Take Me for a Ride Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Praise for the Novels of Karen Kendall

  Take Me If You Can

  “A sexy, riveting read!”

  —New York Times bestselling author Christina Dodd

  “Flirty, fun, and fabulously original.”

  —USA Today bestselling author Julie Kenner

  “Sexy, witty, fast-paced, and full of delicious plot twists.”

  —USA Today bestselling author Cherry Adair

  “Sexy, charming, witty, and irresistible.”

  —National bestselling author Roxanne St. Claire

  “If you’re looking for a fun, entertaining read that will keep you on the edge of your seat, then look no further than Take Me If You Can. It will make you laugh, make you cry, and keep you glued to the very end.”

  —Romance Reviews Today

  “A swift, smart, and sassy suspense with lots of romantic tension . . . reminiscent of smart, sexy movies like The Thomas Crown Affair. . . . A delight.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  Fit to Be Tied

  “Sexy-hot delicious and laugh-out-loud delightful! Karen Kendall is my new favorite author!”

  —New York Times bestselling author Nicole Jordan

  “Kendall’s lively tale about breaking up, making up, and shaking it up is funny and poignant. Fans of Lori Wilde, Susan Donovan, and Connie Lane will appreciate Kendall’s humorous take on tying the knot.”

  —Booklist

  “Kendall again presents a story that mixes humor with a more serious plot. The journey of the two main characters toward an awareness of what really matters, and secondary characters who make their own discoveries, give this lighthearted romance substance.”

  —Romantic Times

  “This funny, sexy romance will keep you reading.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “Be prepared to laugh, cry, and feel some emotions for the characters and their plights . . . an unforgettable read.”

  —Romance Reviews Today

  The Bridesmaid Chronicles

  First Date

  “Lighthearted comedy . . . the snappy talk keeps the plot in constant motion. . . . Something fun . . . to read on the beach.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A sharp, sexy, and fun read with engaging characters who steal into your heart right away. Karen Kendall’s newest romance contains all the ingredients required to make it a supersassy romp, and practically thrums with vibrant, snappy dialogue. Utterly delightful and very highly recommended!”

  —The Best Reviews

  “First Date is a magnificent, captivating read that will keep you totally entertained from the first page until the last.”

  —The Romance Readers Connection

  First Dance

  “Hilarious and downright sexy! Karen Kendall will delight you!”

  —New York Times bestselling author Carly Phillips

  “Kendall’s sparkling third installment in [the] Bridesmaid Chronicles series offers both zany romance and serious probing of her protagonists’ emotional depths. This witty, well-crafted entry bodes well for the final volume.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Also by Karen Kendall

  Take Me Two Times

  Take Me If You Can

  Fit to Be Tied

  First Date

  First Dance

  SIGNET ECLIPSE

  Published by New American Library, a division of

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Signet Eclipse, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, November

  Copyright © Karen Moser, 2009

  eISBN : 978-1-101-14926-3

  All rights reserved

  SIGNET ECLIPSE and logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the

  product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

  to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is

  entirely coincidental.

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  This one is dedicated to

  the Penguin sales team. Without

  you, I wouldn’t be in print!

  Thank you.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A big thanks to my husband, friends, family, and critique partners for always catching the sky when it fell! I love you all.

  And to Joanne, John, and Sue at Murder on the Beach bookstore.

  One

  Manhattan, September 2008

  Some people steal money. Others steal cars, liquor, or big-ticket items like jewelry. Art recovery agent Eric McDougal stole women.

  He did i
t with wit, style, passion—and guile . . . since they never knew they were missing in action until he returned them to reality.

  McDougal took his women for a ride, and a good time was had by all. Afterward, he set them down gently on their own two feet; then he gave ’em a sweet smile, a wink from his Newman blue eyes, and a swat on the backside. How they handled things from there was not his problem. Well, not usually.

  This evening, as he trained his gaze on the pretty target two blocks ahead, McDougal contemplated the horrifying memory of what a tasty, busty little psychopath had done to his Kawasaki Ninja ZX-14. He’d almost bitten through his own tongue when he saw it. Even now, three days later and a thousand miles from Miami, he winced.

