Ride with Me

“Sure you were.”

She waited, counting to forty-six in her head before he spoke again.

“So are you going to answer me or not?”

Smiling inwardly, Lexie flopped onto her back again. “Why am I not married? I suppose because I have terrible taste in men.”

“Present company excluded,” he said with a slight smile.

“You said it, not me.”

“Let’s hear about some of these terrible men of yours.”

“You are so fishing.”

He nodded and copped to it at last. “I am.”

Though she couldn’t shake the feeling she was having a third-date conversation with a guy she’d already slept with more times than she could count, she humored him. “All right, let’s see. It all started with Barry Hubbard. He was my first boyfriend in high school. I met him in show choir. He was totally dreamy, with these big brown eyes and a lock of chestnut hair that fell just so over his forehead. Nice as pie, and funny, too. And he had perfect pitch. There was only one problem with Barry.”

“Gay?” Tom guessed.

“As a maypole,” she confirmed. “In retrospect, the show choir thing probably should have been a clue. Poor Barry, he’s a lot happier now that he’s out. He and his partner still send me a card at Christmas.”

She considered where to go from Barry, skipping over a few dull high school boyfriends in favor of the more impressive heartbreak of her college years. “Then there was college, with the usual drunken hookups and crushes on floppy-haired guys in my English classes. The big disappointment in college was Richard. We were going to get married after graduation. He seemed like the perfect guy—right up until he started sleeping with my roommate. That breakup was not so friendly. He got struck off the Christmas card list when he told all my friends it was my fault he cheated on me because I was such a frigid bitch.”

“What a jerk,” Tom said, shaking his head.

“I know.”

“I can’t believe he called you frigid.”

He was smiling down at her, pleased with his own wit. She gave him a playful shove, which was about as effective as shoving a brick wall. “Knock it off, or I won’t tell you the rest.”

“Fine, I’ll be good. I don’t want to miss any of the riveting details of your romantic disappointments.” His finger returned to tracing tiny, shivery circles of sensation on her hipbone.

“Okay, so after the Richard heartbreak, I dated here and there, but I was just starting out as a teacher, and I didn’t have a lot of free time. It wasn’t until my fourth year teaching that I met Peter. He was the new assistant principal at my school, and within a few weeks he was pursuing me pretty aggressively. The relationship got intense fast. He asked me to marry him three weeks after we met—we’d been seeing each other nearly every night—and we even set a wedding date. And then … then it got a little too intense.” She paused, recognizing there wasn’t any way to make the story of what had happened with Peter into something funny.

Tom stilled. “Did he hurt you?”

“Not physically, no. But he became controlling and mean, and I think it was probably just a matter of time. I got out before things went that far, but I had to get a restraining order and change schools to escape him.”

Tom put his arm around her and pulled her back against him, kissing her shoulder. “Sorry. You don’t have to talk about this.”

She shrugged. “It’s okay now. I mean, he’s not on the Christmas card list either, but he didn’t do any permanent damage. I took a year off from relationships before I let my friends set me up on a few blind dates, but lately I’ve pretty much given up on that, too. It just doesn’t seem worth the effort anymore. I want to ride, you know? I want to go places and do things

. Most of the guys I meet, their idea of an adventure is a cruise in the Caribbean. Which is fine if that’s your thing, but …”

She looked up through the screen in the ceiling of the tent. The sky was deep blue-purple, and thunder was rumbling somewhere nearby, but the air remained still. Lying here naked beside Tom, watching the weather arrive, it was hard to remember Portland or to formulate an acceptable explanation for why she wasn’t married and living an entirely different life. She wasn’t doing that because she’d wanted to be here, doing this. She’d wanted Tom before she’d even met him.

But wanting was wanting—you had to balance it against reality. In reality, the painful end of whatever this was between them was coming at her just as surely as the rain and lightning were on their way. She and Tom were in the calm before the storm. The only thing she could do was enjoy it while it lasted.

So she shrugged, sloughing off the gloomy turn their conversation had taken with one gesture. “I stopped looking for Prince Charming and bought a vibrator.”

Tom perked up at the word “vibrator,” making her smile. What was it with guys and sex toys? “Don’t get too excited. I didn’t bring it along.”

“Why not?” he asked, his eyes sparkling with amusement.

“Too much weight,” she deadpanned. “Dick is huge.”