More Than Paradise by Jennifer Fulton

to come right out and just say what she should have said in the Þ rst place. Pretending to read her menu, she framed the words. There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. I didn’t say anything earlier because I didn’t want you to feel embarrassed about what happened in the bar. But I’m a woman, not a man. I wasn’t sure if you’d noticed.
    “It’s weird.” Charlotte observed suddenly. “I haven’t done anything like this for ages.”
    The intimate lull of her voice made Ash lean forward to catch every word. Shalimar ß ooded her nostrils again, reminding her how much she liked to smell it on a lover. “Like what?”
    Charlotte pondered for a moment, her head fetchingly angled.
    “Said yes to having an adventure, I suppose.”
    “That stunt wasn’t an adventure. It was an act of madness.”
    “I’m not just talking about that. I mean everything.” Charlotte swept a hand around. “I’m sitting in a restaurant with white linen and candelabras on the tables, and scary tribal masks all around the walls.
    I haven’t read a newspaper in days. I’m in a place where people speak eight hundred languages, mostly not English. I don’t do impulsive things, normally, but here I am having dinner with a stranger who carries three guns and I’m feeling completely comfortable. It’s weird.
    It’s like I’ve been cut adrift and all the rules have changed.”
    Ash had to prod herself mentally to come up with a reply. She’d lost herself so completely in the sensual melody of Charlotte’s voice that she had barely heard the words. “Well, that’s not surprising. Nothing you do here has any social consequences. The people who matter to you are Þ ve thousand miles away.”
    “Exactly.” Charlotte’s eyes were pansy purple in the candlelight.
    They looked like windows to a soul. Ash knew her own were shuttered, by contrast. “It’s like there’s a whole new paradigm, a conspiracy you join without even knowing it. Just because you’re a stranger in a strange land.”
    “I think most travelers experience what you’re describing. It’s part of escaping.”
    Charlotte rested an elbow on the table and cupped her cheek in her hand. “Does it happen to you, too, when you come back here?”
    That voice. It simply had to belong to her. Charlotte was from Boston and obviously hadn’t been in PNG for more than a few days. The bizarre coincidence was unlikely but not impossible. Ash contemplated
    • 74 •

    MORE THAN PARADISE
    asking her if she knew Dani Bush, then realized how stupid that would be. Did she really want this woman Þ nding out she was about to dine with the third person in the bedroom that night?
    “Actually it’s the other way ’round,” she said, answering Charlotte’s question. “As soon as the plane touches down back home all bets are off.”
    “I can’t imagine you doing crazy stuff. You seem so…
    controlled.”
    I’m doing crazy stuff right now. She was sitting opposite a woman she knew spelled trouble, trying to persuade herself that she only wanted to sleep with her, yet knowing there was already more to it than that. She was actually indulging in fantasies about having a future with a woman she’d only just met and who didn’t even know her gender. As she’d driven to the hotel for their dinner date, she’d tried to see herself in a relationship. Then, when Charlotte was looking at the photos of the plantation house, Ash was picturing her on the balcony late at night, the two of them wallowing in the sunset, then going inside to make love.
    Her stomach churned at the thought. That body, this woman, naked in her arms, belonging to her. An aching hunger clawed at her, making its familiar, restless claim on her senses. But there was something else, too, a yearning so profound, Ash was shaken by it. Comprehension ß ashed across her mind. Love at Þ rst sight. She instantly rejected the idea. There was no such thing. People who felt guilty about no-strings sex laid