This Time Love

by Elizabeth Lowell

  She laughed. “Then make like a snake and slither on by.”

  As she spoke, she put her arms above her head and rolled onto her side with her back to the tunnel wall, giving him all the space she could. He didn’t wait for a second invitation. Facing her, arms above his head, his body turned partway on his side, he began his snake act.

  There was barely enough room. He was squeezed between stone and the much more forgiving surface of Joy’s body. Even through layers of muddy clothes, he felt the flexibility and the softness of her. He even felt the laughter rippling through her.

  And then he sensed the sudden, hot instant when she went utterly still, feeling him pressed against her from her forehead to her toes.

  “Joy,” he whispered.

  Trapped between the chill of the stone and the warmth of his body, she couldn’t move as his mouth closed over hers. And even if she could have moved, she wouldn’t have. As his tongue teased her lips, fire exploded through her so hotly she thought she must be radiating like a light stick twisted in his hands.

  The knowledge that she could still respond to a man was as overwhelming to Joy as the instant when she’d found herself half dangling over darkness with nothing but Gabe’s hands to anchor her. She made a sound that could have been his name as he teased open her lips, asking for further exploration, a deeper intimacy.

  She didn’t deny him or herself. The heat and taste of him swept over her senses. She forgot where she was, forgot that he was the man who had left her behind while he chased the lure of discovery throughout the world. She forgot everything but the sweet, hot presence of him inside her mouth.

  With an incoherent sound she pressed against him, giving herself to the kiss, regretting only that she couldn’t put her arms around him and hold him as completely as she had in her dreams.

  After the first few moments of mutual exploration, Gabe felt his own control burning out of his grasp. He wanted to do so much, feel so much, share so much, and he couldn’t even put his arms around her. His mouth bit into hers, straining to be closer to her warmth. When she made a soft, eager sound in the back of her throat, it felt like the stone caught fire around him.

  He called her name, demand and apology at once. He hadn’t meant to come to her like this, half wild, control slipping away with each small movement of her tongue over his, his mind reeling and his body shaking, starved for her. Slowly, sinuously, his whole body caressed her while he searched every texture of her mouth with his tongue.

  She felt the strength and urgency of his passion in every movement of his powerful body. She made a sound of frustration and hunger, wanting to be able to touch him, to hold the heat and arousal of him. She needed to feel his skin sliding against hers, all of it, hot and sleek and utterly naked. It was the only way to reassure herself that this wasn’t a dream, that she was awake and wholly alive for the first time in seven years.

  With a low moan she moved against him, returning the twisting caresses of his body, not holding back any her response. She’d never been able to deny him or herself, even in her deepest dreams.

  His teeth delicately ravaged her lips. He whispered her name again and again in a litany of joy while he licked her mouth with tiny, hot strokes, savoring and caressing her.

  “I used to wake up shaking after I’d dreamed of you,” he said. “I’m shaking now but I’m not dreaming. Tell me I’m not dreaming.”

  Dreaming. Yes.

  Her dream.

  His.

  But this wasn’t a dream.

  Reality broke over Joy in a cold wave. She shuddered convulsively. She would have pulled away but there was nowhere for her to go. There was rock pressing against her and there was Gabe. That was all.

  Dream and nightmare combined.

  “Joy?” he asked, sensing her withdrawal even though she couldn’t move anywhere but closer to him.

  “I . . .” Her voice came apart on another shudder.

  He kissed her mouth with ravishing tenderness, sipping at her lips and tongue as he wanted to sip at the tips of her breasts. And then his tongue filled her mouth her mouth the way he wanted to fill her body, stroking her slowly, deeply.

  Rings of pleasure expanded through her, shimmered, threatened to burst. She’d been wrong, so very wrong. She was capable of responding sensually to a man—as long as that man was Gabriel Venture.

  Somehow she managed to turn her head aside.

  “Don’t,” she said, her voice shaking. Her breath caught when his body moved over hers again and rings of pleasure burst into shimmering light within her. “Ahhh, Gabe . . . stop. You don’t know what you’re doing to me.”

  “I hope it’s half of what you’re doing to me.” His voice was ragged, husky, rich with the extraordinary pleasure of touching Joy again. His hips moved sinuously, hotly, caressing her.

  “Please,” she said wildly. “Don’t. Stop teasing me. I haven’t been with a man since you left me!”

  He froze, unable to believe what he was hearing. He’d never touched, ever, a woman half so sensual, so responsive as Joy. It was unbelievable that she’d denied herself the physical pleasure she so clearly hungered for.

  “Why?” he asked, his voice hoarse.

  She wondered how she could tell him that a man’s touch, any man’s touch, hadn’t moved her, even when she’d been determined to go out and get pregnant with the sibling Kati so desperately wanted.

  “I tried, God how I tried, but I couldn’t respond,” Joy said. “When a man touched me, I’d miss you even more. It was like rope whipping through my hands, out of control, burning me. Finally I just—gave up.”

  Emotion speared through Gabe, light through darkness, defining him even as it changed him. He remembered the times he’d taken a woman in the hope of filling the emptiness expanding inside him, a hollowness where nothing existed. And each time the nothingness had been worse, the void deeper, wider, more complete, growing until he sensed it would devour him and he would live forever in the dark emptiness.

