More Than Paradise (21 page)

Ash walked her back a few steps onto higher ground, where their bodies were better aligned. Bracing them against a tree, she planted one hand next to Charlotte’s head. The other yanked her shirt and tee from her pants. Then it was skin. The mercy of touch. Ash’s naked hand on her naked ß esh. And Charlotte didn’t know if she was sinking or drowning. She couldn’t resist and she couldn’t withdraw. There was no place for her to run from her own desperate yearnings. Where had they been all this time? How had this part of herself, so ruthlessly banished, crept back to demand more?

She was wet, and sucking short gasps of air between kisses. Ash was barely touching her yet, just cupping a breast, eyes closed, face lost in concentration. Her thumb grazed Charlotte’s nipple, her tongue intruded deeper. A knee nudged Charlotte’s thighs apart. Reeling with desire, Charlotte caught at Ash’s shirt, clumsily tugging the buttons open.

It occurred to her that someone brandishing a butterß y net would probably stumble across them at any moment, but she couldn’t summon

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the willpower to stop. Urgently, she moved her hips down on the knee between her thighs, grinding her wetness against Ash, driven by some primal imperative that banished reason.

Both Ash’s hands were on her now, caressing and exploring and making Charlotte quiver and gasp and want more.

“Please.” She sought one and drove it Þ rmly down.

Ash groaned and her teeth settled into the sensitive hollow at the base of Charlotte’s throat. “You’re so beautiful.” The ß eshy part of her hand slowly circled over Charlotte’s center.

Charlotte added some pressure, clamping her own hand over Ash’s, demanding more. Perspiration gathered on her top lip. With disbelief she realized she was close to coming. It would take nothing to push her over the edge. “Please. I want you inside of me.”

She began fumbling with the top button of her pants, desperate to feel Ash’s Þ ngers sliding into her wet waiting ß esh.

“Baby.” Ash shakily halted her. “We can’t do this here.”

“Don’t say that.” Charlotte’s voice seemed too thick to shape into words, her mouth too swollen to pronounce them.

“I don’t want to stop, either.”

“Then don’t.” Charlotte caught hold of the buckle of Ash’s pants, only to have her hand gently seized.

Ash caught it to her cheek before planting a tender kiss in the palm. “I want our Þ rst time to be special. Not rushed. Not hiding in the dark like this.”

“I don’t care.” In fact, being fucked hard against a tree sounded pretty good. Charlotte could not believe she could think such a thing, let alone lobby for it. Where was her self-control?

“Well, I care.” Ash’s expression was as naked and honest as Charlotte had ever seen it, the emotion heart-stopping. “I’ve been wanting to make love to you since the moment I Þ rst saw you. But this isn’t what I had in mind.”

“Does it really matter? We’re here and we want each other. Isn’t that enough?” Her cheeks burned. Having dragged Ash out here and tried to seduce her, she was now being refused. That was the icing on a very embarrassing cake.

“Charlotte, listen. Normally, it would be enough for me. Normally I’d be Þ ne with having a quickie, then doing breakfast with the frog hunters ten minutes later.” Ash cradled her face, a hand on each side.

With laconic humor, she continued, “Ever since the airport hangar—

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and before that—I’ve thought about fucking you more or less anywhere that’s viable. The Jeep. The back of the Huey. Our tent…”

Charlotte’s heart jumped. This was news.

“But this just isn’t the right place or time.” Ash glanced over her shoulder at the sound of something stirring on the forest ß oor. A small dark bird with yellow wattles emerged from a pile of moldy leaves with a huge beetle in its beak.

“You’re right. It’s not.” Charlotte let herself slump against Ash’s chest, and she was drawn into a warm embrace. Lulled by the hushed thunder of Ash’s heartbeat, and Þ ghting tears, she said, “I never let this kind of thing happen.”

Ash stroked her hair. “I can see that.”

“I think I’m afraid.” The confession came out in a rush. “I’m afraid I might never feel like this again. Like I could just lose myself and be…

here. In the moment. All of me. Not taking myself away somewhere.”

She broke off, feeling like she was talking nonsense and Ash would think there was something wrong with her.

