“Suzanne Mayhew.” He liked the way her fingers clasped him, warm and confident.
He showed her his ID. She glanced at the license then took a picture of it with her phone. Smart lady, although part of him liked to think she wanted a trophy so she could prove his age to her hot suburban MILF friends. She took a longer look at the other ID he showed her. “Boston PD? I feel safer already. The girlfriend I’m about to text will definitely feel better about this adventure knowing I’m with a cop.”
“I’m off-duty. Who knows what might happen?”
She laughed. Nice laugh. Not a girl’s cutesy giggle, but deep, throaty, hinting at adult experience and adult pleasures. “That’s why this is an adventure. You want to text anyone just in case I’m a black widow?”
“I’ve dealt with way more murderers than I care to think about on such a nice day. I doubt you’re a black widow. After driving this car, though, maybe you’ll be a merry widow.” Well, that came out a little more suggestive than he’d intended, but since she didn’t look offended, he followed up with a teasing, challenging grin.
She grinned right back. “I like the sound of that. It’s about damn time to be a merrier widow. I think I even have a merry widow stashed somewhere, but boned lingerie seems too fussy for the occasion.”
Chapter Two
I don’t believe I just said that. She’d already made enough of an ass of herself, telling young, buff, beautiful Neil Callahan more than he needed to know about her relationship with Frank. When she finally told herself to lighten up and enjoy a little practice flirting with a hot guy, she’d blurted out something over the top. She was crazy out of practice about how to be charming and playful with a guy she found attractive, but maybe Neil would forgive that, seeing as though she’d been married until not all that long ago and was just dipping her toes into the flirting water.
She didn’t even know if she had that merry widow anymore. Not much point in complicated lingerie when your sex life was by the numbers and you were sure your husband was thinking about someone else. And more often than not, she was too, even if it was just a fantasy Dom out of one of her romance novels.
But she suspected the other women of the Kinky Kougars group, the ones who’d successfully navigated the treacherous waters of post-forty dating and were now playing with a hot young stud (or more than one, in some cases), would say to run with it.
Neil’s blue eyes, an extraordinarily deep shade, almost midnight, raked up and down her body. He’d gone there, and evidently liked the trip. “If you want to change, I’ll wait.”
Blue shouldn’t look as heated as his eyes did. Frank had blue eyes too, but his had been closer to gray, and more often than not as cold and remote as the sky on a winter day. Neil’s were like a tropical sea…
She made herself laugh. “Even if I knew where the darn thing was, which I don’t, and even if it still fit, which I doubt, those things are poky.”
“Point.” His eyes darkened to an even more implausible shade of blue. “And not the best choice for a drive. It’s nice today, but it’ll be cool with the top down.” She raised an eyebrow, and he added quickly, “Have to make sure it works, right? Older convertibles can have problems with the tops sticking.”
Oh, this was going to be fun.
At the last minute, she hesitated, handed the keys to Neil. “No, really. You wanted to test-drive it. You should go first. I mean, it’s still my car. I could drive it any time.”
Now that she’d admitted to herself that she itched to drive the gorgeous, off-limits car, she didn’t quite understand why she wasn’t jumping at the chance to do so. Good manners? A desire to let Neil have the fun of the first drive because she was developing a silly little crush on him?
At least she knew it wasn’t because she was afraid she’d wreck the car. Frank had often implied—very politely, because his manners were impeccable even when he was being a jerk—that she wasn’t a very good driver. But she suspected the problem was more that he was a terrible passenger, too much of a control freak to relax and enjoy the ride. Sad, considering she hadn’t even been getting hot kinky sex out of letting Frank take charge all those years. Long before the end, though, she wouldn’t have wanted it with him even if he’d offered. That spark was dead.
Hot sex of any flavor, with Neil Callahan, with those fierce blue eyes, that short, but touchable dark hair, that hint of scruff, which must be his way of rebelling on off-duty days, that body, would be another question. Which was why she found herself wanting to defer, she supposed.
Bad idea. What was it they’d said at the meeting, and in the inevitable chats on their forum on FetLife? Get to know each other a little as equals, establish a baseline of mutual respect, set boundaries, and then think about submitting. That must go about triple if you’re not even sure the guy’s interested in you. Sure, he’d acted flirty, but maybe he was just a flirt, or trying to butter her up to accept a low-ball offer on the car. It didn’t mean he wanted to do anything kinky even if he was interested in her.
A wave of awkwardness hit her, but luckily, Neil didn’t seem to notice. “I get it,” he said. “You want to take your turn on interesting roads instead of suburban side streets. I can respect that. And this way I can get us heading to someplace more scenic.”
“Where?” she thought to ask, sliding into the passenger seat. She started to text Janice as soon as she sat down to let her know what was going on—she should say where she was headed as well.
“Do you have plans for the rest of the day? I was thinking the Cape.”
Immediately she thought of all the reasons this was a bad idea. The Cape was a long way away. They could be gone for hours. She’d just met this guy, and sure, he was a cop so he probably wasn’t also a rapist or an ax-murderer, but wasn’t it crazy to decide to spend the day with a stranger? She had things to do…
Only she didn’t, really. Nothing she couldn’t do tomorrow or the next day or any damn time. She lived alone and as a kitchen designer, she worked odd hours and had no appointments until late morning tomorrow. If the house was messy because she’d been out having an adventure for once, or if she ended up buying groceries at 1 AM, who cared?
