This Time Love

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “The president and I agreed that you’re our best hope of keeping the Lost River grant alive,” Harry said.

  “The article won’t be finished or published in time to do us any good.”

  “Not this year, or maybe even the next. But the cave has been there a long time. It’ll be there a lot longer. Sooner or later the money will come in again. I’m betting it will come within months of the date Venture’s article is published.”

  Joy didn’t say a word. She already had her résumé out to the few other employers in the world who might need someone who had both a thorough knowledge of how water of varying chemistry shaped caves and the expertise to explore even the most treacherous underground passages in search of new knowledge. Unfortunately, the demand for hydrospeleologists wasn’t great. Add to that the fact that she was a woman and the answer was simple.

  No.

  She had been offered other kinds of jobs, but the prospect of teaching geology or hydrology to bored freshmen in well-scrubbed classrooms made her extremely restless. She would do it in order to support Kati, but she would look at every other job possibility first.

  If she couldn’t have the velvet darkness and unearthly beauty of Lost River Cave, then she hoped for work in some other remote and unusual place. There were so many incredible landscapes on earth, so many of the planet’s secrets that had barely been glimpsed, much less researched. She wanted more than a classroom, more than the security and closed horizons of tenure.

  If helping a nightmare called Gabriel Venture would make it possible for her to get out of the classroom and go back to unraveling the mysteries of Lost River Cave or some other equally unique place, then she would be the most helpful cave guide ever born.

  “You’re right.” Joy’s voice was normal again, crisp and no nonsense. Her eyes focused on the sunny vastness of New Mexico’s Delaware Basin spreading out at the foot of the Guadalupe Mountains. “I’ll do whatever I can to help research on Lost River Cave get the recognition and funding it deserves.”

  “Excellent. We’re counting on you, Dr. Anderson. Mr. Venture’s itinerary puts him in El Paso six days from now, and at Carlsbad in a week. He’ll call and tell you where to pick him up. You be sure and let me know if Mr. Venture needs anything at all for his article.”

  The sound of Harry’s voice became muffled. Obviously he had put his hand over the receiver and was talking to someone.

  “Sorry, but I’ve got to run,” Harry said into the receiver again. “I’ve got a rich estate waiting on line three. You should have all the Venture background material in two days. Three at the worst.”

  The rush of words stopped, leaving nothing but static to listen to.

  Slowly Joy replaced the radiophone on its hook and looked past the black shortwave set to the hot serenity of the late-afternoon desert. After long minutes she came to her feet with the grace of a dancer or a gymnast or a caver, someone who was accustomed to testing the physical limits of her body on a regular basis.

  With her short hair, casual clothes, and barely five foot two inches of height, she appeared more like an undergraduate than a Ph.D. The impression faded when she was close enough for people to look into her eyes. There was a measured quality in her glance that came only from hard experience.

  Watching dust devils rise out over the basin, Joy thought and thought hard. It was a long dusty drive from Cottonwood Wells to the nearest post office. The closest city of any size at all was Carlsbad. Undoubtedly Gabe would be flying in there, unless he landed in El Paso and rented a car. That would be a lovely solution to part of the problem. Let the great explorer rent a four-wheel drive vehicle and find his own way to Lost River Cave.

  Even as the thought came, Joy was shaking her head, knowing it wouldn’t work. The braided dirt tracks leading up a dry wash to the exploration headquarters were carefully unmarked, as was the path to the locked entrance of the cave itself. No one wanted crowds of self-important visitors demanding to be shown around, or amateur cavers determined to leave their mark on a virgin cave.

  Joy had been coming out to Lost River Cave since she was seventeen. Even now, at twenty-seven, she sometimes had a hard time finding the way home after seasonal cloudbursts washed out the tracks of previous vehicles.

  Someone would have to pick up the great adventurer and lead him by the hand to Cottonwood Wells.

