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“Neither do I.” The gun and badge found their place on his belt. He started the engine. “I haven’t had an enounter like this…for a while.”
He fastened his seat belt, and while Alex did the same, he shifted into reverse and backed out of the alley.
Alex tucked her tangled hair behind her ears. “An encounter sounds like a clandestine rendezvous. Like we were supposed to meet. I’m…”
He checked for traffic and pulled onto the street. “You’re what?”
“Confused.”
“Join the club.”
“Yeah, but you’re…older.”
“So I’ve been told.” The lights from the street and other cars let her read the hard expression that deepened the lines on his face. “Doesn’t mean I’ve got women all figured out.”
Her laugh sounded more like a snort. Yeah, she was a real femme fatale. Not. At least not outside that alley. “I sure don’t have men figured out.”
“I’m not going to apologize for what happened.”
“I don’t want you to.” The old Alex’s doubts were quickly resufacing. “I know we didn’t do…everything. But, you enjoyed it, didn’t you?”
“Hell yeah, sweetheart. I enjoyed it a little too much.”
Alex frowned. “You can enjoy it too much?”
He swore and Alex jerked in her seat. “There are rules and regulations to life. To my job. I think I’ve broken about every last damn one of them with you tonight.”
“I’m sorry.”
He headed up a hill, picking up speed. “Don’t be sorry. Be mad. Get that lawyer of yours and sue me.”
“Why?”
“I was supposed to be rescuing a damsel in distress, not gettin’ my rocks off with her. You can report me for that. In fact, I’ll give you the form to fill out and introduce you to the officer where you can file a complaint against me.”
After a moment’s hesitation, she smiled. “I don’t have any complaints. No one’s ever called me a damsel in distress before. That’s kind of girly, isn’t it?”
“I suppose.” She didn’t understand the 180 degree shifts in his mood from hero of the hour to angry cop, but she had a feeling she was going to be okay. “So, milady—will you let me drive you to precinct headquarters before something worse than me happens to you?”
He maneuvered them smoothly through the late-night traffic and pedestrians. “Is that where we’re going?”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re not arresting me?”
“I’m the one who screwed up tonight, not you. Here.” He pulled out his cell phone and handed it across the seat to her. “The call’s on me.” He stopped at an intersection and watched her punch in a number. “Contacting a friend? Family? That lawyer of yours?”
Alex smiled, feeling extraordinarily relieved and comforted by the simple gift of a phone call. “All of the above. My big brother. He’ll come get me.”
“Tell him to meet you at the downtown precinct station.”
She slid a glance across the seat to her knight in shining armor while she waited for Nick to answer. “You won’t tell my brother what we did tonight, will you?”
He scoffed. “If you don’t tell my deputy chief.”
Nick Morgan picked up after the second ring. “Alex? You okay? I saw Buell and his buddies yukking it up at the track tonight, and I couldn’t help but think…I called your cell a dozen times. You’ve got me scared shitless here.”
“I’m okay.” The truck slowed and turned into a parking garage. “My date with Drew’s friend didn’t go as well as I expected. And I lost my purse.”
Her brother swore. She could hear her father in the background now, asking questions. “She’s okay, Dad.” Nick explained a few details to their father, George Morgan, then turned his attention back to the phone. “You’re not hurt?”
She’d been embarrassed, angry, frustrated and a little afraid before this smoky-haired detective had literally picked her up off the street. But she hadn’t been hurt. “I’m okay, Nick. I met…” Detective Galahad was watching her, hanging on to every word. “Nashville PD has been very helpful.” In ways that made her blush and turn away. “Just come get me, okay? I’m at the downtown precinct station.”
“I’ll be there in forty minutes. I love you, Shrimp.”
“I love you too, Nick.”
They were parked beneath the precinct offices by the time she handed the phone back to the detective.
“Thank you.” She offered him a hesitant smile. “Big brother will save the day.”
He nodded. “So now I know this infamous lawyer-slash-wonder-brother of yours is Nick. You ever gonna tell me your name?”
“Look, Detective…” She unfastened her seat belt and reached for the exit handle. “Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed tonight, but…”
She laughed. It was a sad sound, really—a sound that revealed just how much this encounter had been an aberration for her, for both of them, perhaps.
“This isn’t reality. Let’s forget the names so we can skip the embarrassment of you mentioning tonight to anybody who happens to know anybody I happen to know. Okay?”
“Okay. Your call. Tonight never happened.”
So why did it hurt that he’d agreed so easily to her request?
3
Dahlia, Tennessee Present day
“MMM. YEAH. RIGHT THERE.”
