Blooming in the Wild (5 page)

Tanah made a face. “So Pele burned the girl to death, just for choosing the wrong man? Pretty harsh.”

Frank shrugged. “If she’d lived, she might’ve been put to death for breaking kapu. Doesn’t pay for humans to mess with da gods, yeah?”

“That’s true in mythology through the ages,” Joel mused, gazing out at the silver sea. “The ancient Greeks, the Romans—even the first story recorded,
Beowulf
, told of trials sent by vengeful gods.”

Evidently, the action hero did some reading when he wasn’t smiling for the camera. Bella wondered if he’d gone to college. Did they give degrees in hanging off cliffs? Of course he might have a sensible degree in some unrelated field. She’d gotten a business degree herself, although she could’ve minored in botany with all the electives she’d squeezed into her schedule.

“Your Pele is a stern goddess,” Camille put in. “Sending her lava down through villages and homes, even today. Scarcely giving people time to escape.”

“
Pele kia’i o kâna po’,”
Bella shot back and then closed her mouth, astonished not only by the rush of defensive anger fueling her words but that they had emerged in Hawaiian.

“
’Ae,
yeah,” Frank agreed calmly. “Pele looks after her own.” But Camille was looking at Bella. “You speak Hawaiian?”

“A little.”

“She should, she’s half Hawaiian,” Frank said proudly. “A Ho’omalu, yeah?”

“Ho’omalu,” Camille repeated. “Really? Hmm, I know I’ve heard that name.”

“Big Hawaiian ohana,” Frank said. “Nawea Bay, back toward Kona, is theirs.”

“And you’re a member of that family. How lovely.” Camille smiled at Bella and swung her foot idly, gazing into the fire.

The others were quiet for a moment. Bella took another drink of hot coffee and then lowered her cup, glancing around at the circle of fire-lit faces. Awareness prickled under her skin like the brush of a stinging vine. Someone in this group was projecting anger and malice—at her. Not overtly, but it was there, just the same. She could feel it.

But who? Her gaze skipped over Frank, not only an ex-cop, but a longtime friend and employee of the Ho’omalus. The two models, the makeup artist—no, that was just ridiculous. And Camille was smiling as she murmured something to her assistant, his head bent close to hers.

As Bella watched, he nodded and then looked up at Bella across the fire. His face was expressionless, his eyes black in the firelight. She blinked and looked back into her cup, her skin prickling again.

The Asian-American didn’t like her; that seemed clear. But why not? Should she speak with Camille? And tell the woman what? That Bella was sure Li disliked her? That was juvenile. He didn’t have to like her, just do his job. And it was her job to make sure all went well here.

“That was a great dinner,” Joel said. “My compliments to your sister, Frank.”

Bella looked at Joel, his face limned in firelight, highlighting the strong angle of his jaw and the creases in his face when he smiled. He looked so natural here, in his milieu.

She blinked, realizing she’d forgotten to include him in her inventory of people who might be angry with her. He was an obvious choice. He’d made his derision clear on the boat. She narrowed her eyes at him. She’d fed him fruit from her forest, so he’d better not toy with her.

Suddenly, she really wanted to talk to Melia or Claire. Her best friends would understand some of her turmoil, both being recent transplants to the island. And if they didn’t understand, they would sympathize. With a murmured apology, she slipped away again, walking down beside the shore.

Melia didn’t answer her phone, and Bella assumed her friend was asleep. Two months pregnant, the new bride napped every afternoon and still went to bed early. Of course her early bedtime might also have something to do with her husband, the handsome, virile David Ho’omalu.

She tried Claire next, but she wasn’t answering either. Bella scowled at her phone and then shoved it in her pocket. She knew Claire was at Nawea with Daniel Ho’omalu, her husband-to-be. Another intensely virile man, with whom Claire was obviously doing something that precluded answering her phone.

Was everyone having sex but her?

Bella stopped in her tracks.
Au’e
, wow, where had that come from? It wasn’t as if she was
looking
for sex here on the island. Claire, one of her two best friends, had admitted when they came for Melia’s wedding to David Ho’omalu only a month ago that she intended to find a handsome man and seduce him. She’d done it too. And now she and David’s brother Daniel were getting married in a few months. Bella sighed wistfully. The Ho’omalu men were pretty spectacular.

