by Ruthie Knox
He didn’t see that Lexie often. Most of the time, she was polite but distant with him, almost curt. But he’d been watching her, and he was starting to figure her out. She wasn’t as bad as he’d thought on the beach in Seaside. Yeah, she was hyper-organized, and she had this idea that if she didn’t follow all the touring rules, the whole ride would go to hell. Not a big risk-taker, our Mrs. Marshall. But she didn’t try to control him, and she wasn’t mean. Lexie had found a compliment for every stranger they’d encountered, and she went out of her way to convince them what a great trip she and Tom were having, as if she didn’t want anyone to worry about her.
It was her eyes that gave her away. In unguarded moments, they were troubled, even defeated. Lexie wasn’t having any fun.
Probably she was missing her husband. Probably she was wondering how she’d ended up on the trip she’d been looking forward to her whole life with a bastard like Tom.
Not that it was his problem. But it nagged at him anyway, and he kept catching himself trying to think of ways to cheer her up. It was the hero thing rearing its ugly head again. He thought of her as his responsibility, and he wanted to rescue her, even though he couldn’t imagine anyone less suited for the job than him. What Lexie needed was a riding partner who was young at heart, carefree by nature, and as talkative as she was. Somebody like Tom Vargas, actually. Too bad that guy wasn’t around anymore.
Tom could almost hear his sister tearing him a new one for the thought. When he’d spoken to her about Lexie, she’d been so coy, he’d wondered if the surprise she professed was genuine. It seemed entirely possible Taryn had suspected “Alex” was a woman all along. If she had, she’d fixed him up with Lexie for just this purpose—to drag him unwillingly out of his shell and force him to interact like the sociable person he used to be.
Imaginary Taryn had a point. When it came to Lexie, he’d been clinging to a coward’s attitude. Maybe he wasn’t the same guy he’d been before the trial, but he wasn’t a complete loser. He could manage the occasional friendly conversation with Lexie. And anyway, he’d told her in Corvallis he could be nice. It was probably time to give it a shot.
But what did he have to say to the woman? He couldn’t ask her any of the typical getting-to-know-you questions, because he’d been listening to her talk to other people for a week. He already knew she taught high school in Portland, that this was her first cross-country tour, and that her parents had met and fallen in love doing Bikecentennial back in 1976—a romantic story he’d heard her tell three separate times. He knew why she’d decided to ride west to east (more convenient) and why she’d chosen a trailer over panniers (more stable). He knew a lot about Lexie Marshall. He just didn’t know how to talk to her.
Since most cyclists liked to yammer on about their gear, he decided to try a bike question.
When he dropped back to ride beside her, she didn’t even look over at him. Not a great sign.
“So how do you like that saddle?” She had a Terry model designed specifically for women. He thought it looked overpadded and overdesigned, but he could keep his opinion to himself in the interest of being not-horrible.
She gave him a look laced with skepticism. “You’re attempting polite chitchat now? After a week? While we’re busting our asses climbing a mountain?”
Tom winced. He wasn’t any good at this. “Bad timing?”
“It’s creative, anyway. But I’m not going to talk about my seat with you, because you’ll just try to sell me on one of those rock-hard monsters you’re riding.”
He had a Brooks saddle, a smooth, hard leather seat handcrafted in England. With thousands of miles on it, it was perfectly molded to his anatomy and incredibly comfortable. So yeah, he’d have tried to sell her on the Brooks.
“What do you want to talk about then?”
“Why should we talk? We were doing okay with silence.”
She was making this a lot harder than it needed to be. He should’ve seen it coming. Playing the good guy always landed you in the snake pit. But now he had to get her talking. He had something to prove, and her resistance felt like a challenge.
“If we get to know each other better, we’ll have a firmer basis for our mutual dislike,” he ventured with a smile he hoped was charming.
The grade of the road got steeper, forcing him to stand up on the pedals and climb hard for a few minutes. Lexie dropped into a lower gear and fell behind him, and when he let her catch up again, she had a resigned expression on her face.
