This Time Love

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “Be sure to get her young, before she grows teeth,” Joy shot back, stung by the knowledge that Gabe had come back for the cave, not for her. “Otherwise you’ll wake up with fangs in your throat.”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “Actually, I’d prefer that you not wake up at all.”

  Even as the furious words left her mouth, Joy knew that they weren’t true. She remembered her pain when she found out that Gabe had been badly injured, dangling at the edge of death in a foreign hospital. Whatever else he was or wasn’t, whatever his accomplishments and failings, this man was the father of her child.

  “I’m sorry.” Her voice was like her. Empty. “I didn’t really mean that.”

  “You could have fooled me.”

  “Not as easily as you once fooled me,” she retorted. When she saw anger burn across his cheekbones, she said almost desperately, “Gabe, this has to stop. We both have a job to do, and to get it done we’ll have to go down into Lost River Cave together. If we’re slashing away at each other, it won’t work. You can’t go down into darkness with someone you don’t trust.”

  “Oh, I trust you all right.” His voice was cold enough to burn. He was thinking about the abortion she’d purchased with his money. Not being a single mother must have made it a lot easier for her to work her way up the academic ladder. “You won’t let anything personal get in the way of something important like your career.”

  Joy’s eyes narrowed. She started to speak, but he was still talking, still ripping strips from her pride.

  “Without me,” he said distinctly, “you don’t have a snowflake’s chance in hell of getting more money for Lost River Cave, Dr. Anderson. When I’m on a rope down there, I know you’ll take very good care of me.”

  “How odd that you see me only in terms of yourself.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that you’re exactly what you accused me of being—someone who puts career first and everything else last.”

  Her words slid through his angry defenses like light slicing through darkness. But unlike darkness, Gabe felt pain.

  It made him furious that she of all people had the ability to hurt him. She was the woman who had casually aborted his child. She knew nothing about love.

  Who was she to lecture him?

  “But none of that matters,” she continued, her voice unnaturally calm. “We’re adults. We should be able to control ourselves long enough to get this job done.”

  Gabe bit back any reference to her abortion. If he opened that subject, he damn sure wouldn’t be able to keep the discussion civilized, much less adult. It had happened years ago. He should be over it—and her.

  But he wasn’t.

  “Does that mean you trust me?” he asked after a long silence.

  “As long as it’s directly related to your career, yes,” she said, turning away wearily.

  For the first time Gabe saw the blue-black bruise spreading from Joy’s elbow to her shoulder. He forgot the angry words crowding his tongue and remembered the moment when his fingers had closed over her arms and she had cried out in pain.

  “Joy.” His voice was hoarse with exhaustion and helpless agony that the beauty of the past should have become so ugly in the present. “Your arm.”

  Surprised, she looked down at herself. The firestorm of her emotions had overwhelmed the pain signals from her bruised flesh.

  “Is there any ice inside?” he asked. “I’ll get a towel and wrap—”

  “Don’t bother,” Joy said, walking away from him, back into the peace and loneliness of her empty cottage. “I was bruised long before you arrived.”

  The door to the house swung shut, leaving Gabe alone on the porch. Exhaustion, pain, and futility closed around him more darkly than any night.

  Nine

  THE NEXT MORNING GABE WALKED THROUGH BLINDING desert light to the shadowed heat of Joy’s back porch. Fourteen hours of sleep had restored his usual self-discipline, even though the hours had been as riddled with dreams as Lost River Cave was with hidden passages. But unlike the cave, there had been no beauty in his dreams, simply shapes looming out of darkness, voices calling his name in anguish and passion and regret.

  And hatred.

  That was a new voice added to old dreams, a cold thread of darkness stitching through remembered light.

  Deliberately Gabe turned his attention away from his emotions and toward his work. Four people were already in the screened porch and spilling out into the yard. One of them was Joy. She was sorting through caving gear and teasing Davy about needing whale oil to get through Gotcha.

  The honey-and-sunlight flash of Joy’s short hair was like a beacon to Gabe’s eyes. With an effort he controlled a rush of warring emotions. He was a professional. An adult. It was time for him to pull his head out of the painful past and concentrate on the present.

