Risky Moves. Carrie Alexander

remembered what it had been like to have his hands on her—everywhere.

      Casually, he took his arm away. But she saw how he gripped the raw wood sash, his eyes aimed at the view of Mirror Lake.

      The wind caught her hair. She smoothed it, licking her parched lips. “Well. This is pretty nice.”

      “Worth risking your life?”

      “I’m not saying that.”

      “Then why the hell do you want to scale a mountain or jump out of a plane?”

      Julia felt as though all her acceptable notions were in upheaval, crashing and colliding inside her head like tectonic plates, made even more tumultuous by Adam’s presence. She’d said she wanted change. But change equaled Adam, and Adam equaled heartache, because she knew, she just knew that he would leave. It was what had always stopped her before, the idea of being left in Quimby with a whole lot of pleasant nothingness stretched before her. Nothing but memories.

      “Because I…” She filled her lungs with the sweet night air, her gaze glued to the far shore, where the glistening blue-black of the lake met the dense green-black of the trees. It was a conundrum. Did she want nothing but memories, or memories of nothing?

      Just jump, she thought, and so she did.

      “Because, aside from the physical challenge, I want you—” A metaphorical wind whistled past her ears. “I want to be with you and see if we—if we—” Here comes the thud. “If we might still have feelings for each other.”

      A deep silence encased her, hollow as a well, stifling as a bell jar.

      Julia’s instincts for self-preservation screamed inside her head. Adam had probably dared her up to the cupola to show her that she was not capable of feats of derring-do. But he’d miscalculated. She’d done it, and now she was taking another flying leap, risking more than a hard landing.

      Broken bones heal, you goose. Hearts don’t—not as easily.

      She remembered Cathy saying that the Brody spell lasted a long time. It was true. Julia had been wanting to try again with Adam ever since her eighteenth birthday—the night they didn’t talk about because to do so would be to acknowledge a major betrayal of trust.

      It had been ten years. Long years. Other than the aberration of his involvement with Laurel, Adam’s asceticism had been known to reach monklike proportions. Julia had tried to be as disciplined, but she wasn’t. She was human and frail and filled with yearnings for what she couldn’t forget.

      The terrible silence continued.

      She looked at Adam crosswise. His hard-edged profile was inscrutable.

      He’s all bone, she thought. Bone and sinew and tough muscle. No softness at all…or is there? Buried deep beneath the bravado and the austerity and the iron will, was there maybe a soft spot for her? The tiniest bit of tenderness?

      She thought there might be. Was counting on it, in fact.

      All I want is a safe place to land, she told herself.

      Which was such a lie, but a lie she’d better darn well stick to.

      3

      “ADAM?”

      “Julia?” Adam stared in shock. “What are you doing here?”

      “I’m—it’s—” Julia clutched the lapel of a loose, shimmery robe beneath her chin—she sure hadn’t been wearing that last time he’d seen her—and glanced over her shoulder at the candlelit motel room. He tried not to gape at the way her breasts moved beneath the silk. “I wasn’t expecting y-you. I was expecting….” Her voice died as she backed away, flushing pink with embarrassment.

      Zack. Of course, Adam thought. She didn’t want him. She wanted Zack.

      The sound of an approaching car made Julia rush forward. She grabbed his hand and pulled him into the room, then slammed the door. “Isn’t Zack coming?”

      “I don’t know. I got this note—” Adam reached into his shirt pocket, making sure to withdraw the note and not the photograph he’d filched from the party.

      Julia snatched it from his hand, her eyes wild. Wilder than he’d ever seen them. “Who gave this to you?”

      “One of the guys. The party was breaking up and someone said Fred left this for me. Didn’t make sense, but…” Adam shrugged. In her distress, Julia had forgotten about the robe. And the short gown she wore under it. Her legs were bare, and the rest of her, too, he’d bet, beneath the not-quite-sheer silk.

      Abruptly, Adam sat on the bed. Oh, man. He was hard. She’d see. And be horrified, because she was his brother’s girlfriend and he wasn’t supposed to think about her that way.

      Julia was staring at the crumpled note, her long blond hair falling against her cheeks.

      Adam cleared his throat. “You got the wrong brother, huh?”

      AT FIRST, Adam refused to look at her. “Did you know I went to Japan?”

      She gave a wordless gesture, apparently thrown by the non sequitur.

      “Three years ago.” His heart was racing at a ridiculous pace.

      “I heard about it secondhand,” she said, brittle-voiced.

      “It was a memorable trip. I went to do some ice climbing in Hokkaido, but I ended up staying for six months. Their philosophy of living in harmony with nature is inspiring. I hadn’t thought the Japanese way of bringing order to the outdoors would appeal to me, but it did. Have you ever seen a Japanese garden? Absolute perfection. There are people whose job it is to pick shreds of debris from the great moss gardens—painstaking hours spent on their hands and knees…”

      She wrinkled her nose. “And you’ve decided it’s your calling to be one of them?”

      “God, no. They’d have to take me away in a straitjacket by the end of the first working day.”