Page 45 of Crazy Spooky Love

“You have a flat tire,” he says, after stepping back to survey the van.

I yelp and fling myself out to check. Oh, crap, he’s right. Babs is always unsteady on her axles, but she’s pancake flat on her back tire.

“Have you got a spare? I’ve got a kit in my car to change it.”

“Do you think I have a bloody spare?” I say, starting to panic. “She’s over fifty years old.” I don’t tell him that the only thing I keep in the spare wheel well is an emergency biscuit stash, it felt like the right just-in-case place.

“Can you tow me home?”

“Melody, if I tie a rope to that thing, it’ll just pull the bumper off. It’s likely to fall into a heap of spare parts.”

“What else am I supposed to do?”

“Leave it here ’til morning. Phone Mick in town, he’ll come and sort it.”

“I can’t leave her here all night on her own,” I gasp. “She’ll be lonely.”

He sighs as if he knows what that feels like, and for a second, I think we have that much in common.

“Shall we have a sleepover in the Mystery Machine?” he says.

I ignore him, because something occurs to me and sends me into a spin.

“But I need her back on the road by six a.m. ,” I splutter. “Honestly, it’s an emergency, I have to be somewhere.”

He frowns, and I shake my head, defensive.

“Don’t ask me to explain it, because you wouldn’t believe it anyway.” I press my hands against my hot cheeks, stricken. “I don’t know what to do, Fletch.”

He sighs and pulls out his phone, tapping away on the screen as I chew my lip. I’d love to be able to solve this on my own, but I’m all out of ideas and if I’m painfully honest, very glad he’s here. After a minute his phone pings and he turns the screen to showme.

Relief washes through me; Mick has agreed to come out to mend Babs at five in the morning then drive her back and leave her outside Blithe Spirits.

The suggestion that leaving her unlocked with the keys tucked behind the sun visor is safe in this case is mildly insulting, as is Fletch’s laughing emoji reply, but I let them have that one, given everything.

“He owed me a favor,” Fletch says, offhand.

“And now I’m in the unfortunate position of owing you one,” I say. “Thank you. I mean it, I would have been in a mess.”

“Now, that I’d like to see. Could it involve chocolate and handcuffs and being naked?”

And there he is again. I swallow, because the thought of chocolate, handcuffs, and naked Fletcher Gunn sets off an involuntary spasm in one of my eyes. He probably thinks I’m winking at him.

I scowl to cover it, then pace around a little bit with my bag of Haribos. “I’ll call myself an Uber,” I say. “You can go now, I’ll be fine here.” I stash my phone away, closing Babs up with a silent promise to see her again soon.

“I’ll give you a free ride,” Fletch says.

“There’s no such thing as a free ride. My mother taught me that much.”

“Your mother also taught you to speak to thin air for money. I wouldn’t take her advice as gospel,” he says. “Get in my car, Melody.”

His simple, direct approach has a surprisingly odd effect on me. I go all dry-throated and hot. I’ve read about women who like to role-play being kidnapped and manhandled, I think I might be developing that kink.

He holds the passenger door open and looks at me moodily, and I sigh and slide into the dark leather interior of his car.

It isn’t new and flash, but it’s well put together and knowingly masculine.

Not a discarded sweets wrapper in sight, and I seriously doubt he needs to karate kick the glove box to openit.

“They say dogs look like their owners,” I say. “I think the same thing applies to cars.”

“You don’t look like your car,” he says. “Thank God.”

“Does your car have a name?”

I know the answer even as he shoots me a look. The darkness has turned his rock-pool green eyes lethal. “No, Melody,” he says, gunning the engine.

I wish he’d stop saying my name, it’s giving me micro-thrills, like a volley of tiny orgasms.

“Do you want to go straight home?” he asks.

“Where else would we go? I’m in my pj’s and you’re…you.”

He pauses. “We could go and look at the moon from Breakers Hill.”

Breakers Hill is a local viewpoint, high and quiet. Everyone knows it’s a local spot for stargazing and steaming up your windows.

“I do like the moon,” I croak, and then turn and look out of my window, as if I expect to find an audience there to mouth, “What am I doing ?!” at, and they will clamp their hands over their eyes with horror and shout “Don’t look at the moon, Melody! It’s a sex-trap!”

Fletch doesn’t speak, just slides the car out of the car park and turns away from town.

I can’t deny it. I’m hot for this whole scenario. I’ve been wrestling lately with the weight of work, the case, and proving myself, but right now all I can think about is the late-night linger of Fletch’s aftershave and the capable way his hands move on the steering wheel.

We fall into a heavy silence until he takes the side road up toward Breakers Hill, my insides flipping over.

“I only left home for Haribos,” I say, when he turns the engine off and looks atme.

