This Time Love Read online

  This Time Love

  To everyone who got it right

  the second time

  Contents

  Prologue Gabriel Venture slumped on the floor. . .

  One I couldn’t have heard right.

  Two Gabe shifted against the weight. . .

  Three Sun poured over the converted resort. . .

  Four After Gabe left the main highway. . .

  Five The entrance to Lost River Cave. . .

  Six Joy scrambled up the last steep pitch. . .

  Seven Silently Gabe walked up to the back porch. . .

  Eight Emotion shook Gabe, a fury he hadn’t felt. . .

  Nine The next morning Gabe walked through. . .

  Ten Too surprised to do more. . .

  Eleven The road to Lost River Cave’s trailhead. . .

  Twelve “We’d better get going,” Joy said to Gabe.

  Thirteen Nothing was visible in the vast darkness. . .

  Fourteen Almost immediately the rope holding. . .

  Fifteen Even days later, in the pouring light. . .

  Sixteen The front screen slammed. . .

  Seventeen “Mommy? what’s for dinner?” Kati called.

  Eighteen Ten days later the voices closed. . .

  Nineteen In aching silence Gabe followed Joy. . .

  Twenty Working slowly, Joy and Gabe found. . .

  Twenty-one Slowly Joy let out the breath. . .

  Twenty-two A few hours later, arms loaded. . .

  Twenty-three Suspended between passion and fear. . .

  Twenty-four For a moment Gabe simply stared. . .

  Twenty-five Gabe and Joy arrived. . .

  Twenty-six As Joy drove the jeep back. . .

  Twenty-seven As the jeep pulled up to the cottages. . .

  Twenty-eight As Gabe hammered a piton deep. . .

  Twenty-nine “Off rappel,” Gabe called.

  Thirty Gabe held the radiophone in his hand. . .

  Thirty-one Gabe refused to spoil the barbecue. . .

  Thirty-two Long after the sound of Gabe’s vehicle. . .

  Thirty-three In the thin, cold air. . .

  About the Author

  Also by Elizabeth Lowell

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  GABRIEL VENTURE SLUMPED ON THE FLOOR OF THE crowded airport and wondered how long it had been since he’d had more than three hours of sleep at a time. If someone had asked where he was, he couldn’t have told them. After the first fifty or sixty airports, they all looked alike. To someone as worn out with travel as he was, they sounded alike too—a babble of strangers.

  That was why he had a finger stuck in one ear and a cell phone pressed to the other, making contact with the only people in the world who gave a damn whether he lived or died. Whenever he’d needed them, his family had been there. He tried to be there for them too.

  “Sorry if I woke you or whatever,” Gabe said to his brother. “I don’t even know what time it is where I am.”

  “You sound beat.” Dan’s voice was sympathetic. “Hard assignment?”

  Since Peru they all had been hard, but Gabe didn’t think his family needed to hear about that. Even more than the money he sent them when the family company was having a tough time, Dan and their mother got a real kick out of following Gabe’s global travels. There was no reason to spoil their pleasure.

  “Just squeezed for time,” Gabe said, yawning.

  “Maybe you should take a vacation. How many countries have you been in during the last year?”

  Gabe tried to count. His brain fuzzed. “I’d have to check my logbook, and it’s packed. How’s Mother doing?”

  “Much better. The dental implants have her chewing steak with the best of us, and the knee surgery really helped her too. She should be playing tennis again soon.”

  Gabe smiled. One good thing had come of his packed assignment list—enough money to pay for family medical needs that weren’t covered by cost-conscious insurers. “Just what the world needs—a carnivorous geriatric terror on the courts.”

  Dan laughed. “Hey, get used to the idea. Our parents were in their forties when they had us. At the rate you’re going, you will be too. You should quit trotting over the world and find a good woman.”

  “That’s not what you told me seven years ago,” Gabe said before he could stop himself.

  “Seven years ago I was picking up the pieces of my pride after I fell for the wrong woman. Times change. You should change with them. Suzy is a good woman and I know it.”

  “You getting any closer to marrying her?”

  “The church she wanted is booked for the next twenty months.”

  “Man.” Gabe yawned again. “No wonder people live in sin.”

  “That’s why we did the justice-of-the-peace thing. As of yesterday, we’re officially married. We’ll throw a big party later.”

  “Hey, that’s great! Congratulations! Give her a kiss and a hug from me.”

  “I tried to reach you but—”

  “No worries,” Gabe said quickly. “Only God could have gotten through to me where I was. And at your advanced age, you can’t afford to lose a second.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I’m a whole three years older than your thirty.”

  Gabe didn’t say anything. He felt a hell of a lot older than thirty. He felt older than the mountains that had nearly killed him.

  “We’re going to wait a few years to have kids,” Dan added. “But not too long. I don’t want to be like Dad. He used to get so pissed when someone thought he was our grandfather.”

  Gabe made a few sounds that said he was listening. He wasn’t. He was thinking of seven years ago, when the woman he might have loved had casually aborted his child. He’d thought about it a lot while he dangled head-down over a cliff and saw his climbing rope coming apart strand by strand. He’d come very close to dying with nothing more to show for his life than a few books, a trunk full of articles, and a fistful of book offers he never had time to take on.

