This Time Love

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “Have you climbed since then?” When he didn’t answer immediately, she said. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to pry. It’s just that if you don’t climb anymore, there will be a lot of places in Lost River Cave that—”

  “It’s all right,” he said matter-of-factly, cutting across her apology. “As soon as I physically could, I went back. That mountain took a lot from me and gave me only questions in return. I didn’t want it to take my self-respect too.”

  Even as he said the words, Gabe knew that was why he’d been driven to return to Lost River Cave. Somehow, in some way that he didn’t understand, he’d lost or left behind something of himself here. He didn’t know what it was or if it could be regained. He only knew that he had to find out.

  As the silence lengthened, Joy wished she could see his face. She wanted to ask what he was thinking. She wanted to understand him with an intensity that shocked her.

  When she’d been with Gabe seven years ago, she hadn’t felt it was necessary to share his mind, his fears, and his hopes, or to have him share hers. The mere presence of him had been overwhelming, like the moment when she’d pushed through the tight crawlway called Gotcha and found herself within the murmurous beauty of the Voices. That instant had so saturated her senses that she hadn’t been able to think at all. She’d simply felt the immensity of the room, seen its beauty shimmering in the sweeping cone of her light, and heard its eerie, extraordinary voices whispering in the velvet darkness.

  She hadn’t thought of the forces that had shaped the chamber or the explorations awaiting her. She didn’t consider the dangers or the sheer hard work and unexpected rewards of surveying the new chamber. She didn’t even think about the possibility that this room would lead to other rooms, other passages, other instants of overwhelming discovery. All of those thoughts had come later, after she’d absorbed the Voices into herself, growing and changing to meet the challenges of her discovery.

  There hadn’t been any “later” for her when it came to Gabe. There hadn’t been any chance to absorb and grow and change to meet his challenges. There had been only the incredible rush of discovery, the sweet, hot, wild moments within his arms, and the endless chill of his loss.

  Losing him had been like being caught down in Lost River Cave with no more than a few matches to light her way. That had happened to her once. As part of her training in cave exploration she’d been left alone in one of Lost River Cave’s smallest rooms, with only seven matches for light. She’d managed to grope her way back to the entrance, but she’d never forgotten how unfamiliar the cave had become, how distorted by darkness and fear.

  It was a lesson she learned very well. Never again did she enter a cave—no matter for how short a time—without thoroughly checking her light sources.

  In the same manner she’d groped her way out of darkness and fear after Gabe left and her parents died. She’d learned from that too. Not once in the days and weeks and years since then had she allowed herself to trust and love another human being enough that his absence would cast her adrift in darkness without light or hope of it.

  Only Kati had slipped inside her guard.

  Only Kati, Gabe’s daughter, a little girl whose smile was like her father’s, lighting up any darkness.

  For an instant Joy wanted to tell him about Kati, about the life that he’d so casually spurned. It wasn’t the first time the impulse had come to her. Often in the past six years she’d wanted to send pictures to him, to share with him the trivial and transcendent moments of raising his child.

  She’d never given in to the impulse before.

  She didn’t now.

  Seven years ago Gabe hadn’t been interested in anything but the sensual moment and the long term of his career. He’d had no room in his life or his mind or his heart for the woman who loved him. How much less would he have been interested in a baby who at first needed rather than gave love?

  After Gabe met Kati, if he asked who her father was, Joy would tell him the truth. No man was Kati’s father, except in the briefest, most meaningless sense: sperm donor.

  The instant of conception wasn’t the enduring relationship known as fatherhood.

  When Kati turned eighteen, Joy would tell her who her biological father was. Until then, Kati would have no father except in her own dreams. It was better that way. Dreams were kinder than reality. It would crush Kati to know that her father had never wanted her to be born.

  As for Gabe . . . he’d made his choice seven years ago. Joy had lived with it.

  He had no right to complain.