“Okay, we can talk,” she said in a tone that suggested it would be a chore. “But I’ll ask the questions.”
“I can live with that.”
“What do you think of Walden?”
That caught him by surprise, though maybe he should’ve seen it coming. He’d noticed her interest while he was reading it. “You want to talk about books? While we’re busting our asses climbing a mountain?”
She gave him a small smile. “Yeah. Humor me. I teach Thoreau.”
“Yeah, all right.” He thought about it for a minute. It was no accident that he’d brought Walden along on the trip. It was one of his favorites, and he’d read it several times since first encountering it in college. “I think Thoreau had the right idea when he said you can get a clearer view of society if you remove yourself from it, and how that’s a good way to figure out what really matters and what doesn’t. I love the line about how he knows in his soul that most of what his neighbors call ‘good’ is bad. I mean, you’ve seen it, right? You spend enough time on a bike, answer enough questions from people who can’t even begin to conceive of getting from point A to point B without a car or spending a single night without their DVRs, you start to understand Thoreau’s frustration with humanity for being so convinced we need all of this stuff that’s not important. He really pares it down to the essentials: humans require fire, food, clothing, and shelter. The rest is just frivolous.” He paused. “Maybe I’d add ‘bike’ to the list. Fire, food, clothing, shelter, and a bike. That about does it for me.”
She didn’t say anything for a long time, and he started to worry his answer had been too weird. Taryn was always giving him a hard time for alternating long stretches of silence with gloomy, apocalyptic speeches. Had that been a gloomy, apocalyptic speech? Pretty close. Damn.
Finally, he couldn’t stand it. “Sorry, I’m kind of rusty at chitchat. Was I supposed to say ‘It’s pretty good’?”
Her lips drew together in a bow and then slowly stretched out into a wide smile. Maybe he wasn’t completely botching this after all.
“I’m just a little stunned to hear you string so many words together, Geiger. Are you aware people don’t usually converse in paragraphs?”
He grunted, and she laughed at him—another victory, even if it was at his expense. After a pause, she said, “I hear what you’re saying. I love the book, too, the whole idea of living in solitude to find out what life is really all about, rejecting the parts of society that are just convention. My students go crazy for it.” She frowned, biting her lip. “But I’m not sure you’re getting the whole point. Thoreau went to the woods to find out what life was about so he could be sure he was really living. That’s my favorite line in the book—‘I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.’ ” Her eyes went all dreamy as she quoted, her speech growing more passionate.
“I bet you’re a good teacher,” he said without thinking.
She frowned. “I do okay. I’m kind of burned out on it, though, after seven years. Anyway, my point is, part of the book is about getting away from society. But it’s about recommitting to it, too. He goes back home eventually, you know? And he tells his neighbors about what he’s been up to, even though he more or less thinks they’re idiots. He writes Walden, and he tours all over the country giving lectures. Thoreau wasn’t saying the answer was to go live in the woods and hoe your own bean field. He was saying you also have to mix with the rest of the human race, get your hands dirty, try to solve the problems. Otherwise, yo
u’re not really living.”
The comment was so naive, it made him smile. If testifying in the trial that had brought Vargas Industries to its knees had taught him anything, it was the futility of trying to change the world for the better. Tom had gone to bat for his convictions, and the result was fifteen thousand people out of work, his divorce, and three members of his family who wouldn’t speak to him. Not exactly a banner day for the good guys. He’d have been better off hoeing beans and keeping his head down.
“Eh,” he finally answered. “I think I’ll stick to my ‘life of quiet desperation’ and leave the marrow-sucking to idealistic English teachers like you.”
Lexie looked amused that he was quoting the book back at her. “Lucky I’m not a vegetarian.”
