Kiss a Falling Star

by Barabara Elsborg

  “Did I hurt you?” he whispered.

  “No.”

  Caspar groaned. “Oh God, you’re so wet and tight.”

  “And you’re so big and hard.” She put as much dramatic awe into her voice as she could.

  He laughed and Ally felt his cock jerk. Then his face changed and he swallowed hard. “I never dreamt it could be like this,” he said, and Ally understood then that they weren’t playing, and it was as if something caught fire inside her.

  “Me neither,” she whispered.

  He began to thrust, deep, slamming strokes that Ally arched into. She lifted her head so she could see his cock drive into her, the shaft gleaming with her cream as he pulled back. The muscles flexed in his belly as he fought to stay in control, but Ally could see the wildness in his eyes.

  “Caspar, Caspar,” she gasped his name, and his hips shifted into another gear, shunted into a different angle, and there was almost a frenzy in the pace of his thrusts.

  Ally clung to him as they flew together, bodies molten, minds fused, hearts entwined.

  Oh shit, I love him.

  Oh shit, I love her.

  As Caspar came down from the high, he pushed back the thought. How could this be love? He hadn’t even known her a week.

  Lust?

  Then why couldn’t he stand to be apart from her? Why did he feel “right” when he was with her? Why did he want to protect her to the death?

  Love?

  If it was love, should he fight it or embrace it? Did he want to do either?

  Caspar cuddled her tighter. He was afraid of letting her down, getting it wrong, destroying her dreams. If he fucked up, how could he live with himself? He’d already made one fatal mistake and lost his sister. What was there to stop him messing up again? Better to let this run its course. Ally was different. That’s why he felt like this and the feeling would pass.

  He’d make it pass.

  * * * * *

  In the morning, Ally left Caspar sleeping and crept out of his bedroom, clutching her holdups. She gathered the rest of her clothes and dressed in the hall. Quietly closing the door behind her, Ally fastened her coat as she made her way to the main road. With a bit of luck, she’d be able to sneak up to her room in the adventure center, shower and be ready for breakfast with the others without anyone realizing she’d spent the night elsewhere. She walked as quickly as high heels allowed.

  It hadn’t occurred to Ally that the place might be locked until she tried the door and it didn’t open. When she spotted Tom behind the glass, she rattled the handle.

  “And what time do you call this?” he asked as he opened up.

  He might be smiling but Ally thought she caught a glimpse of disappointment in his eyes.

  “When did the others get back?”

  “One o’clock. Good thing I didn’t have anyone else staying here. I didn’t know women had such loud voices.”

  “Anyone up yet?”

  “Nope. You might want to wake them. We leave in thirty minutes and they need to eat something.”

  “Have you heard how Neil is?”

  “He’s comfortable.”

  “Good.”

  And not just for Neil. Please don’t die. Caspar was still the hero, and Ally wanted him to stay that way. She hurried up the stairs and down the corridor, unfastening her coat as she went. Ally opened her door, switched on the light and laughed when she saw the orange snake on the bed. No way would she be fooled twice. She covered it with her coat so she didn’t have to look at it and then froze.

  What had moved? Just her coat settling? Ally rolled her eyes. How could there possibly be a real snake on her bed? She stripped, dropped the school girl costume onto a chair and went into the bathroom. As she stood under the torrent, she thought about Caspar’s timed shower and smiled. They hadn’t talked about tonight, but Ally didn’t intend to sleep here when strong arms waited for her the other side of the village.

  Ally dressed in the old clothes she’d bought, gray chinos, a pink t-shirt and her blue sweater. She bent to tie the laces on her tennis shoes and let out a strangled gulp. Heading toward her across the carpet was a mottled orange snake. Not plastic. Real.

  Fuck. Ally screamed. And kept screaming.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Tom burst into her room. “What the—?”

  He took one look at the snake, slapped his hand over Ally’s mouth and kicked the door shut.

  Noooooo, we’re still in here with it.

  Ally struggled, but Tom wrapped his other arm around her and kept her still.

