Fascinating—almost as fascinating as her smile. She had a beautiful smile; her lips weren’t full, just very soft looking, and she had pretty teeth, the kind a guy wanted to run his tongue over. He wished she would take off her sunglasses and her ball cap. All he could really see of her were her cheeks, and her mouth, and her nose, which was a very delicate, very cute nose, indeed. But it wasn’t enough. He wanted to see her eyes.
“How old are you?” he asked, surprising himself with the bluntness of the question. He’d wanted to know, but he hadn’t meant to ask.
“Probably older than you think,” she said, turning around and opening the cage door on the freight elevator.
He hadn’t even noticed when it had arrived, which frankly amazed him, because it was loaded with one of the hottest cars he’d ever seen, a lime green Dodge Challenger with a big black racing stripe running up over the hood.
“Which means you’re not fifteen?” he said.
She laughed again, disbelievingly. “You thought I was fifteen?” She stepped into the elevator and gestured for him to follow.
“Yeah.” He nodded, getting in behind her.
“Well, you’re off by about five years. I’ll be twenty next week.”
Thank you, God
—he sent up a silent prayer of thanks, shot through with relief. She was still young by his standards—he usually went for older women, even a lot older women—but there was definitely something about her that was flipping his switches.
She pressed a large button on the cage wall, and with a rattle and a screech, the elevator began to rise.
She came back around the car, trailing one hand along the hood, when something caught her eye.
“Man, oh, man, Superman,” she said, bending at the waist to peer in the driver-side window. “What kind of trouble did you drag home tonight? Cripes, will you look at this?”
She reached in and pulled out a dress, a little red dress with the zipper undone, the whole dress, without a woman in it—which simply lit up his imagination.
She held it up to herself, which fired up a couple more of his fantasy files.
“So what do you think?” she asked, angling her gaze up the side of the building. “You think we’ve got a naked woman running around up there?”
Yes. That’s exactly what he thought.
She let out a short laugh and looked back inside the car.
“Oh, this is going to cost him big-time. Will you look at this mess?”
Obligingly, he bent down and looked through the open passenger-side window—and immediately got a whole lot clearer picture of what had happened with the red dress.
Sex.
He could smell it. Sex and chocolate, and Chinese food.
Wow.
There was a pair of red satin underpants not two feet from him, hanging off the gearshift. The matching bra was draped around the inside door handle. He saw one red high-heeled sandal and a guy’s shoe. A pair of boxer shorts had been eighty-sixed into the driver’s seat, and the back window sported a couple of cartons of Chinese food. A few more cartons had spilled, one in the backseat, and two on the floor.
And the sex. Had he mentioned that? The car was still hot with it, really hot with it. Steamy.
Steamy enough to turn him on. He couldn’t help it. He was afraid if he closed his eyes and breathed too deeply, he’d have an instant hard-on.
“So what do you think?” she asked, but he didn’t think she really wanted to know. “I usually charge him a hundred bucks to detail Roxanne here, but this”—she made a short sweeping gesture—“this has got to cost more like two, two-fifty. What do you think?”
“Two hundred and fifty dollars to clean a car?”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought, too,” she said, as if he’d just agreed with her. “Two hundred and fifty. You hungry?” She reached in and grabbed one of the unspilled cartons and broke open the fresh pair of chopsticks lying on the dash.
Wielding the chopsticks like an expert, she offered him a piece of food across the interior of the car. He couldn’t resist. He’d take anything she wanted to give him, but he did have to lean way in to get the food. So there he was, right in the middle of the aftermath of Superman’s lovemaking with the woman in the red dress, with the punk-rocker chick feeding him steamed dumplings. The whole thing was enough to make his head spin a little.
She fed herself a dumpling and pulled out of the driver-side window to walk around the back of the car. He followed her lead, and the two of them leaned back on the trunk to finish off the food, while the old elevator groaned its way skyward.
She was right about the view. It was spectacular, the lights of Denver spreading up into the foothills.
“Do you want to see what’s in those cartons in the back window?”
“Sure,” he said, though he really didn’t think it was a good idea for him to get in the car.
Crab wontons and spring rolls—two of his favorites, well worth the effort of getting them, but it still felt slightly illicit to be eating this guy Superman’s dinner. When the elevator finally docked on the seventh floor, his whole idea about Steele Street was transformed.
