Eden Burning (2 page)

“You’ll see,” Dane said, giving his older brother an arch look. “I’m really going to enjoy saying ‘I told you so.’ There is nothing else like Nicole when she dances.”

Chase bit back what he wanted to say about hormones and stupid men. It helped that he was ignoring his brother. If he looked at Dane, he would probably take a swing at that smug smile.

In the Kipuka Club’s dim light, Dane watched Chase’s face, hoping to see hidden enthusiasm or at least interest on the subject of Nicole. He saw nothing but hard angles, the pale flash of gray eyes, the inky black of his brother’s short hair and mustache. If Chase felt anything more than fatigue and boredom, he wasn’t giving it away to anyone, not even his younger brother.

Frowning slightly, Dane looked away, remembering another time, almost another man, a younger one who laughed at jokes and smiled at the sight of a puppy chasing a ball. But that had been BTB: Before the Bitch. After Lynette, Chase hadn’t smiled much and had laughed even less. While Dane sympathized—no one liked being taken to the cleaners by a pretty gold digger—he thought it was past time for his older brother to get over his mistake and get back to enjoying life. After all, Chase was hardly the first man to screw up in the marriage department.

Dane and Jan had spent a lot of time worrying about his older brother after he lost the custody battle. They were still worried. That was why they had decided that Hawaii was just the place for Chase to heal.

And Nicole Ballard was just the woman to teach him that Jan wasn’t the only generous, gentle, loving woman ever born.

Chase drank from his beer glass and waited for the red-hot shimmy dancer to take the stage and have her body admired. The anger that seethed in his gut no more showed on the outside than a mainland volcano showed the molten stone that was its living core. He was a man who had learned the hard way that emotions were treacherous, particularly when beautiful women were involved.

Tonight there was most definitely a beautiful woman involved.

Though it had been seven days since Chase had seen Nicole Ballard in that snapshot, the image still burned in his mind. And his crotch. The woman in the picture was all sex and grace and energy, with long, golden-red hair streaming out as she spun around with a laughing child in her arms.

Once he finally had gotten past the sheer sexuality of the snapshot’s impact, he had been caught by the combination of intelligence and vivid life in Nicole’s face. Then with the next breath he would be punched all over again by the sensuous, fiery cloud of her hair and the delight of his own daughter at being whirled around in the heart of fire. Pele, woman of fire.

The picture haunted Chase.

It wasn’t a pleasant haunting. Every time he looked at the photo, he thought of how easily Lynette had fooled him and of how vulnerable Dane was. Any man would be. Jan was no match for the red-haired temptress who was worming her way into the family’s daily life.

No woman was a match for Nicole.

Every time he looked at the blurred snapshot, it was like a fist in the heart, sending a shock wave through his body. Each time it happened, his anger burned higher, hotter. Dane couldn’t stand against such temptation for long.

No man could.

That was why Chase was sitting in a private Hilo nightclub, his body jet-lagged and his mind churning with what he had left behind professionally and what he had in front of him both professionally and personally. He had come to Hawaii sooner than he should have. He was still fielding faxes and e-mails and disbelieving phone calls from the vulcanologists he had been overseeing on two continents.

Worse, he hadn’t even been allowed to unpack or shower before Dane had dragged him to the Kipuka Club to see Pele dance.

At the moment Chase was tired, angry, and in general feeling savage enough to eat his meat raw. All things considered, it was the perfect mood for confronting an ambitious shimmy dancer. Unfortunately Jan, Lisa, and Sandi were running around backstage, so nothing useful could happen tonight.

He knew he should be grateful for the delay. He was in no shape to wage the kind of cold-blooded warfare it would take to defeat another Lynette.

But he wasn’t grateful. He just wanted the whole nasty business behind him so he could concentrate on his daughter and Hawaii’s famous volcanoes.

With a hidden, sideways look from ice-pale eyes, he studied his younger brother. It didn’t take a mind reader to see that Dane was all but dancing with impatience for Pele to appear. Not for the first time, Chase wondered how deeply the red-haired predator had sunk her claws into his trusting brother. Not as deeply as she wanted them, obviously, or Dane would be asking for a divorce.

Well, Pele was shit out of luck, Chase told himself grimly. She didn’t know it, but her little shimmy show was over. She would just have to take her home-wrecking act on the road and find another rich, trusting fool.

Unconsciously Chase shifted his big body as though he was shouting numbers behind the line of scrimmage, waiting for the football to smack into his hands. He wanted to get on with the game, to get close enough to Pele to turn her greed against her. Then he would hammer in a wedge and break her wide open, ending the threat to his brother’s marriage.

Until then, all he could do was wait, muscles clenched with the effort of holding back his disgust. He was careful to keep his feelings well hidden. He knew that Dane believed the woman to be virtuous, intelligent, warm, loving, kind, and all the other lies and lures females used to attract gullible males.

Chase wasn’t gullible anymore. Lynette had well and truly cured him. Any lingering delusions he might have had about the true nature of the female character had vanished when Lynette called him six weeks ago and announced that she was tired of his sickly daughter, her new boyfriend hated whiny children, so Chase could just take her back. For good. She never wanted to see the little wretch again.

It was typical of Lynette that Lisa had been standing nearby listening while her mother dumped her.

Just the memory of Lynette’s casual cruelty made Chase’s whole body tense with rage. He had married because he wanted a child and thought Lynette did, too. It soon became clear that she hadn’t wanted Lisa at all; she could barely be bothered to hold the baby. He had thought it just needed time, that not all women were natural mothers.