  His work was all he had left.

  He paused, gathering first impressions of the people he would go caving with and write about. Davy looked as big in daylight as he had in darkness. Though only a few inches taller than Gabe, the grad student was nearly half again as thick. His broad, blunt hands made the climbing ropes look frail.

  The young woman standing next to Davy came up to his jawbone and was as generously built for a woman as Davy was for a man. Like the black bikini she wore, the word “statuesque” barely covered the tall redhead’s presence. Gabe hoped that she was keeping Davy’s mind—and hands—off Joy. The redhead looked like all the woman any one man could handle, and then some.

  The third person looked vaguely familiar. Medium tall, compact, wiry, athletic build, a face that was both shrewd and calm. It was the mechanic from last night, the one who had directed him to Joy’s cottage. Gabe searched his memory for the man’s name. It’s something odd for a desert man—Waters? Finn? No, but close. Fish. That’s it.

  Fish was tinkering with a battery pack. Sweat gleamed on his naked back as he bent over a toolbox. He looked up as Gabe opened the porch door.

  “Mornin’, stranger.” Fish stood and held out his hand. “Sorry I wasn’t real sociable last night. That old generator can be right trying at times. Other one is even worse.”

  Smiling, Gabe shook Fish’s hand. “I wasn’t feeling real talkative myself. One way or another, I’d been on the road for seventy-three hours just to get here.”

  “Myanmar or Cambodia?”

  “Yeah. Via the Philippines.” He gave Fish a searching look. “How did you know?”

  “Come in from halfway around the world once or twice myself when I was in the service.” The skin around his brown eyes crinkled in an almost invisible smile. “Took damn near eighty hours the last time. That’s when I decided being a world traveler was a mighty big pain in the butt. I mustered out, bought into a service station in Carlsbad, and commenced swearing at machines other than airplanes.”

  “He’s real good at it, too,” the tall redhead put in. “You ever want something talked to, you just holler for Fish.”

  “Now you know I never spoke poorly to nothing that didn’t have it comin’,” Fish drawled. He looked at Maggie. “You met Gabe yet?”

  “Nope.” She looked up from a pile of coveralls and smiled. “Hi.”

  “This here is Gabe Venture,” Fish said. “Gabe, Maggie O’Mara.” Fish winked at Gabe. “If you go to fallin’ down in that cave, you just be sure this here gal is underneath when you land. She come factory equipped with some right nice cushions.”

  “Whisper it, Fish. Davy might hear,” Maggie said. She looked over her shoulder to where Davy was carefully coiling ropes. “If that mountain of muscle fell on me, I’d flatten like a drop of water.”

  Davy smiled slightly but otherwise ignored the teasing.

  Gabe held out his hand to Maggie.

  “Are you really Gabriel Venture, the writer?” she asked, taking his hand. Her eyes were wide. Disbelief was clear in her voice.

  “Disappointed?” he said.

&nbs
p; “No way! I expected you to be old and ugly. You’re a long way from either.” Grinning, she looked at him with open approval.

  “You’re half right,” Gabe said.

  “Which half?”

  “Both. I’m half old and half ugly. Looks like you got my shares of young and beautiful.”

  “Oh, I’m falling in love.” Maggie gasped theatrically, staggered, and clutched the general area of her heart.

  “Don’t fall on me,” Joy said crisply, stepping out of the way. “I don’t have any cushioning to speak of.”

  Davy looked up suddenly. “Now that just isn’t true.” He gave Joy a brief, intense look before he went back to wrapping a rope. “Some cushions just aren’t as stuffed as others.”

  Maggie turned quickly and confronted Davy, her fists on her firm hips. “Are you calling me overstuffed?”

  He glanced up again, smiling. “Do I look like a man with a death wish?”

  She feinted with her fist. He blocked it with his broad upper arm. Her fist smacked against his biceps. It was a teasing blow, hard enough to be felt but not hard enough to hurt.

  “Someday, shrimp,” she taunted, “I’ll take you home to meet some really big men. Roy would make two of you, and he’s my smallest brother.”

  Davy cocked a blond eyebrow at Maggie, handed her a tangle of rope, and said, “Since you aren’t decorative, be useful.”

