Dirtiest Little Secret
Where in the hell had he seen her? “Did you get lost on your way home from Manhattan, Ava?”
She tilted her head and held his gaze. “No. I’m here by design.”
“I’d say that design needs to go back to the drawing board.”
She smiled. A big, amused smile. The kind of smile he saw on toothpaste commercials.
“Where are you from?” he asked, his mind still searching.
Ava. Ava. Ava.
“I live in the city. My parents have a place here.”
He’d been right about Manhattan. “Here as in Devil’s Run?”
Humor lit her eyes as if the idea were absurd. “A little farther north.”
He’d nailed it. Greenwich was directly due north. And she lived in New York.
Greenwich, old money, Ava…
It all clicked. Ava Jennings.
Isaac’s worlds collided. Ava-fucking-Jennings in a biker bar. The universe tilted on its axis.
He leaned into the bar and searched her eyes. “Do I look familiar?”
He might be older, he might be wearing more scruff than usual, but when he visited his parents, people always recognized him.
Her smile flashed again, and her hand shifted in his to a far more intimate hold. A hold that made him realize he’d never put her hand down. “I’d like to see enough of you to say yes.”
A laugh he hadn’t known was coming rumbled in his throat. “I guess that would be a no.”
As kids, they’d spent many Sunday nights sitting across the table from each other at dinner while their fathers talked shop: his father building bridges, her father supplying the steel to construct those bridges. They’d been young, with her nose always stuck in a book, and sure those dinners became more and more infrequent as both companies grew, but still.
“I’m Isaac,” he told her, braced for her to connect the same dots he had.
“Isaac,” she repeated, her expression sultry. “That’s a nice name. Why don’t you sit? Tell me about yourself? I don’t know anything about bikes, but if you were my teacher, I’d be a very willing student.”
Isaac pulled his hand back. “You might want to be careful who you make that offer to around here. Just about every one of these guys will take you up on it.”
“What about you?” she asked.
“Not me.” He glanced around for Bix and found him at a table on the other side of the bar. “I’ve got business.” He slid his gaze over her one more time. Her curvy body had been poured into a little black skirt and a crimson off-the-shoulder blouse. The fabric molded to her breasts.
Man, she’d grown up nice. And every biker in this bar would want a piece of her.
“I’m serious,” he said. “Watch yourself here. You don’t belong, and they know it.”
3
Ava blew off the latest offer to hook up—this one from a fifty-something lizard-skinned man with faded tattoos and a basketball beer belly—and finished off her third vodka tonic.
Talk about a bust. Someone should have told her that very few biker dudes were hot biker dudes.
She let the glass snap against the bar and sighed. Katie had abandoned her for a charming ginger and was laughing up a storm with a group of bikers about twice her age. Just another sign Ava needed to let more of her inhibitions slide. But to what end? The only guy remotely interesting had turned her down cold.
His flat-out rejection had somehow taken the meager breeze from her confidence sails. All the determination she’d come with to fuck her cheating bastard of an ex-fiancé from her system had bottomed out.