  For a moment Joy thought about letting Davy Graham fetch the visitor. The Ph.D. candidate was photogenic, intelligent, and probably in awe of a well-known world-traveled explorer like Gabe. Assigning Davy taxi duty would save her the trouble of thinking up polite things to say during the long drive in from Carlsbad.

  Tempted, she enjoyed the idea before she rejected it. No one alive knew that she had fallen in love with Gabe when she was twenty, had had his daughter when she was twenty-one and hadn’t trusted herself with a man since Gabe left her crying. Only Fish even knew that she had worked with Gabe years ago in Lost River Cave’s seamless darkness.

  She couldn’t hope to keep their old professional tie a secret, but the old personal tie was no one’s business except hers. And, eventually, Kati’s. As for Gabe, he hadn’t cared enough even to write and ask if the baby had been born.

  And that, too, was another thought she would shove back into the deep well of the past, when she had been a child. Right now the present was all that mattered, because that was where she and Kati lived.

  So the decision was easy after all. If she hoped to keep her past affair with Gabe a secret—and she must—she’d have to be the one to pick him up. Too bad just the thought of dealing with Gabe again made her tight, brittle, teetering on the raw edge of fury. She’d have to put a lid on her emotions and screw that lid down real tight.

  The famous Gabriel Venture couldn’t affect her unless she let him.

  She’d had nearly seven years to forget many things and learn some others. She wasn’t worried about succumbing to him sexually again. She knew now what she hadn’t known at twenty: Gabriel Venture was a man who put his career first and love second. She’d given him her love and physical innocence. He’d given her physical passion and a child he didn’t want.

  No, I’m not worried about loving Gabe again. I’m only worried that he’ll discover how much I hate him.

  The bitterness of own thoughts startled Joy. Then it gnawed at her. For years she’d turned aside all thoughts of Kati’s father, pushing them away, ignoring them, refusing to admit they even existed. She didn’t want to feel anything for Gabe at all, love or hate. What he had once meant to her was fixed in her past, unchanging, like the dry upper reaches of Lost River Cave where water no longer came to dissolve and re-form the very stone itself.

  Dead.

  It had to be that way. There was no other choice. She couldn’t let her emotions eat into her until she was so raw that she wanted to scream with pain. She owed Kati more than that. She owed herself more than that.

  She hadn’t hated Gabe in years. She wouldn’t hate him now. She couldn’t. He meant nothing to her. He no longer had the power to make love or hate run hotly through her.

  Her emotions were her own and they were calm.

  With a long sigh Joy let out the breath she’d been holding. There was a lot to be done in the present. She’d wasted too much time exploring the dangerous, brutal landscape of her past. What she’d felt for Gabe was buried now, like Lost River itself, consumed by darkness.

  Let it stay that way.

  Two

  GABE SHIFTED AGAINST THE WEIGHT OF HIS CARRY-ON baggage.With each movement, the muscles of his left leg and hip ached, protesting a year-old injury and more recent confinement in airline seats designed for short, skinny teenagers. At least it shouldn’t be long before he was out of the cramped plane. There were only seven passengers on the little feeder flight. Six of them were tourists from Germany who had chatted in their native language the whole trip.

  The young flight attendant and Gabe were the only English speakers in the cabin. The woman found Gabe a lot
more fascinating than he found her. He’d been hoping to catch a nap during the ride from El Paso, but short of being a lot ruder than he wanted to be, he hadn’t been able to escape the friendly attendant.

  He walked a bit stiffly down the plane’s narrow aisle toward the exit. Although he wasn’t due in Cottonwood Wells for another week, he’d worked overtime wrapping up his Asian story. Then he’d gained another day by trading in his first-class ticket. Despite the fact that it meant a long, uncomfortable flight in tourist class, he’d leaped at the ticket with an eagerness that he didn’t understand.

  Or didn’t want to.

  The flight he took out of the Philippines had given him just enough time in Los Angeles to clear customs and get on another plane bound for El Paso. Once on the ground in Texas, he didn’t do the sensible thing and hole up in a motel to sleep the clock around. Instead he boarded a plane to Carlsbad, New Mexico. The little plane was even more uncomfortable than the transpacific flight had been, but was mercifully brief.

