Suddenly he felt very much like a doting boyfriend.
Which wasn’t helping his concentration.
Get back in the game.
He’d been walking slowly, acting like a man enjoying the nice day and checking out the view of the beach and water from the lot—Nauset Beach’s parking lot was set well above the beach itself, making it quite a spectacular spot.
Romantic, even with the crowd.
Or it would be if that gray Lincoln weren’t sitting there, its engine running as if the occupants wanted to be able to follow them at a moment’s notice.
Maybe they just liked looking at the water in air-conditioned comfort in their jackets and ties. Maybe it was two completely different guys, stopping at the beach for a breather on their way home from a law office; even on the Cape, lawyers tended to be formal. Hell, for all he knew, the two guys were a couple having a heart-to-heart or a fight and that was why the windows were rolled up tight.
In fact, there were so many reasonable explanations that Neil almost managed to convince himself his law-enforcement Spidey senses were mistuned.
Until he got a good look at the people in the car. The tint on the windows was enough he hadn’t been sure from a distance, but as he passed the car, it was obvious.
Same guys.
Different car, same guys.
How the hell had they followed them to the Cape, especially with the detour to the Audubon preserve?
The guy had Suzanne’s cell phone number.
If the guy could triangulate using cell towers, he could track them that way. It wouldn’t be easy to pull off on your own, and highly illegal unless you were law enforcement with a warrant, but not impossible if you had mad hacking skills and/or the right contacts.
Hell, there were apps and websites that would let you track someone’s cell phone. All the legit ones were set up so the trackee had to consent—they were meant for keeping tabs on kids or people with health issues—but hackers were hackers because they got a big old woody out of getting around safeguards like those. And that was the kind of hack that could make someone a lot of money.
It seemed like something out of a spy movie, but it was the most logical explanation he could think of.
He bought the ice cream. He didn’t want to let the two well-dressed goons know they’d been made.
And while he waited for the cones, he took what he hoped looked like a picture of Suzanne and the Mustang, but wasn’t. He couldn’t make out much through the tinted glass, but maybe it could be enhanced. It wasn’t like on TV, where someone could take five pixels and get a clear image from it, but maybe he’d captured enough that between the image and their verbal descriptions, a sketch artist could come up with something decent.
He greeted Suzanne as affectionately as he could with them both holding ice cream and whispered, as he did, to confirm their friends from Bellwood had found them again. Then he suggested they switch places. “I know the roads down here,” he said, trying to sound casual and, for her sake, not saying he was the one trained in driving for pursuit and evasion.
From her strained expression and the smile that didn’t reach her eyes, she figured it out without him saying anything.
He also made a great show of driving out of the parking lot one-handed, licking his Kahlúa-and-cream cone until the Lincoln was out of sight. Temporarily. They’d be back because they wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble if whatever was going on wasn’t important.
Then he tossed the cone toward the curb (with a childish internal whimper because it had been really good ice cream) and, with both hands on the wheel, put all his training in defensive driving and everything he’d even thought of about ditching pursuit to the test.
As soon as they were on a mostly empty back road, he ordered, “Take the battery out of your cell phone. Now.”
Suzanne gaped and sputtered “What the hell?”
Chapter Six
“Take the battery out of the phone,” he repeated using slightly different words, as if she hadn’t understood him the first time. “They’re tracking you. Using the GPS, I think, but maybe towers.”
Holy shit! This was like something off NCIS. One of her favorite TV shows, sure, but not something she wanted to find herself living. “But what if one of my clients or my mom calls? And my safe-call friend might freak out if she can’t reach me. She’s super-protective. Like Wonder Woman or something.”
That was the way to handle it, making light of the situation. He had to be mistaken. Paranoia must become a natural side effect of being a police officer, and the incident this morning had been creepy enough to trigger it even in someone with less reason to see crime everywhere. Then she had a thought. “If it is the same guys, how do you know they’re not after you?”
“I don’t. They switched cars once, and they might have done it more than once. For all I know, they tracked me to your place from Boston, in which case, I’m really sorry. And we’ve made it easy for them. A vintage Indian and a red Mustang are both distinctive.”
“Oh why couldn’t I have been selling a white Accord? Oh, because you wouldn’t have been interested in it.” The poor attempt at snappy dialogue made her feel braver for a few seconds.
“Whichever one of us they’re targeting, my gut says they caught up to us using your phone.” He took one hand off the wheel, and, without taking his eyes off the road, wrapped strong fingers around her wrist. “Do it, Suzanne. It’s the best way to be sure. Trust me.”
Her panic mounted, but at the same time, something about the firm grip on her wrist, the authoritative voice, set her shuddering for an entirely different reason.
This moment shouldn’t feel sexy. Not when she was apparently being followed by creepy people in an SUV. Not when a cop was worried about those stalkers and talking about scary, spy-movie kinds of things.