As for him being a stranger—yeah, he was, but he was the one who’d suggested the safe call.
Which, come to think of it, was something that had come at the Kinky Kougars meeting, as a precaution people should take when getting together with a potential Dominant. Maybe younger people did it as a matter of course, or maybe it occurred to him because of his work, but she liked to imagine Neil was a kinkster who’d fulfill her every fantasy.
Dreams were good. Dreams were all that had kept her going for the last few years of her marriage, when Frank got so wrapped up in work, or whatever the hell else he was doing, that she might as well have lived alone.
That, as much as anything, was why she let herself respond to Neil’s suggestion the way her gut and not her common sense told her to do. Common sense was overrated. She’d been living for years with the common sense that told her to stay safe and trapped in a comfortable-enough marriage to a man who loved his work and his hobbies with more passion than he loved her.
Fuck that noise.
She jumped when she realized she said that out loud.
“We don’t have to go to the Cape,” Neil said quickly. “It just seemed like a good place to drive with the top down.”
“Was that the outside voice?” She laughed at herself. “I was just saying shut up to that little voice that told me to stay home and do the laundry.”
“Did you or the laundry win?”
“Me, thank goodness. I haven’t been to the Cape in ages,” she said. “And it’s the perfect day for it. After Labor Day, but still warm.” She added a few words to her text and hit SEND, but her brain was decidedly not on what she was writing.
She figured Janice would understand any crazy typos.
> “Then sit back and enjoy the ride. We’ll find the perfect stretch of road and then you can take over.”
He wasn’t even looking at her as he spoke, busy with the thousand little adjustments you need to make when getting ready to drive an unfamiliar car, but the way he said sit back and let me drive filled Suzanne’s head with vague but delightful images of ropes and blindfolds and Neil’s big hands, so competent-looking on the steering wheel. Lost in naughty thoughts, she read Janice’s almost instantaneous reply to her text: GO FOR IT. SEND UPDATES.
It came as a surprise when the car stopped halfway out the driveway.
Another car, a dark blue high-end SUV with tinted glass, had partially blocked their path.
“Let me handle this,” Neil said. Any urge she had to protest died hearing that tone of voice.
Neil got out of the car and took a few steps toward the offending vehicle. Without being in uniform, without being armed, he managed to scream law enforcement through body language alone.
The driver rolled the window down. “Take it easy. We just want to see the car.” The driver had a slight accent, maybe Arabic or Turkish. His hair was a lighter brown than Neil’s, his skin the color of old ivory—but his hawk-like features struck her as faintly exotic. There was another man in the passenger seat, but she couldn’t get a good look at him. “I simply hoped to catch you before you went out. I’m interested in the car.”
“We’re in a hurry,” Neil said curtly. “Please back up so we can leave.”
“But I want to talk to the lady about the car.”
“The lady and I need to get going. Call the number on that sign later and make an appointment.” He pointed at the FOR SALE sign, now propped up against the mailbox. “I don’t have a lot of time and I’d like my chance for a test-drive.”
Suzanne opened her mouth to say something then closed it again. She’d probably have caved in to the guy’s pressure, but she liked the way Neil handled it. Authoritative but not an asshole.
“I’m not going anywhere until I check out the car.”
“You don’t want to play that game. I’m a cop, which means if I call and say someone’s menacing my friend, this neighborhood will be crawling with uniforms in about two seconds. Blocking someone’s driveway so she can’t leave seems pretty menacing to me.”
The two men in the SUV consulted briefly. Suzanne couldn’t hear them, but she suspected they weren’t speaking English. Finally, the driver barked, “Fine. I’ll call,” and backed up enough to let them out.
Suzanne glanced behind her and saw them making an awkward U-turn in the narrow street. “I guess I wasn’t the only one who thought that was kind of creepy?”
“Probably just an asshole with attitude, but do me a favor and write the plate number down. I’ll run it tomorrow.” She had no idea what the plate number was—she couldn’t even swear it was a Massachusetts plate—but Neil recited it like it was his own phone number and she jotted it down on an old grocery list.
On second thought, she also typed it into the notepad app on her phone so she couldn’t possibly misplace it.
She also kept checking behind them as they headed for the highway, even though she’d seen the SUV going off in the other direction.
It didn’t relieve her nerves that Neil seemed to glance in the rearview more often than most people did.
If the cop was concerned someone was following them, Suzanne figured she wasn’t paranoid from watching too many TV crime dramas and reading too many romantic suspense novels.
Under the circumstances, she’d rather be paranoid.
Chapter Three
As they drove, something occurred to Suzanne. “How did he hear about the car? I just decided to sell it two days ago and put the for sale sign out yesterday. The ads I placed won’t be out until the weekend. I mean, you were driving by on the insanely cool bike, but—”
“Actually one of my friends mentioned the Mustang. He lives around the corner from you, and he knows my dad and I are car nuts.” She was already freaking out a little and while he wouldn’t say he was, that guy had an aggressively bad attitude in an expensive jacket. Best to reassure her—and himself—that there were all kinds of ways Mr. SUV might have heard about the Mustang. “You know John Barrow?”
