Eden Burning (3 page)

“I’m crazy, but not that crazy,” Chase said, giving Bobby a friendly punch in the shoulder that would have staggered most men.

Bobby grinned and returned the punch.

Dane laughed with something close to relief. Jan had said that Chase and the sometimes prickly Hawaiian would like each other immediately, yet Dane had wondered. Some big men didn’t like other big men around them. Chase wasn’t that way. It was a relief that Bobby wasn’t either. Since Nicole had introduced Dane and Jan into the supper club, they had made more friends in a month than they had in the previous two years of island living. Bobby Kamehameha was one of those friends.

The lights flickered wildly.

“The haoles,” Bobby said wryly, “are restless tonight. I don’t blame them. Pele’s back. She’s enough to make Mauna Loa’s stone rivers melt and run again. Gotta go quick-quick.”

With that, Bobby gave Chase another friendly whack and walked to the stage.

Dane looked sideways at his older brother. “Bobby has a Ph.D. in medieval iconography. His second one is in nonverbal communications.”

“I believe it. After meeting him, I’d believe anything.” Chase had a sudden, hopeful thought. “Is he Pele’s lover?”

Surprise showed on Dane’s darkly elegant face. Like his brother, Dane was taller than most men. Unlike Chase, Dane was built along the lines of a distance runner rather than a quarterback who had enough muscle and bone to take whatever punishment the other team’s gorillas dished out.

“Bobby’s married,” Dane said.

“Since when has that bothered a woman on the make?” Chase’s voice was as sardonic as the line of his mouth.

Dane simply shook his head. “Nicole’s not like that.”

Irritation and fatigue got the better of Chase. Before he could stop himself, he shot back, “She’s a woman, isn’t she?”

Dane winced at the bitterness in his brother’s words. “Nicole doesn’t sleep around. Period.”

“Are we talking about Nicole, ‘Pele,’ or a white plaster saint?”

“Now you’re catching on.” Dane’s smile was all teeth. “Pele is the nickname Bobby’s mother gave Nicole when they first met—goddess of the volcano.”

Beneath the table, Chase’s hands balled into fists again. His brother was heading for disaster and didn’t even see it coming. The laughter and affection in Dane’s voice when he talked about Nicole made Chase want to hit something. His brother, for instance. But that wouldn’t be smart, so Chase clenched his jaw against the need to hammer home the truth about the inevitable relationship between women and money into his naive younger brother’s head.

“What does Jan think of this . . . dancer?” Chase asked tightly, substituting
dancer
at the last instant for the kind of word he never used outside the locker room.

“My wife is Nicole’s biggest fan.”

Chase’s savage curse was lost beneath a flurry of drumbeats. The illumination in the club went from dim to zero. Spotlights bloomed and focused in shades of gold on the small, raised stage.

Pele had arrived.

Nicole Ballard saw the sudden sword edge of light coming through the crack in the green velvet curtains. She smiled encouragingly to the seven teenagers lined up in front of her. At her signal they turned and faced the closed curtain. The girls shifted uneasily. It was their first performance ever.

For an instant Nicole rested her hand on the shining chestnut hair of Sandi Wilcox, silently reassuring the nervous girl. She and her friend Judy had been practicing in secret for months, wanting to surprise their fathers. The men knew that their daughters had been dabbling in dance, but they had no idea just how elegantly feminine their teenage daughters could be.

“Remember,” Nicole murmured in a voice that went no farther than Sandi, “you’re a goddess.”

With a final gentle touch to the girl’s hair, Nicole left the stage. Her bare feet made no noise on the floor.

Jan stood in the wings, holding the hand of a small, slender girl with clear gray eyes and hair as black and shiny as volcanic glass. When Nicole approached, the little girl held out her free hand.

Smiling, Nicole took the cool fingers and wrapped them in her warmth. Together they waited with breath held, nearly as nervous about the coming performance as the girls onstage.

The hula would tell an ancient story of feasting and sly gods and clever men. The chant had been passed through countless generations of Hawaiians until it had ended up in the files of the university’s ethnology department. In the course of her volunteer duties, Nicole had discovered the chanted form of the amusing dance. With the help of Bobby’s mother—a woman as graceful as she was gigantic—Nicole had reconstructed the most probable dance movements and taught them to the children.