  Joy thought that she was the only one who sensed Maggie’s flash of hurt at Davy’s words. Then she turned and caught Gabe looking thoughtfully from Maggie to Davy.

  Gabe’s sensitivity surprised Joy. She didn’t remember him as being aware of other people’s emotional nuances—unless his family was involved. Or sex. Then he had an instinct as hypersensitive as a seismograph. Maybe that was why he was tuned in to Maggie. Maybe he wanted her.

  When I want a female viper I’ll go out in the desert and get one.

  Be sure to get her young, before she grows teeth.

  Maggie was fresh and young, the way Joy once had been.

  The thought slashed through her, catching her unaware with its raw pain. Echoes of last night broke around her, cutting her with razor edges.

  Sharp-tongued. Flat-lipped. As much joy in you as a squeezed lemon. Female viper.

  “Don’t listen to him, Maggie,” Gabe said in a casual, teasing voice. “You’re a knockout and Davy is just too tongue-tied to admit it.”

  Maggie didn’t look up from the rope she was wrapping. “Nice try, but I know better.” Her voice was almost casual. Almost, but not quite. “I’ve spent my whole life with five older brothers telling me what I look like. I know I’m ‘overbuilt and under-pretty.’ “ She hesitated and smiled up at Gabe almost shyly. “But thanks anyway. It was nice to hear.”

  Davy’s intense blue eyes narrowed and he looked at Maggie as though seeing her for the first time, hearing the wistfulness and sensitivity beneath the constant clowning that was her usual manner.

  Gabe, too, heard the vulnerability in her voice. “You tell your brothers they wouldn’t know pretty if it tripped them and laid them out flat. You’re more than pretty, Maggie. As for being overbuilt,” Gabe grinned, “I don’t know a woman who wouldn’t kill to be put together like you.”

  “Amen,” Fish muttered.

  “Such wonderful lies.” Maggie sighed deeply, clowning again, but this time there was pleasure rather than wistfulness running through her voice. “Or maybe you’ve just been out in the wilds too long?” she teased, slanting a blue-green glance at Gabe.

  “Don’t slander him,” Joy said. “Didn’t you know he’s a world-class expert on women? And his specialty is the barely twenty girls. A real connoisseur of them.”

  Joy heard her own words and all but winced at what they revealed. She would have to guard her tongue so that her bitterness wouldn’t seep out like acid with every word she spoke. It wasn’t Maggie’s fault that Gabe was gentle with her and cold with his former lover. It wasn’t Maggie’s fault that she was young, stunning, and innocent, and that Joy was not.

  So Joy smiled brilliantly, turned to face Gabe’s glittering green eyes, and discovered just how angry her crack had made him. Her eyes stared back at him, as transparent as spring water—and as cold.

  “I know you’re very experienced in many areas,” she said, speaking in a casual, low voice that belied the clear ice of her eyes, “but it’s been a long time since you were in a cave, so I—”

  “Six years, eleven months and thirty days,” Gabe cut in.

  He gave her a smile that lowered the temperature on the hot porch by about half. When he saw the look of surprise on her face echoed on Maggie’s and Davy’s, he half turned to them.

  “Oh, yes,” Gabe said softly, including everyone in his words without releasing Joy. “I remember to the exact day how long it’s been. Lost River Cave was a unique experience for me.”

  “Why?” Maggie said. “I mean, you’ve been everywhere.”

  He answered without looking away from Joy. “Yes. I’ve climbed some of the world’s tallest mountains until I blacked out from lack of oxygen. I’ve nearly drowned in the warm storms of some very exotic seas. I’ve come close to succumbing to the hot seductions of a few deadly jungle flowers. But I have never been as fooled by anything as I was by the transparency of Lost River Cave’s waters. So pure, so perfect, so innocent, seeming no deeper than my hand.” The line of his mouth was grim. “But if you believe that innocent, sweet, deceptive surface, you’ll stumble in and drown. If you don’t freeze to death first.”

  Fish gave Gabe a swift, shrewd glance and went back to tinkering with the battery box.

  Joy saw the look and felt heat rise on her cheeks. Fish knew that Gabe was talking about exploring women as well as landscapes.

