Just Fooling Around

by Julie Kenner

  “If something bad happens,” she started, and he pressed his mouth over hers, squeezed himself into the condom and then pushed inside her.

  “Oh,” she breathed, and he loved that soft sound, that quiet hitch in her breathing. Something soft and quiet whispered inside him, yet he froze because his world was the ground-shaking roar of Pratt Whitney engines, the shrieking sound of sirens and reveille at dawn. Against all those booms and rattles, Chance had forgotten what calm was like.

  But then her muscles clenched around him, firm and demanding, and he drove into her, deep and hard.

  6

  THERE WAS THUNDER and some sort of shattering explosion, but Devon didn’t care. All she wanted was to stay here in bed, over Chance, under Chance, submerged in mindless bliss.

  Her nails raked over his back, his sculpted ass. Her mind knew her house was going to collapse, but she needed this. She deserved this.After all, it was April Fools’ and she was having the very best sex of her life. Her back arched in ecstasy, and she felt the harsh bristle of his jaw against her neck, most likely drawing blood, and before the first orgasm passed, the second one began.

  Her mouth flew open, trying to form words, a scream, a prayer, and the buzz of the alarm clock brayed in her ears. Chance threw it against the wall, hitting the mirror.

  Breaking it.

  Over and over he thrust inside her, the old wooden bed no match for what was apparently a lifetime of unexplored passion. First there was a crack, then a thud, and finally a splintering sound that meant disaster.

  Right as the bed frame collapsed, Chance rolled them to one side just as they crashed to the floor. He took the brunt of the fall, one quiet oomph. Before she could call 9-1-1, he was filling her again.

  Certain that this was her last, best sexual experience ever, she rained desperate kisses over his sweat-damp neck, the hard planes of his chest, willing him to stay, in case her thighs padlocked around him weren’t a big enough hint.

  But somewhere in her mind, it dawned on her that he wasn’t running, he wasn’t leaving, he wasn’t even slowing down.

  The unbreakable window shattered, shards of glass flying, but he picked her up and ran to the living room before she was hit.

  “How you doing?” he asked, climbing on top of her, busy hands on her chest, and she loved the sound of his unruffled drawl.

  “I told you I was cursed.”

  He kissed her mouth, her neck, the tip of her breast, and she didn’t feel cursed. Quietly she sighed, a breathy, exhilarated sound that definitely indicated delight.

  “And I told you I do my best work under pressure. Lay back and relax, honey. The night is young, and I want to hear all that dirty actuarial talk again. Assuming, of course, that the roof doesn’t fall in,” he added, tempting the fates.

  Thankfully, he had her safely in the basement before it did.

  7

  DEVON AWOKE to the unfamiliar sensation of a brawny arm thrown casually across her breast. The basement floor was hard and cold, and her body protested as she began to move.

  A new day. April 2. Ah, yes, she thought, steeling herself for what was to come. Rejection day. Normally it didn’t hurt this much.“Good morning,” he told her, sitting up and rubbing his dark hair, and looking too darn cheerful to reject her. Sometimes men could be pigs. Sexually virile pigs with finely honed bodies, but pigs nonetheless.

  “I hope you’re not hungry,” he continued in that same cheery tone, “’cause I don’t think there’s much left of the kitchen.”

  Then he leaned over and kissed her. Soft and lazy, and very unpiglike, and some of the steely walls of her heart started to melt. It was the nicest thing any man had ever said to her on the morning of April 2. Actually, it was the only thing any man had ever said to her on the morning of April 2.

  “I suppose you’ll want to get back to the base,” she began cautiously, since this was uncharted ground.

  “If you feel up to driving. You seemed sort of skittish before. Or, if the phone’s working, I can call Scott if it’s too much trouble.” Slowly he rose, uncurling his long length, and Devon felt another punch of lust as her gaze drooled over him.

  “No. Let me get dressed,” she said, keeping her voice just as light and carefree as his. Carefully she picked her way up the basement stairs, into the remains of her house and sighed.