  That was when he’d stopped seeking women at all.

  Now, finally, he understood why. When he’d joined his body with Joy’s the first time, he’d wanted to equal her generous sensuality, to melt her to her bones so that she’d never be touched by anyone without remembering him.

  It had been just like that. Hot. Perfect. Enduring.

  And it had worked both ways.

  Never again had he touched another woman without remembering Joy, remembering as her loss ate deeper into his soul, emptiness growing.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered, brushing her lips with his breath, his tongue. And then, in a ragged rush, “No, I’m not sorry. I should be, but I’m not. I’ve missed you in ways you’ll never know, in ways I’m only just discovering. Whatever I did to you I did to myself too. I just didn’t know it, didn’t understand.”

  Joy could no more speak than she could pull back from him. She was suspended between the passionate present and the bleak pain of past betrayal. She was falling, falling, falling . . . and the regret in Gabe’s anguished voice was a safety rope burning against her body as she fell.

  She didn’t know if he could hold the rope, stop her fall. Or if she wanted him to. If she wanted her life held within his hands again.

  Her watch alarm cheeped urgently, startling both of them.

  Gabe drew a deep breath, pinning her intimately between his aroused body and the stone wall of the tunnel.

  “Time to go home?” he asked, trying and failing to make his voice calm.

  “There’s still time for you to have a look at the new cavern,” she said, controlling her breathing with an effort. “A very fast look.”

  “How much time?”

  “A minute. Maybe mo—”

  She didn’t have a chance to finish. Gabe tilted his head and found her mouth again, blending their bodies together in the only way he could right now.

  The kiss was different from those he’d given her before. There was flaring passion, yes, but there was something
more, something both tender and enduring, apologies and promises spoken in silence, a warmth that went beyond the cold stone passage wrapped around both of them.

  After more than a minute he slowly, reluctantly, ended the kiss.

  In stunned silence Joy felt him slide past her, moving back toward the Voices, moving away from the newly discovered room. Automatically she followed him, working backward by reflex and experience, for her mind was still spinning around a fact more incredible to her than the discovery of her own renewed capacity for passion.

  Gabe had stayed in the tunnel to kiss her rather than going on to see the undiscovered territory just beyond the stone overhang. He never would have done that seven years ago.

  She could barely believe he’d done it now.

  Twenty-two

  A FEW HOURS LATER, ARMS LOADED WITH GRITTY CAVING gear, Joy and Gabe wearily climbed the steps up to her screened porch. Behind them the desert’s hot, brilliant sunlight filled the air to bursting. Around them Cottonwood Wells was completely silent. Everyone else had stayed at the cave to grab a few more precious hours.

  Joy would have stayed, but she had too much paperwork to do up on the surface. Closing down the exploration required more forms than beginning it had.

  Gabe held open the screen door and followed her inside, letting the door swing shut behind him. She looked at her watch, then at him.

  “Sure you don’t want to change your mind?” she asked. “I could belay you down and you could help the others look for a shorter way to Small Favors. In fact—”

  “Small Favors,” he said, laughing and shaking his head.

  “The new tunnel,” she explained.

  “As in thank the Lord, no worms?” He watched her with luminous jade eyes. His smile was as wide and warm as the sun itself.

  “That’s the one.”

  “Small Favors leading to Joy’s Castle.”

  “I still don’t—”

  “Nope,” he interrupted. “Too late. Fish, Davy, Maggie, and I all agreed that even though you found it, you’d never name it for yourself, so we would. It should be named for you. Joy.”

  She started to object again, then shrugged, accepting the name. She dropped her equipment and stretched, enjoying the freedom and dryness of the desert day as much as she would enjoy the mysterious darkness and damp of Lost River Cave when she returned.

  “Okay,” she said. “Joy’s Castle it is. People will think it refers to the emotion, anyway.”

  “To tell the truth, I’m having a hell of a time separating them myself.”

  She gave him a startled look.

  “You have the most beautiful smile I’ve ever seen,” he said simply, tracing her lips with his eyes. “That hasn’t changed. Not in all the years, all the memories, all the dreams. I didn’t know it then, but I used to measure how empty I was by remembering your smile.”

  Joy’s lashes dropped over her transparent gray eyes, concealing them for an instant.

  “Gabriel,” she said, her voice tight, strung between the past and the present.

  “Yeah, I know. I promised you that I wouldn’t talk about the past.”

  And now his editor was calling every evening, asking about progress, hinting that two weeks was more than enough to spend on this article. Something big was in the works that Gabe should clear the decks for. Something only he could do.

  Something.

  No, I can’t tell you what or where or when, Gabe. But it could come at any moment and it will be the chance of a lifetime, the kind of career rocket for you that the Orinoco article was. You have to be ready.

  Gabe wasn’t.

  Period.

  Sighing, he put down his equipment and dirty clothes, then ran silt-stained fingers through his hair. He remembered the flash of hatred he’d seen more than once in Joy’s eyes during their first few days together. Yet he no longer believed she hated him.

