Free Driving in Neutral by Sandra Antonelli

gossip-go-round with Karl and had wanted to throw up from all the spinning.
    Never again . Never again .
    “Listen, Maxwell—”
    “ Emerson . People who work for me call me Maxwell. My friends call me Emerson.”
    “I hardly know you—”
    The Jeep honked again.
    Emerson put his hand over the top of hers. “So get to know me,” he said, his voice low and full of promise. Her rich brown eyes wandered over his face and he knew his appeal was indisputable, he knew the chemistry was there and she couldn’t deny it. “Don’t be such a cynic and automatically think the worst of me because we had an unusual start.”
    “I’m not a cynic. I’m merely realistic. I don’t fool myself into thinking this would amount to anything more than a fling and I’ve got other things to concentrate on, more important things.”
    “Spoken like a true wet blanket.”
    “I think you mean wet rodent .” She pulled her hand away. “Good night, Maxwell.”
    A weekend of sitting around with his knee elevated was all it took to realize exactly how much his curiosity had been piqued. That first Monday morning, after he’d rummaged around in a pile on his desk and finally read her impressive CV, Emerson did an Internet search on Olivia.
    He was further impressed.
    She’d been a member of the Halray Touring Car Race Team before she turned design engineer and test driver for the team and moved on to BMW Formula One prototypes. She hadn’t competed in over fifteen years, but the Team Halray website had a photo history of past and present members. There was a sweet picture of Olivia Regen in a red fireproof suit, and she looked so damned cute standing beside a green car with a crash helmet tucked under one arm.
    Emerson enlarged the image and studied it. She wore dark sunglasses; the pointy kind popular in the ’50s. The pink scar near her mouth was missing.
    Chicks were supposed to dig scars on guys, but damn, that crescent-shaped scar of hers fascinated him. It reminded him of Cindy Crawford’s mole. That tiny brown button above Cindy’s top lip was the thing that made her stand out, what made her incredibly gorgeous. Little flaws like that were so much more appealing than china-skinned perfection.
    More curious than ever, Emerson continued his web search. He keyed her name into Google and a slew of web links popped up. Each one listed Olivia’s name with an Austrian driver named Karl Abenteuer, and the first line of every web link mentioned a video. There were other words too, words like raunchy , naked , and porn .
    Porn?
    Olivia had done a porn video?
    Emerson’s palm hovered on his wireless mouse, his finger poised to click a link.
    Well, well. Racing cars and kissing strangers in elevators certainly meant she was daring, despite the No Trespassing sign she wore like a pendant around her neck, but Olivia doing a raunchy skin flick? Now that was sure a surprise.
    Porn…home sex videos…YouTube links… They were out there. In the public domain. For everyone to see.
    It was like an itch, a devilish itch at the base of his… He glanced at sentence fragments in the YouTube link and read words like wife … threesome … nude actress…tattoos on her amazing …and Abenteuer’s Adventure .
    His finger was still poised over the mouse. He looked at thumbnail photos, grainy pictures of a couple. He made out shapes, what could have been the peachy curve of a woman’s bare buttock, a bare shoulder, an open mouth that was too small to see if there was a scar beside it.
    Emerson felt his tongue lick at the edge of his mouth. Ideas began to float about his mind, natural ideas that men were built to have, randy ideas that came without thinking. The film clips and photos were in the public domain and he was the public in that domain. Which meant he wouldn’t be the first or last to see what was freely available, what was broadcast worldwide.
    He was about to click his mouse, to watch a clip on YouTube, but something stopped him. While it