Ethan Chase had lied to his mother. He'd said he was not sentimental about the tools and machinery he surrounded himself with. But there was a single exception, her convertible. She'd owned the Miata for as long as he could remember. It was a graceful, sexy little thing that grew more beautiful as the years passed. He loved its lines and the throaty note of its engine.
It reminded him of Lauren herself. But he would never tell her that. Certainly not in those terms.
And it needed his help.
Replacing the crankshaft meant pulling the engine. When he got the block clear, he noticed the black box. It sat against the inner fender just in front of the firewall, where no such thing belonged.
He didn't touch the box. He walked around the front of the car several times, studying it from different angles. He got down on the crawler with a light. He could reach it, but only because there was nothing in his way.
Whoever had placed it there would have had to move the engine, which meant a hoist and tools.
He surveyed the vehicles and parts in his hangar. What else was assembled and running? He'd just pulled the carb limiter off of the Dnepr that he'd had shipped over from Yugoslavia. This afternoon would be the time to find out if the thing could merge onto the interstate without killing him.
He kick-started the bike and set off to visit Lew Bradley. He had questions for the attorney, and they had nothing at all to do with corporate law.
The Bradleys lived in the foothills, in a new Spanish Colonial on a cul-de-sac in a neighborhood with long green lawns that were a couple of missed waterings away from turning back to dust. A slender young woman opened the front door as Ethan parked on the curved flagstone driveway.
"Hey, Ethan." Peyton Bradley waved at the old motorcycle and sidecar. "That is so cool. And loud."
"Hi, Peyton. Your dad home?"
"Uh-uh. Don't know where he's gone. Come on, get out of the heat. It's like, what, a hundred and three? Can I get you something?"
"Glass of water, maybe."
"Sparkling?"
"Tap is good. Thanks."
Peyton was a pretty girl whose emotional affect was situated at the junction of cheerful and vacant. Ethan was more attracted to older women. Women who'd lived lives that showed in their eyes and the way they carried themselves. They liked him too. During his abbreviated college career, he'd had affairs with a forty-something psychology professor, an ancient history lecturer, and two comp sci instructors. Ms. Maddy Jones, his psych professor, had taken the direct approach: one day after class she'd locked the lecture hall door, dropped to her knees, and practically gnawed through the front of his jeans.
The history teacher had stuck with the classics and simply offered him a better grade for sex. He hadn't needed the academic help, but he'd enjoyed the extra tutoring.
So Ethan accepted, based on experience, that he had his share of natural gifts. But human beings confused the hell out of him. As fortune had permitted, he'd taken refuge in the world of algorithms, machines, and rational data.
"Irina might know where Dad is," Peyton grabbed a plastic cup from the dishwasher. "She's sunbathing out back."
"Was." Irina stood in the doorway, tall and tan and wearing only a white thong. Her brown shoulders, the soft peaks of her nipples, and her flat tummy glistened with oil. "I should thank you for making all that racket in the driveway. I'd have napped myself right into the burn ward. Foolish of me."
"You want ice?" Ethan caught the edge in Payton's voice. Losing a guy's attention to her exhibitionist stepmother apparently irritated her. She handed him the drink and left the kitchen.
"Lew went down to the office for some papers he's got to review over the weekend. He should be back in an hour or two. You can call him down there, I'm sure." Standing less than a foot from Ethan, she was tall enough that she barely needed to lift her chin to meet his eyes. "Unless there's something I can help with?"
"Well, I'm not sure. I just wanted to ask him why he'd pay a mechanic to put a GPS tracker on my mom's car."
Irina raised an eyebrow. "You're right. You'd have to ask him that yourself."
"Irina, that's not the way to play it. You're supposed to say it like this: 'What? I don't understand, why would he do that? I don't know what you're talking about.' Something like that. But make it your own."
She bit her lip. "I don't really think--"
"So, I'm going to go ahead and assume that you had your husband bug my mom's car because the Novaks told you to."
"Lew's warned me that you're a clever one."
"It's my profession to find patterns in random data. This one's obvious once you know to look for it. Isn't the most attractive thing about Lew his proximity to our money?"
"Easily," Irina agreed. "Ethan, we don't mean anyone harm. Everything we're doing will benefit you in ways you can't yet imagine." She leaned in close, smelling of coconut and orange blossoms. "Let me--let us--show you."
Her breath was a furnace. The sunlight through the window behind her haloed her fine dark hair, growing inexplicably brighter, eating into the shape of her head and burning away all detail and shadow until she completely dissolved into the flare. Ethan tried to shield his eyes from the fire, but moving was like walking on the ocean floor. Irina kept talking but the words were of no language that he knew. A roar like a jet engine rose inside his head, drowning her out.
Peyton's chipmunk soprano cut through the noise, echoing from the far side of the cosmos.
"Don't let him hurt himself!"
He pivoted drunkenly and grabbed with both hands at the melting granite edge of the kitchen island. It shrank from him like a frightened octopus and crumbled to sand, floating away. His hands came loose from his arms, chasing it until everything disappeared into the smothering dark.
Little by little, the watery pale light of a winter moon resolved into a frosted glass lamp in the center of an overhead fan. Ethan lay counting its turning wooden blades. Four. No, five.
To his left was a window looking out at the mountains. Long evening shadows filled the pockets and valleys of the range. He could raise and turn his head freely, but his wrists and ankles were bound by soft leather cuffs fitted with bolt snaps, which in turn were fastened to steel rings attached to wide straps made of heavy webbing. The webbing was looped and buckled around the mattress on which he lay. He was naked. It didn't bother him, as he was fairly sure the thousand-mile-long body strapped to the bed belonged to someone else. The erection jutting up from between his legs could not be his. He was big enough, but this thing was a stony, priapic monument. And anyway, it made no sense for him to be aroused.
"Wuh..." he shook his head hard to clear it. That was a mistake.
"Give yourself a moment, dear. There's no hurry." Irina's voice. She and Peyton stood by the bed looking down at him. They were naked as well. Okay, the hard-on made some sense, after all.
"I did good, huh, Mom?" Peyton leaned against her stepmother and offered her lips for a kiss. Irina's mouth closed on hers, elegant fingers caressed the arches of the young blonde's pelvis.
"Offhand, I...can...think...of five hibib...uh,
hypnotic
drugs that are tasteless in water." The stumbling, alien croak of Ethan's own voice startled him. He stared at his stubbornly erect dick again. "I'm betting that Libidramine isn't like that, though."
"Water? Oh, that was the benzos," Irina said. "You won't remember, but by the time we offered you Lib, you were more than willing. Enthusiastic, I'd say. You even helped us get you up here and into our playset. Thank God. I wasn't sure that the two of us together could carry you if you completely passed out."
Ethan nodded weakly. "I guess I just flunked Private Eye 101."
"When you saw Irina, I could've handed you a glass of sriracha and you'd have drunk it," Peyton teased.
Ethan hoped that keeping up aimless chatter would persuade Irina he was still fuzzy-headed. He hoped that he wasn't still more doped up than he thought he was.
Taking stock of his predicament, it was easy to see that neither woman was armed. The bondage rig he found himself in was as Irina had described it--no more sturdy than a playset. It shouldn't take more than two good strong yanks to tear something loose and to break free.
"You guys can yak if you want. I'm gonna play with his cock." Peyton climbed onto the bed. Her dark blue eyes were alight and her lips moistly parted as her finger circled the rim of Ethan's glans.
"Ah-ungh!"