Take Me

by Anna Zaires, Pepper Winters, Skye Warren, Lynda Chance, Pam Godwin, Amber Lin

  “Who are you calling?” she asked on a whisper.

  “The police.” The words were abrupt as the line of his mouth flattened.

  “Please don’t do that.”

  Her words were beseeching, and Marco found himself having to grit his teeth against them. “Why shouldn’t I? Somebody’s sure as sh—” he assessed her possible age once more and swiftly cleaned up his language. “Somebody’s going to pay for the damage to my car.” He quickly took in the state of her clothing and determined the approximate year of her vehicle. Everything he could see indicated a lack of money. He was so fucked. She probably didn’t even have basic liability insurance. Receiving a citation from the police would put her in the wrong, guarantee her insurance would pay—if she had any—and it would make him feel so much better.

  Her face paled and she began to shake her head. “It’ll be okay, I promise it will. Just don’t call the police. Please. That will only make matters worse.”

  He hesitated only fractionally. “Maybe you should call your father.”

  Her face froze in lines of tension that hardened almost imperceptibly. “I don’t have a father. This is my cousin’s car.”

  Two lone tears made tracks down her face and she lifted her hands and scrubbed at them quickly, obviously trying to get a hold of herself. The tears made her appear heartbreakingly fragile and made him feel like a supreme dick. Marco hesitated another fateful moment as he watched her, his guts tightening. No doubt it would make matters worse for her if he called the police. He was a bit incredulous that he actually felt sorry for her, but at the same time, he was suspicious she might be playing him. “Let me see your license,” he said in a voice that softened only minimally.

  She reached down and began digging around in a purse that was almost as old and battered as her car. When she successfully located what she was looking for, she handed it over to him through the window.

  Marco noticed a few things immediately when he took her license. Her name was Natalie Lambert and she wasn’t nearly as young as she appeared at first glance. She was twenty-four. The moment he calculated her age from her date of birth, he felt an internal shift in his body temperature. She wasn’t a girl; she was a woman, and he looked her over again before reading the rest of her information, wondering what it was about her that made her appear so young. Now that he knew her age, it was easy to see. The rest of the information was basic. She was from out of town, her eyes were blue, she was an organ donor, and her height was five foot three.

  Fuck—five foot three.

  He’d always had a thing for small women. He’d deny it to his grave, but he had a basic, visceral reaction to them, especially those like the one in front of him with soft silky hair who looked helpless in the extreme. It was a knee-jerk, caveman reaction, but he couldn’t shake it. Yeah, it was something he’d never, ever admit to. It wasn’t politically correct, there wasn’t anything intellectual about it, it had basic written all over it, but there it fucking was. It was a compulsion he almost always fought, because he didn’t want his sexual partners to get too close to him. But there was no doubt that his fantasies always included a petite partner, and the thought of sliding into a narrow, tiny opening never failed to arouse him.

  It was arousing him now as he looked down at her sitting demurely and nervously behind the wheel of her car, waiting on him to make a decision that might impact her life.

  Incendiary heat rushed through his veins.

  He couldn’t see much of her behind those damn glasses and short of asking her to remove them, there wasn’t anything he could do at the moment to see her better. Her hair, medium length, was a mess and just an average, brownish color, but she was looking up at him with a soft trembling of her incredibly full lips, and although he was pissed about his car, he was fighting a hard-on big time—and a goddamn urge to protect her from the mess she had created for herself.

  He shook his head at his own reaction to her. This was absolutely not what he needed right now.

  He turned away from her to look at the traffic and then turned back again, letting out a pent-up breath. “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to pull into that parking lot over there and figure this out. If you have a problem with that, I’m calling the police.”

  “No, I don’t have a problem. I’ll follow you,” she agreed quickly.

  Marco pocketed her license instead of returning it to her, turned to his car and with economical movements slid behind the wheel and eased back into the flow of traffic.