The result was very much like the Kipuka Club itself, a mixture of tradition and possibility rather than the rigid preservation of rituals from a time long gone.

Tonight the girls wore neither modern cellophane skirts nor traditional ti leaves for their dance. In keeping with Bobby’s pursuit of “the truth rather than the fact of tradition,” the girls’ costumes were more Samoan than Hawaiian—the best available, in Bobby’s opinion, rather than the most “authentic.”

In this case lavalavas got his nod of approval. The wraparound skirts were silk, short, splashed with vivid flowers against a dark background, and fit snugly around the hips. So-called grass skirts of cellophane were little more than a rustling, slithering striptease in Bobby’s opinion. Lavalavas emphasized the grace of the body’s movements, not the sex of the dancer. Each girl wore a matching halter top, a hibiscus flower over her ear, and a lei woven of fragrant plumeria.

There wasn’t a purple orchid in sight.

Bobby had put his size-sixteen foot down, hard, on the subject of purple-orchid leis. They weren’t a modern enhancement of the “best available” tradition of Hawaii. They stank. They weren’t allowed past the front door. Or the back.

It was the same for Hawaii’s famous steel guitar and ukulele music. No way. Never. Period. No matter how passionately the patrons pleaded or argued, the wailing, twanging music was forbidden within the Kipuka Club’s carved wooden walls.

Nicole fully approved. Cellophane and steel guitars weren’t on her top one hundred list of favorite things. They weren’t even in the second hundred.

Orchids, however, didn’t stink. They were delicate, gorgeous, sensual and . . . well, all right, a few orchids did smell like rotten food. But many had a delicate, heavenly fragrance.

Despite her personal delight in orchids, she had given up arguing with Bobby over the flowers. It was a small sacrifice in order to dance to the driving, exotic rhythms of bongo drums, Bobby’s bass chants, and the husky, eerie notes of the Bolivian panpipes that he loved. Every time he could find someone else for the drums, Bobby settled in with his mystical, magical pipes.

Tonight Bobby was stuck with his bongos.

A subdued pulse of movement went through the novice dancers as Bobby shifted the beat from attention-demanding rhythms to a more fluid sound. He began chanting softly, telling the story of the hula in liquid Hawaiian while the curtain parted to reveal, not Pele, but seven young dancers.

There were muffled sounds of surprise from the audience as parents recognized their children beneath the colored lights.

Nicole smiled, knowing that hearing their names whispered through the audience was all the reward the nervous girls needed. The audience’s surprise was complete, and it would only increase as the teenagers danced. They had worked hard. It showed in the easy grace of their hands describing legends in the dusky room. The hula was slow, fluid, each motion a separate phrase in an unspoken language.

When the music ended, the girls received enthusiastic applause from aunts, uncles, fathers, mothers, siblings, and neighbors. Smiling, trying not to giggle, Sandi hurried offstage with the other dancers and threw her arms around her mother.

“Did you see your dad?” Jan asked, grinning.

Sandi shook her head. “The lights were too bright. But I heard him. And I heard Uncle Chase laughing.”

“Not at you, honey,” Jan said quickly.

“Oh, I know that.” Sandi’s voice was easy, confident. “He was teasing Daddy about something. I could tell by his tone. Honestly, they’re worse than me and Mark.”

“Worse than you and your brother? Um, I’ll have to get back to you on that,” Jan said, hiding her smile by bending and picking up Lisa.

Lisa giggled and kept her fingers wrapped around two of Nicole’s. With shining eyes, the little girl looked from one to the other of the two women who were helping to heal the hurt of her own mother’s rejection.

From both wings of the stage, university students began filtering into position behind the closed curtains. Nicole gave Sandi a quick, one-armed hug and then nibbled teasingly on Lisa’s fingers. Giggling again, the little girl let go of Nicole.

“Are you staying?” Nicole asked Jan.

“Can’t. Dane will take you home. I’ve got to get Lisa to bed and finish my proposal.”

“What is it this time?”

“ ‘Eden in Shades of Green.’ ”

Nicole tilted her head thoughtfully, then nodded. “That’s a happy relief from the usual academic titles. I really like it.”