  She felt fury, yes. A hot desire for revenge, probably. But hatred?

  No.

  When he touched her, currents of hunger ran through her like a river seething through darkness. She couldn’t hate him and still respond like that, no matter how long it was since she’d been with a man.

  “But it’s damned hard not to talk about the past,” he said, watching Joy, wanting her, wanting much more than a few weeks. Wanting it all. But that couldn’t happen until they talked, really talked, to each other. “There are things we have to settle.”

  “There’s nothing to settle.”

  “That’s not true and you know it.”

  She turned away and put her helmet on the shelf. Automatically she pulled the batteries out of the pack and plugged them into the recharger.

  “What I know is the simple truth,” she said finally. “The past is gone. Out of reach. Nothing can affect it in any way.”

  “And the future?”

  For an instant her body stiffened. Then she continued caring for her equipment.

  “The same,” she said, her voice bleak. “Out of reach. Forever.”

  “I’m Kati’s father. That began in the past and will go on forever. How’s that for a simple truth?”

  She spun toward him. “While you’re passing out simple truths, try this one on for size. Whether or not I tell Kati who her father is, when this assignment is over you’ll go on to the next one, leaving your daughter behind, rejecting her all over again, crushing her heart. Have you thought about that, Mr. World Explorer?”

  Anger flashed through Gabe, a need to hurt as he himself was being hurt. After the intimacy of the cave he hadn’t expected her to attack him. “What do you want me to do? Stay here in New Mexico with Kati while you get your revenge playing international globe-trotter?”

  “Didn’t we already have this conversation? We know all the answers. They haven’t changed.”

  “And just what are those answers?”

  The very softness of his voice should have warned Joy. It didn’t. She was in the grip of a searing rage that was every bit as deep as her passionate response to him had been.

  It was the same for him, passion and rage mingling hotly.

  “The answers all boil down to the same thing,” she said. “Nothing means as much to you as your career. You don’t know how to love. Haven’t you learned that about yourself yet?”

  He was too stunned to respond, but it didn’t matter. Joy was still talking, shredding his fragile, unspoken hopes for the future with every razor word.

  “That’s why I’m not going to tell Kati who her father is until she’s eighteen, when she’ll be old enough to handle it. Tell her sooner and you’ll destroy her. You won’t mean to, but you’ll do it just as surely as you almost destroyed me.”

  Emotions ripped through Gabe, anger and something more, something deeper, a twisting anguish that he couldn’t express. But he could give words to anger. That was easy. He’d had a lifetime of practice at that.

  “Are you saying that you know how to love?” he asked savagely.

  “Yes.”

  “Gee, that’s odd. I always heard that forgiveness was the hallmark of love.”

  Joy went pale beneath the streaks of rich silt smeared across her cheeks. “Is that why you were so forgiving when you thought I’d had an abortion? Did your love just overflow with the understanding that you’d put me in the position of having to choose between an abortion and my own sanity?”

  His eyelids flinched in a pain greater than any anger. Talking about the past wasn’t helping. It was making it worse. “Joy—”

  “But you didn’t think of that, did you?” she said relentlessly, talking over him. “You just thought that—”

  “I thought that you’d lied when you said you loved me,” he broke in. “I was wrong. You loved me. If I’d known that seven years ago, I’d have—”

  He stopped because he didn’t know what he would have done. If he’d stayed seven years ago, it would have meant turning his back on his brother and mother and career. It would have meant marrying a girl and having
no way to support her. He would have been trapped as she’d been trapped, no way out but to keep going forward because going backward wasn’t possible.

  Maybe they would have done better together. Maybe they simply would have come apart.

  Seven years ago, they both had been too young.

  “You would have left me just the same.” Joy’s voice was flat and unflinching as she finished Gabe’s sentence.

  “I don’t know. All I know is that I came back.”

  “But you didn’t come back here for my love or even my forgiveness, did you?” she asked, her voice low, trembling. “You didn’t even know I was here. You came back because the Lost River Cave article was one of the best pieces you’d ever written and your editor wanted another one like it. Work, Gabe. You came back here because of your damned career. Forgiveness and love had nothing to do with it.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “I might have, once. But I haven’t known what to believe since I watched my life peeling away with each strand of rope.”

  She flinched. No matter how furious she was, the thought of him dying was a knife turning in her soul.

  “That’s the real reason I came back here. I spent a long time in that filthy hospital thinking about life. My life. I thought about all the mountains I’d climbed and the ones I hadn’t, the wild places I’d known and the places I’d never know. And through it all Lost River Cave was like a candle burning in an overwhelming darkness, calling to me in ways that I still don’t understand. It . . .”

  He hesitated, understanding part of himself for the first time. The discovery was bittersweet, because it brought with it a knowledge of his own past limitations.

  “It frightened me,” he said simply. “I ran. Everywhere. Mountains, oceans, jungles. A year. I ran until I was too exhausted to fight my obsession with Lost River Cave any longer. So I came back here. And I saw you. Joy.”

  She looked at his eyes, startled by the hesitations and emotions resonating within his voice. He was a man who had always known what he wanted, what he thought, what was or was not worthy of his time and consideration. Self-confident. Sensual.