Driving in Neutral (3 page)

“I’m sorry. That’s right. You’re not unhappy. You’re just ill-mannered.”

“Well, do you want it or not, you wet little rodent?” he choked.

“
Wet little rodent
? Is that the best you could come up with?”

“Listen, you soggy chipmunk,” he panted, “I know what you’re trying to do.”

“Oh, I’m just on edge waiting for you to tell me what that is,” Olivia said, looking at him through narrowed eyes as she dragged his jacket over her shoulders. It smelled wonderful, like nutmeg and cardamom and autumn leaves.

“You’re trying to…” he gulped in air, but it only seemed to go halfway into his lungs before he could continue. Maxwell yanked at his tie again and began unbuttoning his shirt. His galloping heart was on the verge of exploding beneath his ribcage, the pulse racing in his temple, in his neck, in his wrists and groin. His hoarse exasperation shot through his clenched teeth. “You’re trying to disarm me!”

“Disarm you?”

“Yes, you waterlogged hamster, you’re trying to get my mind off the fact I’m trapped in a godforsaken elevator with a half-drowned rabbit! It’s not going to work!”

“You were going along pretty well there with the whole rodent thing, but rabbits are not rodents. They belong to a different order,
Lagomorpha
, not
Rodentia
, and why would it be so bad if you were distracted from feeling uncomfortable?”

“It’s not going to work, so…so…just…quit it,” he puffed.

“Okay, so then stand there covered in flop sweat and let fear get the better of you.”

“Shut…up…shut…up…
shut up
!” Maxwell couldn’t breathe. Well, he could, but it felt as if the air was being squashed back out of his chest as soon as it went in.

“You’re going to take me down with you, aren’t you? When you pass out—and you’re going to if you keep hyperventilating—you’re going to fall on top of me.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he wheezed, bending forward at the waist to snatch his breath back as if he’d just sprinted 800 meters. Shit, he
was
hyperventilating.

No, he was
hyper-hyperventilating
.

This was ludicrous. He was nearly forty-eight years old and terrified of being in a very small room simply because it had no window and…his mind suddenly zeroed in on that important point.

There was no window
.

What if the emergency light died?

What if the storm outside made the Chicago River flood into the basement of the building like it did back in ’92?

What if the rubber-coated elevator cables, the cables suspending them in mid-air above nothingness, snapped?

Any way he looked at it they were locked in this box…trapped in this vault…enclosed in this coffin…sealed in this
tomb
.

Instantly, his rapid, shallow breathing picked up speed and he began to twitch involuntarily. His shaking fingers started to curl in toward his wrists, and he sank to the floor heavily. His head slumped toward his bent knee. Camera flash splotches of bluish-white appeared to mar his sight, his peripheral vision compressing into tunneled lines of black. His body capitulated to the oncoming blackout with an incremental steadiness, his hands and feet fizzing into numbness, and he moaned.

The woman’s cool, faintly clammy hand settled on the back of his neck and her knee brushed against his shoulder as she crouched beside him. Gentle fingers slipped beneath his chin, and she tipped his face up to wipe away the perspiration dripping from his brow and hairline. She held his dim gaze with the kindest brown eyes he had ever seen.

“Okay, Maxwell. Slow down and we’ll do it together. Keep your eyes on mine. Just look at me. I’ll count to four and we’ll breathe together, in and out. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four and rest for four. Okay? It will be easy. Watch me. Here we go,” she said, her voice low and soothing. She began to count to four then inhaled, nodding at him to do the same while she tallied the seconds with her fingers.

He struggled to concentrate on her face and wrangled with his breath for a moment, desperate to quash the panic, to get a rhythm, but the air still hitched in his throat.

With a soft, encouraging smile she began again and he tried one more time as she counted, but his breath snagged halfway down as if caught in a rising bubble.

He moaned again and she looked at him with a funny expression behind her kind eyes.

Olivia saw his fear was absolute, his panic an obstacle he wasn’t about to overcome with controlled breathing exercises and calm reassurance. The old paper bag trick was still a handy method to ease hyperventilation. If she’d had one tucked inside her purse she would have whipped it out, but the man was beyond the relaxation techniques she knew and used. There were two obvious solutions, each of them clichéd. The entire elevator situation was a hackneyed scenario straight out of a romantic comedy starring some twenty-something actress and a guy twenty years her senior, but trite predictability was on her side here. Regardless of what she did, he wasn’t going to be happy and Olivia figured she could count on Maxwell’s anger. Anger was easier to deal with than unconscious or an ongoing circle of fear and panic.