“I hope the Pacific Rim Educational Foundation does, too. It will cost a bundle to do right. Did you know that no one has done a comprehensive, scientifically accurate botanical survey of these islands yet?” Jan demanded, her voice rising in disbelief and indignation. “When you think that—”

A flurry of drumbeats cut her off.

The rhythm tugged at Nicole, making her heart beat faster with the promise of the freedom of the dance.

“Let me know if you want to send a few drawings with the proposal,” she said hurriedly to Jan. “I’ve got some of Waimea Canyon that are just that—shades of green.” She kissed Lisa quickly. “See you tomorrow, honey.” Nicole turned to Sandi and stroked her shining hair. “You were a goddess. I’m going to be out of a job.”

Though Sandi giggled and ducked her head, her smile was brighter than the spotlights on the stage.

Just as the curtain parted, Nicole took her place at the back of the raised wooden floor. The advanced Polynesian dance students stood in front of her. Men and women alike wore colorful lavalavas wrapped low on their hips. Fragrant leis graced their necks.

The dancers earned pocket money and learned audience skills working in the Kipuka Club four nights a week. Some of the dancers were ethnography students who wanted to feel closer to their subject. Others were science majors looking for a change of pace or dive enthusiasts working on their aerobic stamina. Where they came from or where they were going didn’t matter to Nicole, as long as they loved the dance enough to work at it.

Even though Nicole stood well out of the spotlights, the audience discovered her immediately. Murmurs of “Pele” rippled through the crowd.

Like everyone else, Chase leaned forward, straining to see the woman who dominated the stage even from the shadows. He saw nothing but a dark shape haloed by fire that twisted and shimmered with each liquid movement of her body. His breath caught when he realized that it wasn’t fire he was seeing—it was hair the color of flames, a glorious fall of incandescent red-gold strands.

With heart-stopping grace, the woman’s arms lifted, their smooth golden flesh framed by the silken violence of her unbound hair.

Pele, goddess of fire.

For a moment Chase was afraid he had spoken the words aloud. In the next heartbeat he realized that he could have shouted them and no one would have noticed. A thunderous storm of applause had drowned out the drums.

When Nicole didn’t move from the shadows, the audience sighed and settled back. Pele would dance, but she would dance to her own demands, not theirs.

Bobby’s deep bass chant and gently throbbing drums wove in and out of the dancers’ motions as he pursued his version of “traditional” entertainment. The effect was an elemental fusion of ancient and modern into an electrifying new way of approaching Polynesian dance. Sometimes he would switch his narration from English to pidgin, or to a rhythmic, humorous combination of the two that was unique to him.

The audience laughed while the dancers’ movements and Bobby’s chants told of men outwitting gods and one another. People clapped in time to the triumph of men over the sea and watched in taut attention as two lovers were tricked by a jealous spirit into throwing themselves into the lake of lava burning within Kilauea’s black mouth.

Motionless, Chase watched as intently as anyone in the audience, but it was Nicole he watched, not the other dancers. They simply didn’t exist for him. There was nothing onstage but the woman with burning hair and golden skin.

Unconsciously he leaned forward even more, trying to make out details of her appearance. He couldn’t. She was too well concealed within her softly waving hip-length hair and the shadows at the back of the stage.

Gradually the rhythm of the drums changed from the stately dignity of the Hawaiian hula to the playful, sensual rhythms of Tahiti. One by one, all the dancers except Nicole stepped forward to display their skill at this new form of dance. Their movements were graceful, rapid, and demanding. Tahitian dance required as much strength and stamina as it did coordination and grace.

Soon bodies began to gleam like polished gold or mahogany. Away from the spotlights, darkness throbbed with the rolling thunder of drums. The rhythm increased in speed and intricacy, challenging the dancers to equal its driving presence. Those who couldn’t keep up with the constantly increasing pace drifted to the side of the stage and sat like participants at a feast. From there they called out praise and subtle taunts to the remaining dancers, spurring them on.

The number of people standing on the stage shrank to five, then four, then two—Nicole and a young Polynesian scientist named Sam Chu Lin. He was barely as tall as Nicole’s five feet ten inches. Like her, he wore a short lavalava. Unlike her, that was all he wore. As he faced her, his superb physical conditioning showed in every rippling muscle of his body. He swayed provocatively, tauntingly, daring her to equal him.