There were cars, unbelievable cars, rows of them, a million dollars’ worth of truly exquisite cars: muscle cars, sports cars, Jaguars, Porsches, hot red cars, two gull-winged cars he didn’t even know what to call. And the bank of offices built along the north wall looked expensive and modern. He could see tons of electronic equipment and elegant furnishings through the windows looking out onto the garage floor. The place was a high-tech dream.
He had a car, a Jeep. It started when he turned the key, and it stopped when he stepped on the brake. It usually, but not always, got him where he wanted to go without too much trouble, and that was about it.
“Hop in, and I’ll give you a ride,” she said, opening the driver-side door on the Challenger, after opening the freight cage door.
“No, thanks. I’ll just walk.” He wasn’t getting inside that car with her. No way. Not that he thought he was in any danger of getting lucky. It was the weirdest thing, but he was getting absolutely no vibe of sexual awareness off her at all. None.
Nada.
And it was driving him a little crazy. Hell, he’d had gay chicks hit on him just for the cheap thrill of it—but he was getting nothing off Skeeter Bang.
She started the Challenger, and a big grin instantly split his face. God, what a cool car. It roared and rumbled, and made the elevator shake. He could feel the power of the engine all the way from the bottoms of his feet to the top of his head. It made him wonder if maybe he just had never really given cars a chance. To have one like Roxanne would just be too cool.
Roxanne. Nadine. He wondered if every car at Steele Street had a name. Somehow, he figured they did.
She parked the car in a washing bay and walked over to meet him, where he was standing next to a navy blue GTO.
“Corinna,” she said, running her hand over the roof of the car. “A 1967 with a Ram Air 400 and a four-speed. J.T. won her back from Hawkins a couple of years ago, but I guess . . . well, Kid will have her now.” Her voice broke a little, and when she got to the front of the car, to the grille, she lifted her hand off the sleek blue finish and offered it to him. “Thanks. It was real sweet of you to walk me home. If you want, I can give you a lift back to the gallery.”
Sweet? And she was kicking him out?
He took her hand, but he didn’t take the hint. “You live here?” He looked around the garage.
“Up on the eleventh floor, across from Superman.” Without being all that subtle about it, she retrieved her hand.
“Shouldn’t I, like, see you to your door or something? This is an awfully big place.”
“Actually, my friend Johnny is going to be here in about a half an hour, and we’re going to give Corinna a tune-up, rotate her tires, maybe blow her out on a run to Colorado Springs, check up on a friend down there.”
Definite brush-off, but at least the Johnny thing didn’t sound like a date. Rotating tires?
“So your schedule is pretty packed through the middle of the night, up until dawn?”
She at least smiled at that. “Yeah, pretty packed.”
Well, he obviously had nothing left to lose.
“I’d like to see you again.”
She didn’t say anything for so long, he started to wonder if he’d accidentally spoken in a foreign language or something.
“No,” she finally said. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. I don’t think I want to do the Beauty and the Beast thing with you.”
He’d been dumped by girls before, a number of times, but he’d never not even gotten out of the starting gate with one, and she thought he was a beast?
Somewhere in her cold, cold heart, she must have taken a little pity on him, because when he just stood there, struggling with her flat-out rejection, she spoke up again.
“Look, you don’t even know me, okay?”
Finally, something he could latch on to.
“That’s the whole idea behind seeing each other again,” he said, though he thought that idea was pretty self-evident. “To get to know each other. It doesn’t have to be a date or anything. It can just be coffee.”
“Okay,” she said, way too quickly. “I’ll give you a call sometime.”
Liar. She was lying through her teeth, and for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out why that hurt. Something must have shown on his face, because she let out a big, heavy sigh and reached up and took her glasses off. Her head was tilted down, and he still couldn’t see her face because of her hat. But then she reached back up and pulled it off her head, careful to pull her ponytail through the back, and then she stood there, looking him straight in the face.