But his intense, deep voice, his strong, tanned hand, the sense that she needed to obey him, all conspired against her. He was being his cop-self, she knew, not a fantasy Dominant, but damn if it wasn’t playing into some of her fantasies.
Or maybe being crazy turned on kept her from becoming a complete panic stricken, whimpering idiot, in which case it was a survival tactic.
She still hoped he might be mistaken, or that the men’s presence here was a coincidence.
But better to be safe.
She opened the phone and pulled the battery out.
For a second, she let it rest in her hand, slightly warm and feeling much heavier than it actually was. She flashed to the stranger’s cold eyes, the behavior she’d thought of entitled pushiness but could also make sense as something more ominous.
She flung the battery from the car. She was tempted to throw the phone after it, as if it were somehow contaminated.
“Good girl.” His voice was almost a whisper, but it was so intense that it carried over the road noise. It zinged through her body, quivered on her nipples and clit. Had she been waiting all her life to hear those words in that tone from a man like Neil Callahan?
Maybe.
Okay, yes. Yes, she had been.
But none of her favorite writers would feature these circumstances as a sexy set-up in her next erotic book. Neil might be hot, but scary stalkers weren’t.
Suzanne slumped lower into the red leather seat, reality hitting her.
Her stomach roiled, and she realized she was shaking. She closed her eyes, focusing on the purring of the big engine and let it take the edge off her terror.
She didn’t realize she’d knotted her hands together tight as tangled yarn until Neil’s big hand came to rest over her entwined ones. She breathed deeply, drinking in the warmth of his skin on hers. “What now?” she asked, ashamed of how her voice quavered. She had sounded more composed talking to the officer who called her after Frank’s accident. “I can’t go home, can I?”
She made herself op
en her eyes, look at Neil. He seemed impassive, but his gaze kept shifting to the mirrors, checking behind him constantly. His hand squeezed hers as he said, “Not until I have a better idea what’s going on. I’m not sure I should either. It makes more sense that they were following me, not you. I can’t place them, but cops do make enemies.”
“Hotel?” Her damn libido kicked in as she said it, obviously liking the idea of holing up in a hotel with Neil. She told it to pipe down.
Neil shrugged as he replied. “The car’s too distinctive, and not many hotels on the Cape have garages. But I have a friend who works at Woods Hole.”
“I don’t want to get him involved in this. Whatever this is.”
“He’s at sea doing research for the next five weeks. I know where he keeps his key, though, and he’s always said he’s fine with me borrowing his place if I want to chill on the Cape.”
To her astonishment, Suzanne laughed. “Chill? You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
“Princess Bride? I knew I liked you for a reason.” He squeezed her hand again. “No, this won’t exactly be chilling.” He turned his eyes from the road for a second, looked into hers.
And there was that hot blue again, tropical, compelling. She could drown in his eyes and die happy. She was about to laugh at her own thought when, despite everything, Neil smiled. “The opposite of chill. Things may get pretty hot.” He drew a line with one finger on the soft skin of her inner arm, but it seemed like he stroked someplace more intimate and even more sensitive.
Suzanne swallowed hard, her mouth as dry as her panties were wet.
Neil zigged and zagged on back roads, relying less on his GPS than on instinct, best guess and memories of rides on the Indian. No one car had been behind them for very long, and every time he spotted someone following them apparently by chance, he’d turned. Only once had the other car turned after him, and it had pulled into a driveway moments later.
But he still felt uneasy. The men had been in a different vehicle the second time he’d spotted them, and he suspected they’d been trailed part of the way with a completely different car driven by different people. So who knew who might have spotted them, passed intel on to…whoever was in charge.
Which, he told himself firmly, was crazy talk. This couldn’t be some kind of large-scale operation. It wouldn’t make sense.
Not unless Suzanne wasn’t what she appeared to be. Soccer-mom drug kingpin? Suburban madam who’d blackmailed the wrong person? He’d heard of weirder things.
More likely, though, an innocent woman who’d caught the wrong person’s attention. She hadn’t admitted to any misguided dating adventures or creepy clients, but maybe she just hadn’t made the connection. Dealers and mobsters might get bored and lonely and check out OKCupid or FetLife, but they probably took a brush-off even less gracefully than the average online creeper. Or, as he said earlier, this had to do with him or maybe even his father, and they’d been using the Mustang as an excuse.
He glanced at her again, got hit by another wave of rampaging lust. Something else, too, something that made him want to protect her—not like he protected the public as a cop, but in a more personal way, like a knight in freaking armor or something like that, defending his lady.
She’d better not turn out to be a criminal. He’d made it this far without fucking any criminals, as far as he knew. It would be a shame to spoil that record. And he had every intention of fucking her, and doing other things with, for and to her, if she’d let him.
Which he was pretty sure she would.
At least he was sure of something, because everything else was damn fucked up. Nothing like stumbling into what might or might not be a crime off duty and outside his jurisdiction.