  “The next part starts out easy,” she said, turning away from him, leaving him in darkness. “There’s a steep scramble down, about a hundred feet of stooping, and then the ceiling pitches way down. Thirty feet later you’re into Gotcha.”

  She hesitated. Never in the time she’d known Gabe had he showed any hint of claustrophobia. But that might have changed, like the change from a Gabe who rarely noticed other people’s feelings to the man who not only saw Maggie’s hurt but tried to ease it.

  In Gotcha’s tight passage claustrophobia could be fatal.

  She turned back toward him. “Are you at all uneasy in close places?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure? I found another way into the Voices, but it takes forty-five minutes and involves a vertical drop of one hundred and seven feet at the end.”

  “I’m sure. But if you’re worried, take me the long way around.”

  That surprised Joy. Seven years ago he would have insisted on going through Gotcha just to prove that he could. And he would have been able to. Then, as now, he was both supple and strong.

  In silence Joy moved her light slowly across Gabe’s body, as though measuring him against both her memories of the past and the needs of the present.

  “You’re not as thick as Davy,” she said, “but you sure are wide in the shoulders. Wider than I remem—” She stopped in mid-word, jerking back from the black pit that was the past.

  “I spent a lot of time living outdoors, exploring rough country.” He shrugged. “Strength was just one more survival tool.”

  “Living on the edge.”

  He started to disagree, then shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so. Adrenaline, the young man’s drug of choice.” He shook his head, remembering. “Hard to believe we all survive it.”

  Joy didn’t say anything. She could see for herself that Gabe wasn’t young like that anymore. The years of testing himself against the land had left him with a strength and physical assurance that was both reassuring and oddly exciting.

  That hadn’t changed. Gabriel Venture was an exciting man. He would still be exciting when he was sixty.

  Abruptly she turned away. “Gotcha it is. I’ll go through first and take our equipment. Then I’ll come back and follow you through.”

  “Why?”

  “So if you get stuck I can pull you out.”

  “You?”

  “Believe it. I pulled Davy out once.”

  “Impossible,” Gabe said, not bothering to hide his laughter. “You’re too small.”

  “You’ll laugh up the other sleeve after I yank you out of the third angle and get you headed straight again.”

  “Small but tough.”

  There was no laughter in his voice now. He was remembering what she’d gone through when she was barely twenty. Yes, she was tough. He’d known grown men who went under trying to carry less of an emotional load than she’d shouldered through her twentieth year.

  “I’ll try not to get stuck on you,” he said. Then he realized his words could be taken more than one way.

  Before he could say anything more, she did. “Don’t worry. I’m a champion unsticker and you’re a champion eel. Gotcha’s little games will be no problem at all for us.”

  She walked off quickly. With the ease of long experience, she picked her way between the tapes across the uneven, often slick, downward-slanting floor. She kept her light pointed at the orange tape rather than glancing around at t
he cave formations that were appearing more and more often.

  It was harder for Gabe to stay focused between the orange lines, but he didn’t complain. He followed her at his own pace. He could have gone faster, but didn’t. It was stupid to hurry through unknown territory for no better reason than the watch on his wrist. Accidents happened that way, and regrets.

  He’d made enough mistakes in the past to learn that it was much easier to do it right the first time than to try to undo errors in the midst a storm of if onlys.

  “Pit ahead,” she said.

  “How deep?”

  “Bo Peep’s just a middling drop. Under forty feet. Straight down, though. Doesn’t go anywhere useful that we’ve discovered. Doesn’t blow, either.”

  “Blow?”

  “Air movement. Cavers have a saying: If it blows, it goes. Bo Peep doesn’t blow and doesn’t go.”

  They skirted the pit’s black mouth.

  The farther down they went, the more signs of moisture there were—dampness on the walls, patches of very fine-grained mud between rocks, the vague glistening of stone surfaces. Every gleam of moisture proved the cave was alive, limestone dissolving and forming again in a new shape, drop by drop, millennia by millennia.

