Reese had never been like this with any man.

They played grab-ass at the registration desk.

They would have had sex in the elevator if it had been more than two floors or in the hall if they’d been at the far end.

As it was, while he battled with the keycard, she stood behind him. Peeling back the coat she’d opened in the elevator, she yanked out his shirt hem and ran her hands over his flat stomach and up his chest, pulling herself hard against his back.

He had a workout chest, the legs of a man who walked for a living, and hips that her legs fit around like they’d been made-to-order.

Why in the world had she been avoiding that?

The sha-shink of the releasing lock was the only cue she needed to shove him against the door, pushing it open with his body. It was a good thing that Malcolm was fast on his feet or he might have been locked out in the hall and she’d have been helpless to pause long enough to let him in.

Jim let her pin him back against the wall. There was no questioning that he let her because even as strong as she was, he was in a whole other category.

“Reese?” Jim’s voice was tentative. Cautionary.

“Don’t you get,” she spoke between attacking different portions of his and her clothing. “There are times when you don’t talk. All you do. Is get naked.” Both of their sidearms hit the floor with a heavy thump.

“This is one of those times?”

She finally had his pants off and grabbed him. The way he filled her hand was amazing.

He grunted hard into their kiss when she simultaneously rammed their mouths together to stop any more words.

Okay, perhaps she’d grabbed him a little too hard, but he felt so incredibly good. So powerful. So…male. For the first time in her life she actually wanted all she could get of his pure, unadulterated maleness.

It wasn’t his anger at how she’d been treated in her past that wowed her—she’d already known he wasn’t one of those guys.

It wasn’t the way he stood up for her at every opportunity—though that was sexy as hell on several levels.

It was… She didn’t know.

That almost stopped her.

She wasn’t a wanton, not by any stretch of the imagination. But Jim Fischer made her feel so free at the moment that she wished she was one. Just for him. Even if it was just this once.

“I’m not stopping,” she told them both, then gave him another squeeze to prove her point. “You going to do something about it, dog boy?”

“Well, if you insist.” He kicked his shoes and pants free. With a shake of his arm, he managed to shuck the last of his shirt and jacket off his wrist. Then he squatted down just enough to shoot an arm between her legs. One hand grabbed her butt, the other wrapped around her shoulders; he scooped her aloft as if she weighed nothing.

Three steps later, he threw her down on the bed. Hard enough that if it had been a better mattress, she would have bounced.

“Ready?”

“Stop talking!” She was breathless from the magnificence of him. From that moment of flying before she’d struck the covers—floating loose in the instant before a gear shift once more threw power into her system.

And he did stop talking. He fell on her. His hands…his mouth…were everywhere.

Faster than had ever been possible, he drove her aloft until everything came apart.

But he didn’t stop there.

Again and again he showed her just what was possible, then found a new way to break through the envelope and find even more performance from her fracturing nervous system.

He stuck to her like perfect racing slicks on a hot track until she couldn’t know what was coming next and could only hang on for the ride. When he finally took her, when he finally pounded into her, there was little more left in her than a whimper.

But it was a whimper of joy from the body, not from her. Deep inside her, down at the heart of her body’s engine, it was so much more.

Somewhere inside her, the past was burning away.

That bastard who had thought rape was his due.

Gone.

The drivers who had harassed her on the track…crowded her car into corners so that she ate a wall and was out of the race…who had done everything they could to prove that a woman didn’t belong in a man’s sport.

Blown away.

All of the times she’d somehow thought it was her fault. Her fault that she’d cracked up another car, even though they were always tapping her rear fender to break her loose. Her fault that she had come in second, not first, despite the on-track battles she’d surmounted. Her fault that…everything!

Gone!

Jim Fischer had just shown her that, in his book, there was no woman who deserved more. That she was special beyond her body—that it was only the stock equipment that he’d driven like a master tactician to prove to her who she might one day become, beyond her body’s performance specs. There was a glimmer of light there that she’d never seen before.

Never imagined.

Yet Jim’s passionate need for her had revealed it as surely as lights illuminating a nighttime racetrack.

She clung to him. A tangle of limbs in a cheap hotel, unable to let go, unable to ease up her double-armed throttle hold around his neck. All she could presently do was feel and know that she held one man—one fantastically special man.