Eden Burning

by Elizabeth Lowell

  Despite its built-in dangers, and perhaps even because of them, Chase enjoyed hiking Kilauea. The landscape was magnificent, a powerful statement of the living force of the earth itself.

  Nicole stopped next to a particularly shiny formation of pahoehoe and bent down. “Have you ever seen Pele’s hair?”

  “A few nights ago.” Chase looked at the braided red blaze that was almost concealed beneath the white scarf she wore Gypsy style on her head. “It was beautiful. Like fire.”

  She accepted the compliment with a quick, almost shy smile. Every time someone mentioned her hair, she remembered her ex-husband’s repeated complaint.

  The only thing hot about you is your hair.

  “I meant the volcanic rock that’s called Pele’s hair.” She pointed to a fist-size hole in the lava. Inside was something that looked like a flattened tangle of silver-gold hairs. “Look in the pukas—the holes in the lava.”

  Chase squatted on his heels next to Nicole and touched the shining hairs with a gentle fingertip, careful not to disturb their fragile beauty.

  “I haven’t seen this outside a specimen drawer or the pages of a textbook,” he said reverently. “It’s a miracle that something this delicate can come from, and then survive, such a violent event as the earth splitting open and bleeding rivers of molten stone.”

  For a moment he looked away from the shining hairs to the unusually clear sky. Against the horizon the massive, gently curved slope of Mauna Loa far overshadowed Kilauea’s smaller mass. As he measured the bigger volcano, his eyes were unfocused yet clear, the look of a man appreciating something within the silence of his mind.

  “What are you thinking about?” Nicole asked softly, hoping he would answer.

  She needed to know more about Chase than his desire for her. Other men had wanted her—or at least wanted sex with her—but she had never wanted them in return, never wanted to explore them mind and body. Because of that, she kept wondering what it was about Chase that made him seem so different to her, what it was that made her want him body and mind.

  She couldn’t answer that question, yet she kept returning to it again and again, like a tongue pressing against a sore tooth. Maybe if she asked him enough questions, it would somehow let her answer the only important one.

  Could she trust herself to him?

  “What am I thinking about?” Half smiling, Chase gestured toward the smooth, brooding mass of Mauna Loa. When he spoke, his voice was husky, slow, the tone of a man thinking aloud. “Did you know that if you measure Mauna Loa from its base to its summit, it’s the biggest mountain on earth?”

  “But Mauna Loa isn’t even fourteen thousand feet high, and Mount Everest is twice that,” she objected.

  He pinned her with his clear gray eyes. “Mauna Loa’s true base is three miles below sea level. Its summit is more than thirteen thousand feet above sea level. That’s nearly thirty thousand feet total. Taller than Everest.”

  She glanced out to the ocean as though she could see the submerged base of the volcano beneath the restless blue water.

  “If you’re talking about mass,” he continued, “Mauna Loa is still the giant. Everest rises from the Himalayan Plateau, which is already about two miles high. Mauna Loa starts from the bottom of the ocean and takes up ten thousand cubic miles of the island. For all its fire and smoke and drama, Kilauea is little more than a boil on Mauna Loa’s side, and the other small volcanoes on the Big Island are eroding away while we talk. But Mauna Loa is still alive, still growing, still the reigning queen of earth.”

  He looked away from Nicole’s amber eyes to the indigo curve of the huge volcano. “The only mountain we know that’s bigger than Mauna Loa is on Mars. Olympus Mons.” He smiled briefly. “Roughly translated from Latin, that means ‘God’s own mountain.’ It’s fifteen miles high. And it, too, is a volcano.”

  Her eyes widened with interest and surprise. “Is it alive?”

  “So far as we know, it’s extinct and has been for millions and millions of years. What we see now is what time and whatever passes for Martian weather have left of an incredible, once-living mountain whose base would have stretched from Los Angeles to San Francisco.”

  She sighed. “I wonder what an eruption would have been like.”

