Fallen Into You (3 page)

She paused at the door, thinking about her car. She fished the cell phone out of her purse and fired it up, relieved to see a very faint signal. It was enough. She scrolled through the contact list until she found the cab company, and punched the “send” button as she stepped out onto the porch.

She closed the door very quietly behind her. She didn’t even think about going back to say goodbye to Anders. Her manners seemed to have fled along with her common sense. The thought of what she had done with him flooded her again, and her head started pounding even harder.

Was this the walk of shame? She had never been on one of those before. Hard to believe for someone pushing thirty.

Maybe I’m just a late bloomer.

The cab dispatcher picked up. She gave him the street name. “I’ll just be outside waiting,” she said, and hung up after the confirmation that yes, someone was coming to get her.

The walk of shame…

She wondered what was worse: what she had done last night or what she was doing right now, sneaking out from a man’s bed without even saying goodbye. What was the etiquette for one night stands? How was she supposed to act after getting it on with a guy she barely knew?

She looked up at the sky, which was now perfectly clear and blue. There was debris all over the yard, mostly tree leaves and branches that had been brought down by the storm. She could hear the sound of machinery in the distance, and the unmistakable voices of men at work. The power would likely be on again soon.

And soon Anders would wake up, and he would see that she had left the flannel shirt on the kitchen table, and the used ice packs on the living room floor, and he would find condom wrappers everywhere – on the couch, the floor, and certainly the bed – and what would he think? Was this the kind of thing he did all the time?

She would never know.

Kara carefully stepped down from the porch. The steps were agony on her knees. In the bright light she could see that they were both swollen and bruised. But she was grateful for the pain, because it hid what the rest of her was feeling – the tiny bruises and love bites from a man she should never have been with in the first place.

The last thing she wanted to do was think.

Kara walked down to the end of the driveway, then to the end of the road to wait for the cab. She never once looked back.

Chapter Three

A
nders woke up to the sound of the front door closing. He rolled onto his side and rose up on his elbow. The clock on the nightstand said it was seven in the morning. If the clock was working, that meant the power must be back on. The sun was ridiculously bright, a reminder that yesterday’s storm was long gone.

And so was Kara, apparently.

Anders collapsed back onto the bed and contemplated going after her. He assumed she would call a cab and be back to wherever home was within ten minutes, in the shower shortly after that, and washing him out of her memory by the time she sat down for breakfast. Even though he was a modern man who truly did understand the psychology of one-night stands and friends with benefits arrangements, it still stung a little to know that she didn’t even bother to kiss him goodbye before she headed for the hills.

But he supposed he had done his fair share of the same thing, back when he was too young to know any better – which wasn’t all that long ago, truth be told. Anders was only in his late twenties, something that usually shocked the hell out of the old-timers who came into his shop and asked to speak to the owner. They expected someone like his father, God rest his soul, but they got Anders instead – a young man with muscular arms, tattoos here and there and hair that was always a little bit too long. The male drivers usually tried to be a bit condescending to him, but the women…

Anders grinned up at the ceiling. The women were the ones who came to get their engines tuned up and made it clear that they were lusting after tune-ups of a different kind.

Yes, he had indulged in such things. He had spent more than a few hours late at the shop, checking out what was under a pretty lady’s hood, so to speak. He had even crossed his own moral line once or twice and given a woman a tumble despite the fact that she was wearing a wedding ring the whole time. Anders would never, ever claim he was a saint, or anything even close to it.

But still…for all the women he had sampled and all the friends he had turned into lovers, there was always something missing. It was nothing he would ever speak of to his male friends, the ones who would bust his balls for acting like a romantic dolt. But sometimes he wondered what it would be like to have a good relationship with someone, the kind of relationship where he was expected to turn down advances from other women and come home at night, where he would get everything he needed and more from the one woman he loved more than anything else in the world. Sometimes when he watched a woman get dressed to leave him after a few moments of bliss, he fantasized that she was actually his, and that she loved him, not just lusted after him.

But in the absence of love, lust would have to do.

Anders thought about Kara again, wondering where she was now. Had the cab picked her up yet? His pride kept him from going to the window to look.

She was definitely a firecracker. She had looked like a damsel in distress on the side of the road, but it was soon apparent to him that this was a woman who would be entirely capable – in other circumstances, that is. It was tough for anybody to be fully capable when they had just put their car into a ditch and gone a few rounds with an exploding airbag. Anders was still impressed by just how together she seemed to be after all that.

And last night…

A smile grew on his face. She was slow to get started, but once she started to burn, that fuse was long and hot. She had kept him busy most of the night, stopping only to grab more condoms and load up on ibuprofen for those hurting knees. They had sampled every position – except cowgirl and doggie, of course. Putting her full weight on her knees would have been a buzzkill of epic proportion. But she had given her full enthusiasm to every other thing they had done, and he knew that when it came to cowgirl, she would have ridden him like a spirited pony.

Anders slipped his hand under the covers. He was naked and just a little sore, but in the good way, the way that said he had been delightfully used. He wondered if she felt the same way – if he had left his mark on her just as clearly as she had left hers on him. He moved a bit in the bed, just to better feel the ache in his groin, and of course he sprang to attention immediately.

