Free Hunting Daylight (9781101619032) by Piper Maitland Page A

of her hand.
    “Your body wants me,” she said.
    “No.” He tried to push her off, but she gripped him tighter.
    Sensations rushed through his lower extremities, and he felt himself slide toward an edge, clear and flat as a sheet of glass. He sucked in air, and then his breath came out in a rush, blowing against her blond curls.
    Stop. Her. Now.
He grasped her hand and flung it away.
    “What is your problem?” she said.
    “I don’t want this. I have a wife.”
    “She won’t know.” Tatiana reached for him.
    He caught her wrist. “But
I
will.”
    She stared at him a long moment, then twisted away. “You’ll be in Gabon for a month—with me. Remember, what happens in the rain forest, stays in the rain forest.”
    After she left, Jude reached into his backpack. He pulled out Caro’s blue ribbon and touched it to his nose, breathing in her smell. Long before they were even born, their lives-to-be had intersected. His father, Sir John Fleming Dalgliesh Barrett, had been a prankster during his days at Eton, and his partner in crime had been Nigel Clifford, Caro’s uncle. A stunt at St. George’s Chapel had brought the Windsor guards rushing down, and the boys’ fathers had been summoned from a cocktail party at the House of Lords.
    Decades later, after Jude had begun studying the longevity gene, he’d corresponded with Nigel Clifford, and their letters had eventually led him to Caro—the old chaphad been looking for a way to explain vampirism, and he’d brought Jude and Caro together.
    He shut his eyes, remembering the first time he saw her. She was running out of her flat in London, her blond corkscrew curls flying around her. A jolt of sexual energy had almost knocked him to the pavement. He’d followed her to Heathrow Airport, blatantly ignoring the Barretts’ family motto: “Be Skeptical.”
    Oh, what a mess he’d been in those days. Tidy and precise, his pencils lined up in a row. Shy and bumbling. More skilled at introducing a gene into bacteria than inviting a woman to the cinema. But he’d fallen headlong in love with Caro. He couldn’t stop touching her, looking at her, smelling her. The scientific part of his brain had wondered if she’d emanated an addictive substance. Whatever it was, he wanted more.
    From the beginning, they’d shared a strong, sensual connection, but they’d fit together in other ways. She’d been an historian, so they’d shared a love of academia, but unlike him, she wasn’t pedantic. Her idea of a romantic date was an evening at the Bodleian Library. She was smart, funny, audacious, straightforward, and tender. She knew when to be ladylike and when to be risqué. Yet she could also be proper and bawdy all at once—that was thrilling. When they were together, Jude stood a little taller, feeling dashing and brave for the first time.
    Just when the broken pieces inside him had begun to realign, he’d learned about her hybrid genes. He remembered how stunned he’d felt. Adrenaline had pumped through his veins, and a huge neon sign began flashing inside his head:
fight or flight
.
    He’d picked flight. As he walked away from Caro that night, he decided to return to Dalgliesh, his family’s home in York. His stepmother had turned it into a tourist attraction, and she always pointed out that the manor was built around a hawthorne tree. To this day it thrived in the cellar gift shop. That was when he knew that he couldn’t leave Caro. If a tree could grow in the dark, then love was just as durable. Just as miraculous.

    Jude awoke shortly before daylight, when Hamilton crept into their tent. Rain was hammering against the canvas roof. A few minutes later, Jude drifted back to sleep, and the next time he opened his eyes, it was still raining.
    He rubbed his eyes and sat up. “What time is it?”
    “A little after dusk,” Hamilton said, tossing Jude a jacket with a hood. “Let’s get something to eat.”
    Rain blew sideways, sweeping across the path, as Jude and