Eden Burning / Fires of Eden Page 2

  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.”

  “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.

  2

  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. S
o-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.

  3

  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 p
olished 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.