  Beneath their feet, the cave was a mosaic of rubble and slick spots where water dripped and formations grew. Gabe wanted to stop and examine some of the cave decorations that his light revealed, but Joy showed no sign of slowing down.

  Something at the edge of his light kept sparkling like a veil of diamonds. He opened his mouth to ask for a few minutes to look around, then shut it without a word. There would be time later to question and explore the fine details of Lost River Cave. For now it was more important to get some idea of its broader outline.

  Joy’s light stopped, then swept back over the cave floor to Gabe’s feet. “Everything okay?”

  “Just got caught in some of the small details.”

  Her smile gleamed beneath her helmet light. “Hard not to. There are galleries I could show you no bigger than a doll’s theater and so beautifully decorated in miniature you’re sure fairies go there to dance.”

  “Do you have file photos of those special places, or should I bring my camera next time?”

  “We have more photos than you have pages to write about them.”

  “No problem sharing a few of them with the magazine?”

  “Shouldn’t be.”

  “Good,” he said, coming up to stand beside her. “I can cover a lot more ground if I’m not stopping every few seconds to take an irresistible photo.”

  She laughed. “You sound like Gina, one of the grad students we can’t afford anymore. She was a video nut whose husband was a video wizard. She had a digital camera that could do everything but make dinner.”

  “Really? What kind? I’m always on the lookout for a good camera.”

  “Ask Davy. He keeps all the digital info for his maps.”

  Joy moved her headlamp away from Gabe to the trail ahead. It was a steep scramble over flowstone, rubble, and breakdown that had fallen so long ago it was sprouting stalagmites like beard stubble. There was a sling anchorage for the belayer and a rope that had been used by the three cavers who had gone ahead to the Voices.

  Unlike the first descent into the cave, this pitch was narrow, water-smoothed, and had almost no reliable hand- or footholds. Here belaying was not only a safety precaution, it was a necessity. The chance of somebody slipping—especially somebody unfamiliar with the cave—was about one hundred percent.

  Silently they prepared for the descent. Joy snapped herself into the anchor sling, settled in for the belay, and waited.

  “Belay on?” Gabe asked.

  “On belay.”

  “Ready to climb.”

  “Climb,” she said, bracing herself subtly.

  “Climbing.”

  For a time she could hear the soft scuff of his feet as he walked backward into darkness. Those small noises disappeared beneath the whispering sound of rope moving over her clothing when she fed out more of the coil as he needed it.

  From where she sat she couldn’t even see the glow of his lamp. He had dropped down over the lip so swiftly that he was invisible to her. Only the change in tension on the rope feeding through her hands told her that she wasn’t alone. She felt smooth pulls and then sudden lurches when he lost his footing for an instant. Each time he regained his balance almost as soon as she realized it had been lost.

  But not before her heartbeat raced. She found herself straining to hear the least noise, to sense the slightest change in the pressure on the rope.

  Gabe could feel Joy’s attention in her deft handling of the rope that helped him keep his balance. The steeply slanting rock face in front of his light showed faint traces of other boots. It also showed the glisten and shine of fresh moisture, the—

  Suddenly his feet shot out from under him. In a heartbeat he was back on the deadly mountain again, hurtling out into the void while rocks and the screams of men battered him.

  “Falling!”

  Fourteen

  ALMOST IMMEDIATELY THE ROPE HOLDING GABE WENT taut, ending his fall. Even so, it took him a moment to understand that he was in Lost River Cave, not on a Peruvian mountain, that he was dangling from Joy’s hands rather than from a piton hammered deep into stone, and that there was a steep, smooth slope rather than a two-thousand-foot drop beneath his feet.

  Cold sweat slicked his skin. Adrenaline slammed through him. His chest was an aching void that both demanded and resisted breath.