  He watched the rear-view mirror carefully for any sign that she might bolt, but she seemed to be following him as promised.

  * * *

  Natalie breathed a sigh of temporary relief and followed the jaw-dropping, incredibly handsome man in the suit to the parking lot of the Holiday Inn Express that was off the feeder directly across from where they had collided. She took a deep breath to steady her nerves. At least there was a chance she wouldn’t be getting a citation. She hoped, anyway. Unless he changed his mind.

  She pulled in beside him and tried to brush the wrinkles from her shirt as she climbed from the car. He was already standing between their cars, talking into his phone, and she tried to listen unobtrusively to the conversation he was having. It appeared he wasn’t on the phone with the police, thank God, but was speaking to someone about cancelling his afternoon appointments.

  Damn. She’d made him miss something that was probably important. Another bad point against her. Could this get any worse? Her life sucked right now. So badly. “F.M.L,” she muttered under her breath as he was ending his call.

  He turned to face her with what seemed to be a perpetual scowl on his granite features. “I’m sorry?”

  “Nothing.” She blushed.

  “Answer me. What’d you just say?” His eyes had narrowed on her.

  “F.M.L,” she repeated softly. At his blank look, she continued in a stronger voice, “You know, eff my life?” God, now he was going to think she was crude. Just a ridiculous, stupid woman who didn’t know how to drive and had the vocabulary of a sailor. Way to go, Natalie.

  He frowned as his eyes ran over her. “I haven’t heard that one.”

  “You know, Superbad—the movie?”

  He continued to look at her with a blank expression and she tried to move past it, realizing that a man of his caliber probably didn’t make a habit of watching comedies that involved teenagers. “Never mind. It just means my life sucks. Have you ever heard that one?” she asked with a small hint of sarcasm that she couldn’t contain. Looking him over, with all his tallness and maleness and hotness, she imagined he’d never had a bad day in his life. Unless he was having one today, because of her.

  “If you’d been paying better attention, you wouldn’t have nailed me from behind,” he admonished harshly.

  He took a step toward her and suddenly Natalie was hit with how very tall he was. And how freakin’ sexy he was. Why hadn’t she noticed just how sexy he was? Men in suits had never really done it for her before; she wasn’t from the big city and had never seen their appeal—she was more of a Wranglers and boots kind of girl. But as he stood two feet in front of her, with the words ‘nailed from behind’ wringing in her ears, she felt a shocking quiver of sexual heat slide down her spine and mingle with the trepidation the situation was inducing. She took a deep breath and stoically tried to hide it.

  She swallowed hard and watched as if in slow motion as he put his hand out toward her. “Marco Donati.” His voice was hard, business-like and in control.

  Very slowly, she put her hand in his. “Natalie Lambert.”

  “I’d like to say it’s a pleasure, but—” His words trailed off suggesting he was experiencing anything but pleasure at the moment, but the hand that held hers was telling a slightly different story. His fingers wrapped around hers in an iron grip, holding her hand too long for comfort.

  Natalie jerked her hand from his as quickly as she could manage. His touch was hot, scorching, and she felt the
sudden need to take a step back from him. She turned and took the few steps toward the passenger door of her car and opened it, holding her breath unconsciously as she began searching the glove compartment for Justin’s insurance information. She came up with a clear plastic sleeve that contained what she was looking for. And then her eyes fell on the expiration date, two months past. A sliver of very real fear, and a hazy premonition of being owned, body and soul, by the man in front of her infiltrated her entire being.

  Frozen in place, she felt rooted to the spot, but knew she needed to face him again. She left the car, carried the insurance information with her and handed it to him. “I need to call my cousin, but my phone’s dead,” she announced as calmly as she could manage.

  Marco tried to shake the memory of her perfect ass bending over in the car, and focus on what she was saying. “Dead?” In his experience, everyone had a cell phone, from his cousin’s six-year-old twins to the custodians who cleaned his office.

  “I don’t have any minutes left. You know, it’s a pay-as-you-go?”