  Pink. She’d painted the Ninja pink. His jaw worked.

  Why? He’d taken her to nice places. He’d never made any promises. He’d given her—if he did say so himself—the mother of all orgasms. And just because he hadn’t called afterward . . .

  Okay, so maybe he wasn’t much of a gentleman. He’d never advertised himself as one. But . . .

  Pink.

  It was cold. Beyond cold. Vicious brutality without conscience was what it was. Carnage.

  He was tempted to press charges. But then he pictured the cop’s face as he filled out the report, and he deep-sixed that bright idea.

  Focus, you bonehead.

  Natalie Rosen, his mark this evening, had nothing to do with the destruction of his bike. An art restorer and probable thief, she lurched left on the crowded Manhattan sidewalk between Ninety-second and First. The door of Reif’s opened and she vanished inside.

  Reif’s? She didn’t look the type for a seedy old neighborhood bar run by three generations of Irish. Reif’s was a blue-collar place in a now-affluent neighborhood. North of Ninety-sixth got dicey as it eased into Spanish Harlem, but south of Ninety-sixth had become gentrified. Still, there were a few old holdouts like Reif’s, where electricians and plumbers mingled with white-collar yuppies and argued politics in a haze of dust mingled with decades of lingering stale cigarette smoke. The Yankees, the Mets, the mayor, the weather . . . those were typical topics.

  Reif’s was situated on the ground floor of a six-story apartment building. It smelled beer sodden and mildewy, but it was also homey and offered a sort of tobacco-stained comfort that suited McDougal . . . but not a girl like Natalie Rosen.

  Natalie had dark, glossy, straight hair and dark, serious eyes that looked a little at odds with her snub, lightly freckled nose. She was cute in a repressed, academic sort of way. Not tweedy or preppy—more earnest and artsy. The chick wore a lot of black, but there was a difference between severe New York black and sultry Miami black.

  New York black covered, while Miami black revealed. New York black involved tights, turtlenecks, scarves, and coats. Miami black involved thongs, skirt lengths just shy of illegal, spike heels, and fishnets—particularly on some of those little Brazilian hotties, with their bras clearly showing under skimpy tops. Oh, yeah. McDougal was a big fan of Miami black.

  Focus. He frowned. What in the hell was a girl with an art degree from Carnegie Mellon doing in a beer-soaked joint like Reif’s? Surely not unloading a $2 million necklace that had once belonged to Catherine the Great.

  It was his job to find out, but he needed to hang back for a few. Let her get settled. Have a drink or two. He pegged her for the type that would walk into a dusty place like Reif’s and order, say, white wine. A little naive. A little out of touch with reality.

  Twenty minutes later, McDougal shoved his hands into his pockets, crossed the street, and entered Reif’s. He glimpsed her immediately: Natalie perched on one of the old, backless wooden barstools, staring sightlessly into the dregs of a short glass of what looked like whiskey on the rocks.

  His opinion of her went up a notch—at least she hadn’t ordered a white Zinfandel in an Irish pub. Of course, his opinion of her didn’t matter much—he’d get what he came for, regardless. He always did.

  In all that black, Natalie looked as if she’d smell of sulfur or mothballs, but as she dug into her nylon messenger bag for a tissue, he caught a waft of fresh laundry detergent and a tinge of 4711, a cologne his sisters used to wear.

  Over the bar hung a four-foot-by-eight-foot mirror that reflected, among other things, Natalie’s drawn, downcast face. Something was on the lady’s mind.

  McDougal nodded to the bartender and mounted the stool next to hers. It was covered in cheap green vinyl and had seen better days, but the upside of worn was comfortable. It announced his presence by creaking under his solid 180 pounds, but Natalie didn’t look at him.

  Didn’t matter. She would. Women always did, eventually—not that in every case they liked what they saw. Some of the smarter ones summed him up as a player in one glance and dismissed him. Others focused on the bare fourth finger of his left hand. The fun ones started shovel ing verbal shit at him immediately. Which type was she?

  As Eric casually ordered a Guinness, he watched her in the mirror. Watched as her pointed little chin came up and she pushed some hair out of her face and cut her eyes toward him, her lashes at half-mast.

