Driving in Neutral (31 page)

As he pressed against her, Olivia responded. She closed the door and turned to him.

“Olivia, no.” Emerson’s voice was choked with discomfort. “Open the door.”

“
Shhh
.” She slid her hand in between their bodies, down the front of his pants to brush over his fly. His arousal was instant, and she whispered thickly, “Trust me.”

In the barest, most faint hint of light that came from the crack under the door, Emerson looked into her warm, deep eyes; the kindest he had ever seen, and focused on her. He set a hand on her bare shoulder and swallowed.

“We were interrupted a little while ago, weren’t we? I want to finish what you started,” she whispered.

Eager and hesitant at the same time, he allowed her to shuffle him to the back of the pantry where the shelf was stacked with bottles and jars of various condiments. In the near darkness he looked about uncomfortably. The only light came from the thin line beneath the door, and fixed on that for a moment and waited for the compressing sensation to begin. He took a sluggish, deep breath and began to count to five. He got as far as two when Olivia slipped her hands up his chest and began to kiss him fervently, working his jacket from his shoulders. It fell to the floor and she tugged his shirt from his pants.

She untied his tie and unbuttoned his shirt before she pushed him into the far shelf, her mouth wandered over his bare chest, through the hair there, nipping and biting his distended nipples while her fingers slid to the waist of his pants. Breathing rapidly and very softly she slipped a hand down the front of his pants, cupping him, caressing him gently over the constrictive dark fabric.

Emerson exhaled a quiet gasp. In the splinter of light he saw her eyes, wild and full of desire. He liked her being assertive. Confidence was incredibly sexy and he liked knowing how much she wanted him. He liked it even more when she unbuckled his belt, undid the button inside the waistband of his trousers, and unzipped his fly.

She hooked her thumbs inside his pants and pushed them down over his hips, letting them puddle around his ankles. She took several steps back and began to lift her skirt. Her hands moved beneath the dark fabric, and she wiggled, slipped off her panties and shot them at him like a rubber band. He watched her step back again, closer to the door, her dress scooped over her forearms, but she paused suddenly, cocking her head as if she was listening.

Olivia stood stock still, holding her breath. Then she dropped her skirt and turned toward the door.

“I think they’re gone,” he whispered. “C’mere.”

Carefully, allowing just enough space, she opened the door and poked her head through for a peek.

“
Katzchen
?” Karl said, his accent thick as marmalade. “What
machts du
in dere?”

Emerson bit back a four-letter word.

Olivia looked back at him without any trace of feverish passion on her face. Then she stepped through the aperture she’d made and pulled the door shut, the doorknob rattling with a metallic clatter.

Emerson’s eyes fixed on the crack of light at the bottom of the door and the oddly-shaped illumination coming through an old skeleton keyhole. His heart began a little warm-up jog in his chest, but he breathed in, slowly and deliberately, and listened to Olivia speak entirely in German. With his trousers bunched around his ankles, he shuffled toward the rectangular block of light and the tiny odd-shaped blob of keyhole light, feeling just above it for the doorknob. He gripped the cool round globe in his clammy hand, acquiring a necessary sense of security from it.

“
Bist du fertig
?” the German asked.

“Yes, I’m finished,” Olivia answered in English. “Thanks for bringing those down. Please take them out to my car.”

As his mouth started to go dry, Emerson bent down and hoisted up his pants, buttoning them before he peered through the keyhole. Olivia’s arm crossed his obstructed line of sight as it moved out toward Karl. The violet of her dress flashed momentarily and he caught sight of DeeDee’s canary yellow ribcage. Then Olivia stepped back in front of the door. As his tongue ran over his teeth in an effort to make some saliva to moisten his mouth, he shifted from his right eye to his left, thinking he’d get a better view. He saw the edge of Karl’s dark coat and swish of DeeDee’s gauzy dress move off in the direction of the hallway.

After five seconds of breathing in, Emerson straightened and twisted the knob in his hand, pushing the door forward. Nothing happened. He tried again, twisting the knob the opposite way and pushing a little more firmly. Still, the door didn’t budge. “Olivia?”

“Yes?”

“Are they gone?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, you can stop leaning against the door now.”

