Surrendering Series Box Set

“Does it have a name?” I said, leaning on the back.

“No, I don’t have a name for my car,” Lucah said, giving me a look.

“What? A lot of guys name their cars. Especially when they’re very important cars.” He just shook his head and came around to the passenger side to open my door for me.

“Ooohh, I like this. We should go driving more often,” I said, and got in. The interior of the car was spotless. I was afraid to touch anything for fear of getting fingerprints on it that he would have to wipe off later.

Lucah got in and smiled at me.

“What do you think?”

“This is a fine piece of machinery you have here. What’s her name?” I asked him again, because I knew, without a doubt, that this car had a name and I was going to get it out of him. It was my experience that whether it was cars or ships, they were almost always female.

He shook his head and then mumbled something under his breath.

“What? I didn’t quite catch that.” I put my hand at my ear.

“Bluebird. Her name is Bluebird.” He blushed as he said it, which made me laugh.

“Well, nice to meet you, Bluebird,” I said to the dashboard. “May you drive fast and true.”

Lucah started her up and she roared to life. He revved the engine and the sound shattered the quiet of the parking garage. Stealthy, we were not. Lucah revved the engine again, and backed out of the space as I buckled my seatbelt. Then he hit the gas and we screeched around the corner. I held onto the door and tried not to scream.

“You’re not scared, are you?” he said as we rounded another corner and burned some rubber.

“Nope,” I squeaked. “I trust you.” It was the car I didn’t trust. And other drivers. And things falling from buildings and rogue construction cranes and cinderblocks and a million other things that could hurt us while we were in this car.

“You ride in cabs all the time, and you trust those guys?” Well, I never really thought of it that way.

“Great, now I have to be nervous about cabbies,” I said as we left the garage and merged onto the busy street. Lucah’s brother and his family lived outside the city in Lexington, one of the nicer suburbs. He and his family had grown up poor, but it seemed as if Lucah and his older brother, Tate, had managed to turn it around and be successful. And then there was Ryder.

“Does Ryder ever come up to visit?” I asked as we sat in traffic to get over the Zakim bridge.

“No. He and Tate don’t get along. It wouldn’t be a good situation, with the girls there, so Ryder avoids it. Which is probably a good thing. If you wanna plug in your phone, you can. I rigged it up to play through the speakers.” I got out my phone, plugged the cord in and turned on the radio. Simple Minds blasted through the speakers and nearly deafened me.

“Yeah, I forgot to tell you that I like to listen to music pretty loud when I drive,” Lucah said, turning the volume down. “What’s up with the song?”

“Sloane and I watched The Breakfast Club the other day, so I had the song stuck in my head.” I put the music on shuffle and skipped to the next song, which turned out to be a version of “Clarity”, similar to the one that we’d listened to when we’d danced at the ball. I watched Lucah’s face and he smiled when he recognized it.

“I never saw the appeal of a ball until I saw you coming down the stairs in that dress.” It was at Sloane’s studio now because she could store it much better than I could.

“I could get it from Sloane and put it on again and we could have a reenactment.”

“I like this plan. Can we reenact the part after the ball? Not that the dancing wasn’t fantastic, but the removing of the dress and so forth was more fantastic.” My ladyparts quivered with the memory of that night. We broke some new sexual barriers after the ball, and I was pretty sure I saw through space and time a few times.

“That was pretty fantastic,” I said, putting my hand on his, where it rested on the shifter. Was there another term for it? I had no idea. It didn’t really matter.

We crossed the bridge and hopped on the highway and I realized how few times I’d left the city in the past few months. I’d always wanted to travel, but I’d always been working, so the only travel I’d done was for work, and I’d been either stuck in a boardroom, or a hotel room or an airport.

“We should go somewhere,” I said.

“Isn’t that what we’re doing right now?”

“Obviously, but what I mean is that we should go somewhere, go somewhere. Like on a trip to a faraway place.”

He started laughing.

“What’s funny about that?”