Free Spoils of Eden by Linda Lee Chaikin

as part of the bargain, you’ll stake me in my own plantation as we agreed.” Keno scowled. “But saying good-bye to Candie will be bad.”
    Candie, was it? How the dour Ainsworth Derrington would bloat like a toad to hear a “Hawaiian boy” call his favorite niece, chosen from childhood for the golden crown of inheritance, “Candie”!
    Rafe laughed. “Ah, we men are such fools. Poor, lovesick Keno.” He patted his head. “Your misery makes me feel better already.”
    “As they say, misery loves company.”
    Rafe was still smiling when he stepped outdoors to the barrel of water standing under a coconut palm. Scooping the chipped ladle into the water, he drank.
Did she really enjoy hurting him like this?
He tossed that self-pitying notion aside almost at once. He’d been raised to take it on the chin, not to whine and fuss. Eden wasn’t trying to hurt anyone. She was too innocent for that. But she
would
end up hurting herself. That was what bothered him the most. She didn’t think he understood her reasons for delaying marriage, but he did.Very clearly.
Too
clearly, actually. In many ways she was still a little girl working through the hurts of childhood. She wanted what she’d been denied—a close, loving relationship with her father. She would have him at last, or so she told herself, and she wouldn’t allow anything or anyone to interfere. Right now, Rafe himself had become the “other man” by demanding she be his alone.
    Eden was wise in so many things, yet she refused to see that her father was like a drowning man. Rafe feared that once Jerome discovered he could not cure his wife, he would pull Eden under the waves with him.
    The secret no one else appeared to understand was that Dr. Jerome blamed himself for Rebecca’s sickness. When Rafe was a boy, he had heard Jerome and his father, Matt, arguing about Rebecca Stanhope, as she was then called. Matt said something like, “You’ll end up taking her from the Royal Hawaiian School to work with lepers, and the day will come when she’ll end up one of them.” Strangely, she had.
    Keno folded the old map, whistling. “We will survive. We are already on our way to recovery. As soon as we feel the pitch and roll of the ship, the water slapping on its sides, and the smell of salty wind, we will be healed.”
    “That’s the old spirit,” Rafe said. “Run up the flag and beat the drums.” Absently he removed the coconut shell canteen hanging by a strap from the tree. Then he noticed Keno staring down the narrow road. Rafe followed his gaze.
    A woman was driving a familiar buggy along the track in the direction of the bungalow. The horse and buggy belonged to Ambrose, and the woman … was Eden. He could recognize her anywhere, the nurse’s uniform, the red cross, the toss of her dark hair shimmering in the wind beneath her hat.
    His eyes narrowed. Unplugging the coconut, he took a swallow—and spat it out, choking and coughing and tossing the canteen aside!
    Keno dove to save the liquid from draining out.
    “What is that?” Rafe choked.
    “My new invention … made from rotting pineapples.”
    “It’s rotten, all right.”
    “I’ve been experimenting,” Keno said proudly, putting the stopper back. “If I could make a pineapple wine—an
innocent
wine, you understand—”
    “Innocent wine!”
    “And, well, convince old P. J. to market it in San Francisco, I’ll become rich. Then I’ll win Makua Ainsworth’s respect. Money will do it every time. You said so yourself. He’ll let me marry Candace.”
    Rafe shook his dark head wryly. “Forget what I said about taking Ambrose’s place. You need to go back to the foot of the mourner’s bench.”
    “What! I’m saved in three tenses, pal. Past, present, and future. And I’ll learn to say them in Greek too.”
    “If Ambrose finds out you’re making wine with rotten pineapples, hoping to get rich, he’ll bar the door on Monday nights. And your Aunt Noelani will keep you in back doing