Sexy Beast
Sherri L. King
Be careful what you wish for…
When Angel’s car dies at a crossroads, during a full moon, at midnight no less, she fervently wishes the clunker will restart and wheeze the few remaining miles to her home. And along comes Otto, a sexy beast who “fixes” the car and takes his payment in trade—Angel’s body, naked and ready on the hood of her old Diablo. That’s what devils do, after all. Trade. But Angel learns of her mistake too late. While a supernatural car with a permanently undying engine is great and all, her body is a pretty steep price to pay.
Too bad that’s not all Otto wants.
An Ellora’s Cave Romantica Publication
www.ellorascave.com
Sexy Beast
ISBN 9781419927461
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Sexy Beast Copyright 2010 Sherri L. King
Edited by Kelli Collins
Cover art by Darrell King
Electronic book publication February 2010
The terms Romantica® and Quickies® are registered trademarks of Ellora’s Cave Publishing.
With the exception of quotes used in reviews, this book may not be reproduced or used in whole or in part by any means existing without written permission from the publisher, Ellora’s Cave Publishing, Inc.® 1056 Home Avenue, Akron OH 44310-3502.
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This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.
Sexy Beast
Sherri L. King
Trademarks Acknowledgement
The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:
Audi: Audi A.G.
GMC Diablo: General Motors LLC
iPhone: Apple, Inc.
Technicolor: Technicolor Trademark Management
Chapter One
Fell Falls, Montana
The moon was a crispy, cold wafer floating in its web of stars. The autumnal sky was cloudless, no fluffy pillows of mist to cushion the blinding brightness of the spying orb overhead. Angel eased her old car to a coasting halt at the deserted four-way stop, cautious as always to observe and obey all traffic laws. She hated full moon nights—especially so soon after Halloween. To her mind, right now the moon was a lidless eye, forever staring down, just waiting for her to let down her guard so it could squash her flat.
Or something like that.
Angel herself would be the first to admit she had a fruitful imagination and a yellow belly to match its penchant for ominous overtones. But admission didn’t cease the chills that gnawed at her spinal cord with tiny, jagged teeth. Sometimes—most of the time—she enjoyed a good scare. But not tonight.
The crossroads was aglow in silver. The cracked, aged-gray asphalt reflected the moonlight as if it were made of mercury, its shape reminding her of a crucifix. Like an oil-slicked river stretching out before her, the way looked slippery and tainted. Polluted. She was glad to put her foot back on the gas pedal of her 1978 GMC Diablo clunker. Happy to be moving on.
She was not happy when the engine sputtered and died.
Not happy at all when it failed to fire again, though she heavily pumped the gas pedal with each turn of the ignition key—a crucial step in resurrecting the old lemon even at the best of times.
This was not the best of times. Her Diablo lived up to its name tonight, damn it.
Quiet deafened her ears like plugs of cheap cotton balls. And the yawning dark beyond the shimmering glass windshield seemed to stretch on for an eternity. Some unnamed weight with a density reserved for dark matter crushed her from an invisible height.
Those chills? The ones gnawing at her spine? They were now dancing in her bloodstream like tiny little go-go dancers hosting a rave in her veins.
“Stupid, jerry-rigged, bastard car!” She pounded on the steering wheel in a fit of frustration that did nothing but make her cold palms ache.
After her fit, she settled back in her seat, closed her eyes, took a deep, steadying breath and then reopened her eyes. “Okay baby,” she now cajoled in a low murmur. “Just give me the last few miles to the house. You can do that, can’t you? All right now, come on.” She pumped the gas pedal to the floor once and turned the key.
Nothing.
She pumped the gas pedal to the floor twice and turned the key.
Again nothing.
From long experience with her stubborn car, she knew if it didn’t start this time, with three full pumps of the accelerator, it would likely not start again until she crawled under the hood to discover whatever new ailment had befallen the machine. As this was her first and only car—purchased nearly twenty years prior when she was fifteen—she had a very special understanding with the vehicle. Angel knew she was lucky the body hadn’t rusted to dust years ago. She couldn’t do much to repair the body—it was the engine and all its accompanying parts that were her specialty. But even her expertise in the shop wouldn’t keep the Diablo alive much longer if she didn’t replace a whole lot of its innards.
Expensive innards, the cost of which might outweigh the worth of the car altogether.
Three pumps, and this time, when she turned the key, the engine taunted her with a loud, racking cough before finally dying. Dying for good.
“This is shit I don’t need right now.” Angel’s voice echoed in the silent vehicle and she reached for the hood release before throwing open the door to step out onto the cold, forbidding road. The wind cut her sharply, screaming once before continuing in a dull roar, tossing her pale hair behind her in a fury. She pulled the throat of her coat closed and cinched her knitted scarf tighter, so that it was no longer a chic accessory but an absolute necessity against the biting cold. Autumn it may be, but this was Montana—Northeastern Montana—and Fell Falls not only held the record for the coldest temperature ever recorded in the United States, it held the record for the coldest November recorded, just two years earlier.