  While Gabe waited for the flight protocol to finish so that the exit door would open, he wished he had a free hand to rub over his face. Three days of stubble—or was it four?—itched. He scratched his chin against his shoulder and wondered if he’d packed a razor. He couldn’t remember. He had lived on the road for so long that time, like place, no longer held a lot of meaning for him. Everything he’d done in the past seven years ran together in his mind.

  Except Lost River Cave.

  Joy had been an innocent twenty to his experienced twenty-three. At least he’d thought he was experienced. Then she had taught him just how little he knew about passion. But he’d been too young to know how rare she was. And she’d been too young, period.

  Though he’d done everything he could for her short of canceling out on his Orinoco contract, she hadn’t been willing to wait even a few months for him to come back.

  Yet she haunted him.

  When he’d hung head-down over a chasm, looking at his own grave two thousand feet below, it had been Joy’s face that came to him, her voice that he heard. He regretted losing her more than he’d ever admitted to himself until that moment, when it was too late.

  In the end, the rope had held.

  So had his regret.

  You’re riding for a fall, fool, he told himself bluntly. Nothing is as good as time and distance make it seem. Especially a woman.

  The weary words echoed in his head without rebuttal. He was too tired to hold up both ends of an inner argument that had no resolution and no end.

  Besides, she’s long gone from New Mexico and Lost River Cave. With her brains and looks she probably married a Greek shipper or a Microsoft millionaire. She sure as hell didn’t hang around a small town like White City waiting for her first lover to come back.

  That Gabe was certain of. There was no listing for a Mr., Mrs., or Ms. Smith-Anderson in Carlsbad or White City. There hadn’t been for at least six years.

  So why am I here? Why did I break my neck to cram in an assignment to a place I’ve already been? I’ve never done that.

  “Have a nice trip, Gabe,” the flight attendant said. She smiled with unusual warmth as her glance roamed over his finger-combed dark hair and wide shoulders. “If you ever get to Dallas, remember to call me, hear?”

  Automatically he responded with a polite smile. “Thank you . . .” What the hell is her name? Cindi? Sandi? Mandi? Mindi? They all run together after a while, times and faces and places. Except one. She’s in my blood like malaria. He focused on the attendant’s name plaque. “Cindi,” he said. “You’ll be at the top of my Dallas list.”

  He heard his own words and winced.

  The attendant didn’t seem to mind being one of a list of things to do. She simply smiled more warmly and touched his arm with searching fingertips, tracing the hard line of muscle beneath.

  It was all Gabe could do not to draw back. He managed to smile at her while he wondered if he was going crazy. The woman was pretty, bright, experienced, and likely came with a USDA stamp of approval on her shapely ass. There was no reason for him to act like a kid getting his first proposition in a back alley.

  “Sorry. Jet lag,” he said as he stepped out of the plane into Carlsbad’s hot, slanting sunlight. “It’s tomorrow where I came from.”

  “Where’s that?” she asked, holding him with her words and fingertips on his sleeve.

  “I don’t remember.”

  She laughed. “So, where are you going?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then why are you going there?”

  “Don’t know that either.”

  She laughed again, then realized he wasn’t quite joking. Reluctantly she let him go. “Be safe, hear?”

  “Thanks. You too.”

  Gabe started down the steep metal steps. Though it was late afternoon, the intense heat of the day radiated back from the cement in waves. He broke into a sweat immediately. His body had spent the last nineteen hours in a temperature that was at least twenty-five degrees cooler than the Carlsbad afternoon. His heartbeat increased as the dry hot air wrapped around him.

  Even while he blamed his accelerating pulse on the heat, part of his mind jeered silently. It was heat all right, but its source wasn’t the sun. It was memories brought on by the unique feel of summer in southern New Mexico, and the first vague smell of the desert seeping through the machine odors of the airport.

  Dryness.

  Sharp scent of creosote.