  “Ally, it’s okay. It won’t hurt you. Calm down.” He took his hand from her mouth.

  The snake slithered under a chair and coiled up. The sudden bang on the door had Ally lurching back against Tom in case the creature tried to make a break for it.

  “Please don’t say anything,” he whispered.

  Why? In case they panicked the snake? Because he didn’t want people to get the wrong idea about him being in her room?

  He opened the door a crack.

  “Ally, are you—? Oh Tom. Is everything okay?” Emma asked. “We heard a scream.”

  “Spider,” Tom said.

  What?

  Ally tried to pull the door wider. Tom stopped her. Emma gave her a puzzled look. “Didn’t think you were frightened of spiders?”

  “It was in my shoe,” Ally blurted.

  “Breakfast is ready. We’ll be down in a minute.” Tom pushed the door closed with him and her and the snake together in the room.

  No, no, no.

  He still had one arm around her. Worrying about what Emma and shortly everyone else would think about him being in her room ranked low compared to worry about the murderous three-foot reptile under the chair. How had it gotten in her room? Tom’s pet and it had escaped?

  “What the hell is that thing doing in your room?” Tom whispered.

  Oh damn. No simple explanation then.

  “Sure it’s not poisonous?” Ally asked. “It’s not one of those types that can leap across the room and sink their fangs into you or unhinge its jaws and swallow someone whole?”

  “It’s a corn snake. Not poisonous and more frightened of you than you are of it.”

  “Impossible.”

  They stared at the snake who stared back at them.

  “Please don’t say anything about this,” Tom asked. “It’s a nasty joke and it could wreck my business. If people think they’re going to find snakes in their rooms, they won’t stay here.”

  “I don’t think this was aimed at you,” Ally said. “Someone wanted to scare me, though it makes a change from wanting to kill me.”

  She lifted Tom’s arm away from her waist and moved toward the door, not taking her eyes off the tangerine menace. Ally didn’t like the look in its eyes.

  “Kill you?” Tom pressed his hand against the door.

  “The train I fell in front of—well, I was pushed.”

  Tom gaped at her.

  “I was also knocked off my bike by a car, nearly crowned by a flowerpot and given a shove at the top of the tallest escalator in Europe.”

  “Why?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Tom scratched his head. “But this snake won’t hurt you.”

  Ally huffed. “I have a morbid fear of snakes. I don’t think Caspar is keen on them either. Was it you who left the plastic one at the top of Tyburn Crag?”

  The snake moved an inch and Ally put Tom between her and it.

  “Good God, of course not. I can’t believe all this. Someone trying to kill you? That’s ridiculous.” Tom sighed. “Look, go down to breakfast. I’ll ring someone to come and take care of this and I’ll talk to you later.”

  Ally was disappointed Tom didn’t believe her but not surprised. She knew how crazy it sounded. By the time she reached the dining room, everyone sat eating. They looked up and grinned.

  “You jammy devil,” Emma said. “He is rather gorgeous.”

  “No wonder you wa
nted to slip away early last night,” Kerry said.

  Ally groaned. She hadn’t told Kerry she was leaving with Caspar. “Tom was just getting rid of a spider.”

  “Since when did you need rescuing from spiders?” Delia gave her a knowing wink.

  Oh shit. Ally helped herself to a plate of food and joined them. Change the subject. “So all ready for the naked parachuting?”

  Six horrified faces turned to look at her.

  “Oops.” Ally put her hand over her mouth and smiled.

  “Morning,” called a voice.

  Geoff stood by the door.

  “Morning, sweetie.” Emma jumped up and ran over to give him a kiss.

  “Have a good time last night?” he asked.

  “Brilliant,” Kerry said.

  “Did you?” Emma asked.

  “Me and Tom sank a few jars here and watched the football.” Geoff walked up to the table. “You look a bit pale, Ally.”

  She plastered a smile on her face. “I forgot my legs aren’t hollow.”

  Tom came up behind Geoff. “Hi, mate. You want something to eat? They’ve paid for it, you might as well help yourself to what’s left.”

  “Thanks.” Geoff filled a plate and sat between Emma and Ally.

