This Time Love

by Elizabeth Lowell

  He stood with his arms out while she added a piece of clothing to the growing pile he carried.

  “I was living with the Childers,” she said.

  “Were they friends of your parents?”

  “No. Susan had advertised for live-in help, and after my parents died I needed a place to live. The job was perfect for me. Room and board, enough time to study, and enough pocket money to pay for gas to get to school.”

  He’d known Joy’s parents weren’t wealthy, but he hadn’t thought that she’d been left without any money at all. “Didn’t your parents leave you something? Insurance money or . . . anything?”

  “They left me memories.” She unclipped another piece of clothing and handed it to him. “Good memories. And the Jeep.”

  He was stunned. The check he’d left for her hadn’t been nearly enough for her to live on. He’d meant it only to tide her over until he got back from the Orinoco.

  Yet when he’d finally come back to civilization, he’d discovered that she didn’t need or want him anymore. At least he thought that was what her words to Dan meant.

  She told me to go to hell and she would do what was best for her.

  Both men had been wrong, but it was Joy who paid.

  “How did you manage?” he asked, his voice husky with emotion.

  “I used your check to help pay for the pregnancy and delivery.”

  “But what about your day-to-day expenses?”

  She shrugged and handed him more clothes. “I did what everyone else does who needs money. I worked two jobs. Susan was my live-in job. The other job was as a research assistant to several professors in the geology department.”

  “Was the pregnancy . . . difficult?”

  “The doctor called me her prize patient. Young, strong, healthy, and flexible. Cave crawling keeps you in good shape. Physically I was fine.”

  Gabe didn’t ask about her mental health. He didn’t need to. He could imagine how difficult it had been for her to go through with her pregnancy in the face of her parents’ death, his own total absence, and the necessity of holding down two jobs while still going to school.

  “What happened?” he asked finally. “Why was Kati born in the desert?”

  Joy piled more dry clothes in his arms. And didn’t say anything.

  “Sweetheart?”

  “I had false labor on and off for several days. I’d get halfway to town and the contractions would stop. Then I’d turn around and drive back to the Childer ranch.” She smiled wryly. “Repeat as necessary.”

  “Why didn’t your doctor do something?”

  “Like what? At the end of term, false labor is just a part of giving birth, especially for first-time mothers. Perfectly natural.”

  “But why didn’t you check into the hospital just to be safe?”

  “I’d budgeted enough money for a one-day stay.”

  His fingers clenched around the clothes, but he bit off his hissing curse before she heard it. “So you drove back to the Childer ranch. Then what?”

  “I did the back-and-forth thing three times. The fourth time the contractions came, I just ignored them and kept working. I didn’t have any more time to waste on false alarms. All the men were out in the field. A tractor had broken down or something, and Susan was already overdue with Laura, so she wasn’t feeling very lively.”

  “Go on.”

  Joy pulled the last of the clothes off the line and folded them over her own arms. The grim look on his face told her what he was feeling.

  “There was a lot to do around the ranch for everyone,” she said, “and I just kept doing it until I couldn’t. Then I got in the Jeep and headed for town. By the time I realized my body wasn’t fooling, it was too late. I was only halfway to town and I wasn’t going to make it. Kati was impatient to be born.”

  “God. What did you do?”

  “The only thing I could. I pulled the Jeep over to the side of the road, dragged a bedroll out of the back, and . . .” She shrugged and tried not to remember how frightened she’d been.

  How horribly alone.

  “You must have been terrified,” he said in a raw voice. “A scared twenty-year-old giving birth alone in the desert.”

  “I was pretty scared at first. Later on there wasn’t any time for fear.” She smiled wryly. “Birth isn’t exactly a voluntary process on the mother’s part. Toward the end I was pretty much along for the ride.”

  At first he couldn’t force out the words. Yet he had to know. “You were alone the whole time?”

  Joy glanced up. The pain and regret in his eyes made her wish the subject of Kati’s birth had never come up.