To cut it short, the weather was colder than a witch’s tit and it was no big surprise, even if it was a big pain in the ass.
What a time for car trouble. Not that any time was good for it, but this was just all-around crappy timing. If Angel didn’t see a quick fix underneath the behemoth hood, she’d have to wake her nearest friend and bum a ride home, which would not only be an embarrassment but also a severe drainage on her allotted sleep time. It was close to midnight and she was expected earlier than normal at the shop to help soup up two special-order V-8 racers. Without adequate sleep, not only would she be cranky, but she would also be slower witted at a time when she needed to be her sharpest.
On the hood of the car the demon decal beamed at her with a cheery red glow, still bright as the day it had been stamped there by the factory, in sharp contrast with the faded, chipped black coat of paint beneath it. Gaudy and dated, it constantly reminded Angel of her awkward teenage years. Of mornings spent praying she could parallel park the beast in the school lot without failing three or more times before succeeding. Of afternoons spent cursing each backfire as sh
e’d pulled away and headed for work. The car had been a junker when she’d bought it and it was a junker still.
Times hadn’t changed much—the car still backfired, she still hated to parallel park, and she still struggled between the frugality of keeping this hunk of belts and bolts working or just giving in and buying a new car with credit she could ill afford to spare. It was an argument she never settled with herself. The car had held on tenaciously. She’d give it another chance, but just this one last time. Again.
Angel sighed and hoisted the hood. The loud groan of aged steel hacked the night to pieces, easily drowning out the hum of the wind in her ears. She’d long ago rigged a system of four tiny lights to a stand-alone battery, triggered to turn on with the lifting of the lid. Their glow, coupled with that of the glaring moon, gave Angel plenty of light to see her way around the engine. What she saw was as familiar as the lines across the palms of her hands.
“C’mon baby, show me what’s bothering you.”
In contrast with the battered, faded exterior, the engine was clean and well oiled, as spic-and-span as imaginable. It was clearly the engine of a skilled mechanic. But Angel knew that no matter how skilled she was, money was tight and skill could only get her so far. It was new parts the old car needed now, and it was new parts Angel had no money to buy.
She’d exhausted all the junkyards with parts available both near and far, on the internet and through her colleagues at the shop. Unfortunately, there were some pieces of machinery Angel just couldn’t rubber band together as successfully as others without ready cash. With the mishmash of parts she’d assembled into a working engine, Angel knew the next step was a total overhaul and the cost of another engine would probably run her the same as buying a newer car, one she could fix more cheaply when it eventually failed her in the future.
The crapper of it was that if she could scrape the money together to put a rebuilt engine in the Diablo, there was little doubt in her mind that something else would surely break soon after and she had absolutely no money to replace anything else. And since she couldn’t see anything readily fixable now, she suspected something vital was in disrepair. The Diablo, it would seem, had finally gone to hell.
“It’s where you belong, you old bastard,” she muttered, though without much heat. For all the trouble it had put her through, the clunker was her first car. Her only car, ever. And she had a fondness for it. Even now, standing in the bite of the cold arctic air, stranded and alone in the middle of the plains, Angel felt a fist in her heart and the hot wash of tears behind her eyelids.
Damn, but she was tired. Just worn out and frustrated, cold and irritable. She reached into her pocket, already kicking herself for disturbing her friend Yancy—who was no doubt snuggled, warm and smiling, in the arms of her new fiancé right now. It sucked that Angel had to call and disturb her friend, but there was no one else who would answer at this late hour. This wasn’t the first time she’d had to resort to a late-night distress call. But maybe, if she were really lucky, it would be the last.
She reached deep into her pocket for her iPhone and pressed the button to bring the screen to life. It glowed brightly at her, a small comfort as the moon overhead spied on her every action. With the speed of long practice, she flipped to her contacts page, selected Yancy’s name from the list and dialed her home number.
When she put the phone to her ear, instead of the sound of ringing, there was no sound at all.
She looked back at the phone and frowned at the now-black screen. Once again she pressed the single button at the bottom of the device and waited for it to brighten back to life.
And waited.
Angel let out a frustrated growl and pressed the button again, but again it failed to awaken the phone.
Oh hell.
Had she forgotten to charge it that morning? Surely not—it was an ingrained habit, just like brushing her teeth and washing her hair. Angel always plugged the phone into its charger each day when she arrived home from work. Yet here she was with a dead cell phone in her hand, an equally dead car sitting in the middle of the road, and a whole lot of empty night ahead and behind her.