  It was worse than usual, and she wanted to cry. Most of the walls had been blown in, the floor was a collection of dirt, unbreakable glass, drywall and mud. Quietly, Chance came to stand behind her, and to her surprise, he wrapped his arms around her, as if this were some ordinary morning.

  “Looks like a tornado came through. I’d like to think it was my earth-shattering sexual prowess, but you don’t look gullible enough to fall for that one.”

  Her mouth curved up, and in the face of destruction and desolation, she smiled. She was insured. “A one-house destruction zone is more like it.”

  He pressed a kiss against her neck, and against her rear she could feel the thick length of his sexual prowess growing again. “Let me dig out my jeans and stow away the heavy artillery before you think I’m completely uncivilized. Then I’ll help you clean up.”

  “You don’t have to,” she told him, stepping away from the warm safety of his arms. She picked up a throw and wrapped it around her. Men never stayed. They never helped, and certainly Chance was more well-mannered than most, but she was a Franklin.

  The endings never changed.

  The sunlight drifted in from the east, tracing over him, and he was so perfect, so beautiful, so out of her league, but she had a lot of nice memories. It was going to be easier next year. Even alone. She could sit on her couch, eating ice cream until the power blew, and remember the one perfect night with Chance Cooper.

  Quickly she wiped at her eye and sniffed. “There’s a lot of dust in the air.”

  His lazy grin was back in place, and he tilted up her chin. “Honey, I know I don’t have to. But this looks like a hell of a lot of work, and unless I get my ass in gear, I’m going to miss my dinner date.”

  His dinner date? She swallowed the boulder that was lodged in her throat because that was the April Fools’ joke. Finally, she understood. Despite what he’d told her earlier, he was involved, or married, or engaged. “No, we couldn’t have that.”

  She tried to pull away, but he kept her close, and then, adding insult to injury, reached under the plaid blanket and patted her ass. “I hope you like steak. After last night, I could use the protein.”

  His hand lingered, wandered, but Devon was no longer insulted or downhearted. Actually, she was starting to feel…happy. “I like steak, but it’s hard on the heart.”

  “Devon, there’s nothing harder on the heart than you are. I’ll take my chances with steak.”

  Devon couldn’t help it. She kissed him.

  “So are you this much fun on April 2?” he asked, a long moment later.

  “Not nearly.”

  He blew out a relieved whistle, and his glinting silvery eyes made her quiver all over again. She could see this might be an ongoing problem.

  “I gotta tell you, that’s a real relief. I know I told you I do my best work under pressure, but I underestimated the full extent of your libido. I couldn’t do this every day.” His fingers trailed down her spine, the completely unneeded throw falling to the floor.

  “Every other day of the year, I’m actually very boring,” she told him quite primly. As primly as a naked woman could.

  He looked her over, once, twice, and took her back into his arms. “Boring? You? Not a chance.”

  “You’re okay with this? It’s my life. Actually, it’s my entire family’s life. It’s this curse. Once a year, things just go bad.”

  He pressed a soft kiss on her forehead. “Not so bad. In fact, some parts of last evening were so exponentially-not-that-bad the word curse just seems wrong.”

  She didn’t understand. She kept throwing him these opportunities to leave, but he acted as if he w
asn’t going anywhere. “You’re willing to go through this again? In the future?”

  “This?” he asked, raising a brow. “Honey, I’m Air Force. Any Task. Any Place. Anywhere.”

  Ruefully, she shook her head. “I think I’m going to like you.”

  “Think? Think? You’re blowing holes through my considerable ego with these doubts. What do I have to do to convince you?”

  “I got ideas,” she said, pressing against him quite shamefully.

  He began to laugh, found a nearly destroyed cushion from the couch and they fell on it together.

  “Yup,” he whispered, covering her mouth. “Yesterday was my lucky day.”

