Ride with Me

“If I buy them, will you wear them?” he asked with a mischievous smile.

“I’ll lose all my feminist street cred,” she grumbled. But she accepted the shoes and tried them on, and when she saw the way his eyes followed her as she took a turn around the store, she let him add them to his pile of purchases.

They’d made it to Silverthorne, which was half lovely Colorado mountain town, half traffic-choked outlet mall. Much to Lexie’s surprise, Tom had proposed they go shopping, claiming he needed to replace his threadbare shorts and T-shirts. He’d managed that pretty quickly, and so had she, but then he saw her eyeing some girlier clothes in a window and had steered her into the store, promising to take her out to dinner if she bought something nice to wear. When she’d complained she didn’t have space in her bag for frivolous clothes, he’d told her to mail them home or throw them away if it was such a problem, and she’d caved and gone along with it.

She was getting used to going along with Tom’s whims. After their night in Steamboat Springs—a night that had easily vaulted to number one on Lexie’s all-time sexual top ten, beating out nine other nights that also featured Tom, Tom, and only Tom—they’d spent a lazy morning in bed with a huge room-service breakfast, and then they’d lumbered back onto their bikes and followed the Great Divide Trail to Breckenridge.

She’d been nervous about that, but Tom had talked her into it. Having done the whole Divide trail alone two summers ago—a mountain bike journey of twenty-five hundred miles from Banff in the north to the border at New Mexico—he’d assured her the section they’d be following was all dirt roads she could manage easily on her touring bike. So she’d agreed to take the plunge, though part of her couldn’t help but fret about detouring around more than a hundred miles of the TransAm.

Guessing what she was worrying about, he’d laughed at her. “We’re still going all the way across the country. It counts even if you don’t follow the exact mapped route every single step of the way, you know.”

It went against her nature, but she had to admit he had a point.

Tom was starting to have a knack for working out what she was worrying about and offering just the right reassurance. It was disarming to realize how well he knew her. Certainly better than any of her friends back in Portland. Probably as well as any member of her family. It made her nervous to admit they shared that sort of intimacy, but she liked it, too. To a point.

He was right about the Great Divide detour, at any rate. It had totally been worth it. A few miles out of Steamboat, they’d started winding through the woods on a narrow, isolated dirt road. The canopy of shady hardwoods overhead made Lexie feel as if she were passing through a fairytale of the rural West. It was different than anything they’d seen on the wide-open highways of the TransAm, and she’d found herself as enchanted with the route as she was with the stories she’d managed to coax Tom into telling her about some of his adventures with black bears, hair-raising descents along narrow single-track trails, and emergency repairs in the middle of nowhere.

She’d let go of her inhibitions about touring almost as easily as she’d dropped her inhibitions in the shower, with equally amazing results. It turned out she liked not really knowing where the road was going to take them next, not keeping precise track of how many miles they put in or how fast they were going, not having an exact destination figured out for the day. When you toured Tom’s way, it was perfectly okay to stop in the middle of the morning and make love under the shade of a willow tree by a stream, because stopping suddenly wasn’t a delay on the way to their destination, it was the whole point. It was fine to take a break for milkshakes at the bottom of the pass just because a huckleberry milkshake sounded really good.

And it was okay to admit you were starting to feel something for your riding partner that was maybe a little bigger than infatuation. Scary, but still okay. Especially when your riding partner was more relaxed and open—even flirtatious with you, surprise, surprise—than you’d seen him in all the miles you’d traveled together.

She supposed that explained how, after almost two months in shorts and outdoor sandals, she found herself in a ruffled black skirt, a short-sleeved white blouse, and the heels, being escorted to dinner at Silverthorne’s finest restaurant by a handsome stranger in black slacks and a gray pinstriped dress shirt. She’d grown so used to Tom in beat-up shorts and a T-shirt, she actually found herself nervous and blushing around this charming, urbane guy who selected wine off the list with confidence born of experience and who looked at her across the table like he wanted to eat her for dessert.

“I want to know more about corporate Tom,” she said as they lingered over coffee. “Did you travel much?” She’d found she could get him to tell her a bit about those days, so long as she didn’t ask anything too direct.

He nodded and took a sip of wine. “A fair amount, yeah. I got to take the company plane. You ever fly on a private jet?” She shook her head. “It’ll spoil you for commercial travel forever.”

“That luxurious, eh?”

“Nah, it’s just a plane with leather seats. What’s great about it is you don’t have to check in or go through security or sit next to some old lady who smells like talcum powder and wants to show you pictures of her grandchildren. The food is pretty good, too.”

She laughed. “Sounds perfect for a Scrooge like you.”

He smiled in response, but then he caught sight of something over her shoulder and the smile faded. For half a second, surprise, dismay, and regret played over his face in rapid succession. Then the steel cage he usually kept his emotions in slammed shut so hard she could practically hear it clang, and he went completely blank.

Lexie turned to see an attractive blond woman making her way to their table with a sunny, social smile. By the time she arrived, Angry Tom was back. He introduced the woman to Lexie as Beth, but that was about as far as he ventured into the realm of polite conversation. Though Beth struck Lexie as a perfectly nice woman who was genuinely pleased and excited to see Tom, he froze her out with curt replies to her questions and an expression so humorless that her cheerful smile soon cracked, faltered, and gave out under the pressure. When Beth finally encouraged Tom to keep in touch and fled to the safety of her table, Lexie was furious.

Not so much because he was being rude, though he was, and it was embarrassing. No, she was furious because she was sick of Tom walling her out, sick of letting him get away with retreating behind silence and a bad temper whenever anything happened that he didn’t like. He was acting like a spoiled high school student, and she wasn’t having it this time.

So after Tom paid the check in silence and guided her outside, she grabbed his elbow and asked him, “Who was that?”

“That was Beth,” he said gruffly, his eyes warning her he didn’t want to pursue the subject.

“That’s not what I’m asking, and you know it,” she shot back. She wasn’t afraid of Tom, and she didn’t have to handle him with kid gloves just because he was being an asshole.

“It’s none of your business,” he warned, stepping closer until he towered over her.

“I’m making it my business.” She kept her chin high and looked him in the eye, intending to hold him there until he told her something, anything to give her some insight into the secrets that made him so defensive. Because why should Tom get to hide when he was forcing her to be so vulnerable? How could she trust him if he was going to shut down every time he felt threatened?

But when their eyes met, she didn’t see the brick wall she’d expected to find there. Instead, for just a second, he let her see he was scared. And of course, because she was a sap for the guy, all she wanted to do was comfort him.

And of course, because he was an emotional icicle, when she softened, he froze up. “Don’t,” he said.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t look at me like that. Don’t care about me.” He threw the words at her, as if caring were the worst possible betrayal.

“It’s too late,” she whispered. But she didn’t think he heard her, because he was already walking away.