  With the discipline that had kept him alive more than once in the past, he brought his body and mind back under control. He turned himself until he was facing the wet, gleaming rock. An instant later he was supporting his own weight.

  “Climbing,” he called up to Joy.

  “Climb.”

  She hoped that Gabe couldn’t hear the relief in her voice. It wasn’t just that he hadn’t hurt himself—as long as the belay held, he hadn’t been in any real danger. But after what had happened in Peru, she knew that he must have a bone-deep horror of falling. To feel himself out of control again, even for an instant, must have been terrifying.

  Yet he’d kept his head, found his footing again, and resumed the climb as though nothing had happened.

  Joy understood the kind of courage and determination required to overcome helplessness and raw fear. Once, three years ago, Kati had wandered alone into the desert picking wildflowers. Before Joy found her again, she discovered just how much she loved her little daughter.

  It had been a terrifying discovery.

  Until that instant Joy had believed that she would never love again—not like that, her whole being hostage to another life, a life that could be taken in an instant, leaving her alone once more.

  The rope went slack in Joy’s fingers.

  “Off belay,” Gabe called.

  Her answer floated down in the darkness to him. “Belay off.”

  A few moments later the upward-tilted lamp from Gabe’s helmet washed over the smooth, steep pitch. The small, gliding figure of Joy moved through light and darkness with dreamlike ease. When she touched the cave floor beside him, she gave him a quick glance and a reassuring smile before she led him deeper into Lost River Cave.

  As he followed her, he found himself at first intrigued, then fascinated by her grace and assurance. He’d been with many men in many wild lands, but he’d never met anyone who so completely accepted a place for what it was. She didn’t so much conquer the cave as slide between its spaces, its unique possibilities.

  It wasn’t her strength that gave her access to the cave’s secrets, but her finesse. She knew herself, knew her equipment, knew her own abilities and limitations.

  At twenty she’d been much more impulsive, much less accepting of the idea that she couldn’t do anything and everything.

  When she was twenty he never would have stepped off backward over a slippery stone lip while she held his life in her hands. It had a
lways been the reverse. He had belayed her. She had trusted him.

  The insight all but paralyzed him. Like the moment when he had first seen Joy’s delicate features in the shadow of Davy’s naked strength, Gabe felt as though he’d taken a blow to his gut.

  Why should she trust you now, fool? asked the sardonic part of his mind, the part that hadn’t let up on him since he’d crawled off that deadly mountain in Peru.

  But I never meant to hurt her.

  Bloody wonderful. Bet that just comforted her no end when her parents died. Bet it helped her all to hell at the abortion clinic too.

  He stumbled and nearly went full-length on the cold stone.

  “Gabe?” she asked, hearing the scrambling sound behind her.

  “I’m fine,” he said curtly.

  With a savage inner curse, he controlled his thoughts and his body, focusing his attention on the demands of Lost River Cave’s uneven surface rather than on the pitiless, unreachable past.

  “Ceiling’s coming down,” she said.

  “Fan-fucking-tastic,” he said under his breath.

  “What?”

  “Oh frabjous day!” he amended quickly.

  “Callooh! Callay!” she retorted, smiling.

  He laughed. “You remember ‘Jabberwocky.’ “

  “I read it at least twice a week,” she said, ducking around a stalactite that had left more than one gouge on her helmet.

  “Anyone ever tell you that you have unusual taste in reading material?”

  She caught herself just before she said Through the Looking Glass was one of Kati’s favorites. “It’s a break from chemistry monographs.”

  Gabe’s answer was a grunt because he was duckwalking again, grateful for every one of the viciously painful exercises the physical therapist had given him after the mountain had nearly killed him. Now, despite the strain of the awkward movements forced on him by the cave, his left side wasn’t much worse off than his right.

  It was small comfort, but better than no comfort at all.

  The farther he went into the cave, the more he understood why Joy didn’t use a backpack. Every time he tried to shift position to take the strain off his quads, the backpack snagged on the ceiling.