Hard and Fast by Erin McCarthy Page A

Lap.”
    The ridiculous name he called her in return made her laugh, but she shook her head. “Don’t try it.”
    “Watch me. We’ll skip the highway and take the back roads to my place.”
    “It’s raining. The roads are slick.”
    “You think I can’t handle a little slick blacktop at a puny hundred miles an hour?” Ty shifted gears hard and opened the car up a little as they turned out of Tamara and Elec’s suburban neighborhood onto the rural route heading south.
    “The real question is how you’ll handle my hands around your neck throttling you if you don’t listen to me.”
    He laughed so hard at her unexpected words he started coughing. Swallowing hard, he said, “Them’s fighting words, Emma Jean.”
    Damn, it was a refreshing change to have a woman tell him exactly what she thought. Nikki had been a pouter, not a protester, which was annoying. Pouting from a woman made him feel irritated and guilty. Imogen’s firm no-nonsense approach amused him and had him obeying. He eased up on the gas pedal.
    “Thank you,” she said in acknowledgment of his decreased speed.
    “You’re welcome. But for the record, you’re too small to throttle me with any success.”
    “Do you want to test the theory?” she asked, pushing her glasses up on her nose.
    “No, ma’am.” He shot her a look. “I can think of a lot better things you could be doing to me with those hands.”
    “Part of me assumes that what you are saying is so obviously sexually charged, you don’t actually mean anything specific. It was just meant to be a sort of verbal foreplay. So I shouldn’t bother to ask the inevitable ‘like what?’ question. But the other part of me wants to know if there is actually something you would like me to do to you in bed. You know, if you have a particular fantasy or position that you’ve been contemplating.”
    Ty almost groaned. He did shift in his seat to try for a more comfortable angle since his jeans were suddenly cutting into him from the erection that had sprung up at her words. There was something so unbelievably hot about Imogen’s bold curiosity. She didn’t say anything to be coy, but to satisfy her own curiosity and to make sure that she was in full awareness of all the facts.
    He’d never tried the academic approach to sex before and it was doing a number on him.
    There hadn’t been any particular action he’d been thinking of when he’d spoken. He had just wanted to keep her aroused and focused on sex until he could get her back to his condo. But now that she had asked, he had a whole slideshow of positions clicking through his head. He didn’t think he could pick just one.
    “Let me think about it and I’ll let you know.”
    “Okay.” She bit her lip. “But just so you know in advance, I’m not having anal sex with you.”
    Ty almost drove off the road. He could not believe she had just said that. Trying desperately not to laugh, he nodded carefully. “Okay. I’ll make note of that. Though that ruins all my plans for the night. Guess I’ll have to reorganize and come up with a new strategy.”
    “Really?” She sounded a little unnerved.
    “No.” He tossed a grin at her.
    It was hard to tell in the dark, but he thought she might have blushed. “I didn’t need to announce that, did I?”
    “Probably not, but I can appreciate you wanting to make that clear. Anything else I should know?” It was more than likely a bad idea to ask Imogen to list her sexual taboos, because God only knew what would come out of her mouth, but he wanted to reassure her.
    “Well, I suppose there are but it occurs to me that normally those likes and dislikes, off-limit areas, and an agreement on a mutual level of kink are revealed in the bedroom together with a combination of hands-on and verbal discovery, not ahead of time in casual conversation.”
    He wasn’t sure he had understood a damn word she’d said. He had pretty much lost all his blood from his brain to his erection when Imogen