  “Hey, Ally,” Sal said. “You’ll never guess who came into the pub last night after you’d gone.”

  “Not me,” Geoff grumbled. “If I’d have known there was only one bloody pub in this village, I’d have thought twice about driving you lot. Still, good of Tom to keep me company.”

  “Who was it?” Ally asked between mouthfuls of egg and toast.

  “Mark.”

  The toast stuck in Ally’s throat and scratched as it lurched down. Mark was here? Oh God. What the hell did he want? Ally gulped. He knew how much she loved snakes. Could it have been him trying to scare the crap out of her?

  “You and he are finished, aren’t you?” asked Bryony.

  “Yes.”

  Bryony lowered her voice. “You’re really not interested in getting back with him?”

  “No,” Ally said.

  Her voice wasn’t the only thing Bryony lowered. She wouldn’t meet Ally’s gaze. Ally’s mind set off on a speculative voyage. Maybe Bryony had got off with Mark in The Wyndale Arms. If he’d spent the night with her—there wouldn’t be anywhere else to stay with the film crew around—he might still be in the building, waiting to leave after they’d gone. Had Mark put the snake in her room? Had he pushed her in front of the train? Done the other things?

  Hardly a way to win her back, and that message with the flowers sounded like he might even have planned to ask her to marry him. Moron. She opened her mouth to warn Bryony and then closed it again. They all knew Mark had cheated. If Ally went on and on about it, it’d sound as if she couldn’t let it go. She could. She had.

  “Everyone ready?” Tom called from the door. “Car park. Five minutes.”

  When Ally stepped outside the adventure center, shock froze her in her tracks. “What are you doing here?”

  “I need to talk to you and I can’t get you to listen. I thought it was easier to come and see you.”

  Jack ran his fingers through his hair. He looked terrible, dark circles under his eyes, his face pale, his clothes rumpled.

  “I had to sleep in the car,” he said, taking in her gaze. “Can we talk?”

  The others came out of the door behind her, laughing and joking.

  “Not now. We’re going out for the day,” Ally said. What the hell was happening? Mark and now Jack?

  “When you get back then?”

  “Fine.”

  Ally climbed into Tom’s minibus. It wasn’t fine. Jack’s behavior was freaking her out. Maybe he was the one who’d put the snake in her room. Who else was going to turn up in Wyndale? Ally’s birth mother? That bitch of a foster mother who put her in the dog kennel? Her long-lost father?

  She wanted Caspar. She wanted to sit down with him and talk through stuff and try to come up with a reason why all this was happening. Caspar was the only one who believed her.

  Ally looked back through the window as Tom drove away. Jack stood staring after her. What reason could he have to want her dead?

  * * * * *

  Caspar stretched out his arm and sighed when all he found was a cold, empty space. He’d not heard Ally leave and he wished she’d woken him. But if she had, maybe she wouldn’t have left. He grinned and checked his watch. If he hurried, he’d be in time for the bus that took him along the valley bottom where the paragliders landed.

  On the way to the bus stop, three people stopped him to congratulate him on saving Neil. The last one, Mike’s mother, made a weird comment about him having been trained for that sort of thing in his job and then winked at him. Caspar had no idea what she meant.

  By the time he got off the bus in the heart of the valley, he could see one red-and-white canopy high in the sky. Caspar headed down the lane toward the field where they’d land, and then sat on a drystone wall to watch.

  One by one, the paragliders launched off the hillside, rising on the air currents and circling in the big blue sky like giant psychedelic eagles. Caspar’s heart pounded as he wondered which canopy Ally lay suspended beneath. He’d never tried paragliding—something about deliberately throwing himself off a mountain that went against his climber’s sensibilities.

  His phone vibrated in his pocket and he pulled it out, not taking his gaze from the sky. Caspar almost dropped it when he saw who was calling.

  “Hello,” he muttered into the phone.

  “We’d like you come for lunch today,” said his father. “If you’re free.”

  We? “Any particular reason?” Caspar asked.

  “Martha’s cooking your favorite. Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.”

