Reese sat wide awake in the silent darkness trying to understand what was happening to her and how she’d come to be here.

Jim lay asleep with his head on her lap; he had a hand wrapped lazily over her bare thigh. Her hand was tangled in his hair, which was almost as soft as Malcolm’s, who lay upon her feet. She was warmed by two males…her two males.

It was an uncomfortable thought for such a comfortable position.

A comfortable position in…

She sighed, softly, so as not to wake her boys.

She’d often been asked about the possibilities of sex in a stock car—invariably in the crudest of ways. And the answer was that it was wholly impossible. A stock car had a single bucket seat wrapped in a steel roll cage. Steering wheel, stick shift, and protective padding turned it from seat into cocoon for one. It was not a place for claustrophobes.

Not that she’d disliked the image, just the jerks who tried to use it as an opening line. Sex in a hot racing car. Two very good things in the same space.

She’d never thought to have sex in their current location however.

She, Jim, and Malcolm were on the homebound leg back to Andrews Air Force Base in the guts of a C-17 Globemaster III jet transport. The Beast limousine had been loaded aboard with the three other surviving vehicles from the Motorcade—there’d been eight aboard on the way out. Air Force One and the President were already safely back in DC; the Marine One helicopter seeing to the final stage of returning the President safely to the White House.

They’d been over Kansas when Malcolm had come up to her sitting in one of the forward crew area seats. The other drivers with her were either fast asleep in their seats or involved in an intense game of poker. The C-17’s crew were sitting up forward with the pilots.

She and Jim were the only other ones awake…except that she didn’t see Jim anywhere.

Malcolm appeared anxious to return to his master, so she waved him away and, after only a moment’s consideration, followed the dog. He’d led her past the first three vehicles in the massive cargo bay only barely lit with red nightlights. Just enough light so that she didn’t trip over the front-and-rear chains anchoring each vehicle to the deck so that they couldn’t shift in flight.

At the rear of the aircraft had sat the battered Beast. Her car.

And the massive rear door had been propped open, ever so slightly.

She’d hesitated again, longer that time. It hadn’t been difficult to guess what awaited her—a truly amazing man—but the implications were huge!

To make love with Jim Fischer in the back of her car was part teenage fantasy. But that car was also all that she was.

No. She’d only thought it was all she was. Jim had proved to her that she was more than just the car she drove. She was also a woman that he wanted to survive—the one he believed in so deeply.

That had been enough to have her pulling open the door, allowing Malcolm to climb in where he curled up on the President’s seat.

Then she’d stepped in herself to join the man waiting for her.

She hadn’t been convinced that it was the right choice, but she’d stepped in anyway and pulled the door shut.

And now, despite what they’d just done, she still wasn’t.

The question was, did she want to be convinced?

Inside the Beast, the outer world had gone away. The tinted windows dark enough to allow only the softest glow from the plane’s red nightlights to filter into the car. The heavy armor cut off the massive roar of the four big Pratt & Whitney engines, and her ears had popped when she removed her earplugs.

Initially they’d simply sat on the forward bench talking about the car, the Motorcade, and their narrow escape from the attack.

The reporter, a long brunette, had put on a real show of horror at the whole situation, even as she was caught recovering a camera from the bottom of the flipped and destroyed Spare—though the driver had gotten off with only a broken wrist.

She’d been promised Pulitzer material and a million-dollar bonus to keep her mouth shut about how she got the images. She’d signaled her accomplice the moment the First Lady’s Motorcade had left the UN, and the instant that the President’s Motorcade had left the Olympic Training Center.

The other side of the chain had been less obvious until she finally revealed that she was sleeping with a Saudi prince from a renegade branch of the royal family. Or at least that’s what they were calling it now. Who knew the actual truth. The prince in question had regrettably died during “an accident” shortly after his arrest. The king had promised more answers soon.

The Beast’s armor made the car so well insulated that their own body heat soon had them opening, then peeling off their jackets.

She remembered how Jim’s smile had made peeling off her blouse seem so natural just moments later. Any residual hints of chill had been scorched away by the attention he’d lavished upon her willing body.

It was only as they were deep in the throes of their encounter that she began to appreciate the location.

They were in the Beast.

They were in her car!

A charge had run through her as that insight fought its way through the blinding heat that Jim had generated to replace the last of the cold. It didn’t take long before they’d fogged the windows.

“It’s like the mile-high club, only better,” Jim had whispered close by her ear.

“We were over a mile high in the Colorado Springs parking lot,” she’d teased.

Being made love to in the Beast, inside an airplane, while flying six miles up in the sky should have been the upper limit. But Jim had found a way to pack the power of turbo-charged adrenaline rush into a moment of such gentle perfection that the explosion of their bodies should have launched them into orbit.

Thankfully sound traveled no better out of the Beast than it did inward, because the cry that burst from her was unstoppable. She’d never felt anything like the joy that Jim had pumped into her body as she’d knelt over him in the deep leather seat, her hands braced on the ceiling, his hands firmly clamped about her waist and his face buried between her breasts.

Would it last?

When she’d finally come down, when she had at long last managed to flop bonelessly into the seat beside him and he’d laid his head in her lap, she could finally ask the question.

But the question, she now knew, was pointless.

She knew it would last. The pleasure they gave each other might someday become familiar, but she suspected that too would always be exceptional. The least experience with Jim far overshadowed the best moment of anything prior.

But even that truly didn’t matter.

Jim didn’t just want sex with her. Neither did he want to change her into someone she wasn’t. He would always be the patient, even-tempered person in their relationship. And she would always be the quiet one who had to be coaxed into facing anything inside her.

Inside her.

She could feel Jim inside her. And from far more than the delicious sex.

She could feel him inside her like a light. Like the green flag fluttering high above the track the moment before it flashed downward to launch the cars on their way.

He believed in her. Not merely her ability to drive, but also her ability to make the right decision in crisis. He stood inside her with a purity of faith as clear as her father’s had been. Perhaps more so.

Her father had never seen past the next race, the next season. All he’d focused on was the edge of the envelope…and it had killed him. There was more than the next race. There was more than the points-ranking for the season.

Reese hadn’t understood that before.

Yet Jim always saw all of the futures ahead of them.

She brushed her hand through his hair and listened to his sleeping breath. Yes, he’d showed her how to see more than the next time at the wheel. He’d taught her how to believe in a future she’d never even given thought to—never mind dreamed about or believed in.

And still her beautiful man slept in her lap in the back seat of her car.

She wiggled her toes under Malcolm.

He at least woke up enough to sigh happily.

Jim slept on, unaware of the change he’d made inside Reese’s heart.

It was okay. He’d have years and years to learn about those changes.

So would she.