For the first time Nicole stepped fully into the spotlight.

Her hair blazed suddenly, vividly, drawing a low sound of awe and pleasure from the audience. Swaying rhythmically, she answered the male dancer’s challenge with movements that exactly echoed his.

Bobby gave a short cry of encouragement and shifted the rhythm into an even more rapid pace.

Sam answered with sinuous, repeated, powerful movements of his hips. The motions were as difficult as they were frankly sensual. With each intricate movement, he inched closer to Nicole’s teasing, gleaming body.

She didn’t retreat. She moved her hips in a figure-eight motion that was so quick the print of her lavalava blurred into a halo of color around her hips. Her hair flew out as she spun and turned her back on Sam, giving him a clear view of her wildly gyrating and perfectly disciplined hips.

Then she smiled over her shoulder at him. It was a smile as old as Eve, a feminine challenge as fiery as the flame-colored hair that enhanced each fast, sensuous movement of her body.

Beneath Bobby’s flying hands, driving rhythms pulsed out of the drums. It seemed impossible that anything could match them, but the dancers did.

As Nicole turned to face Sam again, he leaped into the air. When he landed lightly on the stage, his urgently moving body was closer to hers, so close that her hair licked over him like fire and clung to his hot, gleaming skin.

He smiled at her, an elemental male smile whose intent was as unmistakable as the potent motions of his body.

She answered with a swift, impossible quickening of her dance, her body burning brighter than her hair.

Chase felt like he had taken a fist in the gut. His breath went out with a thick sound that was almost pain. Blood raced through him until his own arousal pounded with the insistent beat of the drums. Each hot movement announced that in Tahiti, dance was an erotic ritual where both partners displayed their physical lures to a potential mate—strength, stamina, grace, and an elemental sensuality that was literally breathtaking to watch.

Chase would have given a great deal to be the man on the drums, driving the primitive rhythms to their inevitable climax. He would have given even more to be inside Pele, deep inside, driving that hot, beautiful body of hers higher and higher until she screamed with pleasure.

As the drumbeat thickened and increased yet again, Nicole and Sam danced toe to toe, their bodies moving so rapidly that individual motions were a blur. Taunting, provoking, challenging, dance and dancers were an eruption of sexuality that stunned Chase. There was no sound but the rapid, primitive thunder of the drums and the soft thud of bare feet meeting wood with each shift of the dance.

The beat increased as relentlessly as Chase’s reckless hunger for the redheaded dancer. He didn’t try to fight his need, because he didn’t even know it was there to fight. He wasn’t aware of himself any longer. He knew only the vivid, pulsing sexuality of Pele.

Sweat gave Nicole’s skin an iridescent quality, as though she was burning from within. Her partner was working even harder. Drops of sweat gleamed, gathered in golden rivulets, and ran from Sam’s body. His breath came in harsh gasps as he fought to keep pace with Nicole’s incandescent dance.

But no mere man could match the goddess of fire.

With a hoarse cry, Sam dropped down among the dancers who were sitting on the stage.

Nicole’s dance never even paused. With a provocative snap of her hips in Sam’s direction, she turned and held out her hands to Bobby, inviting him to replace her exhausted partner.

Bobby answered with another quickening of the pounding beat of the drums.

The new rhythm swept through Nicole, exploding into passionate movements of her body that were both dance and something far older, as deeply rooted in the human soul as life itself. Fiery hair flying, body gleaming, smile flashing, Nicole gave herself wholly to the hot, sensual dance.

Bobby’s hands became a dark blur over the drums, yet still he could not keep up with her. He held the violent rhythms at their peak for a long instant. Then, with a hoarse sound, he threw up his hands and surrendered to the woman who burned wildly in the center of the stage.

With a throaty, triumphant cry, she danced on alone, accompanied by only the wild beating of her heart and the audience calling
“Pele! Pele!”
as they celebrated her victory.

Without warning, the dance ended.

Nicole stood alone within the blazing spotlights, her breasts rising and falling rapidly, her arms held out as though to an unseen lover, her skin shimmering with heat, her hair the color of Pele’s own burning lava fountains.

The room plunged into darkness.