  Then came her first impression, the undercover evaluation of his six-foot-two frame, his muscular forearms sprinkled with freckles and golden hair, his denim-clad legs. She took in the brown leather jacket and the reddish brown stubble on his chin, then the grin that widened as he watched her.

  That was when she realized that he’d seen her inspecting him in the mirror. Her gaze flew to his in the reflected surface and froze. A slow blush crept up her neck—a blush so fierce he could see it even in the dim light of Reif’s.

  “Hi,” McDougal said, turning to face her with the full wattage of his grin.

  She blinked, stared, then looked away as the blush intensified. She put a hand up to her neck as if to cool the skin off. “H-hi.”

  She was a babe in the woods . . . without mosquito repellent. He prepared to feast on her tender young naïveté.

  “I didn’t mean to embarrass you,” McDougal said, taking his grin down a few notches, from wolfish to disarming.

  She seemed to have no adequate response to that.

  “It’s very normal to check out the guy sitting next to you. He could be a vagrant, a pervert, or a serial killer.”

  She laughed reluctantly at that, and it transformed her face from mildly pretty to dazzling. She’d gone from librarian to . . . to . . . Carla Bruni in a half second flat. It was McDougal’s turn to stare. The French First Lady had nothing on her.

  “So, which one are you?” she asked, evidently emboldened.

  “Me? I’m just a tourist, sweetheart. The only cereal killing I do involves a bowl of raisin bran or cornflakes.”

  That got a smile. “Where are you from?”

  “Miami.”

  “Florida,” she said, sounding wistful. “I’d love to be on a beach right now, not in the city.”

  “You work here?”

  Natalie nodded. “I’m a restoration artist.”

  “A restoration artist,” McDougal repeated. “As in, they call you to touch up the Sistine Chapel?” He nodded at the bartender and pointed to her glass.

  “Something like that. But I specialize in rugs and tapestries, not painting.” A wary expression crossed her face as the drink was set in front of her. “Um, I didn’t order—”

  “It’s on me,” McDougal said.

  “Oh, but . . .”

  “What’s your name?”

  She hesitated. “Natalie.”

  “Natalie, it’s just a drink. Not a big deal. ’Kay?”

  “Thank you,” she said after a long pause. She curled her small but competent hand around the glass. “Actually, you have no idea how much I need this.”

  Yes, I do. First heist, honey? It always shreds your nerves. But all McDougal said was, “You’re welcome. I’m Eric.” And he proceeded to chat her up while she got tipsy on her second whiskey.

  Really, he should be ashamed of himself.


  Natalie Rosen’s eyes had gone just a little fuzzy, her gestures loose and her posture relaxed. She’d also gotten wittier. “So, you said you’re a tourist. Are you an accidental one?”

  He smiled. “Nope. I do have a purpose. Are you an accidental barfly?”

  “No.” She averted her gaze, then looked down into her whiskey and murmured, “I’m an accidental thief.”

  “Do tell,” McDougal said, showing his teeth and signaling the bartender again. If he had his wicked way, she’d soon be a naked thief.

  Natalie took a sip of her third Jameson’s whiskey and had a short debate with her smarter, more sober side. Hadn’t her parents always told her not to talk to strangers? Not to accept candy—or whiskey—from them?

  However, the drink had come straight from the hand of the bartender, so she knew there was nothing funny in it. And she desperately, urgently needed to talk to someone about the crisis she faced. She could pay a shrink . . . or she could talk to this startlingly good-looking stranger with the laser blue eyes. Not like she’d ever see the man again after tonight, which was kind of a shame.

  Eric had a young Paul Newman’s features but not his cool, distant countenance. Instead he possessed the freckles and warm mischief of Prince Harry. He also had the prince’s ginger hair, but his skin was unusually bronzed for a redhead, rather than milk white. His looks bordered on irresistible, made even more so by his air of total confidence.

  If Natalie was being honest, she didn’t know whether she was slightly drunk on the stranger’s looks or on the whiskey. Probably both. There he sat, one reddish eyebrow raised, looking intrigued and attracted—to her, of all people—and inviting her to tell her story. She had the sensation of acting out someone else’s page in a script.