“Oh man. No. No, no, this is not happening.” She shivered against the cold and tried in vain to resurrect her phone. “God, please don’t.” As if to punish her doubt, the wind picked up force and grew colder still, throwing tangled hair in her face to blind her.
From inside the car, the radio roared to life. Angel shrieked before she could contain her shocked expulsion. It took a second to catch her breath, dislodging a cold brick loose from her lungs with a gasp that hurt the back of her throat, and in that time she came to recognize the lyrics and tune that played from the old speakers in a cracking, thinly hissing wheeze. Mama Cass belting out the words to Dream a Little Dream of Me was usually a fine thing to hear, but now, in the cold and the dark of midnight, muffled by ancient speakers, the song sounded more than a little creepy. It echoed like the voices of dead leaves trembling against crypt walls.
There was something about oldies stations, this one the only FM frequency her old radio could clearly receive, that could turn an ordinary song into something seriously evil sounding.
Angel shuddered and crept back into the car to turn off the music. It was obvious now that something electrical had gone haywire, which was both good and bad news. Good because she knew she could fix it, but bad because she wouldn’t be able to pinpoint the issue until she could get it towed into the shop for a diagnostic.
“What I wouldn’t give for a car that behaves.” She let out a frustrated breath. “Or a fully charged cell phone battery. I wish my luck weren’t so damn rotten.”
A shadow moved at the edge of the illumination of the still-burning hood lamps. Angel squinted, wondering what deer would be brave enough to venture out this close to the road, away from trees and cover.
It was no deer.
Angel’s blood turned to lead.
The shadow moved again. Its shape said man, but something about the way it moved said monster.
No. With sheer force of will, she curbed her mental acrobatics and smothered her morbid imagination.
But the shadow moved, and underneath its darkness something seemed to slither.
Every horror movie she’d ever watched, every crucial moment when she and her friends would scream at the female lead onscreen to turn tail and haul ass, was playing in her mind. But, like any other scripted cliché, Angel couldn’t resist leaving the relative safety of her car to get a closer look.
The man—for Angel saw with certainty now that it was just a man—stumbled to a standstill at the corner of the four-way. His dark, mussed hair could have been brown or black, but she couldn’t be sure because of the way the moonlight seemed to slide around him, not touching him. He was disheveled, clothes dirty, but not with the ground-in grime of vagrancy. If she didn’t know better, she’d have thought the man looked as if he’d just run from a mob with pitchforks through a haunted forest.
“Are you okay?” she asked tentatively, looking around for the vehicle he had to have vacated along the lengths of the roadways.
“I’m fine, Angel baby. Just taking a stroll. Thanks for asking.” He raked a hand through his midnight-kissed locks. “I sure could use a ride though. Cool car, by the way.”
Chapter Two
His voice could melt hard caramels with its hot, sinful sweetness.
Angel watched, stunned into silence as he walked the short distance to her. “Otto?” She frowned, bewildered to not only recognize the man but to see that he was real and not imaginary.
“None other.” He grinned wolfishly at her, showing large white teeth. “Did you miss me?”
She moved her mouth soundlessly, feeling like a fish out of water. Now this was a man she’d never expected to see again. Not that she’d given him much thought since their first and only meeting.
Really.
She hadn’t.
Not much.
Their introduction had barely been
over one week ago. But what a meeting it had been.
Otto was a man who could get things. In the instance of their meeting, he’d been getting a false identity ready for Yancy’s fiancé. Well, the identity wasn’t exactly fake—Conrad Walsh was Con’s real name, but he’d been born about a century earlier is all, too early to have a social security number assigned through proper channels. Yancy’s future husband was an ex-zombie, only recently restored to the living.
Con had been reborn on Halloween and was in desperate need of a paper trail that proved he was no longer among the ranks of undead.
Enter Otto and his “special skills”. Bang, boom, presto—here’s all the documentation you need, Conrad…now that will just be ten thousand dollars.
Angel and Yancy and their friend Robin had pooled all their resources to come up with the large sum of money. Angel didn’t regret it, even given her current financial straits. Anyone who made her friend as happy as Conrad did was worth every effort. Every cent.
But Otto—the go-to guy—had danced with her. And after a spectacular barroom fight, he’d given Angel a kiss that made her straight hair curl. Then he’d run off with ten thousand dollars in his pocket.
And her heart in his hand.
“W-what…” She had no tongue, no words. Her mind had shriveled to a vapid sieve that filtered everything but grunts that she had to bite back with Herculean effort.
What on earth was he doing here?
“I’m sorry?” He cupped a hand around his ear. “You’ll have to speak up, this wind is just too much tonight.” Otto then reached out and, as if he felt he had every right, ran his hands up and down her arms. Even through the thickness of her coat she could feel his heat—and here he was in nothing but a rumpled button-up and dark slacks with a torn hem on the left leg.
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