The Darkest Embrace. Megan Hart

in front of them. A dark flash of something big moving in front of them caught her gaze.

      Max swerved. The Chevy Suburban shuddered as it crossed what would have been the center line on a bigger road. The tires dipped into the rut on the side of the road as Max yanked the wheel in the other direction, keeping the big vehicle from going into the ditch but sending them bouncing so hard that Jessie’s seat belt locked against her shoulder and neck. The suitcases in the back rattled, the clink and clank of bottles in the boxes of food they’d brought along becoming the alarming crunch of broken glass. Jessie was sure the SUV was going to cross the road completely and hit the trees on the other side, but it came to a skewed stop with a squeal of brakes.

      “Are you okay?” Max unbuckled his seat belt to lean across to her. “Jessie?”

      Touched that his first thought was for her but a little too shaken to speak, she nodded. Something big and dark moved at the passenger side window, skittering around the back of the Suburban. With a gasp, she twisted in her seat to look out the back window.

      “Something’s back there,” she said.

      Max looked, too, but the road on both sides was still clear of anything but asphalt and shadows. “Did you see what it was?”

      “No.” Jessie took a few calming breaths. “It was fast whatever it was.”

      “Deer probably. They’re all over up here. Glad we didn’t hit them.” Max shook his head. “Thank God you were paying attention. Hey, you sure you’re okay?”

      He scooted closer to twist a tendril of her hair away from her face. When he leaned in to kiss her, Jessie slipped a hand up to cup the back of his neck, holding him close. The kiss started off sweet but lingered, turning sexy. Max broke it, his lips still so close they brushed hers with every word.

      “We stopped really suddenly. You might be a little sore,” he whispered.

      “Maybe you’ll have to give me a massage,” Jessie whispered back and kissed him again, her mouth open and waiting for his tongue.

      He gave it to her in soft, slow strokes that got faster when she moved against him. His fingers wound in her hair, tugging a little to bring her closer. Everything inside her melted and turned liquid. Heat pooled low in her belly at the soft moan from the back of Max’s throat. Her fingers found the seat belt buckle and unclicked it so she could slide across the bench seat toward him.

      His mouth opened wider, their teeth clashing just a little as she moved. His hand in her hair pulled harder as she dug her fingers into his shoulders with one hand, the other high on his denim-clad thigh. She shivered at the bunch and shift of his muscles under her hand.

      The rap of something hard on Max’s window scared them both into breaking apart. Breathing hard, her heart already pounding from the taste of him, Jessie put a hand to the throbbing pulse at the base of her neck. Max had put out an arm to shield her, but relaxed a little at the sight of a black-and-red plaid shirt and a bearded face peering through the glass. The man on the other side of the window rapped again, a wide gold ring clinking on the glass.

      “Sit back,” Max murmured. He cracked the window a little, smart enough not to open it more than half an inch. “Hi.”

      “Youse okay?” The man leaned a little lower to stare across Max’s shoulder at Jessie from under bushy eyebrows that raised a little when he saw her. “How ’bout you, ma’am? You all right?”

      “Fine. We’re both fine.” Max cracked the window a little more. “Almost hit a deer.”

      “Yeah, they’ll try to run you off the road around here, that’s for damn sure.” He nodded and took a step back from the Suburban as he tapped the roof, then bent again to look in the window. “Where you headed?”

      “We’re going...camping,” Max said with a pause.

      “Oh, up at Romero’s, I bet?” The man’s grin showed white, even teeth too large for his mouth. Jessie had thought him to be a lot older until she saw that grin—now she’d have put him in his late twenties instead of forties, and the change was startling.

      Max glanced at her, then back at the stranger. “You know it?”

      “Yeah, I know it. It’s my brother’s place. It’s up the road a ways. You’ll have to take the next two lefts before you get to the lane. I can go ahead of you, if you want.”

      “That’s okay,” Max said evenly. “We have a GPS.”

      The man guffawed. “Good luck with that. We get shit service out here. Cell phones, too. Might as well use smoke signals for all the good they’ll do. But, hey, if you just take the first two lefts, you’ll get there. You can always stop in at Dave’s Meats if you need more directions.”

      He thumped again on the roof and took another step back. He made a show of looking up and down the road, then at the SUV. “You didn’t hit the deer, did you?”

      “No, I don’t think so.” Max shook his head, already moving to put the SUV in gear.

      “Good.” The stranger’s voice dipped so low for a second that it was almost impossible to hear him through the window. “Good you didn’t hit it. Your tires, though. They look a little low.”

      “Yeah? Damn.” Max craned his neck to look into the driver’s side mirror as Jessie did the same on her side.

      She couldn’t see the tires, and she wasn’t about to get out of the Suburban and look—or let Max. There was something creepy about that guy, something she couldn’t put her finger on and was probably just her overactive imagination. Even so, there was going to be no getting out of the SUV.

      Max must have had the same idea because he nodded at the guy through the window and put the truck in reverse, carefully executing a perfect three-point turn to get them back on the road in the right direction. As he pulled away, Jessie looked over her shoulder to watch the guy get smaller in the distance. That’s when she realized what had been so strange. The man had needed to lean down to look in the Suburban’s window, but the vehicle itself was huge.

      “He must’ve been super-tall,” she blurted, twisting again to look behind her, but the stranger had disappeared. “And where’d he come from anyway?”

      “Hell if I know,” Max answered as he took the first left. “But I sure hope he gave us good directions.”

      * * *

      Max should have known better than to trust the GPS. Now he was going to look like an idiot to Jessie when they couldn’t even make it to the cabin he’d spent so many hours carefully researching to find. He’d wanted this weekend to be perfect—romantic and sexy, just like Jessie herself—but it wasn’t off to the greatest start.

      “There,” she said, pointing. “There’s Garden Stop. Oh, and there’s Dave’s Meats.”

      It was a normal-looking gas station and convenience store with old-fashioned pumps out front but modern neon advertisements in the spotless plate glass window in the front. It also came complete with the obligatory sexless, ancient person in a rocking chair, smoking on a pipe. Max looked at the gas gauge and figured it was better to be safe than sorry. He pulled up to the pumps, but the sign said he had to prepay inside.

      “No credit card payment,” he said ruefully with a glance at Jessie who was peering around him at the front of the store. “We’re really in the boonies.”

      She laughed and unbuckled her seat belt. The click of it reminded him of how she’d slid across the seat to him before, which reminded him of the way her mouth had felt on his and how she’d smelled and sounded, and then his dick was starting to stir and he had to concentrate on something else so he didn’t embarrass himself.

      “I hope they have a restroom,” she said as she got out. “And that it’s not too gross.”

      They had more than a restroom—they had a full set of showers, available for only five bucks, according to