  “No,” she said quickly, touching his arm. “Fish came along after a while. It was all right after that. He’d had some emergency medical training, and he was very kind, very gentle with me. He knew how to help. Kati wasn’t hurt at all. That’s what really had terrified me—that something would go wrong and I wouldn’t know what to do for the baby.”

  “When . . .” Gabe swallowed and tried again. “When did Fish get there?”

  “I don’t know. One moment I was alone and hurting and scared to death, and the next moment he was there, reassuring me. It was easier after that. Kati was born very quickly.”

  The clenched strength of Gabe’s muscles beneath Joy’s fingers was frightening. He looked like a man who had never smiled and never would.

  “Gabriel,” she said in a low voice, “don’t. It wasn’t your fault.”

  As the words left her lips, she realized how true they were. For a long time she had blamed Gabe for leaving her to bear a child alone. But it hadn’t been all his fault. Not really. She’d wanted his lovemaking, had demanded it, and hadn’t thought beyond the moment when he would move inside her.

  Yet she hadn’t been stupid or ignorant of the mechanics of conception and contraception. She simply hadn’t cared. Childishly she’d assumed that it would turn out all right, that all she had to do was love Gabe and everything would work out in the end.

  It had.

  Just not the way she’d expected.

  That wasn’t Gabe’s fault. She couldn’t blame him any longer for her own willful naïveté and the fact that her parents had died so soon after he left her.

  Yet he was blaming himself. It was there in the bleakness of his eyes and in the brackets of pain around his mouth. At one time the sight of his suffering would have given her a vindictive pleasure, but she didn’t feel that way anymore.

  His pain was also hers.

  And it was destructive.

  “Gabriel, listen to me,” she said urgently. “I don’t blame you anymore. I was smart enough to know better, but I didn’t want to know anything except you. I wanted you. I did everything I could to make sure you wouldn’t think of anything but making love to me. I didn’t have a thought beyond that.” She laughed. “For a certifiably bright girl, I was really stupid.”

  “Don’t,” he said hoarsely. “Don’t blame yourself. I’m the one who should have known better. I never should have taken a virgin.”

  “You didn’t take anything,” she interrupted fiercely. “I gave myself as freely and—and as passionately as any woman ever has!”

  “Oh, God, yes.” He closed his eyes, remembering. “There was never anyone like you. Ever. You haunted me to the ragged ends of the earth.”

  The words went through her like a flood, sweeping up the shattered debris of the past and carrying it away, opening new possibilities where before there had been only old barricades.

  “That’s only fair,” she said. “You called to me in every one of the Voices.”

  “You hated me.”

  She started to deny it, but couldn’t. “Yes. For a time. I hated myself, too. I hated life. But I’m growing up. Finally. Don’t hate yourself, Gabriel. It’s not worth it. Nothing is.”

  Unable to meet her eyes, he tilted back his head and let the sun’s savage light wash over him.

  How can I not hate myself for what I did to her?
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  “How did you manage not to hate me?” he asked finally.

  “It’s called growing up. It’s knowing yourself, warts and all, and not hating yourself.”

  He took a deep breath and looked again into Joy’s luminous eyes. After a long silence he said, “You told me if I came to Lost River Cave to find forgiveness, I came to the wrong place. Yet you’re trying very hard to forgive me.”

  Her breath came in sharply. He was right.

  Seeing and learning about the Gabe of today had made her understand much better the Gabe of seven years ago—and herself. She had participated in the passionate recklessness.

  She had paid.

  So had he.

  “Are you forgiving yourself, too?” he asked softly. “Do you still believe you were a fool to give yourself to love? To me?”

  “I—I don’t know. It’s too soon. I just found out that I don’t blame you anymore.”

  “Joy,” he whispered, bending to her, arms full of sun-drenched clothes. “Kiss me. Please. I want to know what forgiveness tastes like. Then maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to forgive myself too.”