  And so did she.

  She supposed she deserved it for her crack about connoisseurs and twenty-year-olds. The fact that her words were true didn’t make the comment any less acid.

  But he had no right to call her deceitful and cold. She’d never lied to him, and Kati was living proof of a heat that still haunted Joy’s dreams.

  “Since you’re aware that what little you know about Lost River Cave isn’t trustworthy,” Joy said into the silence, “you won’t object to being treated as a total novice.”

  “Would objecting do any good?” Gabe asked.

  “No.”

  His smile was a razor slash of white. “Then by all means, Dr. Anderson, teach me whatever you think you can.”

  Davy looked up sharply, disliking Gabe’s tone. “Why don’t I show Gabe the ropes?” he said to Joy. “We can catch up with you later in the cave. Or maybe you should stay here this morning. Your arm must be giving you fits.”

  Gabe remembered the instant when he’d grabbed Joy and she gasped in pain. He turned to her with a swift, almost violent movement. “Is it still bothering you? Didn’t you put any ice on it?”

  “There wasn’t any.”

  “Let me see your arm.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “The hell it is,” he said. “I’ll have a look at it, Dr. Anderson, or I’ll know the reason why. If you think I’m trusting my life on a rope with a belayer whose arm is half dead, you’re—”

  “I’m not a fool, Mr. Venture,” she cut in. She pushed up the sleeve of her loose gauze shirt. “I wouldn’t go caving at the risk of someone else’s life. Even yours.”

  Gabe swallowed his response to her last words and looked carefully at her arm. The bruise that had seemed so huge last night looked much better this morning. Without the added dark streaks of mud and the livid color that came from cold, it was obvious that the bruise wasn’t serious. She would be able to go caving safely. The blue-black area was barely half the size of his palm.

  What made seeing it like a blow to Gabe was the fact that there were two blurred yet unmistakable bars where his fingers had closed over the bruise, further damaging the tender flesh. He’d only meant to help her stand up, but instead he’d hurt her.

  Very
delicately he stroked his fingertips over the discolored skin, seeking any hard knots that would point to true injury.

  There weren’t any.

  He cupped the bruise gently against his palm, restraining Joy with a hand on her wrist when she would have flinched away.

  “I’ll be careful of you,” he said calmly, watching her gray eyes, seeing the pupils expand, sensing the sudden intake of her breath. “I just want to see if it’s hot.” He ran first his palm, then the back of his hand, then his fingertips down her arm from shoulder to wrist. “Feels fine,” he said, his voice husky. Then, too softly for anyone but her to hear, “Very fine.”

  Joy felt her pulse accelerate and knew that in another instant he would feel it too. She wanted to snatch her wrist from his grip, but didn’t. Yanking herself back from his touch would be as revealing as anything she could do except slap him . . . or return the caressing motion of his fingers with her own.

  “Are you taking notes, Davy?” Her voice was light, her eyes icy. “This is how a connoisseur acts. Of course I’m not twenty, I don’t have a shape other women would kill for, and I’m, shall we say, shopworn, but Mr. Venture is willing to overlook a few defects in the interests of civil intercourse.”

  When Joy heard the rage seething beneath each cold word, she wished she had bitten her tongue before she opened her mouth. She was afraid that the others would sense her fury and wonder why.

  Gabe certainly had sensed it, and knew precisely why. Yet despite the answering contempt in his eyes, his touch remained gentle on her wrist and arm.

  She had a crazy impulse to tell him that she understood, that she knew he wouldn’t have grabbed her arm last night if he’d seen the bruise. But saying that would reveal too much to him.

  And to the other people.

  She could fairly feel everyone’s curiosity about her reaction to Gabe. In all the time she’d worked with them, she’d never showed anger, no matter what happened.

  “Well,” she said, “I’m afraid our secret is out.” She rushed on before the surprise in his hard green eyes could translate into words. Forcing a wry smile, she looked over her shoulder at the other three people. “You see, Gabriel Venture and I struck sparks off each other seven years ago. Obviously that hasn’t changed. But we didn’t let it get in the way of caving then, and it won’t get in the way now.” She looked back at him. “Will it, Gabe.”