Alexandra Morgan caught her tongue between parched lips as her thoughts drifted away from the fan belt she stretched between her hands and took note of how the fender of the ’94 Buick she was repairing pressed against the juncture of her thighs. A pocket of pressure was gathering where hard steel met soft woman, fueled by an errant fantasy that seemed to keep cropping up at the most inopportune times.
Normally, she relegated her secret fantasies to the privacy of her bedroom or one of her late-night bubble baths where she washed away the grime of a day spent in the family garage where she worked as a mechanic. But this was a routine fix on a slow day, just maintenance stuff for a local customer. The real excitement of her job wouldn’t start until tomorrow or Thursday, when the drag racers who frequented the Dahlia Speedway across the parking lot started showing up for replacement parts and tune-ups in preparation for the regular weekend races.
In other words, Alex was bored. And when she was bored, her mind wandered. Wandering into something as pleasant as her fabricated forbidden affair with the big-city cop with the wide shoulders and hushed, seductive words was a welcome respite from the grief and anger over her brother Nick’s recent death that normally filled her head these days.
Outside the open doors of Morgan & Son’s Garage, the afternoon air was heavy with the promise of a spring rain. Maybe the green scents of budding trees and flower blossoms hanging in the mist and dappling her bare arms with moisture had reminded her subconscious mind of those bubble baths where a cop with stormy gray eyes had had his way with her time and again in an assortment of imaginary story lines.
Her imagination took her to places far removed from tense, worrisome reality.
“You like that, milady?” her knight in shining armor drawled, sliding his hand between her legs and cupping her warmth.
“Yes,” she moaned, closing her eyes against the pleasure of his strong hand reaching into the water and rubbing against her clit. “Please don’t stop.”
“Ah, my damsel is in distress, is she?” Broad shoulders filled her vision as he bent over her to gentle her soft cries with a kiss. “You don’t have to beg with me.”
Her diaphanous bathing gown floated in the water, its sheer material hiding nothing from his eyes. The smoky gray orbs lazily looked their fill, each visual caress like the stroke of his hand on her body.
He was unlike the other men in her kingdom. This one came from a far-off country. He served her willingly, while the treacherous knights of her own kingdom were not allowed to touch her. Her mystery knight, the Silver Fox, spoke in hushed, seductive tones. He ruled his own lands with an iron fist but always treated her as nothing less than a lady.
“Will you join me, good sir?”
“You only had to ask.” His tunic and breeches became a taut black T-shirt and jeans as he peeled off his clothes and slipped into the tub with her. Water sloshed over the sides and she laughed as his big frame displaced all the bubbles. Alex’s thighs clenched together when he wrapped his viselike arm around her waist and pulled her onto his lap. A well-honed warrior, he’d fought many battles. But each evening he returned to her chamber to take her in any number of ways. Tonight’s seduction was to be slow and sensuous. And merciless, she thought with a gasp of pleasure, as the bulging evidence of his arousal poked against her bottom. “Milady should never have to beg for pleasure.”
He kissed the back of her neck as he palmed her breasts. His big hands lifted them and kneaded them with a gently urgent reverence—like the patient, mature man he was, not some grabby, greedy teen who could earn ten bucks on a bet if he touched them.
Teen? Eeuw. Reality tried to nudge its way in and mess with her fantasy.
Alex squeezed the humiliating memory from her mind and tried to feel the hardness of the grown man pressed against her.
“You don’t think I’m common, do you?”
“You talk too much, milady. Let me show you my appreciation.” No. She smiled wickedly. This time she’d show him. She spread her thighs slightly, boldly catching his arousal and squeezing it. “Alexandra…”
How did he know her name? That was one of the rules between them. No names. Ever. She squeezed him again, gently punishing him for forgetting.
Alex squirmed in his lap, guiding him closer and closer to where she wanted him to be. Inside her.
“Alexandra…” No names. She adjusted herself over him. He moved beneath her. This time they’d come together. He wanted it, too. She was a lady. His lady. The kingdom need never doubt her fine qualities again.
The pressure was building. The water on their skin—lapping between them, surrounding them—simmered with heat. Their heat.
“Alexandra…”
Someone was shouting her name.
But not in passion.
“Alexandra Morgan!”
Alex jerked at the drill-sergeant shout, bumping her head on the open hood of the Buick. “Ow. Damn.” She slid off her perch on the fender and tugged her tool belt back into place, embarrassed to think that an errant monkey wrench and a tan sedan had triggered one of her stupid fantasies.
“Daddy?” Alex rubbed at the sore spot beneath the yellow bandanna wrapped on top of her head, clearing her brain of naughty thoughts and ignoring the male laughter coming from underneath the car in the next bay. She quickly scanned the length of the garage, from the lube pit to the office hallway door, trying to account for each of the employees who hadn’t gone on lunch break yet. No one had seen her squirming on top of the car, had they?