  He opened his mouth and then closed it without saying a word. He was trying to imagine what it would have been like to see Olympus Mons in action.

  “How do you describe a mountain fifteen miles high blowing out immense rivers of fire while the surface of the planet itself trembled and shook?” he said slowly. “Maybe vapor condensed on the volcano’s slopes, turning into rain that ran in wild torrents seven miles straight down to an empty ocean. Or maybe there was water on the surface of Mars back then, clouds and streams and rivers, even life swimming in a doomed sea.”

  Nicole closed her eyes and tried to imagine a mountain nearly eighty thousand feet high and four hundred miles across at the base. Dreamily she wondered what it would be like to stand on the lip of its awesome crater today and see Mars spread out below like a painting done in infinite tones of rust.

  And then she heard Chase’s deep voice say, “I’d sell my soul to have seen that mountain erupt. I’d sell my future for a chance to stand on its slopes even now.” With a rough sound that could have been a laugh, he straightened and stood beside her. “But I was born far too late for the eruption and too soon for the exploration. I’ll be dead long before man stands on any part of Mars.”

  The buried yearning in his voice made emotion thicken in her throat. Suddenly, fiercely, she wished that she could give Chase his impossible dream, could see his face as he stood on a mountain fifteen miles high and saw an alien planet spread at his feet.

  “You have Hawaii,” she said in a husky, intense voice. “It’s not as high as the volcano you’ll never see, but it’s alive. You can hear its breath in the deep cracks of the lava, feel its warmth, sense its heartbeat beneath your feet. And sometimes you can see Hawaii’s living blood pouring out, setting fire to everything, even stone.”

  Chase looked into her golden eyes and saw himself reflected, his own buried dreams and acceptance of what could not be.

  I’ll never stand on Mars. But I’ll stand on a living mountain with the goddess of the volcano at my side.

  I’m standing there now, and she is here, burning.

  Making me burn.

  “Yes,” he said, his voice deep, “I have Hawaii, and Pele is my guide. What more could any man ask?”

  Silently the answer came to him. He could ask to trust his guide.

  Oh, but you can, he assured himself sardonically. You can trust her to be like other women—selfish to the core.

  Hawaiians worshiped Pele, but they didn’t love her. Those men weren’t fools. They knew that a woman is as tricky and dangerous as a living volcano.

  “How much farther is the kipuka?” he asked briskly, breaking the intimacy of the instant when he had believed that he saw his dreams reflected in a woman’s eyes.

  “Twenty minutes, maybe a bit more.”

  Chase looked dubiously over the rumpled, furrowed landscape. There was nothing in all directions but lava, lava, and more lava.

  “It’s there,” she said, pointing across the black, stony land. “See? It looks like a tiny smudge of green on the far side of that aa flow.”

  “Green smudge,” he muttered, shading his eyes and looking.

  “Yes. The green is the tops of the tallest ohia trees.”

  “You’re hallucinating.”

  Nicole laughed. Then she set out across the landscape that had been born in liquid fire. After a moment Chase followed, shaking his head. He was afraid he was being led on a long hike to nowhere.

  Without so much as a look over her shoulder to see if he was coming, she walked at a clean, ground-eating pace until she came to a broad stream of aa rising like a black wall on top of an earlier flow of pahoehoe. The wall of aa was why she rarely came to this kipuka. It was a tough scramble up and across
the lava, and tougher still to get down into the kipuka floor. She had never tried the descent, because she didn’t want to risk injury when she was hiking alone or with Benny.

  Unconsciously rubbing her hands on her shorts as though to assure a good grip, she headed for the six-foot-high wall of cold lava.

  “You’re kidding,” Chase said, catching up to her.

  “Nope.”

  “Hell.”

  She scrambled up onto the flow and began picking a path across. Along the way she scraped one palm, scratched both ankles, and picked up a few other small souvenirs of her trek over aa. But finally she stood on the other edge of the flow. At her feet lay an improbable green oval surrounded on all sides by a lava flow that was naked of plant life.