  Her arms as full of clothes as his, she stood on tiptoe, touching his lips with her own. When his tongue teased the curves of her smile, she sighed and opened her mouth. For a long moment she leaned against him, knowing only the sweetness of his kiss.

  “Well?” she asked finally, nuzzling against his lips, teasing and at the same time very serious. “What does forgiveness taste like?”

  “Sunlight. Peace. And peppermint.”

  Her laughter rippled through the afternoon.

  He watched her transformation, the pleasure so clearly revealed in her smile, her eyes as radiant as his deepest dreams. This was one memory that hadn’t been a lie.

  There was nothing on earth as beautiful as Joy laughing.

  Twenty-eight

  AS GABE HAMMERED A PITON DEEP INTO LIMESTONE, THE sound of steel ringing against steel echoed painfully within Small Favors. He drove in a second steel spike, and then a third, carefully selecting his angles to ensure maximum holding power.

  The stone was dense. It took the pitons cleanly, with no visible fracturing.

  Two pitons would have been enough for safety. He knew it. He also knew that Joy would be the first one dangling over the void. That was why he drove in a third metal spike. A backup for the backup.

  Steel carabiners snapped securely into place, anchoring the rope Joy would use to rappel down into the unexplored room that bore her name. But not just yet. He wasn’t quite satisfied with her safety.

  He wrapped the climbing rope around his body, braced his feet against the side of the tunnel and heaved back again and again, grunting with effort as he tried to break loose one of the pitons.

  Nothing gave. Nothing shifted. Nothing felt the least bit loose.

  Gabe kept on throwing his full weight back against the rope. He didn’t stop until he was as certain as possible that the pitons and rope would hold.

  “I still wish you’d wear a safety rope,” he said.

  “On rappel,” Joy said patiently, “a safety rope is more trouble than it’s worth. The two ropes tangle all the time, which leaves me—”

  “—knotted and dangling like a fly in a spiderweb, not able to go up, down or sideways,” he finished. “I know, I know. I’d do the same if I was the one going down. I just don’t like it when you’re the one going without a safety rope.”

  He yanked at the line again before he went to the lip of the overhang and began feeding the rope out over the edge a few feet at a time. The climbing rope was one hundred and twenty feet long. If it didn’t find bottom, he’d switch to the two-hundred-foot rope Davy had carried into the cave.

  Perhaps fifteen feet of rope was left when he felt the weight taken from his hands. In the darkness below, the free end of the rope was resting on something. Bottom, he hoped, rather than a ledge jutting out over another drop.

  “Want the two-hundred-foot rope?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Not until we’re sure we need it. If I come up short, I’ll climb out and try again.”

  He looked out into Joy’s Castle. The green glow from the light stick that Joy had thrown still gave an eerie illumination to a huge flowstone palette that was fringed with a beautifully fluted drapery. The bottom of the formation wasn’t visible. Nor was the light stick itself. There wasn’t any way to tell whether the light lay on the floor of the cave itself or was caught within one of the many intricate formations.

  Invisible in the darkness, water danced and sang. Ghostly conversations rose on the air currents caused by Lost River’s undiscovered waterfall. Joy’s Castle was an extraordinary place, as enthralling as any Gabe had ever stood on the brink of exploring.

  And he was stalling rather than send Joy alone into the unknown territory.

  So quit spinning on your thumb, he told himself. She’s exploring with the same extremely sane safety measures you would have used. She’s doing it just the way you’re going to do it when it’s your turn. As she pointed out, what’s sauce for the gander is sauce for everything else in sight.

  But the thought of losing her to an exploring accident made him realize how hollow life would be without her—and how full it had become when he was close enough to feel her laughing within his arms.

  When he found himself seriously considering driving in a fourth and absolutely unnecessary piton, he didn’t know whether to laugh or swear. Instead, he eeled backward to the wide spot in the tunnel where Joy and the other cavers waited.