But she had bigger problems.
“Alexandra!” Her father’s deep, booming voice—as crisp and quick as his military stride—announced she was in trouble. Again.
The door to his office slammed, jolting through Alex’s body with dread. “Oh, no. He found it.”
“Found what?” Winston “Tater” Rawls, a longtime employee of the garage and the closest thing to a big brother she had now that Nick was gone, rolled out from under a Ford hybrid in the next bay. “What’d you do this time, Alex?”
She grabbed a rag off her tool chest and wiped her hands, mentally shaking her head at the lanky blond goofball’s question. “I was thinking for myself again.”
He made a tsk-tsk sound behind his teeth. “That’ll teach you. I think I’ll just listen to the fireworks from here, if you don’t mind.”
“Thanks for having my back, Tater.” Sarcasm dripped from her voice.
“Anytime.” He rolled back beneath the Ford, his laugh echoing from under the chassis. “Anytime.”
Alex dashed toward the exit leading to the business offices. She made it all the way around the sedan before the stale smells of body odor and cigarette smoke stopped her in her tracks. Not now.
She tipped her chin to the black-haired mechanic who blocked her path. Artie Buell was nothing if not persistent. Of course, she wished he’d also learn how to wash his stained coveralls, use a little less gel in his hair, and take no for an answer.
Using his tongue, he rolled a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other with a suggestive swipe. “I’ll watch your back, Alex,” he drawled. “You need me to smooth over anything between you and your daddy, I’m your man.”
Right. Ever since their sophomore year of high school, when dating his older brother hadn’t worked out so well for her, he’d tried to be her man. She’d grown up, moved away and learned to dream of bigger things than small-town stereotypes. She’d come home again because her father and brother had needed someone to manage their home and feed them. She couldn’t cook as well as she could fix a car. She couldn’t sew or garden as well as she could grow a business. But she loved the men who’d been her only family from the time she was a toddler, and for right now—especially now that Nick was gone—she’d be whatever her father needed her to be.
Artie Buell, however, hadn’t changed a bit in nine years. If he wasn’t such a good mechanic—and the sheriff’s son—she’d have raised a stink about him working here. But she had her own reasons for wanting to stay on the Buell family’s good side now. The truth might depend upon their cooperation. And for that reason alone, she summoned a smile. “I can handle my dad just fine. Thanks.”
“I think I impressed him when I won the Moonshine Run last month.” Damn. The polite chit-chat wasn’t over. Alex froze her smile into place and endured. “You know, I didn’t see you at that race. I kind of thought you might want to root a friend on, especially seeing as how I rebuilt most of that car right here in your daddy’s garage. Remember I ran some of those last-minute calibrations by you?”
“Sure. I’m glad they helped. Gotta go.”
When she would have scooted around him, Artie’s hand snaked out to grab her arm and halt her beside him. “You should have at least helped me celebrate at the party afterwards.”
Working with Artie was one thing. Anything more personal would be like reliving a nightmare. Keep it nice. “I told you I was busy that weekend. Congratulations again, though.” She tugged against his grip. “Dad’s waiting.”
Instead of releasing her, he pulled her close enough that she got a whiff of the cigarettes on his breath when he leaned down to whisper. “You haven’t even been down to the pit to see my trophy. It’s a bigun.”
Right. Like she’d ever venture down into that sunken room that reminded her of a burial chamber unless she had a damn good—work-related—reason to do so. The fact that it was Artie’s main work space at the garage probably added to the eerie claustrophobia she got whenever she went down there. “A bigun? That’s a pretty lame line, even for you.”
“C’mon, Alex. I’m not the bad guy in the family. Remember?”
“Artie.” Tater was out from underneath the Ford again. This time, he wasn’t laughing. “I thought I asked you to get the specs for this car off the computer for me.”
Artie winked one dark eye at Alex but spoke to Tater. “I got ’em.”
“Then move it.”
“I’m movin’.”
When he pulled the printouts from his pocket and released her to deliver them, Alex glanced down at her forearm. She didn’t know which bothered her more, his grimy fingers on her skin, or the memory of another Buell’s touch. Both turned her stomach.
“Alexandra!”
The steel door connecting the garage to the office corridor swung open. Alex jumped as her father’s barrel-chested physique filled the doorway.
For a moment, his stern green eyes looked beyond her into the garage. “Get to work, Artie. I need you back down in the lube pit to change the oil on Jeb Worth’s car before he stops by at one to pick it up. I don’t pay you to stand around and flirt with my daughter.”