  Life coming apart strand by strand by strand.

  The rope and his life had unraveled while years raced through his mind, his life for better and for worse. The biggest emptiness, the deepest regret, the greatest hurt all came from the same source . . . a slim girl-woman called Joy Smith-Anderson. She hadn’t been his first lover, but she’d been the only one that mattered.

  And she had betrayed him.

  “You still there?” Dan asked.

  “Yeah. Can barely hear you. The noise in this place could drown out a Brazilian soccer game.”

  “I asked when you’re coming home.”

  “Not right away. I’m headed for New Mexico.”

  “Stateside? That’s a first.”

  “Second, actually.” Gabe swallowed a yawn. “I’m going to do a follow on my first big article.”

  “Lost River Cave?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why? After all the places you’ve been, that one is pretty small beer.”

  Gabe tried to find a glib answer but was too tired for anything but blunt honesty. “Because of all the places I’ve ever been, it’s the only one that still haunts me.”

  “It’s that girl, isn’t it?”

  “That would be pretty stupid. It’s been seven years, she isn’t there anymore, and we didn’t have anything worth being haunted about in the first place.”

  “I hear you. But you’ve never come close to loving another girl and I feel like I had something to do with—”

  “Leave it,” Gabe cut savagely. “Just fucking leave it alone.” Then he reeled in his temper. “Sorry. I’m real ragged at the moment. How’s the company doing? You need any more cash?”

  Dan’s sigh was
long and unhappy, but when he talked again, it was about the ups and downs of the family business, Venture Construction. “It’s doing a lot better now than it was seven years ago, and the stock market has crawled out of the toilet. We have ‘play or pay’ contracts stretching over the next five years. From now on, we’ll all be looking for ways to spend money rather than save it. Jesus, what a difference a few years makes.”

  Gabe listened and tried not to see Joy’s face, hear her laughter, taste peppermint on her tongue, on his own.

  The taste of betrayal.

  One

  I COULDN’T HAVE HEARD RIGHT.

  Joy Anderson closed her gray eyes and fought to breathe. Hand clenched on the radiophone, she prayed that she hadn’t heard her boss say Gabriel Venture’s name. This was just a nightmare and all she had to do was wake up.

  Warily her eyes opened.

  Nothing changed.

  She was still sitting in a patch of pure yellow sunlight pouring through the cottage’s four-paned kitchen window. The phone was hot to her touch, all but burning her ear.

  She couldn’t see the man she was talking to. She didn’t have to. The memory of Harry Larkin’s broad, professionally amiable face was imprinted in her mind. He was the one who had managed to land the two-year grant that was running out while she sat in the New Mexico desert and listened to the name of her nightmare.

  Gabriel Venture rising out of the past, haunting her in daylight as he had in dreams.

  “Yeah, it’s quite a shock, isn’t it? The great Gabriel Venture is coming to your very own boondocks to do a major article.” Satisfaction rang in Harry’s voice. “But then, he makes a specialty of places that are so remote they don’t even have cell phone coverage. He was even here some time ago, back when nobody but dedicated amateur cavers knew much about Lost River Cave.”

  Some time ago?

  Joy started to close her eyes, then forced them to stay open. No place to hide. No way out. Just herself and the past crashing down around her, bruising and cutting and battering.

  Oh yeah, Gabe was here. Six years, eleven months and twenty-nine days ago, give or take a few hours. But who’s counting?

  The bitter words went no farther than Joy’s mind. She was too shaken to speak and much too careful of her own and her daughter’s privacy to reveal that she knew the time of Gabe’s departure to the day and hour.

  It was hard to forget. Kati had been born nine months after Gabe drove out of New Mexico’s pale, searing deserts in pursuit of the Orinoco River’s steamy green mysteries. Joy had loved Gabe then, and had envied him the freedom of the world waiting at his feet.

  When he left, she’d hated him.

  And resented his freedom even more.

  Joy slammed the door on that line of thought. No matter how difficult it had been to watch while Gabe explored the world the way she had always wanted to, she wouldn’t have traded Kati for all the freedom on earth. Not then. Not now.

  Resenting what couldn’t be changed was a game for spoiled children. She was no longer either spoiled or childish. A mother couldn’t afford to be. Especially a single mother.

  “I told Gabe’s editor that we would be only too happy to help him,” Harry continued, unaware that he had lost his distant audience. “It’s about the only way the Lost River grant might be renewed.”

  Realizing that it had been too long since she had put air in her lungs, Joy took a quick, shallow breath, then another.

  “I don’t have to tell you what a grant renewal would mean,” Harry said. “Not only your own job, but those of the people who work for you. The National Park Service has been very pleased with your groundbreaking exploration and academic papers on Lost River Cave. So has the university. The whole thing has been quite a feather in our cap, publicity-wise.” He paused, waiting for her response.

  Silence.

  “Dr. Anderson?”

  With an effort Joy pulled her shattered thoughts together. From her subconscious she called up the last few moments of Harry’s speech.

  Only too happy to help him.

