Ride with Me

She hadn’t gone to him, but she had wanted to.

Lexie understood now that she’d never been in love before, not really. Back in college, when she’d caught Richard cheating on her, any hurt she’d felt had been drowned out by a righteous fury that had carried her through the painful months following the end of their engagement. Then Psycho Peter’s behavior had frightened her so much, all she’d felt after she escaped him was relief.

Since she hadn’t been in love before, she didn’t have any experience with what it was supposed to feel like when it ended. Once she’d decided she and Tom had no future, she’d expected her heart to break, but she’d also expected it to submit. It astonished her to find that her heart refused to go down without a fight.

Why? her heart wanted to know. Why won’t this work? Why can’t you have him? The closer they got to Yorktown, the more insistent her heart became that whatever had once stood between her and Tom, he wasn’t the same person anymore, and neither was she. He’d trusted her with his secrets. He’d opened up to the world around him. Maybe he was ready to let go of his burden of remorse and love her. Her heart told her she had to find out, because if she didn’t, she’d be sorry for the rest of her life.

So while she might have looked like she was just lying on the bed pining, she was in fact steeling herself to do … something. She just didn’t know what yet.

And then Tom knocked on the door.

When she opened it, he was leaning against the jamb, wearing his same soft, familiar black T-shirt and khaki shorts. So damn gorgeous, she couldn’t stop herself from cataloging him. His hair was still wet from the shower, a little wavy, as long as she’d ever seen it. Colorado was the last place he’d bothered to get it cut. He’d shaved, which he rarely did in the afternoon. She could smell his shaving cream and soap. He had one hand in his pocket and a thick FedEx document envelope tucked beneath the opposite arm. When she finally raised her eyes to his face, there was a smile on his lips, and her pulse sprinted off the starting block.

“I thought you’d be cleaned up already, Marshall. You’re messing with my plan.”

She was a deer in the headlights. “Plan?” was the best she could do.

“I’m taking you out to dinner. It’s our last night, so you can’t say no. But you’re going to have to make yourself decent first.” He brushed past her, the brief contact making her blood sing, and stretched out on the nearest bed with his hands behind his head.

“I’m not sleeping with you,” she blurted out. The vision of him on the bed made it impossible for her to think of anything else. She wanted so badly to crawl on top of him and kiss him until everything went back to the way it was before. Why couldn’t she do that again?

Tom smiled, raking his eyes slowly over her body. “I haven’t asked, have I?”

“You’re asking right now.” She didn’t intend to return the smile, but her mouth had its own ideas.

He laughed. “Okay, you got me there. But I’ll be good. I won’t lay a finger on you unless you make the first move. Now go take a shower, and I’ll try not to die at the thought of you naked in there.” He closed his eyes.

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She stared at him for a moment, still disoriented. He was so cheerful, joking around like the other shoe wasn’t about to drop. “Tom, what is this?”

He kept his eyes shut, but he smiled again. “This is dinner, babe. Get a move on. I’m starving.”

What could she do but carry clean clothes into the bathroom and step into the shower? When the hot water hit her back, her arms broke out in goose bumps. Her skin was as sensitized to Tom in the next room as if he’d been standing a foot away, and her heart was thumping out a lust-crazed rhythm. It seemed an odd time for everything to be charged with sex, but then it had always been this way with Tom. The two of them could strike sparks off each other in a downpour.

They had in fact come close once in Kansas, laughing and kissing in the rain until they’d had to find a haystack to hide behind. She’d been on her knees when he entered her, forehead pressing against the hay, the smell of damp grass everywhere, and Tom had made her come so hard she’d thought she might black out. Her breath caught at the memory, and when she sucked in air, a keening gasp escaped her throat.

“No moaning in there, Marshall.” Tom’s voice came clearly through the thin wall. “A man can only take so much.”

Or what, you’ll come in after me? She had an inkling he would if she asked, and she wasn’t prepared for that. Her heart was bursting with hope, her body ready to melt down, but her brain was still in charge. Barely.

When she emerged from the bathroom, dressed and ready to go, Tom sat up. “Well, that was painful,” he said. “What’s your pleasure?”

She stared at him, not a single intelligent thought in her head. “Huh?”

“You want pizza or Mexican?”

This question, at least, she could handle. “Mexican.”

They walked to the restaurant along a busy thoroughfare, picking their way through weeds and broken glass on the edge of the road. She wondered for the thousandth time on this trip why Americans had let the car kill off the sidewalk. Without a sidewalk, you didn’t have a place at all, just a disconnected jumble of giant box stores and chain restaurants, the people moving from one to the next in the sanitized bubbles of their vehicles, hardly interacting.

“A sidewalk would go a long way toward giving the Center of the Universe some curb appeal,” Tom muttered.

She smiled to herself. When had she started thinking his grumpy thoughts?

The restaurant was loud and busy, the kind of place that had orange queso and entirely too much crap on the walls. Tom got them celebratory margaritas, and they put in their orders with the bored-looking waiter. Then they were alone together, and it was time for her to say something. Only she didn’t know what to say.

He preempted her again, pushing the envelope he’d brought along in her direction.