Ride with Me

“What’s a guy like you doing working as a bike mechanic?”

“What do you mean, a guy like me?” He knew, but he wanted to hear what she’d say. He was curious about what she thought of him.

She narrowed her eyes. “You know what I mean. Are you going to make me spell it out?”

He angled his head in agreement. Now she was giving him the full-on Lexie glare, which he had to admit was kind of growing on him. She was cute, all pink-cheeked and sweaty from the climb. Even her throat flushed when she got really hot. He wondered if the right guy could make her blush all over.

You’ll have to ask her husband about that. Asshole.

She relented. “Fine, fish for compliments, see if I care. All I meant is, you’re obviously a smart guy. Shouldn’t you be doing something a little, you know, brainier than cleaning chains and building wheels?”

He wondered what she’d say if she knew about the Wharton MBA. Probably the same thing Taryn said, that he was wasting his talents playing around at being a grease monkey. Not that it mattered what either of them thought. He wasn’t wasting anything. He was simply choosing not to engage. It was different.

He’d played nice for long enough. “It’s honest work” was all he said. And then he took off uphill. “Race you to the summit.”

The sun beat relentlessly down on the tent, and even with the rain fly off and the inner flaps tied up to let air circulate through the screens, it had to be over ninety degrees. Lexie flopped from her side onto her back and sighed. She’d been trying to take a nap, but it was too hot to sleep in this stale, airless space. Too hot to read. Too hot to do much of anything.

After riding all day, she just wanted to rest for a while—to be horizontal and lazy in the shade. But campground amenities varied, and this one lacked both trees and shelter. The only place she could escape the sun was her tent, and the heat made it next to impossible to enjoy being in here.

She blamed the terrain. Now that they’d come down off the pass and left Sisters behind, they were firmly in the high desert. The forests of majestic ponderosa pines had disappeared, replaced by a subtly undulating landscape of a hundred shades of brown and gold—low-lying, scrubby vegetation and stands of twisted juniper. The air here smelled of sage, sharp and medicinal, and the dry heat made her skin feel parched and dusty even when she kept well hydrated. She and Tom had been trying to get their riding done as early in the day as possible, which kept them out of the worst of the heat but had the disadvantage of leaving a lot of time to kill after they set up camp in the afternoons and before the sun dropped below the horizon and the temperature began its daily forty- or fifty-degree swing.

Lexie needed extra time around Tom like she needed a hole in the head.

Not that he was so terrible these days. He was making an effort to be nice, at least intermittently. He was pretty bad at it, so most of their conversations went more or less like the one on McKenzie Pass—they started out prickly, got interesting, and then ended abruptly when she stumbled onto something Tom didn’t want to talk about and he either bolted or erected a stony wall of silence.

That wasn’t the problem. She could deal with Angry Tom. Actually, she found Angry Tom fairly entertaining.

No, the problem was that she was way too attracted to the other Tom.

It was only natural. The man was seriously good-looking, and in the afternoons he tended to putter around the campsite wearing nothing but low-slung black basketball shorts, flip-flops, and a baseball cap. For most men, this would have counted as showing off, but Tom gave off this laid-back vibe that told her he wasn’t thinking about how good he looked, he was just comfortable in his own skin. Which of course made him even sexier.

After they’d finished riding yesterday, he’d taken out his tools and tuned up first his bike, then hers, cleaning the chains, clicking through all the gears to make sure they were shifting smoothly, spinning the wheels to check the balance. She’d been sitting in the shade nearby trying to read a book, but her eyes had been drawn again and again to the play of the muscles across his shoulders, the deep indentation of his spine, the thin trail of hair down the center of his stomach that disappeared into the waistband of his shorts. He was lean and hard all over, and no matter how she tried, she hadn’t been able to stop looking at him, to stop her fingers from itching to touch him.

Man, she needed to get laid.

Lexie’s experience of sex wasn’t vast, but she’d been with enough men to have had some good sexual adventures along with the bad. She’d never slept with anyone who looked like Tom, though. To be honest, she hadn’t really believed people who looked like Tom existed in nonairbrushed form. And something told her that if he wanted to, Tom could blow even the best of her previous lovers out of the water.

Just thinking of the way he’d looked yesterday—his skin gleaming in the sun, his tattooed biceps flexing as he tightened a spoke—made her wet. Which, come to think of it, maybe she should do something about. She let her eyes drift closed and brought her fingers to one nipple, idly toying with it through her camisole as she imagined moving her palms over Tom’s broad back and downward, trailing her fingers down until they hit the waistband of his shorts and made their way around to his stomach. The synthetic, sweet smell of chain oil, and beneath it the scent of him—sweat and beer and his foresty camp soap. Such a man. She wanted to run her tongue along the sun-warmed skin of his spine as she slipped her fingers into his shorts and took him in her hand.

She closed her eyes, pinched her nipple, her hips rising a few inches off the sleeping bag as a pulse of desire shot through her. Sliding her free hand downward, she unzipped her shorts and worked her fingers into her panties to stroke herself experimentally. She was already slick and swollen, sensitive to the touch.

This was seriously wicked, lying here with her hand down her pants thinking about Tom. But it was delicious, too, and she had no intention of stopping.

He was a big man, five or six inches taller than her five-seven, and broad, not skinny like so many tall men were—he had to outweigh her by sixty or seventy pounds. He would be big all over. Big and thick and hard for her, and she would touch him until he was so desperate to be inside her that he made her stop. But she wouldn’t give him what he wanted, not exactly. Instead, she would come around to his front, push his shorts down, and take him in her mouth.

Lexie moaned quietly, imagining how he would taste, how it would feel to run her tongue over the smooth, soft skin at the tip, the steel of his erection against her palm. Sliding two fingers inside herself, she began to build a rhythm,

brushing her thumb over her clit each time she pulled out and picturing her lips dragging over his cock, in and out. He was so self-contained, so controlled, that the thought of Tom shaken up and helpless in her hands was an unbelievable turn-on. She heard the inarticulate sounds he would make as he fought to hold back, felt him running restless hands over her hair, her neck, her shoulders, needing to touch her. And then she’d grip his tight ass with both hands and suck him, doing with her mouth what she wanted to do with her body, dismantling him systematically until he tensed and lost control completely—

Lexie came suddenly and hard, her inner muscles clenching around her fingers as she turned her face into her camp pillow and bit back the sounds of her release. With small flicks of her thumb, she drew out the sensations until she couldn’t take it anymore, and then she collapsed onto her sleeping bag with a smile, her hand resting on the few inches of bare stomach where she’d shoved her shirt out of the way.

That had been fun. If she couldn’t have Tom, she could at least make use of the eye candy. And she most definitely would not, could not have Tom. What if she slept with him, and then things got all weird between them and he took off on her? Or he became controlling, like her last romance-gone-wrong? Peter had seemed so normal at first, so charming, but she’d had to start teaching at a different school to escape his attempts to control every little detail of her life, from what she wore to who she talked to—even after she’d dumped him. What if things went south with Tom, and she had to break off the trip and fly home to get away from him?

Unlikely, maybe, but it wasn’t worth the risk. She wasn’t in the market for any kind of a relationship, not after what she’d been through. For the duration of this trip, she’d just have to service her own needs. The TransAm mattered more than her libido.

Hearing footsteps, she quickly zipped up her shorts and raised herself onto her elbows, embarrassed at what she’d been doing. With the rain fly off and the tent flaps open, anyone could easily see in, and here she was in the middle of the day—

Well. Maybe she ought to have been a little more discreet, but it wasn’t like there had been anybody around.