Ash planted one small kiss after the next, on her cheeks, her hair, her lips. She felt so close, closer than anyone was allowed to be. It was as if she were drawing Charlotte to her, tenderly courting her inner self, inviting her to stay and trust. Charlotte fell into the bright ocean of her eyes and found nothing withheld. She sensed Ash was offering her a gift. That she found this closeness just as fragile and unexpected as Charlotte did. Yet she was not turning away, and somehow, by accepting this ß edgling bond, they were both reaching into the unknown.

“I know exactly what you mean about going away,” Ash said.

Her voice was rough, fractured by a yearning that matched Charlotte’s own. “And I promise you something. We won’t do that when we make love.”

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There’s something I want to show you.” Ash swung Charlotte’s day pack over her shoulder. Her piercing eyes sought Charlotte’s. The promise in their depths made her stomach plummet.

“Come on.”

Exchanging a few words with her associates as they went, she led Charlotte casually away from the breakfast crowd along a freshly cut trail that wound its way southeast of the campsite. After almost an hour, they broke through the darkness of the forest and charted a path down toward a natural opening in the canopy where several huge trees had fallen.

When they reached a vantage point on the slope just above the area, they paused to look out on an astonishing netherworld so lush it seemed thrown across the land like a sprawling quilt of emerald velvet dotted with ß owers. At this time of morning, and probably for much of the day, it was a cloud forest, enveloped in thin swirling mists. The air was thick and damp, pungent with the bitter green secretions of plants and the drifting vanilla pear scent of crushed agar wood and rare orchids. The few remaining old-growth trees grew thick and gnarled, guarding the magical slope like ancient sentries.

“It’s perfect,” Charlotte breathed as they descended into a world bathed in mist.

After days in the dim underworld beneath the canopy, fruitlessly seeking a match for her leaf samples among the fallen array beneath the various strangler trees she encountered, Charlotte felt heady with delight to be out in the open. The shrills and clicks of countless birds and insects created a hum very different from the mufß ed calm of the

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rainforest ß oor, and the elaborate biome that had sprung up around the fallen trees was unlike anything she had ever seen.

The cycle of natural regeneration in this untouched place made it a virtual laboratory for reforestation research, from the toiling insects to the seedlings, epiphytes, and vines to the mosses and ferns. Fog drip converted rotting wood and leaves rapidly into layers of peat, infusing nutrients into the new growth, and Charlotte could tell the cloud mist was not completely persistent. Sunlight also tended this secret garden, fostering even more diversity and speed of regrowth.

Imagining the seed bank that must be buried beneath the rotting trunk they were skirting, she said, “This is incredible. I could spend a lifetime collecting data here and barely scratch the surface.”

She caught a smile from Ash and her pulse responded by swapping its customary tempo for Þ ts and starts that made her feel light-headed.

In an instant she was transported back to the previous morning and could feel Ash’s skin melting her own every place there was touch. She met Ash’s eyes and saw in them an acknowledgement that she, too, was remembering.

Charlotte reached out to make their connection physical, but her hand met rubbery resistance from something that felt like damp fabric. She took a step back and found herself gazing at a huge spider’s web dotted with crystalline dewdrops. It was at least Þ ve feet wide and eight feet high, a complex construction of pale gold silk angled and elaborately braced against the surrounding plants. Charlotte had encountered a part of it far from the center. She touched the web again experimentally, surprised that it didn’t cling to her Þ ngers and that she hadn’t torn it.

“Simon would lose his mind,” she said. Their butterß y expert also had an obsessive interest in spiders and had declared his determination to locate several of New Guinea’s most famous specimens while he was here.

“See those?” Ash pointed to a row of insect husks arranged in a remarkably orderly line across the web. “That’s to stop birds ß ying into it by accident. The way the spider sees it, they’re homewreckers. No point catching something you don’t want to eat and it tears your place up as well.”

“So the spider makes its own safety strips.” Charlotte was fascinated.

Ash pointed out the owner of the resplendent spider-palace, a

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narrow-bodied arachnid with a golden thorax and long black legs that appeared to be decorated with feather tufts. “Meet
Nephila
. The golden orb-weaving spider.”