  Less than ten acres in size, the kipuka was a miracle of survival surrounded by the desolation of the birth of new land.

  On the uphill side of the kipuka, some irregularity in the old slope had divided the lava flow into two streams. Between the streams of molten stone, plants shriveled, steamed . . . and survived. When the lava flow combined again farther down the slope, it walled off the kipuka from the rest of the devastated land. Except for the kipuka’s few green acres, life in all directions had been engulfed by burning stone.

  Silently Nicole looked at the miracle of the kipuka’s life in the midst of a barren, newly born land. Ohia trees grew in tall profusion. Flowers that looked like scarlet brushes grew at the tips of the graceful ohia branches. Ferns in more shapes and heights and kinds than she could name crowded over the hard rock floor of the kipuka, sending slender fronds toward the life-giving sun.

  Every growing space from ground level to treetop was filled by some kind of plant. The explosion of life was all the more startling for the sterile lava surrounding it.

  Sensing Chase beside her, Nicole turned toward him. He was studying the lush greenery with a wondering expression that made her want to pull out her sketch pad and draw him. But she didn’t know him well enough yet to ask his permission, and she wasn’t bold enough to just go ahead while he was looking.

  “Hard to believe, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “I’ve seen all kinds of freak survivals from volcanic eruptions,” he said slowly. “Trees standing while others only inches away were blown to splinters. Flowers blooming where nothing had any right to survive at all. The tracks of mice that had burrowed out from under a blanket of hot ash. All unexpected. Freaks of fate.”

  She smiled almost sadly. “Freaks?”

  “On the mainland, yes. But not here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Kipukas are normal in Hawaii, not freaks. They’re the inevitable result of lava rivers flowing slowly down sloping, uneven land.” He made a rough sound. “And having said that, I’ve got to admit that it still looks like magic to me.”

  “Yes. Magic.” She smiled. “It’s as though Pele couldn’t bear to burn all of life while she was adding on to her island home, so she saved a few places and plants that were special to her.”

  “That’s a very Hawaiian explanation. Scientists prefer more ordinary reasons.”

  “Those are good, too.” She glanced sideways at him. “For ordinary days.”

  A smiled flashed beneath his black mustache. Then he pulled a notebook from his backpack and began making cryptic entries about the height, width, and kind of lava flow that surrounded the kipuka.

  The temptation was too much for Nicole. She got out her own sketchbook, flipped to the back, and began drawing him with swift, sure strokes. The lines she made with black ink were as intense and unflinching as the face of the man looking into a miraculous Eden surrounded by a destroyed land.

  She worked quickly, almost secretly, not wanting to share the sketch with anyone yet, even him.

  Especially him.

  Chase kept writing until he had filled several pages with notes. They would help him to recall the characteristics of this place even after he had looked at thirty others. This was all very preliminary, more of a lark than real work, but he had a feeling that the secret kipuka would be an ideal subject for the book.

  “Is there a path down?” he asked without glancing away from his notebook.

  Hastily Nicole closed her sketchbook, afraid that he would look up and catch her drawing him. “I don’t know of any path. I went partway around the top once. It’s pretty much the same on the other side as here. At least head-high aa, rough and as wickedly sharp as the day it first cooled.”

  “So here is as good as there when it comes to getting down?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, no help for it, then. I’ve been over worse. I think.”

  He stowed his notebook and scrambled down the sharp, rough wall into the kipuka. The last few feet were so steep and pocked with ankle-deep holes that he finally just jumped. When he had secure footing in the kipuka, he turned at the bottom and glanced back up. Nicole was at the top of the flow, looking doubtful.

  “You don’t have to come,” he said.

  “But I’ve always wanted to go down into this kipuka. I just didn’t want to try getting home alone on a broken ankle.”

  “You’re not alone anymore.”

