I consider her closely before taking her small hand in my own. Mine envelops hers easily, and I think the feeling must make her nervous because she starts babbling again before I give her my name.
“So…I’d like to make it clear that I’m not the type of woman who just hops on random guys’ motorcycles. Not usually, anyway. I guess you could say I’m currently in the middle of a bit of a mess and was overwhelmed, and you sitting there was an escape option I couldn’t resist.” She looks up toward the night sky and sighs. “God, what is wrong with me?”
Obviously, I, personally, have not a fucking clue what’s going on with her.
“I probably seem nuts, don’t I?” Her green eyes meet mine. “Like a total lunatic. I mean, who does that? Who just sprints out of a work party and hops on some complete stranger’s bike? Holy moly, I’m totally losing it!”
She turns on her heel and begins to pace in front of me. After a few groans and even more sighs, she eventually stops and turns to face me again.
“You don’t say much, do you?”
The assertion is obvious, but her comfort in voicing it is much less so. Most people are afraid of me—something about the silence makes them think I’m based in sin. I raise my eyebrows, and she sighs briefly before mixing it with a laugh.
“That’s…that’s good. You don’t ramble in circles like me, which I have to tell you is not always convenient.” Her words are open and honest, and by the giant smile on her face, it’s obvious she is mostly just amused with herself than anything else. “It can get you into some real pickles, actually, and I’ve got the stories to prove it. Some real foot-in-the-mouth scenarios, you know?”
I smile. I can’t fucking help it. There’s something so purely honest about her. It’s endearing.
“I bet.”
She nods enthusiastically as if I’ve just delivered a moving address to the nation. “Exactly! You get it. So, you don’t have an obsession with hearing yourself speak,” she states, and I nod. “That’s freaking admirable. All the men I’ve ever known in my life are blabbermouths.”
“The guy back at the casino?”
Her brow furrows in confusion. “What guy?”
“The guy you were running from.”
“I wasn’t running from—” She pauses midsentence, and her eyes go wide for the briefest of moments before a shocked laugh jumps from her lips. “Oh my God, no. I wasn’t running from Duncan. I might’ve abruptly sprinted away from him while he was doing his usual flirting routine, but I definitely wasn’t running from him. He’s just a coworker. Nothing more than that.”
My eyes narrow, and she starts to pace again, her earlier agitation coming back with a vengeance.
“I was running from something much more life-altering than the office flirt. Something that I can’t actually run from… So, I guess, in a way, I was attempting to run from my own stupidity, but as you can see, I can’t really run away from myself. I just…just thought maybe I could run from tonight, you know?”
I don’t have a fucking clue. This woman is intriguing, but also confusing as hell, and I don’t have a scrap of the time and energy it would take to figure her out.
But I don’t have to crack the code of her innermost workings to be a little bit of what she needs tonight. To be an escape from reality. Surely my brothers can handle keeping themselves alive for one night without me. They’re all grown.
Mind already made up, I pull my cell phone out of my pocket and shoot off a message.
Me: Something came up. Go ahead and start tonight’s festivities without me. Catch up with you later.
Instantly, Remy responds with a, What are you talking about, bro?, but I promptly lock the screen and move my attention back to a still-pacing Daisy.
I hold out my helmet again and jerk my chin to the space behind me.
“Get on.”
“Get on?” She repeats my words, surprise evident in her voice. “Why? Where are we going?”
“Away from the Strip, and away from tonight. You in?”
She considers me for a long moment, her eyes positively churning with the angst of endless possibilities. Whatever’s driving her inside, though, it wins.
Taking the helmet from my hands, she nods and swings a leg over the bike again, leaning into my back. I pause before firing it up, three words making my chest rumble under her hands.
“My name’s Flynn.”
Daisy
Bright lights dance through the dark window, and a car’s headlights flash by on the street. I follow the stimuli like a gnat searching for a place to land, even with an entire rectangle-shaped bar and several tables beyond that between me and the outside.
The truth is, I haven’t known what to say since my new friend Flynn pulled up outside this little bar on a quiet street removed from the busy Vegas Strip. The glitz, the glamour—we left it all behind for life just outside the bubble, and with the way he is, that means neither one of us has uttered a syllable in over twenty minutes.