“I’m not leaning against the door.”

“You’re not?”

“No.”

“Well, all right, but I can’t seem to get the door open.”

“M-hm.”

“What do you mean,
m-hm
? Help me open the door.” He bent again to look through the keyhole. One glance down and he could see the shadow of her feet move away from the crack at the bottom of the door. Back at the keyhole, he saw the purple crescent of her left side near the coffee maker on the long counter and heard her drop something metal on the counter. It landed with a
clink
on the white-tiled top. “Come on Olivia, I’ve had enough.”

“So have I,” she said and a moment later she was in front of the door. “Consider yourself
set up
,” she said acidly.

“What?” Instantly, his jogging heart skipped in a staccato rhythm in time with her heels traveling across the kitchen tiles. “Olivia!”

Her footsteps faded as she moved into the carpeted hallway.

“Olivia, what are you doing?
Olivia
!”

Prickles of sweat broke out on his forehead; he felt them on his upper lip too. Okay. He’d heard of this. Was it her idea he should face his fear and see nothing actually came from the anxiety, except the anxiety…and the heart palpitations and the python-like constriction beginning to loop tighter around his chest.

“Oh, Christ.” Emerson swallowed and rattled the doorknob. Over and over he rammed against the door with his shoulder to release himself. This old house was very well made and built to last, just like the old lock, and the door did not shift an inch.

Shouting, he yanked off his unbuttoned shirt, kicking and hammering his fists on the door until his breathing became shallow and rapid. Vainly, his arm pits sodden, his face dripping with cold sweat, he groped around in the darkness, feeling for an item he could lever between the door and frame, but what good was a bottle of brandy, a rolled up napkin or a bottle of Tabasco sauce?

She’d locked the door from the other side, dropped the key on the counter and left him trapped inside a dark mausoleum filled with lifeless condiments and table linens.

Olivia listened to him from the hallway, just outside the kitchen. From the inside out, she was a burning mixture of rage, unsatisfied desire, and shame. She was entirely exposed, open to every ugly element of human nature, without the benefit of undergarments or a man’s jacket to cover her nakedness this time. Her head and heart had been unrestrained and she’d smashed into Emerson Maxwell without any safety measures. There was no seat belt, helmet, roll cage, or fireproof suit, and the impact rattled every part of her body as if she’d been Maxwell’s personal crash test dummy.

Loathing how she kept associating circumstances to racing and test driving, she let her rage take over. She shut out his distressed pleas to be let out of his oversized coffin and marched outside to the curved gravel driveway.

Vivian had waited for her near the grassy area, almost in the exact spot where the heel had snapped off her sandal the other day. Olivia gathered a few of the frayed ends of her temper. “Thank you for putting my things together, Vivian,” she said. “Once I leave, I need you to go into the kitchen to let Mr. Maxwell out of the pantry—if he hasn’t found the key hanging on the rack and isn’t out already.”

The housekeeper’s mouth twitched for a moment before she nodded. “Certainly. Is there anything else you need?”

Olivia glanced over to a row of parked cars. Karl stood beside her Aston Martin. “A new brain.” She stalked toward her car as Vivian chuckled.

Karl’s arms stretched out wide as he offered his embrace.

Ignoring the gesture, Olivia snatched the keys from the end of his finger. “Thank you, Karl. Did you put the bags in both cars?”

“
Ja
.” Karl dropped his arms and followed her as the gravel crunched beneath her quick steps. “Were you vith me this angry too?” he said as she climbed into the car.

She put the key in the ignition and gripped the steering wheel with one hand as she started the car. “Karl,” she said, tugging lightly on the door he held.

“
Ja
?”

“DeeDee’s waiting.”

He removed his hand from the doorframe and gave her a melancholy smile. “
Sie ist
nothing to me. No woman iss. Not like you were. Not like you are.”

“What? You’re telling me… Oh, don’t you dare go there, Karl. Don’t you ev—”

“You deserves
besser als
him.”

“Shut up. Shut the hell up!”

“I love you still,
meine kleine Katzchen
,” he said, voice low, his head down, staring at the grayish gravel beneath his feet, “
und
I broke it all.
Alles ist kaput und
you are
kaput
as well. Forgive me.”