  “Ready,” he said to her. In a tone that admitted no argument he added, “I cut a very short section of my own rope and tied it to a third piton. Put the rope on and keep it on until you’re out of the tunnel and in position to rappel. When you’re on your stomach, the climbing rope is on the left and the safety rope is on your right. Got it?”

  Davy and Fish exchanged a quick look and waited for Dr. Joyce to tear a strip from Gabe Venture’s overbearing hide. Not that the two men didn’t agree that the safety rope was a good idea. They did, because they knew that the most dangerous part of this kind of descent came during the scramble off the overhang.

  But their boss had never taken kindly to people who told her how to do things. Suggestions, sometimes.

  Orders, never.

  Joy’s head snapped up. She opened her mouth to tell Gabe that she’d crawled a hell of a lot more caves than he had and had survived to tell the tale. Then she saw the tension drawing his face into hard lines and knew that he was worried about her safety, not her ability. He’d explored enough wild country to know that luck was sometimes more important than skill.

  “All right,” she said, letting out the angry breath she had drawn. “Thank you, Gabriel.”

  Davy swore softly. “Damn, Fish. I owe you five bucks.”

  “What for?” Maggie asked.

  “Fish bet that Dr. Joyce would let Gabe belay her into the cave and drive the pitons to hold the rope. Fish was right both times,” Davy explained.

  “So Gabe’s climbed a lot of rocks and knows more about pitons than we do,” Maggie said, not understanding. “So what?”

  Davy made a disgusted sound. “So Fish has crawled a lot of caves, too, but Dr. Joyce doesn’t let him set anchor slings or cable ladders or . . .” he shrugged. “You get the picture.”

  Joy heard. She hadn’t thought about it before now, but it was true: she never trusted her life to anyone else if there was any way out of it at all. She routinely belayed other people and then climbed down alone. When that arrangement wasn’t possible, she let Fish belay her and then she searched until she found a route where she wouldn’t need help from anyone.

  There hadn’t been any conscious thought behind her actions. It was just the way she’d been since Gabe left and her parents died.

  “Fish,” she said quietly over her shoulder, pitching her voice so that Maggie and Davy couldn’t hear, “it’s not that I don’t trust—”

  “I k
now,” Fish said softly, cutting her off. “Hell, if some bastard had left me helpless by the side of the road, I wouldn’t trust a soul, neither, less there weren’t no damn choice. Hard lessons stay learnt the longest.”

  Gabe heard each blunt word. He crouched against the tunnel wall, feeling as cold as the stone itself, wishing he could crawl out of his own skin, disowning himself and a past that he’d never meant to be.

  But the past had happened whether he liked it or not. The past couldn’t be changed. It couldn’t be forgotten.

  And it couldn’t be forgiven.

  Not by him.

  Joy felt the tension in Gabe’s body and knew that he was hating himself. The bastard who had left her by the side of the road.

  She also knew that it hadn’t been anything like that. He hadn’t set out to seduce her and then abandon her to have his baby alone in the desert. If he’d known it would turn out like that, he would have prevented it somehow, no matter what it cost him.

  She knew that as certainly as she knew that she was alive.

  But did he know?

  She started to tell him, then stopped. She couldn’t say anything to comfort him without giving away to Fish who Kati’s father was. But she could reach Gabe in another way.

  “I’m going to test our lights,” she said.

  With no more warning than that, she unplugged the leads from her helmet and Gabe’s, concealing their bodies within Lost River Cave’s velvet night. She took his hand and peeled away the glove until her mouth could find his palm.

  He stiffened, trying to pull his hand away, refusing the comfort she was offering.

  She hung on, cradling his hand against her cheek and lips, murmuring softly, just one voice among the many whispering through the tunnel.

  Abruptly he stopped trying to withdraw. With a fierce, inarticulate sound he pulled Joy against him. When his lips met hers she tasted the scalding heat of a man’s tears.

  “Gabriel,” she whispered raggedly. “Don’t.”

  His only answer was a kiss that was both hard and gentle. Then he eased her away from his body, turned his back to the people behind him, and plugged in the leads to her helmet.