  The taste of Joy sweeping through him as he kissed her beneath a noon sun that wasn’t nearly as hot as the first touch of her tongue against his.

  A passenger bumped against Gabe. He realized that he was standing at the bottom of the plane’s metal stairway, lost in memory, blocking other people from whatever awaited them inside the artificially cool terminal.

  “Sorry,” he said, stepping aside.

  The man said something in German as he and his five friends hurried off toward the terminal. The eagerness on their faces as they looked at the magnificent desert mountains rising into the late afternoon needed no translation.

  Gabe wished he could feel that way again, a kid at Christmas, the whole world waiting to be explored. But he didn’t feel that way anymore. He didn’t know what he’d been looking for all over the face of the earth. He only knew that he hadn’t found it.

  He followed the group with long strides that helped stretch the kinks out of his body. No one was waiting for him inside the building. He hadn’t expected anyone, because he hadn’t notified the cavers that he was on his way. He didn’t even know who to call. He had left the Philippines before the packet with all the pertinent information about Lost River Cave and its recent explorations and explorers reached him.

  Not that it mattered. He preferred to make up his own mind about the qualifications and personalities of the people he would be writing about. When he read the background information—if he ever did—it would be at the end rather than at the beginning of the assignment.

  He went to the car rental desk, smiled wearily at the bored young woman behind the counter, and found himself being offered the only four-wheel drive she had left. The vehicle had been promised to someone coming in tomorrow, but Gabe was here now, and he had a natural male charm that had melted much colder, harder material than the car rental girl. He paid the extra insurance, thanked the clerk, and headed back into the desert sun.

  A rather shopworn Explorer waited outside, baking in the heat. Gabe started the engine, cranked the air conditioner up to max, and drove into town. Although it had been almost seven years since he had left Carlsbad, he found the post office on the first try.

  That didn’t surprise him. He remembered everything about his time in New Mexico with unnatural clarity, a vividness that tantalized, infuriated, and confused him. He had been so many places. Why should this one be burned into his memory beyond forgetting? There was no reason. No reason at all.

  But there it was just the same. He could see everything in his mi
nd as though it had just happened—the long drives into Carlsbad to pick up the mail, Joy sitting close, watching him with eyes as clear and inviting as spring water welling up from the desert. Joy smiling, Joy touching his hand, Joy, always Joy.

  Cursing silently, Gabe dragged his thoughts away from the past and into the present. Carlsbad, the post office, and all the stuff waiting for him. At least he hoped it was. He had traveled enough to know that anything he didn’t carry on himself couldn’t be counted on to be there at the other end.

  A few minutes later he found out that, as usual, Dan had come through. A package of mail and two trunks were there for him to pick up. Mentally Gabe thanked the older brother who was also his mail drop, business manager, and financial consultant. Without Dan to forward clothes and equipment around the world and keep track of the day-to-day details of the life that Gabe had left behind, it would have been much more difficult for his career to flourish. Thanks to Dan, Gabe could vanish into the unlikely places of earth and return to a clean apartment, paid bills, and mail neatly weeded out to the essential business communications.

  Sometimes Gabe thought that Dan must have been born to organize everyone’s lives. Though Dan had been only twenty, he had taken over the family finances after their father died of a heart attack. He had found the millions of dollars were down to a few threadbare investments. Dan had comforted their mother, and then gone to work with a shrewdness about money and people that had baffled Gabe even as he admired it. When Gabe offered to stay home and work rather than go off to college, neither his mother nor Dan would hear of it. They insisted that he go and have the full college experience.

  But Gabe hadn’t wanted the closed ivy walls of a university. Restless, relentlessly curious about the world, he shipped out with the merchant marines. In the next few years, he discovered a gift for telling the people back home about very different lives abroad. It was the beginning of a hand-to-mouth career as a freelance journalist.

  The Orinoco River assignment had been just what Dan said it would be—the turning point of his career. You can’t flush that for an affair! Shit, brother, if the babe is really in love, she’ll wait a few months. If she isn’t . . . well, better to find out now.