Kristin Hardy - Caught

They’d lied when they’d said it was like flying. It wasn’t a bit like flying. Or floating. What it was like was falling, strapped to a jump instructor, her stomach up her throat, the wind flapping around her, nothing to hold her as she watched the distant—and really large, really hard—earth come inexorably closer.

And her mind, analytical to the last, couldn’t stop processing. Acceleration due to gravity was thirty-two feet per second squared, which meant every second she fell thirty-two feet per second faster. Until terminal velocity, of course, a mere hundred and twenty miles an hour, which she should be reaching shortly. On the ground she’d get thrown in jail for going a hundred and twenty miles an hour. Up here she just got charged a lot of money for the privilege. A hundred and twenty miles an hour—more than sufficient to make a nice little splat when she hit the ground.

She really hoped she’d packed the parachute right.

She glowered at her old college roommate Sasha, who’d come up with the whole extreme-sports idea. It’ll be good for you. Live life on the edge . Grinning giddily, Sasha waved.

“How did I let you talk me into this?” Julia shouted, words that were ripped away by the wind.

Sasha cupped one hand to her pressure helmet. “Whaaat?”

Julia shook her head. It didn’t matter. She knew why she’d done it—the same reason behind nearly every absurd thing she’d done over the past eight months. Since her divorce. Since her emancipation from Edward Cleary, her controlling, disillusioned Svengali of an ex-husband. Edward, who’d loved her as the naive student he could mold and instruct. Edward, who wasn’t at all prepared for a Julia with a mind of her own.

And she’d been demonstrating that mind of her own since the papers had been signed by trying every foolish thing she could think of that would make Edward turn purple with disapproval. So okay, maybe the incident on the balcony at Mardi Gras hadn’t been well thought through, but she’d crash the Miramax party at Cannes again any day.

It had been a pretty fun eight months.

And it was time to end it.

Too bad she hadn’t come to that decision before she’d leaped from the airplane. Timing, as they said, was everything.

She felt the tap of the jump instructor on her shoulder and she swallowed. The minute of free fall had whipped by astonishingly quickly. Now came the moment of truth, the moment she pulled the rip cord. A feather light landing or…splat?

Julia grasped the toggle. She stared at the ground, at the squares and circles of green rushing toward her. What was the saying—God protects fools and drunks? Well, she certainly wasn’t drunk, more was the pity, but she was the champion of all fools.

Holding her breath, she tugged—

And with a whispering rush, the chute unfolded smoothly, dragging her vertical. Suddenly, she was floating, with the world spread out below her. Okay, now this part wasn’t so bad. This, she could do. Now she had time to think, time out from the world to figure out what came next. Because she was going to be hitting ground eventually, and when she did, it was time for a change. Most women had transitional men after divorces.

She’d had a transitional life.

Time to move on. Of course, she’d had a transitional man, too—or at least a transitional purely sexual, as-often-and-outrageous-as-possible affair. She sighed wistfully.

Time to move on there, too.

Because when you came right down to it, she wasn’t wild Julia, skydiving, sex-in-public party girl. She was serious, practical, collected Julia. Anything else was temporary, a pose.

The past five minutes had graphically demonstrated that to her.

It was time to get her life back in order. When she hit the ground, she’d get started. When she hit the ground, it was time to make some changes.

1

Manhattan Friday, May 5, 1:00 a.m.

“GOOD LORD.” Alex Spencer rolled onto his back, gasping for breath, heart hammering against his chest. “No more Asian sex manuals for you, woman. You’ve ruined me.”

“ I’ve ruined you?” Julia Covington managed through her own heavy breathing.

With her dark hair tumbled loose and wild around her shoulders and her skin gleaming pale in the light from her entryway, she looked like some odalisque in a seventeenth- century painting—beautiful, tempting and thoroughly addictive. Even now, looking at her made him dry-mouthed with desire.

If he’d been thinking straight, he’d have been worried.

Then again, he’d hardly thought straight once since that evening she’d appeared at the museum fund-raiser in a flame-hot red dress that had left nothing to the imagination. The dry, serious Ms. Covington, who never appeared in anything but utterly simple garments in shades of taupe, charcoal and cocoa, was suddenly a siren. He couldn’t have said what had shocked him more—the dress or the fact that she’d left with him.

And every moment since had pretty much been a toss-up.

“Yes,” he murmured against her mouth, “you’ve ruined me, milked me dry, left me a worn-out husk, old before my time.”

He could feel her smile. “I had some help with that, I think. Some very enthusiastic help.”

He worked his way down her throat, feeling the first faint stirrings of arousal yet again. “Come on, what do you expect a guy to do when you show up at the door in nothing but a robe?”

“What was I supposed to be wearing at eleven-thirty at night?” she said and caught her breath. “You were lucky I let you in at all.”

He smiled beatifically. “I got lucky, all right.” He moved his hands and felt her quiver in response. “And if you give me a minute or two, I just might be in a position to demonstrate my appreciation.”

“Well, you’d better do it quickly, Lothario,” she said— a little unevenly, he noted in satisfaction. “I have to get to sleep. I’ve got work tomorrow—today,” she corrected after a glance at the mantel clock. “Something you might want to think about, also.” She shifted away from him.

Alex calculated and tried for pitiful. “I spend four days in D.C. fighting the sharks for NEA funding, and you’re throwing me out?”

It didn’t work. “You told me last week it was going to be a schmoozefest where the most challenging thing you’d have to do was drink champagne and eat crab claws.”

“And you think that’s easy?” he demanded.

Julia just snorted and rolled to her feet, plucking her Chinese silk robe off the living room carpet as she rose. “Nobody made you come here, you know. You didn’t even call to warn me.”

And, as always, the minute they stopped touching, brisk, matter-of-fact Julia came back.

“I thought you women thought spontaneity was romantic.”

“We’re not having a romance,” she reminded him firmly as she tied the belt of the robe. Too firmly.

“Oh yeah, right. No relationship, no talking, just sex.” Alex reached for his trousers, pushed down the little surge of annoyance.

“Exactly. You sales types should know better than to try to renegotiate as you go along.”

“Marketing, not sales,” he corrected. “We don’t sell antiquities at the museum.” He stopped in the act of buttoning his shirt. “Unless you’ve got a sideline I don’t know about. In which case, we’ll have to find out whether they give conjugal visits to lovers.”

She frowned. “We’re not lovers.”

“Right. If we were lovers, I’d be going to your bed right now instead of getting kicked out into the hall.” Even he could hear the edge in his voice. “I came here because I missed you.” He’d come because he couldn’t make himself wait until the next day to see her. “You were off with your skydiving thing last weekend and then I was gone. It’s just been a while. I thought you might miss me.”