Prepared for a heated reaction, she braced herself on both knees, placed her fingers along the stubble on his cheek and kissed him.

Stunned, his respiration automatically found a rhythm. Without thinking, Maxwell’s hand slid over the wet fabric at her waist. She smelled like rain and spring lavender. His lower lip delicately wedged between hers, delightful warmth telegraphed through his body, and he answered the gentle communication before she had a chance to pull away.

Maybe it was the rush of adrenaline from his fear, maybe it was her perfume or the fact she tasted faintly of sweet coffee, but something encouraged him to pull her into his lap. Her mouth was warm, but her skin was cold, her chilled bottom damp, and the cool moisture soaked into the thighs of his trousers as her arm went around his neck.

From the age of sixteen, car racing had given Olivia a rush, but she’d waited until she was several years past forty to do something as stupid, thrilling, and…overwhelmingly erotic as kissing a complete stranger. It didn’t register that she was no longer in complete control of the situation, or her actions. Her lips had parted slightly in enticing discovery, and she was completely lost to the exploration and sensation of kissing. Olivia sighed against his mouth, and that tiny noise seemed to give him incentive to draw her a little closer.

She was cold, he was warm, and smelled so nice. The fingers she once had on his cheek had traveled around into his hair and her mouth lingered a little longer than intended. He’d relaxed and she was so busy congratulating herself for being so cleverly disarming, that she hadn’t been prepared for how speedily Maxwell recovered his equilibrium or for how suddenly she lost hers.

She shifted, nuzzling against him. The sweet tip of his tongue met hers and a chill of a different sort sketched tiny lines of delight over her rain-cooled skin. One hand slipped into his unbuttoned shirt and her fingers ran through the sheen of perspiration on his skin to clasp his shoulder.

Yes, oh, yes, oh, yes
. She heard it then, the ’70s disco beat, the high-pitched
you kin ring mah bell-ell-ell ring mah bell
.

She nestled into his lap and felt the heat from his thighs and erection pressing into the back of her legs. Olivia realized Maxwell was a completely different breathless powerhouse of nerves to the kind he was before, and
ring-a-ling-a-ling
she liked it.

She liked it a lot.

Yet liking something along these lines wasn’t part of the plan she had mapped out for living her life. In racing, a low center of gravity was key to keeping a car gripped to the track, but Olivia’s center of gravity was slipping, she was losing adhesion and was about to fly off the circuit with a late 70s disco hit stuck in her head.

Quickly downshifting, and irritated she likened kissing him to racing, she drew her mouth away, pulled his hands from her head and slipped from his lap. Aware of every inch of her own feminine skin, her body was a jumbled mess of surging adrenaline, desire, persistent dampness, and utter disbelief. She pulled the jacket across her chest. The fabric smelled of him with that hint of autumn, nutmeg, and cardamom.

For a moment, Maxwell chuckled at himself, at her, and the bizarre experience, dabbing at his mouth with a knuckle. “That was pretty disarming,” he muttered. Sheepish self-consciousness tempered his rush of exhilaration. “Can you come up with anything to alleviate my stupendous embarrassment?”

“Don’t be embarrassed,” she said, rising with a smile and casual shrug, trying to rearrange her dress beneath the blazer. “We all have our irrational fears.”

“So when do I get to see yours?” His mouth twitched, his grin a little devilish since her dress was twisted, rumpled, and sticking to her. She pulled at it to cover the expanse of stocking she’d exposed as she sat in his lap. He didn’t take his eyes off her.

Of course, Maxwell didn’t
want
to take his eyes off her, because then he’d have to acknowledge he was still in an elevator. It felt a hell of a lot better to focus on her with his pulse quickening for a different reason than fear.

He went on looking, drinking her in the same way he’d tried to suck in the oxygen he’d lacked earlier. The rain had drenched her completely, and her green dress clung to her shape as she moved. He caught a glimpse of the soft curve of her breasts in the v-neckline of her dress, and, when she moved again, he could see a lacy outline of bra and panties, the pink color of skin showing through the translucent wet material.