  Caspar’s mouth watered. Damn, he was like Pavlov’s dog with Martha’s food. Caspar knew he hadn’t received an answer to his question but his stomach overruled his brain.

  “One o’clock?”Caspar asked.

  “See you then.” His father ended the call.

  Caspar wondered what he’d done now and then remembered Neil. Had the local grapevine stretched that far? ’Course it had. Chinese whispers probably had Caspar doing open-heart surgery with a fork and spoon. But a meal was a meal and it would make his mother happy.

  * * * * *

  Ally and her friends stayed uncharacteristically quiet as they put on suits, helmets and gloves. She worried she’d pressed them into something they didn’t want to do. Tom offered them the chance to back out, saying Wes, one of his employees, would drive them to the landing site. No one had.

  Sven, the guy who operated the paragliding company, asked each of them how much they weighed and allocated them to an instructor. Ally was surprised to find herself with Tom.

  “Fully trained,” he said. “Only had one slip through my fingers so far.”

  “What?” Ally gulped.

  He laughed. “Don’t worry. You’ll be fine.”

  “Doomed then,” she said.

  Around them, at the top of the hill, pairs huddled as the instructors went through the safety procedures.

  “The important thing to remember is to do exactly what I say, when I say it,” Tom said. “It’s easy. Lean right, lean left.”

  Ally sighed. “Definitely doomed.”

  He gave her a sad smile. “I hope Caspar knows how lucky he is.”

  She felt her face grow hot and turned away.

  Tom laid out the fabric on the hillside, and Ally thought how flimsy it looked and how thin the lines were and how high she would be, and paragliding suddenly didn’t seem like such a good idea. What if someone had gotten at the kite thing and rigged it to fall apart in midair—? Oh shut up, idiot. The snake had done what it was intended to do—made her paranoid.

  Ally watched and listened to the shrieks of her friends as they launched into the sky and then it was her turn to be fastened to Tom and afterward to the giant kite. The arc of blue and red ma
terial rose and inflated behind them. The wind caught it, and when they turned, Ally staggered as she tried to keep her feet.

  “Okay?” Tom shouted in her ear.

  No. “Yes.” If she survived, she’d cut out her tongue.

  “Run.”

  Ally closed her eyes and ran as fast as she could—not fast at all—off the mountain.

  There was a sudden lurch, nothing under her bicycling feet, and when she opened her eyes, they were twenty feet up and rising. Her scream froze in her throat.

  “Get on the seat,” Tom yelled, and Ally wriggled until her backside was planted on the platform.

  “Now breathe,” he told her, and she laughed.

  No engine, no carbon footprint, no noise—well, just the bleep of the altimeter as they went up and the hum as they came down. Ally knew this was the closest she’d get to being a bird. The sky was cloudless, the view endless, the euphoria almost heart-stopping. They turned in lazy circles, Ally trying to lean whichever way Tom directed, and she marveled at how far she could see, how high they were, how exhilarated she felt.

  “Okay?” Tom asked.

  “Brilliant,” Ally said. She meant it.

  He talked to her, explaining how to fly, the slight pressure needed to change direction, and although Ally listened, she doubted she’d ever do this on her own. Not a cheap hobby. She whooped as Tom found a thermal and they soared up. Then she had a slight panic that they wouldn’t stop and would keep going and going until they reached the International Space Station. Below, Ally could see the rainbow arcs of her friends drifting like alien butterflies across the patchwork landscape and she hoped they were enjoying this as much as she was.

  When their circles began to take them nearer the ground, Tom dipped the ends of the wings and made a controlled descent.

  “Out of the seat now,” he said.

  Ally took a deep breath and wriggled forward so she hung in the harness. She bent her knees, kept her legs together and got ready to run. They slowed almost to a stop and then her feet were on the ground and the kite fell down behind them. With an expert flick and twist, Tom tamed the bird and the air fell from the fabric with a gentle hiss.

  They’d landed quite near the minibus, but everyone else stood a few hundred yards away. Ally freed herself from the harness and took off her helmet and gloves.