“No. No more.”
“Just when I was starting to get used to it. Well, it won’t do you a bit of good, Zeke Morrison, trying to go all noble on menow. If you stop chasing me, I’ll just have to pursue you. And I warn you, I can run much faster than you can.”
A reluctant chuckle escaped him. He regarded her with a mixture of incredulity and hope.
“Rory, I never realized that you had come to feel so— I hardly know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything. You talk way too much.”
She pressed a hard kiss to his mouth. It was the first time in her life she had been the one to initiate an embrace, so she was a little rough, a little awkward.
But she must have done something right, because Zeke was not slow to respond, for the moment forgetting all his recently acquired noble impulses. Tangling his hand in her hair, he returned the kiss with an intensity that left Rory breathless.
It was amazing considering what he had recently been through, that he should still be able to kiss that way. It hardly seemed fair. She was now clinging to him, her pulses thrumming, her mind reeling as though she had been the one knocked over the head and shot—straight through the heart.
She had the sensation of falling, tumbling head over heels through the sky. Mid-kiss, her eyes flew open, startled. She found herself staring into Zeke’s own wide, dark ones.
Their lips parted, both realizing at once that the giddy sensation of descending was not due to the fervor of their kiss.
“What the devil’s happening?” Zeke removed his hand from her hair to clutch at the basket’s side.
“The air must be cooling. We’re coming down faster than I thought.” Rory scrambled to her feet and peered over the edge of the gondola. She paled.
“Oh, damn, damn, damn,” she muttered under her breath and began slashing at the few remaining ballast bags with frantic energy.
Ever since first being lifted into the sky, Zeke had been fighting off a knot of tension. Neither Rory’s words nor her actions were calculated to ease that.
“What are you swearing at?” he shouted, bracing himself for the worst. “Are we going to crash?”
“Uh, no, there just doesn’t seem to be a convenient place to land.”
By now Zeke was familiar with Rory’s mastery of the art of understatement. Horrific images filled his mind of the terrain below—tangles of trees, jagged rocks, closely packed houses. Although his stomach lurched, his head spinning at the mere thought of doing such a thing, Zeke forced himself to his feet.
Momentarily he closed his eyes to take a deep breath. Gripping the edge of the basket until his knuckles were white, by sheer force of will, he got his eyes open and stared downward.
The world below was nothing but a blur of gray, and Zeke cursed, despising himself for his own weakness, which had him on the verge of fainting like any of those hen-witted debutantes he’d met at Mrs. Van H.’s parties. But as he strove to steady himself, he realized it was not his vertigo causing the scene below to go gray.
It was gray, a shifting, eddying, chilling gray breaking into waves crested with whitecaps.
“It’s the Atlantic,” Rory said in a small voice.
“I know the ocean when I see it,” Zeke growled. “Although I’ve always had the good sense to view it from a boat, not dangling above it a hundred feet in the air.”
As though to dispute his measurement, the balloon dropped several more yards. The roar of the sea carried to his ears. Zeke had always thought it such a pleasant sound, so soothing, but now it caused a chill to strike through him as though he could already feel the lick of those ice-cold waves.
He never thought he would hear himself say such a thing, but he bellowed at Rory, “Do something. Take us back up.”
But Rory stood frozen, staring over the side, her delicate features a blend of horror and fascination as though she had been hypnotized by the eternal lure of the sea.
In desperation, Zeke reached for a rope that he had seen Rory tugging at earlier.
His movement snapped Rory out of her trance. “No! Don’t touch that!”
Her warning came too late. Zeke had already given a tentative tug. As soon as he heard that god-awful hiss, he knew what he’d done, even before the balloon started to descend.
“Damn it all to hell!”
He let go the rope and grabbed for Rory, expecting that at any moment the pair of them would be plunged into the sea. Miraculously, the balloon leveled off, but some of the higher waves were almost lapping at the bottom of the basket.