* * * * *
Thank goodness for small mercies. Plenty of room for the Mustang in Sam’s garage, next to a well-loved Jeep, still splattered with mud from previous adventures. As a bonus, Neil found a large tarp, still in its package, which he threw over the shiny red vehicle. “Ought to be a crime to hide something this pretty,” he muttered.
Suzanne nodded her agreement as she grabbed the other side of the tarp. She helped him position it, adding, “I have a cover for it at home. But who knew we’d need it?”
“Yeah.”
He let them in through the back door. God, he’d given his friend grief so many times about leaving his key under a rock by the steps, but he was grateful today. Tonight, more like, because the sun was setting.
The little Cape was simple, no-frills, and achingly tidy. Neil teased Sam that he’d make someone a great service sub someday, although the neatness was a habit he’d gotten into from living on ships for long stretches and a level of self-discipline (and discipline of a few select friends) that made Neil look like a slacker. They entered the kitchen, which looked like Neil’s friend had scrubbed it before he left.
Of course there was nothing in the fridge except some condiments and a lonely can of root beer.
Suzanne was looking around, though, like it was the frigging Four Seasons combined with Disneyland.
No, Neil realized, she wasn’t. She was just trying to avoid meeting his gaze. She moved restlessly, just out of reach. Hovering. Anxious. Well, of course she was anxious, but he sensed the anxiety wasn’t just about the crazy situation and all the unknowns, but about being alone with him.
About what might happen next.
He’d set up a good, responsible plan while driving here, a plan that involved contacting his lieutenant, running those plates, seeing if anyone knew anything about men fitting their stalkers’ description or if there’d been reports of similar incidents. This plan involved dinner, even if it had to be pizza or whatever else delivered in Falmouth.
He figured food would help him keep his hands off Suzanne until he had answers for her, or at least until he could say he’d asked the right people some of the right questions and they were on their way to getting answers.
The good intentions dissolved when he saw how lost she looked, how frightened and at the same time, how eager.
He touched her shoulder, more tentatively than he yearned to, more tentatively than he would have if the day hadn’t been so weird and fraught. “Suzanne…” He wanted to say the right thing, but words were failing him.
For a second, not even that, he stroked the fiery silk of her ponytail and repeated to himself everything his father had ever impressed upon him about how to treat a lady.
But when she raised her face, looked at him with big eyes, frightened and confused and yet heated, all his father’s wise words blurred into so much noise, drowned out by the roar of his blood. The combination of fright and confusion and lust was potent for a man with his needs, his fetishes, even knowing that while the spark of attraction between them was real, the nervous bewilderment wasn’t the happy nerves of anticipating a scene with a new Dom. “God, you’re lovely,” he breathed. He imagined his hands on the amazing body of hers. Imagined losing that cute sunshine yellow shirt, peeling off her jeans, experiencing more of her sleek skin.
Imagined himself spanking that fine, firm ass.
His last bit of sense asserted himself with that idea. No. Too soon. Even if he sensed that energy from her. Even if he could smell her need, felt the way she was trembling. Down the road, sure, but this didn’t feel like the right time for opening that door, the negotiating, asking all the delicate questions a Dom should ask with a new playmate, especially one who might be inexperienced. Let them taste each other tonight—he didn’t think he could help himself if she was as willing as she seemed—and figure out the rest later, when he’d had a chance to follow up on the creepers and put both their minds at ease.
Except she looked up with him with those big eyes and pleaded. “Touch me, Neil. Touch me like I think you want to.”
He had to ask, had to make sure they were on the same page, even t
hough his blood roared and his dick screamed for him to just do it. Grab her. Take her.
“Like you’re in charge.” She swallowed hard. He saw the muscles shift in her throat and it was unspeakably sexy, that show of nerves not in the face of would-be stalkers but the prospect of him and her, of him topping her. “Because I want you to be right now. When you grabbed my wrist in the car, I started shaking, and it wasn’t just nerves. I melted. My panties got soaked. And I’m scared half to death about what’s going on because it just doesn’t make any sense but I’m still melted, thinking about you handling me like that, about giving me orders in that growly voice. Maybe hurting me in good ways.”
“Have you played this way—BDSM?”
Suzanne dropped her gaze briefly, as if considering, then looked back at him. “Not in about a million years.”
He snorted. “You have a few years on me, sure, but you’re not that much older.”
“Since before I was married, which seems like a million years ago. Just experimenting, I guess, nothing really hardcore, but I loved it. Then I met Frank and he wasn’t into it. I thought maybe he’d change his mind, but he never did.” A deep breath. “I want this, Neil. Need this. I may be rusty, but I know what I’m doing. Know what I want to be doing, at least.”
Finally, given permission to follow his instincts, he let one hand slide to that tempting firm ass and grabbed it. The other stayed in her hair, but gripped that ponytail, using it in the way—one of the ways—he’d been imagining ever since he saw it, pulling her head back, tugging hard. For a second he watched a lust-charged smile bloom across her face.
Yeah, she liked this.
Drive: Cougars, Cars and Kink, Book 1 Page 4