Although Daniel and Claire’s sexual relationship was a little too strong for Bella’s taste. When Claire donned a bikini after she and Daniel became lovers, Bella had seen bruises on her friend’s thighs and one on her back. But then she’d seen the two in an embrace when they thought no one was looking, and been struck with the sensual heat between them. Whatever was going on, it was not abuse.

As for her, she’d been with a couple of guys, the last one at Christmas. The celebratory spirit of the company Christmas party enveloped her in such a glow she’d ended up in his bed. She’d enjoyed it very much, and they’d repeated the experience a few times, but then he’d fallen in love with someone he met at his gym. And while Bella missed the sex, with her travel schedule it wasn’t as if she had time or energy to look for a replacement.

Until now. She looked around. Here she was in paradise, warm and flowerscented twilight with an ocean lapping at her feet on one side and a forest beckoning her into its shadows on the other. Who wouldn’t think of
hana ai
? This place was made for sex.

Unbidden, the image of Joel Girand watching her strip down to her tankini filled her mind’s eye. She bit her lip, a thrill of remembered pleasure running through her. He’d been as riveted as a man watching a striptease. And she was pretty sure—no, she knew he’d wanted her.

The crazy part was that she’d bet he knew how to make sex into a volcanic experience—the kind that left a sleepy, satisfied smile in a woman’s eyes. The look that Melia and Claire both wore when they were around the Ho’omalu brothers.

Au’e! She had to stop thinking about sex. She needed to go for a run and burn off some nervous energy. But she knew it was foolhardy to try to explore a strange forest in the dark, no matter how strong its magnetic pull, and even if it had given her gifts of food. Camille was right. They were in the wilderness, and it didn’t pay to trifle with natural dangers. Bella wrapped her arms around her middle and stood for a moment, feeling stuck.

The sun had long since set, the western sky only faintly rimmed with light, stars beginning to twinkle on above her. To her left, the campfire flickered in the cove, and she could see most of the group still seated there, those on the near side dark silhouettes, the others bathed in the soft, reddish firelight.

Joel Girand was telling a story now, raising his big hands to make a point while the others listened raptly. Probably bragging about his exploits. She hesitated and then found her feet moving toward the fire, unwillingly drawn to hear his tale.

“So there we were, up the river about as far as you can go, with no other way out through the jungle and no boat.” Someone groaned sympathetically. Bella perched on the edge of a rock near Camille, who smiled at her.

“What did you do?” Matt asked. He sat in a camp chair with Cassie curled on his lap. Tanah sat beside Joel on the log. The pretty makeup artist wasn’t missing a chance to be near him.

Joel sobered, gazing into the fire. “Well, we had fifty pounds of camera equipment and another twenty of camping gear, plus our guides, one of whom was injured when the boat went down. We couldn’t hike out, and the radio had gone with the boat. The locals knew we were up there, but we figured it would take them a few more days before they worried about any of us enough to bring a boat up through the rapids.

“The rest of us would have been okay—not real comfortable, because it was hot as hell, and the bugs were trying to eat us alive. But the injured man was in a lot of pain, with fever setting in.”

He looked around at them. “So we built a raft.”

Matt nodded happily, but Frank raised his eyebrows in respect. “With what, an axe? How long did that take you?”

“No axe. Had my knife and a hatchet in my gear. Didn’t really expect to need the hatchet, but I was damn glad to have it,” Joel told him.

“Lashed the raft together with vines?” Frank guessed.

Joel nodded, pausing to take a drink of his beer. “Fastened everything on the same way, along with our injured man. Tied some handholds, cut some poles to steer with, made a rudder out of a plastic supply bin lid lashed to a pole, and off down the river we went.”

Bella eyed him with reluctant respect. Creating a floatable raft from live tropical wood, most of which was hardwood, with no power tools? The fact that Joel was here now demonstrated his success, but it must have been incredibly difficult. Then she frowned to herself. Why was she assuming he’d been the one to do the work? He might have sat on the bank and whined while the natives did all the work, for all she knew.