  The girl’s situation kept getting worse. Marco grimaced and pulled his phone from his pocket and handed it to her. “By all means.”

  Natalie took his cell with fingers that trembled. The phone was warm from the heat of his body and she couldn’t suppress a small shudder as she keyed in her cousin’s number from memory.

  She turned away slightly, and put the phone to her ear while she wrapped her other arm around her torso in a defensive posture that she couldn’t quite hide.

  Justin answered, breathless, on the third ring. “Yeah?”

  “Justin, it’s me, Natalie.” She was aware that her voice was trembling and that Marco Donati stood only feet from her, watching her, and only barely seeming to contain his growing fury.

  “What’s up? I’m getting on the helicopter in about twenty seconds.” Her cousin worked offshore on an oilrig and Natalie knew he would be gone several months this time.

  She hurried to say what she needed to. “I had a wreck. I’m okay, but it was my fault and the insurance card is expired.”

  “Fuck!” His expletive had her lifting the phone away from her ear.

  Natalie began speaking in a hurry again. “I’m so sorry. You said it was okay for me to drive it. It has insurance, right? You just forgot to put the new card in the glovebox?” she asked hopefully. The car was fourteen years old, and she knew he only kept it for emergencies. He drove a new truck and had said the car was reliable enough for her to drive around town while she searched for a job.

  “Nat, I’m sorry. I checked the oil and the tire pressure. I meant to make sure the insurance hadn’t lapsed, but I forgot. Fuck.”

  She closed her eyes, the knuckles that gripped the phone turning white. “What do I do?” she asked with a quaver of uncertainty.

  “The best you can, Natalie. Who’d you hit? What kind of car?”

  “I don’t know. It looks brand new, really pretty.” Her eyes cut to the black car and then to the man standing between it and her. “His name is Marco D-Donati.”

  “Donati? Like the bank, Donati?” her cousin asked.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Look, I gotta go. I hate like hell to abandon you like this. Tell him it’s my car and I’ll make it good. Tell him you’ll make it good, as well. Don’t make matters worse by arguing or trying to deny it’s your fault—as long as you know for a fact that it’s your fault?”

  “I hit him from behind,” she said in a resigned tone of voice.

  “Right. Have it towed to my driveway. Don’t drive it anymore ’til I can get it fixed and get insurance on it.”

  “Okay, thanks. Be safe.”

  “Yeah, you too.”

  Natalie ended the call and slowly moved toward Marco Donati, handing the phone back to him but not meeting his eyes, while an intense feeling of loneliness hit her. She knew Justin had to leave, he had to make a living. But now it left only Natalie and Justin’s girlfriend, who hated Natalie because she was jealous of her—even though Natalie and Justin were cousins. The situation at Justin’s house was going to go from bad to worse now that he was flying out.

  She missed her mom and didn’t like Houston much so far at all.

  Marco Donati took the phone and slid it into his pocket. “No insurance?” he asked in a coldly flat voice.

  She shook her head and tried to hold his eyes, fighting the guilt and mortification that slid down her spine. “I’m sorry. I’ll pay you somehow.”

  Crossing his arms over his chest, his lips curled into a sneer and his eyes turned cold and flat. “No you won’t. Let’s at least be honest with each other about that.”

  “I will. I really will.”

  “You have any idea how much that car cost and how much damage you did to it?”

  Her eyes slid away from his and with a feeling of a rock being lodged under her breastbone, Natalie took a better look at his vehicle. She had no idea about a car like that, but suddenly, her bad situation was getting much, much worse. She glanced back at him and licked her lips. “Um, more than a Corvette?” she whispered.

  “Um—yeah,” he snapped back sarcastically, irritation coloring his voice.

  Natalie closed her eyes briefly and then opened them again. She was beginning to get a stress headache. Slipping her sunglasses to the top of her head, she took a couple of seconds to massage her temples. Knowing she couldn’t put it off any longer, she raised her eyes to his. “Can we work something out?”