They lapsed back into silence as the grade grew steeper again. Tom took a swig from his water bottle, curling his lip at the taste of hot plastic. The sun was getting more intense, and the landscape shifted abruptly from ponderosa pine forest to bare lava rock. Geologically speaking, central Oregon’s mountains were among the youngest in the country, and there were a lot of places where nothing grew at all. Tom loved the barren lava fields of this part of the state. They reminded him of the moon, and in fact astronauts had trained for the first moon landing at Lava Lands, not too far from here.
“Can I ask you something?” Lexie said after the ground leveled out a bit.
“Fire away.”
“What’s a guy like you doing working as a bike mechanic?”
“What do you mean, a guy like me?” He knew, but he wanted to hear what she’d say. He was curious about what she thought of him.
She narrowed her eyes. “You know what I mean. Are you going to make me spell it out?”
He angled his head in agreement. Now she was giving him the full-on Lexie glare, which he had to admit was kind of growing on him. She was cute, all pink-cheeked and sweaty from the climb. Even her throat flushed when she got really hot. He wondered if the right guy could make her blush all over.
You’ll have to ask her husband about that. Asshole.
She relented. “Fine, fish for compliments, see if I care. All I meant is, you’re obviously a smart guy. Shouldn’t you be doing something a little, you know, brainier than cleaning chains and building wheels?”
He wondered what she’d say if she knew about the Wharton MBA. Probably the same thing Taryn said, that he was wasting his talents playing around at being a grease monkey. Not that it mattered what either of them thought. He wasn’t wasting anything. He was simply choosing not to engage. It was different.
He’d played nice for long enough. “It’s honest work” was all he said. And then he took off uphill. “Race you to the summit.”
The sun beat relentlessly down on the tent, and even with the rain fly off and the inner flaps tied up to let air circulate through the screens, it had to be over ninety degrees. Lexie flopped from her side onto her back and sighed. She’d been trying to take a nap, but it was too hot to sleep in this stale, airless space. Too hot to read. Too hot to do much of anything.
After riding all day, she just wanted to rest for a while—to be horizontal and lazy in the shade. But campground amenities varied, and this one lacked both trees and shelter. The only place she could escape the sun was her tent, and the heat made it next to impossible to enjoy being in here.
She blamed the terrain. Now that they’d come down off the pass and left Sisters behind, they were firmly in the high desert. The forests of majestic ponderosa pines had disappeared, replaced by a subtly undulating landscape of a hundred shades of brown and gold—low-lying, scrubby vegetation and stands of twisted juniper. The air here smelled of sage, sharp and medicinal, and the dry heat made her skin feel parched and dusty even when she kept well hydrated. She and Tom had been trying to get their riding done as early in the day as possible, which kept them out of the worst of the heat but had the disadvantage of leaving a lot of time to kill after they set up camp in the afternoons and before the sun dropped below the horizon and the temperature began its daily forty- or fifty-degree swing.
Lexie needed extra time around Tom like she needed a hole in the head.
Not that he was so terrible these days. He was making an effort to be nice, at least intermittently. He was pretty bad at it, so most of their conversations went more or less like the one on McKenzie Pass—they started out prickly, got interesting, and then ended abruptly when she stumbled onto something Tom didn’t want to talk about and he either bolted or erected a stony wall of silence.
That wasn’t the problem. She could deal with Angry Tom. Actually, she found Angry Tom fairly entertaining.
No, the problem was that she was way too attracted to the other Tom.
It was only natural. The man was seriously good-looking, and in the afternoons he tended to putter around the campsite wearing nothing but low-slung black basketball shorts, flip-flops, and a baseball cap. For most men, this would have counted as showing off, but Tom gave off this laid-back vibe that told her he wasn’t thinking about how good he looked, he was just comfortable in his own skin. Which of course made him even sexier.
After they’d finished riding yesterday, he’d taken out his tools and tuned up first his bike, then hers, cleaning the chains, clicking through all the gears to make sure they were shifting smoothly, spinning the wheels to check the balance. She’d been sitting in the shade nearby trying to read a book, but her eyes had been drawn again and again to the play of the muscles across his shoulders, the deep indentation of his spine, the thin trail of hair down the center of his stomach that disappeared into the waistband of his shorts. He was lean and hard all over, and no matter how she tried, she hadn’t been able to stop looking at him, to stop her fingers from itching to touch him.
