by Ruthie Knox
Whatever she had planned, she was finding it highly amusing. Her lips kept twitching with the tiniest of smiles as she rearranged the bottles, glancing at him every now and again with a twinkle in those whiskey eyes. She kept it up until she’d examined all the bottles and lined them up deliberately, seven little soldiers in a row dividing his side of the table from hers.
Then she brought her eyes to his and raised an eyebrow. Ready?
He shrugged. Knock yourself out.
Lexie picked up the bottle of hot sauce at the far end of the line and presented it to him in her palm for inspection. He knew this one. It was a pretty tame West Indian picante, really more of a salsa. She made a big production of unscrewing the lid, selecting the perfect chip from the basket, dribbling it with hot sauce, and eating it. When she was finished, she squinted her eyes and compressed her lips in a remarkably good likeness of Clint Eastwood’s steely expression from the spaghetti westerns, aimed at the hot sauce bottle with her index finger, and shot it. Pow.
Caught off guard by the playful gesture, Tom smiled. He hadn’t seen this side of her before. Who knew Ms. Annotated Route Map could be funny?
The waitress arrived then with their drinks, and Lexie sat back in the booth as Tom ordered his food, busying herself with squeezing the lime into her Corona and taking a long swallow. When it was her turn, she requested a burrito with the works and handed the waitress her menu, for once without engaging her in conversation.
As soon as the woman departed, Lexie turned her attention back to Tom. She leaned forward and gave the bottle of hot sauce she’d just shot a push in his direction, raising both eyebrows at him in an obvious dare. You man enough for this?
Now he got it. Lexie was challenging him to a duel.
4
The glimmer in Tom’s eyes and the set to his jaw said, You’re on. Lexie could barely restrain herself from doing a little victory dance in the booth. He didn’t know it yet, but she had his number now. She had never met a hot sauce she couldn’t handle. Sooner or later, they’d get to one that was too hot for him, and then he’d slip up and say something, and she’d win.
Smirking, Tom found himself a chip, sauced it, and took a bite. He obviously rated his chances of coming out on top a lot higher than Lexie did. She couldn’t detect any signs of discomfort as he chewed, but then again this first selection hadn’t been anything to write home about. It had a little bit of pop, but hardly enough to merit inclusion on the table. She supposed the weenies deserved condiments, too. Tom leaned forward and knocked over the bottle with a flick of his finger against his thumb, then glanced at her with a cocky curve to his lips.
Lexie got the message: You shot it. I killed it.
Next up.
The second bottle in the row was a chipotle-garlic novelty sauce called Bite Me. It was just hot enough to make her mouth water, with a nice roasted garlic aftertaste. She’d have to remember to put some on her burrito later. After she swallowed and put an imaginary slug through the bottle, Tom took his turn and knocked it flat.
Next.
Number three, which claimed to be “pure death,” was a big disappointment. She’d tried to rank the sauces from wimpiest to hottest, but it was difficult. Hot sauce manufacturers were such a bunch of braggarts. Because this one had let her down, Lexie shot it with both guns and blew the smoke off her index fingers before reholstering them at her hips. That coaxed a full-size smile out of Tom, which upset her equilibrium a heck of a lot more than the first three hot sauces had done. There was something so infectious about this man when he smiled that she beamed back at him without even thinking about it, feeling the tension that had been coiling tight in her chest start to unwind. It was a wonderful, heady sensation.
And then she came to her senses and realized she was sitting there grinning at Tom like a toddler with an ice cream cone. Whoops. This was serious business. She couldn’t let him dazzle her with those white teeth and laughing eyes of his when there was a battle to be won.
Give the man his hot sauce.
Tom smiled a little wider, shaking his head at her antics, and prepared his next chip. While he ate it, she tried not to look at his mouth. And failed. Then he tipped back his head and drank from his beer, and she willed herself not to stare at his throat. And failed. She wanted to reach over and run a fingertip along his jawline, testing the rasp of his midday stubble against her skin. He was the most hypnotically attractive man she’d ever met.