Incensed at his plea for absolution, and furious she wasn’t wearing underpants, Olivia climbed out of the running car and shoved her ex-husband. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?
I’m broken?
I’m not broken. There’s nothing wrong with me!
Nothing
! It’s you and that…that…that
miserable
excuse for a man inside the pantry who are broken!” She pushed him again and Karl stumbled back onto the grass.

When he regained his footing, Karl had a wide grin on his rosy face. His blue eyes glinted with glee. Then he began to snort, to shake, a deep sound rumbled from his belly and in half a second he was breathless with laughter.

Olivia wanted to throw up. He was joking. This was a joke. She was a joke to him. It only took two years of marriage, infidelity, a divorce, and falling in love with someone even more disingenuous, but she’d finally given Karl the kind of reaction he’d always wanted.

She backed up, got in the Aston Martin and spun the tires on the gravel, small crushed stones spitting backward as she raced off, the tears finally washing down her red cheeks.

Self-inflicted wounds were far more vicious than the ones meted out by someone else. Occasionally one could find a sadist like Maxwell to whip you with a sensuous tongue like a cat-o-nine-tales, but nothing flayed you quite as well as the beating you gave yourself. You knew exactly where to deliver the blows to cause the most agony.

Olivia knew she had done this to herself. For the third time in her life, she had misjudged the character of a man. She should have known better, should have let her own history stand as an illustration of not what to do
again
.

I am lousy at choosing men
.

She’d reminded herself of what she’d thought when she felt those first sparks:
never again, never again
, but why hadn’t she listened
?

She had chalked up her first marriage to Adam as a disappointing experience, yet she had been young enough to bounce back and decide what she really wanted in a man, in a relationship. She got involved with Karl because he had been attentive, romantic, and affectionate—everything Adam had not been. Karl wore his sheep’s clothing well, and Olivia had come away from that marriage dulled, a cardboard cut-out of herself. All this time, she’d never lashed out, never exploded in a rage, never shed a single tear over either duplicitous man. She still hadn’t cried over Karl, but, in the few short weeks she had known Emerson Maxwell, he’d burrowed in deeper than the two reprobates she’d married and it cut her deeply. And now she cried.

Olivia drove, and obeyed the road rules and traffic lights as she sobbed and ranted. She ranted out loud—the way characters on soap operas sometimes do, only with much more hophead style animation—and didn’t care who was watching. “You stupid cucumber eye gel using phony son of a bitch! I bet you never really had a zit in your entire pointless life and you probably haven’t ever watched
Star Trek
either! Aliens? Aliens?
You’re
the alien, you howler monkey!”

Why did she always go for the ones who had more in their pants than in their hearts? She wound up with dick-thinkers because, obviously, she was a dick-thinker too. Desire,
lust
, overpowered her rational rules and ground her self-control into the dust until all she thought about was dick.

By the time she’d driven all the way along Sheridan Road to the north side Chicago City limits, she’d stopped raving and the tears she cried over Maxwell had dried. Her face stung and felt sticky. To make things more uncomfortable, her lack of panties made crotch sweat bleed into the back of her dress, and she knew what she’d done to Maxwell was ghastly and unquestionably, utterly
malicious
.

She was not a vindictive person. If she had been, she would have hired a private detective to track down Adam and taken a sledgehammer to the motorcycle he prized more than life. She would have dragged Karl into court and taken him for all he was worth. She would have come up with something far more public, humiliating, and nosier to punish Maxwell for his malicious cruelty instead of locking him the pantry. Her first ever foray into revenge was so out of character, so
wrong
, it left her feeling mutilated inside.

And it should have. She’d played on a human being’s primal fear.

Revulsion, self-loathing, and guilt moved into the raw area of her gut, seeping in like acid etchings to highlight her careless, torturous actions.

Yes, all Maxwell had to do was feel around for the keys hanging on the hook inside the pantry and find the one that fit the lock, but had he found the spare key alongside the other household skeleton keys? If he hadn’t, it would have taken three minutes for Vivian to get to the kitchen from the driveway. By now, he’d be out. Wouldn’t he?