  It was some time before Devon could think about those words, but when she did, she knew. Yesterday was her lucky day, too.

  REG’S RESCUE

  Julie Kenner

  1

  April Fools’ Day, one year ago

  “FOLKS, THIS IS CAPTAIN Edwards. We’ve been dodging several severe weather cells, and control has instructed us that we won’t be landing in New Orleans as scheduled. Instead, we’re being diverted to Houston. We apologize for the delay and we’ll get everyone to your final destination just as soon as we can.”

  A collective groan rose up from the passengers of flight 1281. Professor Reginald Franklin didn’t groan, but he did turn and look at his watch, his movements stiff and forced.Maybe they’d still make it in time….

  He hoped to hell they’d still make it in time….

  He closed his eyes and gripped the arm rest, thankful he’d decided to cash in his air miles for first class. Because, frankly, he needed another drink, and he took his hand off the armrest long enough to press the call button.

  He’d been traveling now for almost twenty-four hours, having left Oxford less than an hour after he’d received Jean Michel’s e-mail. He hadn’t talked to the antiques dealer in years, but now his old friend had said he’d found something—something important. Something Reg had given up searching for.

  Something that might lead to ending this curse.

  Reg hated traveling on such short notice, but he couldn’t risk taking the time to pack or plan. He needed to be on the ground on April 1. A Franklin at thirty thousand feet on April Fools’ Day was a bad idea—his brother Cam’s formerly reckless life had proven that.

  Not that Reg’s planning had done any good. He’d arranged everything so carefully to ensure that he was safely on the ground well before 11:59 p.m. on March 31. He hadn’t, however, accounted for the weather. And now it looked like they’d be arriving into Houston in the wee hours of April 1.

  He clutched the armrest tighter and hoped they didn’t crash. For the most part, the curse was personal. Surely his presence wouldn’t bring down—and injure or kill—an entire plane load of people?

  A pretty, blond flight attendant with a brilliant white smile leaned over and clicked off his call light. “What can I get for you?”

  “Scotch,” he said.

  Her smile widened. “Rough flight?”

  “The delay’s not helping.”

  “We’re so sorry about that.”

  “Nothing you can do,” he said, feeling the futile weight of fate pressing down on him.

  “I can get you that drink,” she said, and headed off to do that. She returned momentarily with two tiny bottles and a fresh glass with ice. She winked at him. “I thought you could use a double.”

  “You thought right.” He opened one of the bottles, poured it over ice and drank it down, feeling the Scotch burn his throat and numb his body. Good. If he was still in the air at midnight, he wanted to be numb.

  There was no one seated beside him, and he leaned over to peer out the window at the scattered lights below. The clouds blocked most of the view to the ground, and the night further disguised their location. He assumed they were over Louisiana and moving now toward Texas, but he didn’t know for certain, which gave him room to imagine that they were in fact passing over their original destination—New Orleans.

  She was down there.

  Anne.

  The thought sat like a stone in his gut, the simple knowledge that he would soon be physically closer to her than he had been in years.

  Emotionally, though…

  Well, they’d broken those ties three years ago.

  He pulled away from the window, his motions feeling suddenly jerky. As a professor of archeology, he’d ostensibly taken the position at Oxford in order to be closer to the excavations on which his academic pursuits had focused. But the job had also been a symbol, a statement. There was no denying that much, especially not to himself. And the statement had said simply that he was abandoning his nonacademic research; that he was giving up the hunt for clues about how to turn off his family curse. He was moving on, letting it lie.

  Being done with it and everything about it.

  He hadn’t regretted the decision. His quest to end the curse had brought him almost as much misery as the curse itself.

  Ruefully, he rubbed his thigh and the long, ragged scar that still ached in bad weather even though it had been thirteen years since the April first on which he’d tripped over a piling at a dig site and ripped the hell out of his leg on a steel post that had reinforced the dig’s earthen walls. Other years had brought different manifestations of the curse, ranging from inconveniences to physical horrors, none of which he wanted to repeat.