Snap out of it, Lexie. Head in the game.
Number three hit the tabletop with a thud, spinning in lopsided circles for a few seconds. Clearly Tom hadn’t thought much of it either.
The fourth sauce vaulted them from the farm team straight to the big leagues. The bottle promised a “venomous extract,” and once she’d chewed enough to bring the flavor into contact with her taste buds, she did indeed feel as if she’d been snake-bit. Her mouth watered, which was no big deal, but her eyes watered, too, and Tom noticed and smiled again, damn him. Lexie drew a deep breath into her lungs, her sinuses as roomy as they’d ever been, and swallowed the tasty, fiery lump. Pointing her finger, she dispatched the bottle with a silent bam. She even managed to count to ten before picking up her beer and draining what was left of it in five long swallows.
Your turn, cowboy.
After the snake-bite chip passed into his mouth, depositing a bit of salt at one corner of his lips, she waited for Tom to faint, flap his hand in front of his face, turn red, something, but he ate it as impassively as if it had been covered in cheese. His eyes didn’t even water. Possibly his nostrils flared slightly, but that could just as easily have been her imagination. And once he’d swallowed the chip, he pursed his lips, scratched his chin thoughtfully, and reached for another one. If they’d been speaking to each other, he’d have said “Mmm” as the second chip loaded with snake sauce made its way into his mouth. Instead, he said it with his eyes. Mmm.
He was mocking her. He knocked the bottle down.
Number five promised enough heat to burn the paint off a Sherman tank. The first four sauces had awakened her senses, and now as Lexie dressed her chip she felt curiously switched on, aware of the conversations taking place at the tables around them and the cool, smooth feel of the glass bottle under her fingertips, the smell of onions on a grill back in the kitchen, and the scent of Tom across the table, all clean sweat and woodsy soap and something spicy that made her want to lean over and breathe him in while she licked that stray grain of salt off the corner of his mouth. Weren’t chili peppers an aphrodisiac? Was that why she was finding this whole exchange positively titillating?
Hard to say. Doesn’t matter. Focus on the chip, girl.
The paint-stripper sauce was incendiary. As soon as it touched her tongue, she broke out in a sweat, sucking air into her lungs and squirming in her seat while she chewed, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of squealing Omigod omigod omigod, even though she wanted to. She did bounce up and down in the booth a little bit, but only because she’d have passed out otherwise. Chew, chew, chew. Jeezy Pete, this was the world’s largest chip, how many more times was she going to have to chew the freaking thing before she could swallow it? Breathe in, breathe out, chew some more, and … there. She got it down. With both hands flat on the table and her eyelids squeezed shut, she focused on breathing and counted to twenty.
When she opened her eyes again, Tom caught her expression and burst out laughing. It was a low, rumbling laugh, as dead sexy as the rest of him. Yum. In a remarkably kind gesture under the circumstances, he passed his beer across the table to her. Lexie grabbed at it gratefully and knocked it back, a smile on her face as her mouth wrapped around the lip of the bottle where his tongue had recently been. She killed the beer, shot the paint-stripping sauce, and waited for Tom to take his turn. Her chest was heaving, her skin flushed, but she’d eaten the chip without saying a word, so she was still a contender.
Tom signaled the waitress, who brought them another round along with their burritos.
They ignored the food, both knowing the unwritten rules of this challenge forbade recreational eating until the contest had come to an end. Solemn as a gravedigger, Tom sauced up his chip and ate it. She waited. At first, nothing. Seriously? Nothing? He wasn’t going to react at all? But then she looked closer and recognized what was happening. Tom had turned to stone. His jaw was moving, his nostrils definitely flaring this time, but every other part of him had gone rigid, his biceps drawn taut and his fingers clamped tight around the edge of the table. He was in agony.
And forgive her for being a sadist, but it was sexy as all get-out. While Tom fought to keep his reaction on a tight leash, sweat beading at his temples, all she could think about was how much fun she’d be having if she were the one doing the torturing, how fantastic it would feel to push this man right past the bounds of his self-control. This was what Tom would look like right before he came. Yum.