She had blue eyes, real pretty blue eyes, kind of a silvery blue, instead of a deep, dark blue. And she had a scar that ran diagonally across her forehead, cut through her right eyebrow, and ended at her temple just an inch or less from the corner of her eye. It wasn’t pretty. It hadn’t faded with time, and being an EMT who spent many of his weekend nights scraping car accident victims off the highways and putting them into ambulances, he could just imagine how much blood she’d lost when it had happened. She must have been blinded by the blood. It had to have run into her mouth and down her chest, and the whole thing must have hurt so badly, she must have thought she was going to die. She must have been terrified by seeing so much of her own blood soaking her clothes.
“Guys like you—” she started.
“Guys like me?” Now he was mad.
“Guys like you,” she continued patiently, “have lots of choices. You know that’s true.” She smiled at him, as if he were going to buy that when she was shutting him down. “And though I admit that I can be a bit of a novelty for—”
“Novelty?” Now he was really pissed off. Novelty? What kind of a jerk did she think he was?
Oh, right. He didn’t need to wonder. She was telling him straight-out what kind of a jerk she thought he was.
“The truth is,” she continued, still so damned patient, which just pissed him off that much more, “there’s no reason for us to get to know each other.”
“I’d like to kiss you.” That was a reason, but where it had come from, he didn’t have a clue. It was true, but he sure hadn’t meant to tell her.
What annoyed him even more was that she took his pitiful confession in stride.
“Gino wants to kiss me, and you don’t see me inviting him to come up here and hang around all night, either.”
What was this? “Guys like him” now included slimy psychopaths like Gino? He was more than shot down. She’d ground him into dust.
And he still wanted to kiss her.
Shit.
There was nothing to do but walk away—which he did, just turned on his heel and headed for the elevator.
She didn’t stop him, either.
By the time he got to the street, he’d decided to just chalk up the whole strange night to the bizarro zone. Skeeter Bang. What kind of name was that?
And how had she gotten hurt so badly?
And why did he want to kiss somebody who thought he was such a jerk?
She was right. He had lots of choices. There had been at least two women who had wanted to take him home from the gallery. Two who’d made it pretty damn clear, which always left him cold. He knew he was slow to hook up with a new person, but he liked to set his own pace. He didn’t have sex with strangers, never had, didn’t imagine that he ever would. It always took a few dates before he felt comfortable approaching a girl that way—which surprised a few of them, because he had this small home business on the side, Boulder Sexual Imprinting, Inc., a business based on his master’s thesis on human female sexuality, but it was business, not personal. It was work, and he was very careful to stay within certain boundaries when he was with a client. The process was sensual, without a doubt, and wouldn’t have been very effective if it wasn’t, but when he was working with a woman on her sexual imprint, he was very careful to keep his responses out of the process. Extremely careful. Sure, he had women who were addicted to the process, but as far as he knew—and he was very intuitive about such things—none of them were addicted to him, or fixated on him, which was a sign of good clinical therapy.
It was the process they loved, the process that healed. He just happened to be particularly adept at facilitating that process. He knew how to touch them, how to soothe them, but he did have to wonder sometimes if his client base was getting a little inbred.
Either way, the business was doing fine, and his social life sucked. He hadn’t been with a woman of his own for a long time—and tonight wasn’t going to be any different. It was just going to be him and his much-loved, maybe overly loved, poster of Regan McKinney in her lavender underwear—a photo he’d all but begged Nikki to blow up and give him.
Actually, he had begged, and had never regretted a minute of his groveling.
Regan was married now. He probably should give the poster up, but he just wasn’t ready to part with it. She was a goddess, all lush curves and pale blond hair, who had never had a tan or lifted a weight in her life, and she’d been his fantasy ever since the day she’d walked in on him naked in Nikki’s studio, when he’d been eighteen. He hadn’t even had the brains to cover himself up. All he’d been able to do was stare at her, and all she’d been able to do was stare back, and he would have sworn something had passed between them. He’d been swearing it for five years, but he’d never once gotten her to admit to anything, or gotten her around to his way of thinking. Too young, she’d kept telling him, but a few times, definitely a few times, she’d come close to giving in. One night in particular, last Christmas, he’d been saying good-bye to her and Nikki at the door, when their granddad, Wilson, had hollered for Nikki. With the two of them standing there, with just the Christmas tree lights on and a couple of candles, he’d taken her hand and asked her why there wasn’t any mistletoe. She’d smiled, started to say something polite, and he’d kissed her, just bent his head down and kissed her.