She nodded. “African-American guy about your age? He’s in IT and his wife teaches at Boston College?”
Neil nodded.
“I designed their new kitchen, and he runs past the house all the time. So maybe the jerk in the SUV knows someone in the area too. That’s the simplest explanation.”
Yeah, and usually the simplest explanation was the right one.
So why was the incident niggling at him so much? It had just been a thoughtless guy with an overpriced gas-guzzler being annoying. Nothing more ominous than bad manners and an entitled attitude, and he ought to be used to that.
But Neil had been a police officer too long to discount the intuition that told him more was going on than someone proving that money didn’t equal class. Might be nothing, but maybe he’d fended off something bad just by being in the right place at the right time. The rude guy and his companion didn’t fit the usual carjacker or home invader profile. They were middle-aged, wearing suit jackets and he thought the passenger even had a tie on, as if they were playing hooky from work to check out the car—but maybe they were trying to blend in with their targets. He hadn’t heard about anything like that going on, but it could be a suburban problem that hadn’t made it onto his radar in Boston; he’d get in touch with some of the local guys and see if he’d missed hearing about a ring of classy-looking criminals terrorizing the wealthier suburbs.
Neil realized with a start that he’d been driving by rote, not appreciating the wind in his hair or the car’s vintage interior, not paying any attention to how the Mustang cornered or what the engine sounded like.
Dad would smack him upside the head, especially since he wasn’t being distracted by the only thing his father appreciated more than a great car: a beautiful woman. Dad, as he often said, was old, but he wasn’t dead.
He flashed a brief smile at Suzanne and was rewarded by a grin in return. “This is great and we haven’t even made it to the highway… Oh, turn here!”
They were almost to Route 95, but he took the left and soon found himself on a narrow, twisty road that felt like it was far more remote than it was. He vaguely remembered seeing a sign for an Audubon reserve at the turn. Judging from the woods around him and the occasional mountain bike enjoying the hill road’s curves, they must be driving through the reserve’s land.
He couldn’t exactly open the car up, not with a speed limit of 30 and conditions that made even that impractical. A couple of times he had to slow to a crawl until he could get around a laboring cyclist.
But it was enough to test the car, enough to give him a feel of the way it handled, the barely restrained power of the eight-cylinder engine. It wanted to run like the wild horse for which it was named, but it could be polite, hold itself back when necessary. Kind of like he was because he wanted to pull off into one of the little trail heads or a random driveway and kiss the woman by his side.
When they got to the reserve headquarters, an old farmhouse surrounded by gardens heavy with cosmos and sunflowers and a bunch of flowers he didn’t recognize though the birds and butterflies obviously did, he pulled into the parking lot. It might be a weekday, but the weather was gorgeous, so the lot was relatively crowded, with several groups milling around pulling daypacks and water bottles out of their cars. Still, he managed to find a spot under the trees at the far edge. “Thank you. That was the perfect road to get started. Now it’s your turn if you’d like. Just go light on the gas. This isn’t exactly the Prius in your driveway.”
“Between you and me, I got the Prius mostly to annoy Frank. Good to be green and all that, but mostly it was because he didn’t think of it as a proper
car and at the time that amused me. But I’ll be nervous with all the damn mountain bikes,” she admitted. “I’d rather wait until we’re on the highway. That is, if you still want to go out to the Cape. Was this enough of a test-drive for you?”
He thought carefully about his answer, wanting to make sure he made it clear he was talking about the Mustang and not about Suzanne—even if he kind of was talking about Suzanne. “Enough of a test-drive to know I’d like to drive this car some more. Enough to let me know I really want it, even though it’s not the project car I was looking for. But yes, I’d still like to get out to the Cape. And I’d love to have you drive me there.” He hesitated. “Do you know how to drive a standard? If that’s why you’re nervous, I understand. And I’ll be glad to teach you sometime if you’d like.”
She laughed. “I’d love to pretend I can’t drive standard because that would give us an excuse to hang out some more, but I actually learned to drive on a standard and thanks to Frank’s car obsession, I’ve kept in practice. The Prius is the first automatic car I’ve owned. I guess I’m just nervous about driving Frank’s baby. But he let me drive the Stingray a couple of times, so this one’s nothing to be scared of. Move over and let me play.” The day was already brilliant, the kind of New England early autumn day that poets probably wrote about, but her smile made it brighter yet. “I’m going to go slowly around the mountain bikes. Those suckers make me nervous.”
He scooted over as best he could, awkwardly lifting himself over the gearshift, just to allow himself a few extra seconds of watching her walk around the car. Yellow T-shirt. Dark indigo straight-legged jeans, definitely not Mom jeans. Black canvas Keds with white polka dots—he hadn’t noticed those before because honestly he hadn’t gotten beyond her glorious ass, the length of her legs, the fall and sway of her hair. Slightly retro, lively, fun—he liked it.
Drive: Cougars, Cars and Kink, Book 1 Page 2