The audience clapped and shouted for Pele, but no one answered. After a few minutes the lights came up. Men and women settled back around their tables and began talking again. Between the words and phrases, currents of excitement still echoed through the room where the fire goddess had danced.

Chase felt like he was on fire himself. He was grateful that the light level in the room stayed low, for his own savage arousal was all too apparent. Silently, uselessly, he cursed his body for its betrayal. The only thing that answered him was the hot drumming of blood through his veins.

He told himself that it would pass, he had been aroused before and life had gone on just fine. He could thank Lynette for that; she had taught him that sexual hunger was preferable to living in yoked misery with the wrong woman.

Slowly he let out a breath, then another, then another, until the vise of sexual need began to loosen. With narrowed gray eyes, he searched the faces of the other men in the room, wondering how many of them were grappling with their own stark arousal. He saw a variety of expressions—pleasure, excitement, humor, appreciation—but nowhere did he see a reflection of his own violent response to Nicole’s sensual dance.

His only consolation was that Dane, while he had obviously enjoyed the performance, hadn’t been aroused.

“Is it time to say I told you so?” Dane asked smugly.

“Just what did you tell me, little brother?” Chase’s voice, like his thoughts, was raw and rough.

“That you’ve never seen anything like her.”

Chase smiled thinly. “Outside of a red-light district, no, I can’t say as I have.”

“Chase Wilcox, closet Puritan!” Dane hooted in disbelief. “Say it again. I still don’t believe it. Tahitian dancing can be a little sexy, sure, but it’s a long way from smutty.”

“Couldn’t prove it by watching the red-hot redhead. I’m surprised the cops haven’t shut this place down.”

Dane realized that his brother was serious. “What are you talking about? Look around you. The Kipuka Club is rated PG.”

After a moment Chase forced a smile onto his lips. He knew that his brother was right. There were families gathered around tables all through the supper club, enjoying the food, drink, and professional conversations that were the Kipuka’s hallmark.

Reluctantly he admitted that if he found Nicole’s dance violently arousing, the problem was with him rather than with the dance itself. He had seen Tahitian dance performed before, had enjoyed the saucy rhythms, the curve of breasts and hips, and none of it had raised his heartbeat worth mentioning.

But that was before the fire-haired goddess.

All Chase could think was that the men in the club must be as blind as stones not to see the wildness in her, the hunger, the sexual heat.

My God, the sheer heat.

On the heels of that thought came another, one that made Chase’s mouth curl slightly beneath the thick black sheen of his mustache. The women must be blind, too, or they would grab their men whenever Pele came onstage and take off like bats out of an erupting volcano.

“When does Nicole make her rounds of the tables?” Chase asked idly.

“Make her rounds?”

“Yeah. You know. Go to each table and smile and press the flesh and get tips stuffed into her lavalava.”

Dane shook his head. “You’ve been keeping the wrong company, bro. You keep acting like this is a strip joint and Nicole’s some kind of exceptionally well coordinated tart. If you try to stuff money in her lavalava, you’ll lose your hand.”

“I don’t notice Jan dancing here,” Chase pointed out.

“Try next Wednesday. That’s amateur night. But if I catch your hands anywhere near
her
lavalava, I’ll hire three men and break your arm.”

Chase tilted his head back and laughed, really laughed, releasing some of the tension that had coiled so explosively inside him. The sound of his laughter was contagious. Nearby people looked around and smiled at him for no other reason than their pleasure in hearing him.

“I’m glad to see you have enough sense to be jealous of Jan,” Chase said finally.

“Just cautious. Women fall into your hands like sun-ripe fruit. Jan makes life very comfortable for me. I don’t want her too close to your lethal charm. After fifteen years of staid married life, she might get itchy and wonder if she missed anything by marrying real young.”

Like you’re itchy?
Chase asked his brother silently. Aloud, he said, “Women trample me to get to you. You’re so damned civilized and elegant you’re almost pretty.”

Dane grinned. “Yeah. Ain’t it grand?”

As long as it isn’t Nicole chasing you, yes.

Chase knew there was no way his brother could have a very discreet, very meaningless affair with Nicole and then go back to Jan a wiser man. But Dane didn’t know that, and he wasn’t listening to his older, wiser brother.