  He held out his hand to help her climb down. The first few feet were fine. Then she hit the crumbling stuff. A chunk of lava broke off and turned unexpectedly beneath her foot. Instantly his hands closed around her waist. With an easy motion he lifted her and set her down on the kipuka’s more even footing.

  “Thanks.” Her voice was too tight, almost breathless.

  She hadn’t expected to be picked up with so little effort. She thought of herself as substantial, not petite. The feeling of relative fragility next to Chase was both sensually intriguing and a bit unnerving. It was as though reality had shifted with the lava under her foot, changing her view of herself and the world.

  “You okay?” he asked at her startled expression.

  “Fine.”

  He looked down into her wide golden-brown eyes, wondering what she was thinking. He started to ask but got distracted by the feel of her supple flesh inside the circle of his hands. He flexed his fingers, testing the resilience of her waist.

  He liked what he felt. A lot.

  “You know,” he said, shifting his glance from her eyes to her slightly parted lips, “I finally understand why men throughout history have paid a lot to have dancers as mistresses.”

  Nicole blinked, wondering if she had heard correctly. She knew she was distracted; the diamond intensity of his eyes made her want to put her hands in his hair and pull him down to her mouth.

  “What?” she asked, more than a little dazed.

  “Dancers feel good. You feel good.” He closed her wide eyes with a lingering kiss on each lid. He flexed his fingers again, more deeply. “God, you feel better than good. You feel incredible, all tight and warm and flexible. You make a man wonder what it would be like to—”

  At the last second he cut off his words, but he couldn’t stop his thoughts. He wanted to have all of her wrapped around him, moving with him, wanting it as much as he did. He wouldn’t have to worry about crushing her or frightening her or being too big for her.

  She would fit him like a hot, satin fist.

  Still savoring the unexpected caresses, Nicole slowly opened her eyes and licked her lips, wanting to taste him but not knowing how to ask.

  Breath backed up in Chase’s throat. His pulse slammed hard and heavy beneath the tan skin of his neck. Between one minute and the next he was ready for her, his erection pressing hotly against her belly when he pulled her into his arms.

  “Chase?”

  “Don’t talk,” he said in a thick voice. “Just kiss me. It’s not enough, not nearly enough, but it will have to do for now.”

  He took her mouth, and his arms tightened around her as they had on the darkened stage. Her body flexed like a bow beneath his strength. He was arching her into his own body with a force that would have been painful if she hadn’t come to him eagerly. Sil
ently he told himself to slow down, take it easy, this was the first rather than the last stage of seduction.

  Then her mouth opened, softened hungrily beneath his probing tongue. Shuddering, he thrust deeply into her, wanting all of her. Here. Now.

  Part of him wondered at his own lack of control when it came to Nicole, but most of him cared only for the sweet fire of having her pressed against his body. She was pliant and warm and so soft that he groaned from the depth of his need for her. With barely restrained urgency his mouth moved over her face and neck and smooth, naked shoulders. Lips and tongue traced the small marks his teeth left, felt the trembling of her responsive flesh, the strength of her fingers kneading his back, urging him on.

  Nicole didn’t even know that she was moving against Chase in a slow, sensuous dance. His mouth was both hard and soft, hot, consuming her with sensations she had never felt, never even dreamed.

  Nor had she dreamed that a man would tremble at the delicate touch of her teeth on his jaw as she returned the wild, biting kisses he was giving to her. The salty taste and rough texture of his cheek swept through her, making her wonder how many other tastes and textures he had for her to discover.

  The thought of all the possibilities made her breath catch. She had never felt like this before—hungry, wild, almost desperate to know all of a man’s body in every way she could.

  Chase felt the sudden passionate tension in her body as though it was his own. He needed.

  And so did she.

  With a low sound he took her mouth in a fierce kiss. His hands raked down her spine, cupped her tight buttocks, and shifted until he could rub every aching inch of himself over the sweet heat between her thighs. Her shudder of response was as exciting to him as the tiny sound she made at the back of her throat when she felt the blunt reality of his erection through layers of clothing.