Man, she needed to get laid.
Lexie’s experience of sex wasn’t vast, but she’d been with enough men to have had some good sexual adventures along with the bad. She’d never slept with anyone who looked like Tom, though. To be honest, she hadn’t really believed people who looked like Tom existed in nonairbrushed form. And something told her that if he wanted to, Tom could blow even the best of her previous lovers out of the water.
Just thinking of the way he’d looked yesterday—his skin gleaming in the sun, his tattooed biceps flexing as he tightened a spoke—made her wet. Which, come to think of it, maybe she should do something about. She let her eyes drift closed and brought her fingers to one nipple, idly toying with it through her camisole as she imagined moving her palms over Tom’s broad back and downward, trailing her fingers down until they hit the waistband of his shorts and made their way around to his stomach. The synthetic, sweet smell of chain oil, and beneath it the scent of him—sweat and beer and his foresty camp soap. Such a man. She wanted to run her tongue along the sun-warmed skin of his spine as she slipped her fingers into his shorts and took him in her hand.
She closed her eyes, pinched her nipple, her hips rising a few inches off the sleeping bag as a pulse of desire shot through her. Sliding her free hand downward, she unzipped her shorts and worked her fingers into her panties to stroke herself experimentally. She was already slick and swollen, sensitive to the touch.
This was seriously wicked, lying here with her hand down her pants thinking about Tom. But it was delicious, too, and she had no intention of stopping.
He was a big man, five or six inches taller than her five-seven, and broad, not skinny like so many tall men were—he had to outweigh her by sixty or seventy pounds. He would be big all over. Big and thick and hard for her, and she would touch him until he was so desperate to be inside her that he made her stop. But she wouldn’t give him what he wanted, not exactly. Instead, she would come around to his front, push his shorts down, and take him in her mouth.
Lexie moaned quietly, imagining how he would taste, how it would feel to run her tongue over the smooth, soft skin at the tip, the steel of his erection against her palm. Sliding two fingers inside herself, she began to build a rhythm,
brushing her thumb over her clit each time she pulled out and picturing her lips dragging over his cock, in and out. He was so self-contained, so controlled, that the thought of Tom shaken up and helpless in her hands was an unbelievable turn-on. She heard the inarticulate sounds he would make as he fought to hold back, felt him running restless hands over her hair, her neck, her shoulders, needing to touch her. And then she’d grip his tight ass with both hands and suck him, doing with her mouth what she wanted to do with her body, dismantling him systematically until he tensed and lost control completely—
Lexie came suddenly and hard, her inner muscles clenching around her fingers as she turned her face into her camp pillow and bit back the sounds of her release. With small flicks of her thumb, she drew out the sensations until she couldn’t take it anymore, and then she collapsed onto her sleeping bag with a smile, her hand resting on the few inches of bare stomach where she’d shoved her shirt out of the way.
That had been fun. If she couldn’t have Tom, she could at least make use of the eye candy. And she most definitely would not, could not have Tom. What if she slept with him, and then things got all weird between them and he took off on her? Or he became controlling, like her last romance-gone-wrong? Peter had seemed so normal at first, so charming, but she’d had to start teaching at a different school to escape his attempts to control every little detail of her life, from what she wore to who she talked to—even after she’d dumped him. What if things went south with Tom, and she had to break off the trip and fly home to get away from him?
Unlikely, maybe, but it wasn’t worth the risk. She wasn’t in the market for any kind of a relationship, not after what she’d been through. For the duration of this trip, she’d just have to service her own needs. The TransAm mattered more than her libido.
Hearing footsteps, she quickly zipped up her shorts and raised herself onto her elbows, embarrassed at what she’d been doing. With the rain fly off and the tent flaps open, anyone could easily see in, and here she was in the middle of the day—