He wrapped his hand around his hardness and started doing what felt good – stroking slowly while he thought about the woman who had just walked out of his front door. He couldn’t have known when he rescued her from the roadside that she would turn out to be so amorous. He closed his eyes and envisioned the way she looked lying underneath him, then beside him, then lying on her belly while he kissed his way down her back. He couldn’t decide which he liked best, so he finally settled on the image of her reclining on the bed, him kneeling over her, watching as she took his hard cock into her mouth over and over again, until she made him explode…for the third time? Or was it the fourth?

Now he was going to explode again, and it was her fault.

Anders gritted his teeth hard when he came. After so many orgasms last night he had expected the morning delight to be lackluster, but damn if it didn’t leave him breathless and a little lightheaded. He lay back and took deep breaths, his eyes closed, trying to hold onto the vision in his mind. But all too soon it was gone, and the room felt too cold, and he had a long to-do list waiting for him as soon as he got out of the shower.

And that list started with Kara’s damaged car.

***

An hour later Anders was standing next to the tow truck and watching as the hydraulics pulled the crashed car up onto the bed. Now he could see what he hadn’t noticed in the pouring rain: the car was a Mercedes, and not one of those sissy ones. It was built like a tank and worth a pretty penny. He thought back to the suit Kara had been wearing. Even as she sat in his truck with that suit soaked through, the quality of it was evident. And those shoes – those red bottoms had triggered a memory of something he read online once, about the guy who made them. They were called Louboutins.

All of that added up to one thing.

The woman in his bed last night had been a woman with a
lot
of money.

She had been going home when she crashed. Anders turned around and looked at the monster of a tree, then at the road beyond. That way led to the really good part of town, where the houses were huge and the lawns were perfectly manicured by gardeners who were paid year-round to keep the places looking pristine. He had taken on a few cars from up there, but not many – he didn’t have the kind of experience necessary to work on foreign sports cars, and that’s mostly what those people up there were driving. Porsches, Alfas, things like that.

Shame – he could have done with the business. He’d have loved to open a shop on the main strip or some other place more upmarket, something to really impress his late father who had built the business up out of nothing, but that was well out of reach for now. Anders always felt that he’d gone too soon. He passed away before Anders really had a chance to do anything much with his life at all, let alone do something to make his dad proud.

The tow beeped as the car came level on the bed. He released the button and walked around the truck, tightening the straps and making sure the car was completely secure for the ride into town. He looked it over with a critical eye. The damage was much more extensive than he had first thought. The front axle had actually snapped when it went into the ditch, and the front of the car had more damage than a simple nose-in stop would cause. He looked at the tree again. Was it possible that the tree was coming down right as she swerved, and not there across the road to begin with?

Anders stepped back and looked at the car again, then shook his head and whistled. Kara was much luckier than he had thought. If she had been going only a few miles per hour faster, she would have been under that tree instead of up against it.

He thought about her as he carefully backed the tow up, swerving to avoid debris from the neighboring trees. He thought about her as he drove into town. Even as he looked at the damaged storefronts, the signs flung into the road and the occasional insulation peppering the ditches, he was thinking about the woman who had been in his bed last night. He got to his shop and breathed a sigh of relief to see it all intact, with little more than a bit of debris scattered across the lot. The road sign, the one that he had stuck into the dirt, announcing that they were offering free oil changes with tire replacement for a limited time only, was nowhere to be seen.

“Probably in some farmer’s field,” he said to the truck as he patted the dash. He talked to that old workhorse more than he cared to admit to anyone, but his tow truck felt like an old friend. It had been his livelihood for a long time, and before he took the shop over from his father, it was sometimes his refuge. When he couldn’t go home, he would sit out in the truck and sip a beer and think about things.

He shook away those thoughts and set about getting Kara’s car down from the bed. As he did he wondered what she was doing now. Where was she? What did she do for a living? Who was she with? What kind of life did she lead? He realized that even though he knew her very intimately in the biblical sense, he really didn’t know her at all.

But then again, wasn’t that true of all the women he took into his bed?

***

By the end of the day, Anders was beat. He had dealt with half a dozen stalled or wrecked cars, not including the regular appointments and the work that was already backed up in the shop. He had been under cars so often that he forgot to eat lunch, missed dinner and was now ravenous as he closed up the engine of a Ford that had seen better days. He wiped down the lines and stood up, his back aching and his head pounding.

“That’s what I get for skipping lunch,” he said to an empty garage. His crew had come in, even a few of the guys who could have had the day off, but they were loyal. That’s what he loved most about working in a shop like this – they had each other’s backs.

The storm the night before had been worse than anyone had first believed, according to the news channel that was on the television in the small waiting room. There had been at least one tornado, perhaps two. Power lines were still down to most of the town, but Anders had been lucky to have the juice flowing strong to his shop all day. He wondered again about the posh side of town, the place where Kara was going, and whether they had power or not.

He normally didn’t think about a woman this much, but something about her got to him. During the day he had come to the conclusion that it was the mystery of it all, combined with the feeling of rescuing a damsel in distress. She had been in a bad situation, she needed help, and he had been able to provide that and more. It was enough to make him feel like a white knight.