“I mean that you’re extremely—” she wiggled her brows “—randy. And you’re feeling sexually frustrated. Taking it out on your car, too. Wax on, wax off. Very suggestive.”

“Is that all, hallucination Sadie?”

“No. I’m also here to warn you. You’re in graaaave danger.”

“Is that all?”

“And I would like a sandwich?”

“Do you evaporate soon?” he asked.

“Nope.” She approached the car and him, her heartbeat speeding up a bit when she got near him. “Because I’m real. Surprise.”

He smiled then, and her heart did a full turn in her chest. “In that case, what are you doing here?”

“I was in town working. Your sister dropped me off.”

“Are you ready to head back?”

“Sure. Are there sandwiches?”

“There could be sandwiches,” he said.

“What kind?”

“Get in the car.”

There was something about that authoritative tone that made her shiver all the way down to her toes. He was magic like that.

“Only because you asked so nicely.” She opened the door and got in, and he did the same. “So, you wash your car on your days off?”

“Yes,” he said. “It’s either that or leave for shift early, or leave late. And I keep the car parked at the house, so it gets a lot of stuff dropped onto it from the trees.”

“You are so cute,” she said.

“I’m not sure how I feel about that.”

“What? I like that you don’t lie and you take care of your things. My gosh, except for your lack of inhibition in bed, you’re like a flashback to a black-and-white film.”

“And what is my lack of inhibition like?”

“A flashback to spam emails often found in my inbox. But, like, in a good way.”

He smiled, started the car engine and pulled forward through the car wash, and around, out toward the street. “I haven’t really been to the beach since I’ve been back,” she said, looking out at the ocean.

“Do you want to go?”

“Eh. Sand has its place. It also gets in places, so there’s that.”

He snorted. “What the hell sort of things do you do on the beach?”

“Not that. That we saved for the woods. It’s more private. Actually most of my teenage shenanigans were saved for the woods. We conducted very few on the beaches.”

“Likely why you got away with them. Especially back when I worked nights, I did a lot of drive-by spotlighting on the beaches.”

“Oh, man, that would have been awkward.”

They needed to change the conversation topic since she was starting to get a bit hot around the shirt collar talking sex with him in an enclosed space.

Something about the car turned her on. And granted, she’d been existing in a perpetual state of arousal since Eli had first kissed her, but this was different. It had an edge to it. Maybe it was the fact that, while she was sure it wasn’t this exact car, he’d put her in the backseat of one very similar to it ten years ago, her hands in cuffs.

And maybe it had something to do with the fact that the memory had morphed into something sexy since she’d begun sleeping with him.

Strange, since before it had been such a horrible one. Not because of what he’d done, but because of what had happened after.

Something about the car fantasy seemed like a reclamation of that night. And maybe that was assigning too high of a purpose to her sexual fantasies, but she kind of liked it.

“So you’ve never had sex in your car?” So much for changing the subject.

He whipped his head to the side to look at her. “What? That’s...random.”

“Not really. We were talking about my sex life...in the woods, not on the beach, thanks. And I was wondering about you.”

“No. That’s edging into... Like I was saying, I was with a woman once who was a badge bunny. Which was fine in some ways, but in others got really weird. And...no, I haven’t.”

“So it only seems weird to you?” she asked, biting her lip, feeling disappointed. “Not even a little hot?”

“I feel like you’re leading me somewhere.”

“I want you to do it with me in the back of your car.”

He applied the brakes, hard, sending her jerking forward, the belt catching her. “Ow. Glad to know I succeeded in shocking.”

“I didn’t expect that.”

“I guess not.” She looked over at him, his jaw clenched tight, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. “What are you doing?”

“Thinking of all the places I could pull over and not get caught. I know where I have caught people having sex in cars before, so I’m trying to be original.”

“Are you serious?” she asked, eyes wide.

He took his hand off the wheel and curved it around her arm, drawing it over to his lap, to his erection, hard and thick beneath his jeans.

She moved her palm over him. “Serious indeed.”

That he was doing this for her, that he wanted to do it when it had put him off before, was a thrill she hadn’t realized it would be.

“You have that effect on me.”