Charlotte laughed. “I was expecting a tarantula, at least.”

“Tarantulas don’t build webs. They burrow.” Ash tapped her booted toe against the moss-covered tree limb they were crossing.

“These dead trunks probably have a healthy population. Watch out for anything really huge and black with hairy legs and a bad attitude.”

Charlotte shuddered. “Great. Is this what you wanted to show me—the valley of the spiders?”

Ash grinned. “No, it’s better than that. But while we’re here, just so you know, the golden orb’s web is almost as strong as Kevlar. If you’re ever in the Þ eld and you get injured, you can use one as a bandage or a tourniquet to stop bleeding.”

“Are you serious?”

“Absolutely. Some of the tribes even turn them into Þ shing nets.”

“You know,” Charlotte gave her a long look, intrigued by her unexpected interest in natural history. Maybe they had something in common other than mutual lust. “You’re a veritable encyclopedia about this place, and between you and me, I Þ nd that very sexy.”

Ash seemed brieß y startled by the ß irtatious comment, then her eyes ß ickered and she replied warmly, “In that case, you’re going to be all over me very soon. Come here, woman.”

She lifted Charlotte over another dead limb and led her along a narrow thoroughfare between a fallen tree trunk of huge girth and a thicket of Cyathia tree ferns with extraordinary frond length. New Guinea was a large island, and something Charlotte found remarkable about evolution on such land masses was that plant species often grew larger, whereas animals became dwarfed.

Here in the canopy Þ ssure, the additional light had given permission for the ß ora to run riot. Fleshy epiphytes sprang like a forest of green antlers from the moss-covered tree trunks; shrubs and small trees had found gaps in which to put down roots. Creepers festooned anything growing vertically, and birds and small animals wandered through the steamy lushness of it all, gorging themselves on grubs and seeds, then lolling back, sated.

None of these creatures ß ed as Ash and Charlotte passed by; they watched with vague interest, then returned to their snacking and snoozing. All the while, as they moved deeper into the cloud forest,

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Charlotte sensed they were being observed by countless creatures concealed from the human eye, tarantulas among them no doubt. She paused as a ß ock of delicate little gray birds descended from a treetop and darted all over the path she and Ash had just trampled, apparently on an insect safari. Standing still, she stared back up at the Fojas, feeling dwarfed by the primeval grandeur of this unearthly place.

“It’s so timeless,” she said. “These forests formed in the Pliocene period. We’re probably the Þ rst people to set foot here in Þ ve million years.”

“And we live on borrowed ground,” Ash reß ected, surprising Charlotte again with the depth of her observation.

She thought about that. It said a lot about her attitude that she was startled every time Ash made a thought-provoking comment.

Embarrassed by her own intellectual snobbery, Charlotte reconsidered its foundations. She knew a lot about some things, in fact, she could be called an expert. But she knew next to nothing about a great deal more, and she was just Þ nding that out.

She had never known anyone like Ash and probably never would again. In Charlotte’s narrow social circles, Ash would be a novelty, the real thing among people who only played at risk-taking. And Ash wasn’t just a woman with some interesting stories to tell, she was an interesting woman.

Charlotte wondered what Ash thought of her. Was this pull of theirs only sexual? Did Ash like her as a person at all? They hardly knew each other, yet Charlotte could already imagine them being a part of one another’s lives. Already, she could not conceive of leaving New Guinea in a few weeks’ time and never seeing Ash again.

The thought shook her, and as she tried to come to grips with what it meant, she became aware of a sound she hadn’t discerned before, a faint rattling swish.

“Do you hear that?” she asked.

Ash heaved a mock sigh. “I was going to blindfold you and make it a big surprise. I should have known you’d have hearing like a bat.”

Her gaze grew bold and her tone caressing. “Feel like taking a shower with me?”

Charlotte’s breath died in her throat. Undone, but trying not to show it, she said, “Oh, let me see. Am I ready to wash Þ ve days of Þ lth off my body or would I rather continue to be a human petri dish?”

Her attempt at ß ippancy drew a lazy smile. “I guess that’s a yes.”

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