  Chapter Two

  Marco watched as if in slow motion the trembling fingers that raised her sunglasses to the top of her head. He froze and waited for her to lift her face to his, sudden impatience grabbing him and holding him in its grip. When he finally saw her eyes, his guts clenched in automatic response.

  A wave of lust hit him hard, and if he’d believed in a place called Hell, then there was absolutely no doubt in his mind that that’s where he’d end up. His gut response to her innocent question, combined with the annihilating beauty of her eyes, was that bad. As he looked her over, standing still and incredibly tiny in front of him in frayed jeans and tennis shoes, the beauty of her face surging into sudden prominence, two things hit him simultaneously. He couldn’t remember ever having wanted a woman so wildly inappropriate, this hard and this fast, and it suddenly occurred to him that her driver’s license hadn’t told the truth. “You’re not five-three.”

  She blinked up at him. “Yes, I am.”

  “Bullshit.” She was smaller than that, and his body began screaming at him even more loudly, begging his brain to let him at her. It was as if there were two parts of his person, diametrically opposed and in a face-off. His guts and his cock wanted her—wanted her badly—but his brain was fighting back. And it was a toss-up as to which part was in control.

  Bristling indignation filled her as she arched her back and lifted her shoulders in determination. “My driver’s license says I’m five-three—so I’m five-three.”

  Marco puffed out a laugh at her temerity, while steeling his insides against the almost uncontrollable urge to reach out and touch the small swell of her breasts. “So you lied to the Department of Public Safety. And now I’m supposed to believe you when you say you’re going to make this good?” he questioned somewhat threateningly.

  “I’ll make it good, I swear!”

  Heat slammed his guts as she repeated his words and unknowingly turned them into an accidental innuendo. He couldn’t stop himself; he had to test her. “You even know how to make it good?”

  Her eyes widened and her mouth opened, then closed, then opened again. “Pay—pay you back,” she stuttered.

  Marco fought his arousal as he studied her. She had understood his innuendo, and chose to ignore it. It said a few things about her. It said she wasn’t looking to work off the debt on her back, so to speak, and it meant that if she reacted as she had at twenty-four-years old, she probably wasn’t overly experienced.

  He didn’t know whether he was pleased
or disappointed. There was a woman he slept with occasionally, and Tanya liked to think of herself as his girlfriend, although he didn’t see her as such—not even close. She’d been wearing on his nerves lately, becoming more and more demanding, and he knew that before too much longer she was going to slide past her expiration date. In fact, she was already there. He didn’t think getting rid of her would be easy; she’d probably go kicking and screaming. But she didn’t live with him, no woman ever had, and when he was ready, it wouldn’t take long to expel her completely from his life.

  He didn’t imagine for even a minute that this girl would have what it would take to hold his attention for long—no woman ever had and he didn’t think she’d be an exception. She sure as shit wouldn’t fit into his world, his—casual and depraved world—and he suddenly knew that he wasn’t ruthless enough to expose her to it—in fact, he was feeling a roiling anger in his gut at the thought of her obvious innocence being spoiled. But there was something very compelling about her, something that was electrifying his insides, something that wouldn’t allow him to let her drive off and leave. He could afford to, certainly. He didn’t need her money or her insurance; getting his car repaired would be a nuisance at most. But he didn’t want to let her off the hook. Call him misguided or even a bit evil, but there was something about her and the raging erection she had induced that was making him act out of the ordinary and even though he recognized it, he didn’t try to fight against it.

  He wanted to get things settled with her and needed to know her situation. “You live in Vidor?” He named the town he’d read on her driver’s license.

  “Not anymore. My mom and her boyfriend live there still, but I’m using my cousin’s couch while I try to get a job here.” Here, of course, meant Houston, and now he knew she had no insurance, no income, and probably no money of any kind to repair the damage she had caused.

  “So how, exactly, do you propose working this out?” he asked stiltedly, referring to her previous offer.