Captivated, he shifted again and felt the tightness return to his injured knee and trouser-covered crotch. His jacket hit her mid-thigh and accentuated the sloping curve of her hips as she tried to adjust her dress. Despite the dim light, he’d seen her close up, and very personal. She wasn’t an ingénue, but she was a woman who liked to laugh. He guessed she was close to his age because her small face held the sort of wisdom younger women didn’t typically have. She wore a minimal amount of make-up. Rain had smeared mascara under her eyes, but it looked more red carpet style than raccoon. Her top lip had a Cupid’s bow that made him think of actresses of the ’30s, and there were remnants of lipstick, which he could still taste, on her pink mouth.

He was amazed how much he wanted to eat off what was left of the lip color on her mouth.

Leaning back, he looked up at her with his eyes fixed on that mouth. “So where did you learn to defuse a situation like that? Well, I don’t mean exactly like
that
. What are you, a shrink?”

“No,” she said. “My sister developed sudden severe stage fright—you know, heart palpitations, sweating palms, shallow breathing—which was pretty bizarre considering she’d been a professional opera singer with the Chicago Lyric for nine years before anything like that happened. She learned controlled breathing techniques to handle the fear.”

“Did she see a shrink for that?”

Olivia shook her head. “Julia talked to my friend Glenn. He’s a trainer, a coach. Her anxiety had nothing to do with performing live and everything to do with working again after having a baby.” She paused to adjust the low neckline of her dress so it flattened out and wished her nipples, which stood out like two diamond-hard marbles, would flatten too. “Julia said she knew she was a great singer, but wasn’t so sure about the whole mother thing. Glenn had her do these focused breathing exercises when things felt like they were spinning out of control.”

“I didn’t get the chance to find out. Does it work?”

“Every time.”

His eyes traced a path from the top of her head to the neckline of her dress as she moistened her bottom lip with her tongue. Olivia realized she was licking what was left of his flavor. “There’s a theory that fear of heights, snakes and such have some kind of root in the primitive part of the brain—you know that fright or flight response that’s kept human beings on top of the food chain. Then there are those occasions anxiety stems from feeling inadequate or an experience—”

He waved his hand dismissively. “If you’re thinking I feel inadequate,” he said, “or that I was shut up inside an attic by an evil grandmother who beat me because I wet the bed, you’re wrong. I don’t like the feeling of not having room to move and I don’t like not being able to see where I’m going.”

“How are you in a plane?”

“Fine. I can get up and walk around first class.”

“I think you’re just fine now, too.”

“I’m not exactly fixated on where I am at the moment, like I was before, but I’m still uncomfortable.” He inspected every inch of her wet body and wanted to yank her back into his lap and pick up where they’d left off. “Aren’t you uncomfortable?” He asked, shifting his position and adjusting his trousers at the crotch.

“Of course I’m uncomfortable. I’m a wet mess.”

“If your dress is soaked, why don’t you take it off and wear just my jacket?”

“Oh, I don’t think so.”

“If I were you, knowing I’d be sitting in here with wet drawers for the next hour, I would have whipped them off by now.”

“Somehow,” she glanced down at herself, “I think I’d look even more unprofessional if I showed up for work wearing nothing but this.”

“Ha! Like that would be a big deal. When I get upstairs I’m going to have to explain these giant rings of pit sweat and convince my staff this wet patch on my pants did not come from a nervous bladder. The security guard downstairs told me it would take maintenance an hour to fix this mess and get the elevators running again. So if we’ve been in this thing for fifteen minutes already, you’ve got another forty-five of sitting around in that clammy dress. So be comfortable. I won’t look,” he said with more than a little bit of a wry smirk.

“Yeah, right.”

“Are you scared?”

“Should I be?”

“Not at all. Really. I won’t look.” He got to his feet, carefully, and faced the door.

Eyes glued to his back, she began to rearrange herself. Despite the jacket, the very soggy, coldly-clinging fabric of her dress wasn’t holding in much heat and her nipples, still at attention, were getting a little chafed. Worse than that was how everything had twisted and bunched up to skim her crotch. She wasn’t about to take off her dress, but she had to pull it back down into place, just so it sat more comfortably. Wary, she slipped off his coat. “Could you hold this for a sec?” she asked.