“First thing we found,” Joel said wryly, “is that you don’t steer a raft so much as you bounce off obstacles with it. I fell off at least five times myself, and we lost everything except the camera gear. My photographer had that tied on so tight it wasn’t coming loose for anything less than an explosion.”

“The Amidauro River?” Camille said. “Aren’t there crocodiles there?”

Joel’s face tightened. “Yup. There are crocs.” He kicked off one of his sandals and crooked his leg, holding up his right foot. “Got that as a souvenir from that trip.”

Bella gazed in horror at the ugly gouge on the arch of his large, well-shaped foot, marring the white strip of skin left by wearing sandals in the sun. Her stomach lurched as she imagined a huge mouth full of sharp teeth snapping at him, nearly dragging him into the water and under it.

“Holy crap,” Matt said. “I heard they pull you under and drown you.”

Joel nodded. “Wedge their prey under a log and let it, uh, tenderize for a few days before they eat it. Luckily, this one didn’t get a good grip on me, and I was able to climb back onto the raft. But if Al, my photographer, had let go of me…” He shrugged, taking a pull on his beer.

Tanah shuddered, and Cassie’s eyes went wide.

“You’re so brave,” she breathed. Bella snapped out of her own vicarious fear for him. The TV star didn’t need any more female fans oohing and ahhing over him.

“How long did it take you to reach the nearest village?” Frank asked.

“Ten hours. Five times as long as it took us to go up in the jet boat. We reached the main river by dark, and it was a damn good thing. Crocs are more active at night, so they would’ve taken me on one of my little dips instead of just trying to nibble.”

Bella felt a grudging respect for his self-deprecating humor. He hadn’t tried to make himself the hero of the story, anyway.

“Of course, there are tiger sharks here,” Li said. “One of the fiercest predators on the planet. I hear they cruise the shorelines at night, searching for prey.”

Bella stared at him in the firelight, her unease about him morphing into dislike. She had to bite back the urge to snap at him to shut up.

“Not gonna bother us,” Frank soothed. “Nobody go swimming at night, yeah?”

“Not me,” Tanah agreed fervently, and the others laughed.

Joel yawned and shoved himself out of his chair. “Well, if I have to smile for the camera bright and early, I’d better get my beauty sleep.”

“Matt and I had better do the same,” Cassie agreed with complete seriousness.

Joel grinned at her. “Nah, you could stay up all night and still outshine the rest of us.”

She’d better go to bed too, Bella realized. Not for beauty, because she wouldn’t be in front of any cameras, but because she was in charge.

She just hoped she could sleep.

An hour later, the camp was dark and quiet, the only sounds the rhythmic hiss of the surf and faint rattle of palm fronds in the night breeze. As a crescent moon shone from a star-filled sky, Bella grumpily conceded that she wasn’t going to sleep anytime soon. Every time she closed her eyes, she remembered something else she must do, or she visualized last night’s dream and worried she would wake to find herself screaming rousing the whole camp. How humiliating would that be?

Then she remembered her “conversation” with the guava tree and was even wider awake. Apparently, she had at least a little of the Ho’omalu gift. She didn’t want to sleep and wake up to work; she wanted to go into the forest and explore it and her strange ability. How much could she do? Was this gift limited to survival, or was there more to it? And would it continue once she left Hawaii?

This thought filled her with such darkness that she shied away. She’d only just gotten here. Time enough later to remember that her home was on the mainland.

Kicking back the light cover of her sleeping bag, she pushed her tousled hair off her face. Maybe watching a video would help her relax. Feeling under her pillow for her flashlight and finding it, she snapped it on. She played the narrow beam around to find her notebook case, unzipped it and powered up the little computer.

She searched through the short list of videos she’d saved. A new romantic comedy, a segment of a Hawaiian nature program, and a few old favorites. Bella hesitated and then, feeling equal parts curious and resentful, plugged in her headphones and clicked on the last title in the list. “The Wild Zone: Cliff-Diving at Panadama”. She wanted to learn more about their star, that was all. Better to know the enemy.

The show’s title filled the screen, followed by a close-up shot of a lean man in a form-fitting bodysuit belting himself into a complicated harness. As the camera panned up over capable, tanned hands working buckles and carabiners, then over washboard abs and a broad, hard chest, Bella twirled a strand of hair between her fingers, watching avidly.