Wrong.

Nothing had changed, except to get worse. By the time Lisa was four, Lynette had been through a series of gigolos. When Chase had asked her to go to a marriage counselor or a psychiatrist, she laughed and said she didn’t need anything but a bigger allowance from him; she was bored, so she picked up men.

Chase had refused to give Lynette more money. The next thing he knew, she hit him with divorce papers and demanded sole custody of Lisa, claiming that a daughter needed her mother and that Chase was always away. What she had really wanted was an open pipeline to the Wilcox family’s wealth.

The judge had been taken in by Lynette’s tiny, heart-shaped face and soft-voiced lies about the joys of motherhood. Chase had been left with no wife, no child except for minimal visitation rights, and no illusions about what women really wanted from men.

Motherhood, his
ass
. Lynette had held on to Lisa just long enough to find another wealthy fool to marry.

Chase was grateful to have his daughter back, in spite of the fact that it couldn’t have come at a worse time for him professionally. When Lynette called, he had been in Mexico overseeing the work of three people on an emergency basis. The emergency had come about when the leader of the expedition got a lungful of El Chichón’s poisonous fumes. A month in a sea-level hospital had been ordered. Chase had volunteered to supervise the work rather than lose the project halfway through the study.

If that wasn’t enough, Mount Saint Helens had been swelling and rumbling with promises of new eruptions, and Chase had been within three months of finishing up the first phase of a long-term study of the return of life to the volcano’s devastated slopes.

Neither El Chichón nor Mount Saint Helens was any place for a thin, shy seven-year-old who was recovering from pneumonia.

Chase had been sitting down to write a letter of resignation from the Saint Helens study when Jan called and asked if it would be all right for Lisa to stay in Hawaii with them for the summer. It had been typical of Jan that she acted as if he was doing
her
a favor when he agreed to let Lisa go.

Bloody idiot,
thought Chase angrily, looking at his brother’s dark, handsome profile. Didn’t Dane know what an incredibly rare treasure he had in Jan? She was the shining exception to the bitter truth that women were whores selling out to the highest bidder.

So what in hell’s name was Dane doing panting after a glorified stripper?

Hands fisted beneath the table, Chase wished that he was on Hawaii solely as a professional vulcanologist and not as an unwanted marriage counselor. To him, Hawaii wasn’t the Big Island, it was Volcano Island, the burning Eden that was the home of the world’s biggest and most active volcanoes. He belonged up on the mountain’s clean slopes, not in a dim club on a Thursday night waiting to meet the slut his younger brother was making a fool of himself over.

“. . . is my brother, Dr. Chase Wilcox,” Dane said, giving his brother an unsubtle nudge under the table.

Automatically Chase turned his attention away from the bitter thoughts churning in his mind. He curved his lips into a polite smile and shoved back from the table to be introduced to yet another volcano-observatory scientist, university ethnologist, or Hilo native. The Kipuka was a members-only supper club supported by a mixture of university types, volcano crawlers, national-park scientists and volunteers, and native Hawaiians such as Bobby Kamehameha, the club’s owner and the drummer for the dancers.

When Chase got to his feet to shake hands with Bobby, he was surprised. At six feet five inches, with a naturally powerful build, Chase was usually the biggest man in any room.

Bobby was bigger. A lot bigger. He was easily four inches taller and at least sixty pounds heavier than Chase. Bobby had the deceptively smooth, almost soft-looking physique that full-blooded Polynesians often had.

Chase knew better than to believe the satin surface. He had played football with more than one islander. They tackled like a falling mountain and felt just as hard. Bobby’s power showed in his calm eyes and in the strong hand gently gripping Chase’s.

“I could have used you in college.” As Chase spoke, his smile changed, becoming less professional and more personal. “The defense kept pounding me into the ground.”

“You play pro?”

“Nope. Too small.”

Bobby laughed, not believing it for a moment. “More like too smart. Dane told me about the Mount Saint Helens project, among others. Hawaii is honored to have you.” The big man grinned suddenly. “Even if you are one more rich sonofabitch haole.”

Chase gave a crack of approving laughter at the unexpected gibe. He let go of Bobby’s hand, only to have the big Hawaiian grab on again. Broad, blunt fingertips traced the ridges of callus on Chase’s palms and fingers.

“You no tell me he drum,” Bobby complained to Dane, slipping into the easy rhythms of pidgin.

It wasn’t the island’s true pidgin, which would have been impossible for nonnatives to understand. Bobby spoke the languid, slangy version of English that was developing in the islands’ yeasty cultural and linguistic stew.

“You no ask,” Dane retorted, grinning.

Bobby said something in melodic Hawaiian that Chase suspected was distinctly unmusical.

Dane’s smile got even bigger.

“Friends,” Bobby added with great dignity and perfect enunciation, “should not have to ask about matters of such great, even grave, importance.” He threw a thick arm around Chase’s shoulders. “You me brudder. Long stay island, sure-sure.”

Chase looked at the array of modern bongo drums set out on a corner of the stage and nodded. “Good thing you’re not hung up on tradition here. Drumming on logs never appealed to me.”

“My ancestors lived as well as they could, as often as they could, and took the best that was available to them at the time.” Amusement and intelligence gleamed in the Hawaiian’s black eyes. “That’s the only Hawaiian tradition I care about upholding. I leave the poi and sixty-pound surfboards for the crazy haoles.”