He swallowed, and this time he did reach for his beer, drinking about half of it in one go. Then he flicked the paint-stripper sauce onto the table to join its fallen compatriots, leaving two men standing.
With growing apprehension, Lexie picked up Steve’s Ultra Hot Death Sauce. If the label spoke the truth, this stuff was eight hundred times hotter than a jalapeño. That was a lot of hot. But Tom was over there—rather a lot of hot himself—and he was smirking at her again, and she’d be damned if she’d back down now.
Lexie had a hard time getting the Death Sauce out of the bottle, and in the end she had to hand her chip to Tom and make him hold it while she whacked the glass with the heel of her hand. The result was a larger-than-strictly-necessary glob of hot sauce on the chip, but she forged ahead. Surely an extra eighth of a teaspoon wasn’t going to decide her fate. Tom fed the chip directly into her mouth, his dark eyes positively dancing with amusement.
As soon as the sauce hit her tongue, her taste buds dropped dead. You’d think that would be a good thing, but it didn’t make any difference, because on their way out those taste buds had rung the alarm, and now every nerve ending in her body was positively writhing in pain. Somewhere in the vicinity of her brain stem, a siren was going off so loudly she thought it might deafen her. Tears streaked down her face as she flapped her arms up and down helplessly like a giant flightless bird. Nose running, mouth full of napalm, she looked over at Tom. He was watching her closely, and his hand covered the bottom half of his face in a completely vain effort to conceal how very entertaining he found her predicament.
And she still hadn’t managed to start chewing.
All of her senses now pulled it together to deliver one urgent message: Spit it out spit it out spit it out spit it out!
No way was she spitting it out.
Eyes locked on Tom, Lexie took a deep breath, pinched her nostrils shut, and ground the chip to pulp between her molars. When she swallowed, the Death Sauce bolus incinerated her throat and blazed a trail toward her intestines, finally settling into position near her lungs, where it continued to send out steady licks of flame despite her attempts to douse it with the rest of her beer and a full glass of water.
It was now abundantly clear that this hot sauce duel was the stupidest idea she’d ever had. On the plus side, it was Tom’s turn. She drew her six-shooter on the Death Sauce bottle, curled her lip in disdain, and plugged it full of lead.
Tom had relaxed back in the booth, arms spread out along the top of the seat in a posture of sated sensuality. He couldn’t seem to stop smiling. Every time his face returned to neutral, his eyes sparked with a memory—presumably unflattering to Lexie—and his lips slowly curved their way upward again, his teeth peeking out, the laugh lines around his eyes crinkling. It was almost worth having choked down the Sterno chip to see him so happy for a change. Which was crazy, because she didn’t even like the guy, right?
Right. And now he was going to pay for mocking her. Leaning forward, she pushed the Death Sauce toward him.
Tom shook his head. “Oh no. I’m not eating that. I’m stubborn, but I’m not stupid.” He stuck his hand out. “You win. Well played, Marshall.”
“What?” Her voice came out a raspy croak. “You can’t quit now. It’s your turn!” She wasn’t ready to declare victory, not until Tom was brought to his knees. If he refused to eat the Death Sauce, he would be ending the contest on his own terms, which was the same as winning. True, she had him talking again. But he still had taste buds, which hardly seemed fair.
“I’m withdrawing,” he replied smoothly. Taking back his hand unshaken, he set the bottle of Death Sauce back in the caddy and picked up the seventh and final selection, Steve’s Stronger Than Death Hot Sauce. “I’ll eat this instead. It’s tasty.” And then he slid his plate over from the edge of the table, dispensed a small puddle of hot sauce onto the edge, dipped the corner of his burrito into it, and started to eat, his appetite apparently as healthy as ever.
“But that one’s supposed to be worse!”
“Nah, it’s all smoke and mirrors. Number six was the real killer.”
Lexie glared at him. “You knew.”
Tom chuckled in response. “Uh-huh. I’ve been here before, lots of times. And I come from a family of chili lovers. My dad is from Oaxaca. They like their peppers down there.”