  She shuddered as she felt the full force of feelings she thought she’d buried so deep she would never have to face them again. Or face herself . . . the child she had been, certain that all she had to do was ask, believe, love, and what she wanted would come to her wrapped in a shiny big bow.

  She had been wrong.

  When she realized how wrong, she’d wanted to bury her foolishness in the past along with Gabe, bury it beyond recovery. But it was all coming back now, knives of rage twisting through her.

  All I want to do with the great Gabriel Venture is never to see him or hear his name again.

  Ever.

  Barring that piece of good fortune, I’d like to drop him down Lost River Cave’s deepest, blackest hole and throw the damned rope in after him.

  The savagery of her own bleak emotions shocked Joy even more than hearing Gabe’s name had. Until this instant, she believed that she’d forgotten—if not forgiven—Gabe’s sweet smile and sweeter touch, and the terrible bitterness of his betrayal.

  Betrayal? No. Stop right there. That’s the spoiled child whining about life being unfair. That child grew up.

  She had to.

  Unconsciously Joy squared her shoulders.

  The adult knows that Gabe didn’t betray me. He never promised me one single thing. He just took what I offered, thanked me kindly, and left me holding the bag. Quite literally.

  But Kati was inside that bag.

  Hating her father won’t do me any good, won’t do Kati any good, and it sure as hell won’t bother Gabe. Hating him almost destroyed me once. I won’t let it touch me now. I won’t let him touch me.

  Ruthlessly Joy shoved her emotions into the dark pit she called the past. After Gabe had left her, she’d raged in silence against him, cried out her loneliness in her parents’ arms until her throat was raw, and kept on raging inside herself until she was emotionally exhausted.

  Then her parents had stepped on the wrong helicopter and died in the kind of crash that left little to be buried except her own childhood. At twenty, she was on her own.

  A few weeks later she learned she was pregnant.

  It had been very easy to hate Gabe then. Very easy to blame him. It brought a kind of acid satisfaction that had almost destroyed her.

  “Dr. Anderson?”

  Harry’s words came like a voice through a deep cavern, distant, echoing. The sound quality had nothing to do with the radiophone’s reception and everything to do with Joy’s state of mind.

  “I’m thinking,” she said, her voice thin.

  Harry chuckled and said in a soothing tone, “Don’t you worry about a thing. We know how busy you are wrapping up the Lost River explorations before the grant runs out. The magazine editor who made the arrangements assures us that Mr. Venture can handle himself in any kind of country, is an expert technical climber, and in general won’t get in your way.”

  This time Harry didn’t wait for Joy to make polite noises to show she was following him. He simply marched ahead like a man with two days of work and an hour to do it in, which was a fair description of his job as a fund-raiser, grant-finder, and general rainmaker for the university.

  “I’ve sent all the information about Mr. Venture’s schedule that you’ll need. It should be at the Carlsbad post office, along with a package of his most recent articles and a summary of his needs while he’s staying at Cottonwood Wells with your team.”

  Dazed, her normally quick mind floundering, Joy let Harry’s words pour over her in a numbing waterfall. His enthusiasm should have been contagious. Normally it would have been. Harry had been her angel on more than one occasion. Without him she would never have gotten the original federal grant that had made exploration of Lost River Cave possible. Now he was talking about the kind of publicity that could ensure eventual funding for further explorations.

  Yet all she could do was stare through the window across a desert basin hazed with sunlight and hea
t and distance.

  Not that what she was seeing made a difference to her right now. She wasn’t really looking at the desert any more than she had really understood anything Harry said beyond one fact.

  Gabe here, with me, in Lost River Cave.

  Again.

  The thought was like a climbing rope whipping out of control through her hands, burning her until she bled.

  Harry cleared his throat and asked a bit impatiently, “Dr. Anderson, is there something wrong with the connection on your end?”

  “No.” Her voice was barely above a whisper. With the gritty determination that had brought her through the shattering year after Gabe had left her, Joy cleared her throat and gathered her thoughts. “If I sound a little dazed, chalk it up to hard work. We’ve all been going at top speed, trying to cram everything in so that the long-term experiments won’t be lost.”

  It was the truth. Just today they had gathered the last samples of cave water at various levels. They would send the samples to the team of chemists that had left a month ago when their own money ran out.

  A dazzling thought came to Joy. She grabbed it and hung on to it like a lifeline. “There’s so much for me still to do. Someone else can show Gabe—Mr. Venture—around. Jim Fisher would be perfect. He’s the best amateur caver west of the Mississippi. He’s been working with us on and off for years and—”

  “No, not Fisher,” Harry cut in, his voice both calm and certain. “This was bucked all the way up to the president and the Board of Regents. It came back down with your name on it.”

  She swallowed against the sudden tightness of her throat. “Why me?”

  Harry laughed and said dryly, “You’ve been down in the dark too long, Dr. Anderson. Take a look in a mirror.”

  Joy grimaced. She didn’t need a mirror to know that she was small, slender, and appealing if you liked pixies. With her pale blond hair and rainwater eyes, she made great photo material, as Harry had pointed out more than once in the past. Add to that her relative youth and expertise in an unusual area of academia and you had a publicist’s dream.

  And the answer to a fund-raiser’s prayer.