  But a curse was a curse was a curse, and want or no, he and his brother and sisters were stuck with it unless someone could figure out how to lift it.

  From the time he was a child, Reg had been the one to claim that challenge. And he’d tried so hard, finding clues in family papers and relics, but nothing that actually panned out to anything concrete.

  Anne had helped at first. He’d been an assistant professor at the University of Texas when she was hired as a lecturer in the English department. They’d met on the West Mall one spring day when the seam had ripped on her bookbag. From the first moment he’d seen her, she’d done something to him. If they’d been living centuries prior, he would have said she’d bewitched him, because once he saw her, he couldn’t even see other women. She was all he wanted—to be with her, to work with her, to touch her and have her.

  And the most amazing part of his infatuation was that she’d wanted him, too. Their romance had been intense and combustible, their bodies firing even without touch. And when they made love, he was certain that one day they would start a conflagration sufficient to rival the Chicago fire.

  He closed his eyes and clenched his fists. He would not miss her.

  But he did. Oh, how he did.

  He finished off the second Scotch and almost called for another before stopping his finger as it hovered over the call button. No. He was about to step into April 1. He needed to keep his wits about him.

  That, of course, had been another thing that he had loved about Anne: her utter acceptance when he’d told her about the curse. She hadn’t told him he was imagining things, hadn’t suggested that he speak to a counselor. She’d simply kissed him and told him that she’d help him break it.

  “My family’s from New Orleans, too,” she’d said, when he told her that he believed the historic city was the source of the curse. “Most of them moved away long ago, but I’ve heard enough stories to believe in voodoo and magic and hexes and curses.” She’d taken his hand on a Friday night. “Let’s go this weekend and see what we can dig up about yours.”

  They hadn’t been able to dig up much, just vague references to an “angel’s amulet” that one of his eighteenth-century ancestors referred to circumspectly in a journal. From what they could gather, the amulet had been stolen by Timothy Franklin (the most ignoble of the then-ignoble Franklins), and although the value of the thing should have brought the family wealth, instead they suddenly found themselves wallowing in trouble, “which is as the witch had said,” Olivia d’Espry, Timothy’s wife had written in her journal. Olivia and Timothy Franklin were the only Franklins to hav
e children, and Reg could trace his lineage back to them. He was grateful that Olivia preferred to write in her journal rather than do needlework as so many women of that time had done.

  But even Olivia’s journal revealed little. A few weeks after acquisition of the amulet, she’d written that one of Timothy’s brothers had sought to dispose of the thing, but soon learned that it had gone missing.

  He had hoped that the amulet’s departure would be the end of their bad luck.

  It wasn’t.

  Anne and Reg had spent the little spare time they could carve out of their teaching schedules to come to New Orleans and plow through whatever records they could locate. But try as they might, they found nothing. Nothing that could lead them to the missing amulet, or even describe it. All they knew was that it had the image of an angel carved upon it—Olivia Franklin had written that it was ironic that an angel could cause such harm.

  They hadn’t found the source of the curse or a solution, despite years of looking. The wasted time dragged Reg down, but Anne had squeezed his hand and reminded him that, at least, they’d found each other. And they had. They’d fallen in love.

  And that simple fact about broke Reg’s heart.

  “That’s silly,” Anne had said, when he’d told her that they couldn’t get married, that even their relationship put her at risk.

  “Anne,” he’d said. “I’m standing in a hospital. You’ve got a broken arm, a broken leg and a nasty gash in your hip.” All of which she’d sustained trying to keep him from sliding down into a quarry when the ground beneath them had suddenly given way. On April 1, of course.

  “You think that would make me not want you?” she’d argued. “Do my broken bones mean that you don’t want me?”

  “You know I do,” he’d said. “Desperately. But I’m not going to stand by and watch you get hurt because of me.”

  Tears had streamed down her face. “If you leave me, I will be hurt because of you.”