“Why didn’t you say something? I can’t believe you let me eat that!”
Tom shrugged. “You’re a grown woman. I wanted to see if you could hack it. You should be proud—I’ve seen that stuff bring men to their knees. Anyway, now you have a good story from the trail to tell all those other bikers we meet.”
“This is not a good story,” she grumbled. “This is a humiliating story.” Somehow, she’d gotten what she wanted, but Tom had taken charge of the game, and she didn’t like it.
“All the best stories are humiliating, Marshall. If you’re not getting humiliated pretty regularly, it’s not an adventure.” He paused to take another bite out of his burrito, adding after he’d swallowed, “See how much fun it is to ride off the beaten path?”
“I think I’ll stick to the route from now on, thanks.”
He clucked his tongue at her. “That would be a real shame.”
“You’re horrible,” she complained, though she didn’t really mean it. The man sitting across from her was turning out to be a good deal more likable than she ever would’ve imagined.
Tom sipped his beer and set it down on the table. “I can be nice,” he said, his voice pitched low and intimate. And then he smiled again, slow and sexy this time, and she realized she was in really big trouble. Because this wasn’t Angry Tom—this was somebody else. Somebody he’d kept under wraps for three days. And she was more than attracted to this Tom. She wanted him bad.
It wouldn’t do at all. She couldn’t ride across the country with Tom if she wanted to jump his bones. She needed a riding partner, not a—well, not whatever Tom would be if she slept with him. A hassle, that’s what he’d be. He’d start thinking he could call all the shots, make her follow him off the route for burritos and beer when they were supposed to be riding all the way to Eugene this afternoon. No. This was her trip, and no way was she letting that happen.
She needed Angry Tom back. Angry Tom she could totally handle. He wasn’t much fun, but he was no threat.
The problem was, she didn’t know how to put the hottie back in the bottle.
5
McKenzie Bridge, Oregon, to Prineville, Oregon. 367 miles traveled.
They spent the morning climbing. It was twenty-seven miles uphill from their campsite to the top of McKenzie Pass, nine of them a long, slow, steep grind to the summit. Tom took the lead, sometimes cranking along in a low gear, sometimes shifting up and standing on the pedals for a while to give his legs and hands something different to do. Though the scenery improved as they ascended, it was tedious riding, leaving his mind free to turn over the problem of Lexie.
They’d been riding together for a week, and so far, they’d only encountered a handful of other people who were riding the TransAm west to east
. The vast majority of riders who decided to test their mettle against the trail followed it in the opposite direction, in part because it was still early in the season to be camping in Oregon. Overnight temperatures often dropped into the forties, and the occasional random June snowfall wasn’t unheard of. Most of the bikers he and Lexie had met so far had been locals.
All of which meant Tom hadn’t made any headway toward finding Lexie a new escort. The first candidate had looked at her like he wanted to eat her with a spoon, so that guy was out. Then there was the married couple from East Germany. They were friendly, but their English had been barely passable. He’d briefly entertained the hope that Lexie spoke German, but she hadn’t been able to manage more than guten Tag, and he could hardly leave her with folks she couldn’t communicate with. None of the other riders they’d encountered were planning to go all the way to Virginia, so they were disqualified automatically.
If he ever met Mr. Lexie, he was going to give the man a piece of his mind for sticking him with this protection gig. What kind of husband turned his wife over to some guy he’d never met? If Tom had a wife who looked like Lexie, he sure as hell wouldn’t let her out of his sight to ride across the country with a stranger for three months. Not willingly, anyway.
Of course, it was a moot point, because he never intended to have a wife again. Not after Haylie. Losing his wife to his brother had pretty thoroughly soured him on the concept of matrimony.
He’d wondered briefly that first day if Lexie really had a husband. But then he’d overheard her on the phone, affectionately teasing someone she called “James” about how he was missing out on the ride of a lifetime. Talking to her husband, she became the woman he’d been introduced to across a row of hot sauce bottles in Corvallis—funny and brassy, playful and clever. The kind of person anybody would want to spend time with.