all, she’d felt it before—usually just before a man turned into an arch wanker and killed it. She knew how to deal with it then. But this was a totally new situation. She was playing a game with someone who wasn’t even real. And he didn’t immediately say or do anything crass, just continued to dance with her, as if it was enough. As if he liked just holding her in his arms and moving to the music. As she did.
Oh fuck…
“What sort of a name is Genesis anyway?” she blurted to avert her confusion. “You can’t really be called Genesis Adam.”
The breath of his laughter brushed her cheek, and she shivered. It was far from unpleasant.
“That’s what I said to my old mum,” Adam murmured. “In fact my dad may well have said the same thing. Never got the chance to ask him. I was supposed to be my mum’s new beginning, so she named me Genesis.”
She peered at him uncertainly. “Is that true?”
“That I was her new beginning? No, I was just a very short distraction. What about you, JK? You must have a real name.”
“It’s Jilly. Well, Jillian. But I like JK.”
“So do I,” he said.
She felt the involuntary contraction of her brow, just before a strange voice said in her ear, “Germans. Get out.”
She spun around, but Adam had heard it too and was already walking her casually toward the back of the café, his arm around her waist. “No wonder our contact was late,” Adam murmured, pushing through the doors to the kitchen. “She’s been caught and grassed us up.”
“Will we get away?” Jilly asked, making for the open door at the back through which she could make out a back alley. She couldn’t help wondering what it would feel like to be shot in this game.
“Haven’t the foggiest idea. Let’s try.”
The alley was quiet, although Jilly could hear German commands barked from the main street. Still with his arm around her, they hurried down the alley.
I like this game…
Jilly’s phone rang, the incongruous strains of the Proclaimers’ Five Hundred Miles blasting into 1940s Paris like a bucket of cold water.
Jilly stopped dead, her gaze flying to Adam’s. He didn’t drop his arm, just waited while she fished out her phone. It was Sera.
“What’s wrong?” Jilly demanded.
“I’ve found him, Jilly,” Sera’s voice said shakily. “I’ve found the body.”
Oh Jesus, oh fuck, oh no…
“Where are you?” she managed. She couldn’t take her eyes off Adam’s face. Expressions surged behind his eyes—hope, fear, sadness, and, surely, irritation. Jilly’s pain felt physical, huge, seeping upward from her stomach to her heart. Behind her, all hell was breaking loose. The German soldiers had entered the café. More were rushing round the alley to the back door.
“In the garden. Through the back door at the utility room.”
“I’m coming,” Jilly said and broke the connection.
She dropped the phone back into her pocket and stared at Adam. “I need to go back.”
“I know.”
“Wait,” she said desperately, and his loosening arm stilled.
Sera had found the body. Adam’s eyes and her own head both told her this was very likely to be the end, that his ghost would vanish with the discovery of his body. Surely that was his only purpose in coming back, in contacting Jilly in the first place. To find out what had happened to him. And now they would know. And she’d never see him again.
“Adam, if this is it,” she whispered. “If it is…I’m so sorry I never knew you, so glad I did this. Adam…”
She reached up to him urgently, with what intention she didn’t stop to think, and, ignoring the soldiers rushing toward them, he tightened his arm around her, bent his head, and kissed her mouth.
Perhaps it was the soldiers, perhaps it was surprise or just the fact that it was all a game. But Jilly felt no need to knee Adam in the groin.
Rough in texture, soft in action, his lips took hers and parted them, and she let him. She even kissed him back, pressing up into his mouth with desperate fervour. He dragged her closer, and the growing hardness between his legs thrilled her. She opened her mouth wider, throwing both arms around his neck, and suddenly his tongue was in her mouth, stroking hers, and she finally understood what it was all about: sheer, shattering sexual desire.
She clung to him, lost in the pleasure of her aching nipples against his hard chest, of the pressure of his shaft at the juncture of