“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.”
He turned away from town, onto a service road that led out into the forest. It wasn’t the preferred location she and her friends had used, but it was similar, she imagined. A pocket deep enough in the woods that people rarely bothered to drive in, especially when it wasn’t hunting season.
Her stomach tightened and she squeezed his cock through his jeans.
“It’ll be over before it starts if you keep doing that,” he said, his teeth gritted.
“Well, we can’t have that. I want my reward.”
“Your reward?”
“I was arrested by you, and put in the back of a car. And it was one of the least fun backseat experiences I’ve ever had.” They were driving over dirt and pine needles now, the pavement ending abruptly as the trees thickened. “Scratch that, it was the worst backseat experience I’ve ever had. Given all that, don’t you think you owe me a better one?”
“I damn well think I do,” he said, pulling into an alcove of trees just off the road. “Get in the backseat.”
She unbuckled slowly, keeping her eyes on him as she did, before opening the door and getting out of the car. It was so quiet the silence seemed to close in around her, around them. It was a strange, intimate openness. Somehow much more public than being in a bedroom, but also much more secluded.
She closed her door, then opened the back door, climbing inside before closing herself in.
He got out of the car and she watched him through the windows as he moved to the back and opened the door, his hands on his belt, sliding it through the loops before joining her inside, closing the door.
“This is way more like it,” she said, leaning back, resting her head on the window.
“Yeah?” He moved over her, leaning in and kissing her deep.
“Mmm. Yeah. Much better than being back here all by myself.”
“I’m surprised you remember it,” he said, and this time, there was no judgment in his voice. No disdain.
“I was pretty drunk, right?”
“Yeah, you and everyone else. They kind of scattered and left you to it.” He brushed his knuckles over her cheeks. “I never thought that was very fair.”
“I survived,” she said. “The charges didn’t stick anyway. My rap sheet remains somewhat mythical.”
“Well, you left town anyway. Probably would have ended up getting charged with failure to appear.”
“I needed to leave,” she said, her heart tightening.
His dark eyes turned serious. “I’m sure you did.”
She looked over to the side and saw a glint of silver in the center console of the car. She knew what they were, remembered what it had been like to wear them in the back of the patrol car. Feeling trapped. At his mercy. How different that thought was now. How different it was with Eli, the man as she knew him now.
“Are those handcuffs?” she asked, reaching out and snagging them. “Well, indeed. You just leave these lying around?”
He took them out of her hand. “Not usually.”
“You put these on me that night.”
Emotion passed over his face. Something like regret wrapped in horror. “I had to.”
She smiled. “I know. But in the interest of re-creating things...”
* * *
Eli looked down at Sadie, his heart thudding dully in his throat, making him feel like he might choke. He was so turned on he couldn’t see straight, and somewhere, in the middle of just trying to remember to breathe, he was trying to parse exactly why when his ex had done this, it had turned him off. And why now, with Sadie, it didn’t just seem sexy, it seemed impossible to resist. And heavy with some kind of meaning he was having trouble guessing.
That again had to do with body parts shifting. Heart to throat, blood to cock. Things like that.
And then the handcuffs.
