Eden Burning by Elizabeth Lowell Page B

how it would feel to get their hands under her clothes. When she refused to wrestle in the backseat of a car—or the front—they called her a tease. And that was the polite name.
    Cynicism had come early to Nicole. It had stayed. She learned to fend off blunt male advances with the same breezy humor that she had previously used to hide her hurt at being ignored by the opposite sex.
    Then she had met Ted. He didn’t act like a starving octopus. He kept his hands to himself. He seemed interested in her thoughts and dreams. Later she realized it was her family’s money that had attracted Ted, not herself. But that was later. In the beginning she had been thrilled that such a handsome, popular man would notice her, much less pursue her and beg her to marry him.
    Dazzled, she had agreed. He wasn’t a gentle lover. Her virginity had been an unhappy surprise. He had dumped a few state-of-the-art sex manuals in her lap and told her to study up on what men liked—there would be a test later.
    She failed that test, and all the others he gave her.
    Sixteen months into the marriage, her father went bankrupt. Ted cast an accountant’s eye over the financial disaster, concluded that the money was gone and wouldn’t ever come back, and walked out on his wife. To prevent the professional and personal contacts he had made since his marriage from seeing him as the cold fortune hunter he was, he announced that the marriage had failed because his so-called wife was a closet lesbian who refused even to have children.
    That was the worst insult of all. She had wanted children. He had been the one who insisted there was plenty of time, they should grab what they could while they were young enough to enjoy it.
    Nicole hadn’t hung around California to see who believed her husband’s lies and who didn’t; everybody, even her own father, thought Ted was a warm, charming, loving man. So she had fled as far as she could, as fast as she could, leaving behind her girlish dreams and a broken marriage.
    She knew flight was cowardly. She didn’t care. There was nothing to stick around for but more of the bitter taste of humiliation and failure.
    The instant she had stepped off the plane at Hilo, she felt a sense of homecoming that staggered her. It was as if the island itself had reached out to wrap her in a warm, welcoming hug. The island didn’t care that she was too tall to be really feminine or that she was too cold to respond to a man sexually. Hawaii simply pulled her into its fragrance and warmth, asking nothing in return.
    “Sad?”
    The soft word slipped through Nicole’s unhappy thoughts about the past. She blinked and realized that she was standing with her sketch pad tucked under her arm, staring at nothing. Automatically her free hand went out to stroke the smooth hair of the child who stood beside her.
    “Mainland sad,” she said huskily. “But I’m in Hawaii now.”
    Hawaii, where a stranger had kissed her and made her believe that maybe, just maybe, there was hope for her as a woman.
    “Always-always?” Benny asked quickly, repeating himself for emphasis in the Hawaiian style.
    “I’ll stay in Hawaii always-always,” Nicole said, reassuring both of them.

 
    Nicole settled lotus-style onto an oversize chaise longue that waited beneath the jacaranda trees. That was her signal to Benny that it was time to be quiet.
    A weathered wood table stood within arm’s reach to one side of the big chair. The furniture had appeared beneath the jacarandas the day after Grandmother had discovered Nicole propped awkwardly against a tree trunk, spare pencils clamped between her teeth, frowning and sketching madly before the incoming afternoon rains veiled the trees in mist.
    At first she had tried to sit on the ground to draw, but even the lush carpet of ferns couldn’t blunt the edges of the lava beneath the green cloak of plants. In her typical generous fashion, Grandmother had quietly made sure that the new family member wouldn’t