A lazy half smile tilts his mouth. “Is this role-play? Are you about to call me daddy ?”

I shake my head. “Is everything a joke to you?”

He looks at the view, the low-slung moon, the scattered gleam of distant town lights.

“Not everything,” he says. “Not you.”

He presses a button and the sunroof slides back, revealing the stars, then he flicks his seat down to almost horizontal. He nods at me to do the same with mine.

I know. I know. Yet still I reach down the side of my seat to find the handle.

“It’s toward the back,” he says.

I feel around but can’t find it. “Where?”

He sighs and leans across me, his face unexpectedly close to mine. “Let me help,” he says.

His mouth is so close, I can taste him, and my nipples spring up when his chest brushes mine, and then my seat jerks flat and he’s a foot away, looking down at me against a star-studded sky. His eyes drop to my clearly-not-wearing-a-bra chest and then back up to my face, and we both swallow hard.

This is the moment. The one where I call a halt to things, where I tell him to take me and my Haribos back to Chapelwick. He bites his plump bottom lip, and the look in his eyes is so blatantly filthy, I forget the Haribos and lift my T-shirt over my head instead.

“Holy fuck,” he breathes, yanking his shirt buttons open as he leans down and takes one of my nipples inside the heat of his mouth.

I stare at the stars and gasp, then shove his shirt off his rock-star shoulders until we’re both naked from the waist up.

His hands are all over me, stroking, cupping, and I explore the cowboy-worthy bunched muscles of his back.

He pushes his fingers into my hair and kisses me like he’d die for me, and I hook my leg around his thigh and kiss him back like he’s the Haribo king.

He lifts his head and looks me in the eyes as he slides his hand down the front of my pj’s, his eyes widening when he realizes I’m not wearing anything underneath them. He shakes his head, laughing raggedly under his breath.

“I’ll never get over this,” he says.

The eye-sex is almost as hot as what he’s doing with his fingers. He’s otherwise still, intentionally focusing all of our attention on what’s happening between my legs.

“What do you fantasize about, Melody?” he says, dropping barely there kisses against my temple, my cheekbones, my jaw.

“Superheroes,” I whisper-gasp as he pushes his fingers insideme.

“I fantasize about you,” he says. “I always start with other women—you wouldn’t believe how hot Margot Robbie is for me—but it’s always you at the end.”

His thumb draws circles, and he bites my bottom lip, and honest to God, I think I’m going to die of pleasure. My whole body is as taut as an elastic band, and I want him in a way that scares me stupid.

“Not enough,” I pant.

The answering animal noise he makes in his throat is almost enough on its own, and then he contorts himself round to kiss my stomach and buries his face between my thighs.

I reach down and push my fingers into the back of his hair and screw my eyes tight shut, because I’m losing it before he even does anything.

His hot breath on my inner thigh, the intimacy of his tongue, the upward drift of his hand to find my nipple as if my body is a map only he understands how to read.

He knows all of my secret roads and shortcuts, and Jesus God, he’s just driven me straight off a cliff edge into a fathomless lake of bone-shaking bliss.

I think I might have just screamed his name at the moon, and now he’s kissing my clitoris in a slow, reverential way that probably means we’re actually married in several countries around the world.

I don’t slam back to earth with a thud. He drags his open mouth up my stomach, my rib cage, his kiss against the space between my collarbones, showing me the kind of care that has me reaching for the zip on his trousers.

“Tell me your fantasy again,” he whispers, pressing his forehead on mine, shutting his eyes when my hand finds its way inside his boxers and closes around him. Our mouths rest together, his breath and mine, a kiss so slow and drenched in intimacy that I can taste myself on his lips.

“Superheroes,” I say, enjoying the effect I’m having on him. He’s hard and struggling to keep himself in check, and he pauses for a second to pull a condom from his wallet in the central console.

“I’ll always protect you,” he says.

I know it’s a pun, a play on words, but they’re just the kind of words that tick my superhero boxes and I spread my legs to let him settle as best he can in the confines of the car.

It’s awkward and he’s breathing hard, and I almost come again when his knuckles press into me as he reaches between us to put the condom on.

He doesn’t take it slow, and I don’t want him to.

I know for a fact that he’s not thinking about Margot Robbie, because he’s saying my name like a goddam prayer as he slams into me.

I’ve never been a double-orgasm kind of a gal before.

My body is generally satisfied with one and would prefer a Mars bar chaser, but I feel that delicious glitter chasing wild through my veins again and I’m totally here forit.

“I’d choose you over Haribos,” I say, and he almost laughs at the same time as he comes, and the sight of him undone is enough to shake that violent second orgasm out of me too. In that moment, I don’t see ghosts. I see stars.