her. “So sweet . . . so damned sweet.”
The words ended in a husky sound as he gave in to his own sensuality, caressing her with an intimacy that he had never known with other women. Nor had he known his own need rising fiercely to meet feminine demand, he urging, she requiring, driving each other upward in a wild spiral of passion that transformed both of them.
When he finally moved back up her body she was crying and twisting against him, offering him everything that he’d ever dreamed of in a lover. She was hot, tight, deep, and if there was pain when he took her neither of them ever knew, for fire knows nothing but its own pulsing flames . . .
THE hot dream memory faded, leaving Gabe aching in ways that had nothing to do with the fall he’d taken nearly a year ago in the Andes. He stood motionless as the echoes of passion clawed through him, leaving a seething hunger in their wake.
You bloody fool, he raged silently at himself. Did you come halfway around the world for a piece of ass?
You bloody fool, he answered himself acidly. Do you really think what’s bothering you is that easy?
There was no answer but the one that had driven him halfway around the world: lust was easy. It demanded nothing but its own satiation.
After Joy, he’d quickly learned the limitations of lust, the depression that came when he realized that sex was over but the hungry emptiness and need went on and on. He hadn’t liked learning that lesson, because it meant that Joy had touched him much more deeply than he’d touched her.
That was why she had haunted him through the years.
Of all the women he had met, she was the only one who enriched his silences as well as his sensuality. She was the only woman who left him feeling complete rather than hollow. She was the only woman whose mental and physical response to him had made him reach down to the deepest parts of himself, satisfying needs that were less tangible and more enduring than lust.
But it had taken him seven years to admit it.
Fool, he told himself wearily. You lost something before you knew what it was worth. By now some man who isn’t as stupid
as you were will have discovered her worth.
By now she’s happily married and has a batch of kids.
The thought made Gabe’s mouth flatten. He couldn’t stop remembering the baby that had never been born.
She said she loved me, but she was too young to know what love is, said the bitter part of him that had never gotten over her betrayal.
You left her.
I didn’t know she was pregnant! I left her every bit of money I had and then some. And even if I’d known she was pregnant, what the hell was I supposed to do? Turn my back on my brother and mother—again—and on a career I needed in order to support myself and my family, much less a wife and child?
What other decision could I have made but to take the assignment and then come back to her?
There was no answer.
There hadn’t ever been, even when he circled round and round the question in his hospital bed in Peru. He’d searched, but he hadn’t found the answer in the South American mountains, beneath the Australian seas, or in the jungles of Asia.
The answer wouldn’t be in New Mexico’s desert either.
He’d been a fool to drive himself to exhaustion just to come back here as quickly as possible. Time went in only one direction: forward. He’d endured the pain of remembering Joy for nothing, nothing at all.
Fatigue settled on Gabe, and with it a chill that didn’t come from the increasing coolness of the evening air. He walked back to the car, started it, forced his mind to deal with the necessities of the moment. He should hurry. There were several turnoffs before he reached Cottonwood Wells. If it got too dark, he’d miss the subtle natural signposts that marked the route.
The way you’ve missed other things?
Shut up, he told himself savagely. Just. Shut. Up.
The car leaped forward, tires spinning, sending dust and gravel boiling upward in a confused cloud.
Five
THE ENTRANCE TO LOST RIVER CAVE WAS A SLIT BARELY seven feet by three. The black opening was all but hidden in a jumble of rock and brush a few hundred steep yards up the slope. When Joy turned off the Jeep’s engine and climbed out next to Fish’s Toyota, the sound of voices floated down over the rugged land to her.