by Ruthie Knox
“Get in there,” he told her, giving her a little shove toward the tiled enclosure.
“You’re bossy,” she complained in a teasing voice.
“Yep. Stand against that wall.”
He followed her in and stood in the spray opposite her, far enough away so that she couldn’t touch him. Then he tossed her a paper-wrapped bar of soap, taking another for himself. “Clean yourself up,” he said, his voice already a little rough from the kiss and the strain of watching the water slide over her skin. Lexie in the shower was his every erotic fantasy come to life. No surprise there. Lexie just about anywhere was his every erotic fantasy come to life. It was as if the universe had made the woman just for him.
Tom lathered and began soaping the road grime off his body efficiently, impassively, denying the impulse to push her up against the wall and find out whether she was as ready for him as he was for her. He let his hands take care of the routine business, but he kept his eyes on Lex as she closed her eyes with the pleasure of the hot spray running over her hair, trailed soapy fingers down her neck, massaged her breasts, slowly bent over and soaped her legs from ankle to thigh, her round ass undulating in the air until Tom had to reach out to steady himself against the wall.
She was teasing him.
But this wasn’t her show. “Touch yourself,” he said. “I want to watch you this time.”
She straightened, her eyes wide. She knew he was referring to the afternoon he’d suprised her in the tent in Prineville.
“You did know,” she said with dismay.
He chuckled. “Of course. And not a single day has gone by since that I haven’t thought about it and wished I’d been there to watch.”
She looked even more surprised, but the flush creeping across her neck told him the idea aroused her, too. Still, she shook her head, a slight negative. “I don’t think I can do it with you watching.”
“Sure you can,” he coaxed. “If it helps, you can close your eyes.”
She dropped her gaze to the floor, almost bashful, and the contrast nearly made him laugh. His sexy bombshell, naked in the shower—the woman who was as uninhibited with him as any lover he’d ever had, and ten times more responsive—was embarrassed to touch herself in front of him. But she needed to trust him if he was going to make any headway in changing her riding style, and the bedroom—or the shower, in this case—was a good place to build that trust.
Slowly, she raised her eyes to his cock, which grew even harder under her scrutiny. “I don’t want to close my eyes,” she said in a quiet voice. “I want to look at you.”
“That’s fine, too, babe. Whatever works.”
He tracked her fingers as they trailed excruciatingly slowly down her stomach to her upper thigh. Tom wanted to see those fingers moving lower so bad he could hardly breathe, but they came to a stop just short of the goal.
“Now you’re killing me,” he growled.
“You want to know what I was thinking about that day?” she asked him in a whisper.
At the time, he’d been sure she was thinking about her husband, and it had made him almost sick with jealousy. If anything, the jealousy was worse now. If this woman ever figured out what she did to him, he was a goner.
“That depends,” he said. “Will I like it?”
“Oh, I think so. Only you’ll have to do me a favor if you want me to tell you.”
“What’s that?” he asked, willing to give her just about anything if she’d start moving her hand again.
“I want to see you touch yourself, too.” The whole time they’d been talking, she’d never raised her eyes from his crotch. Obviously, she liked what she saw there, because she brought her other hand to her breast and swept it across her nipple. When it drew to a tighter peak, her breath caught in her throat. “Get going,” she demanded.
Fascinated, he followed orders and began to stroke himself slowly, gratified by the way her eyes tracked his movements as if they were the most erotic thing she’d ever seen. Her hand slipped between her legs, and she widened her stance, giving him a better view and causing his hand to speed up unconsciously.
Then, without stopping what she was doing between her legs, she told him—in great detail—what she’d been fantasizing about that day, and he nearly came on the spot.
He needed to be inside her. Now.
The shower wasn’t going to work. Lexie had turned the tables on him, and this was no longer an exercise in getting her to trust him. Now it was a test of his self-control, which was in truly sorry shape from her confession. No way would this be the slow, gentle, drawn-out coupling he’d imagined, and he couldn’t have her slipping and getting hurt. Without even bothering to turn off the water, he pulled her out of the shower by one arm and positioned her up against the vanity countertop with her back to him.
“Lex” was all he could manage to say.
“Yeah?”
“Bend over.”
She didn’t hesitate, and the way she leaned over the counter, spreading her legs wide, tipping her hips up invitingly, banished any doubt he had over whether she knew what she was doing to him. She wanted this every bit as much as he did.
He braced one hand on her hips and teased her clit with the head of his cock, covering himself with her slick, wet heat. Their eyes met in the mirror as he moved inside her. Hers were huge and dark, her pupils dilated, and he couldn’t look away. Water streamed off their bodies, dripping from his chest onto her back as he drove in and out of her, and though he wanted to ease up, to savor her, he was way beyond that sort of control.
It didn’t matter, because Lex was, too. With a few quick flicks of her fingers between her legs, she came in a tight clutch that unraveled him completely. Staring helplessly into her reflected eyes, he gave himself over to her.
And damn it, in that moment, he wanted to tell her everything.
Tom dangled a pair of three-inch patent leather heels from one finger, and Lexie rolled her eyes.
“Please. I’m not buying those.”
“If I buy them, will you wear them?” he asked with a mischievous smile.
“I’ll lose all my feminist street cred,” she grumbled. But she accepted the shoes and tried them on, and when she saw the way his eyes followed her as she took a turn around the store, she let him add them to his pile of purchases.
They’d made it to Silverthorne, which was half lovely Colorado mountain town, half traffic-choked outlet mall. Much to Lexie’s surprise, Tom had proposed they go shopping, claiming he needed to replace his threadbare shorts and T-shirts. He’d managed that pretty quickly, and so had she, but then he saw her eyeing some girlier clothes in a window and had steered her into the store, promising to take her out to dinner if she bought something nice to wear. When she’d complained she didn’t have space in her bag for frivolous clothes, he’d told her to mail them home or throw them away if it was such a problem, and she’d caved and gone along with it.
She was getting used to going along with Tom’s whims. After their night in Steamboat Springs—a night that had easily vaulted to number one on Lexie’s all-time sexual top ten, beating out nine other nights that also featured Tom, Tom, and only Tom—they’d spent a lazy morning in bed with a huge room-service breakfast, and then they’d lumbered back onto their bikes and followed the Great Divide Trail to Breckenridge.
She’d been nervous about that, but Tom had talked her into it. Having done the whole Divide trail alone two summers ago—a mountain bike journey of twenty-five hundred miles from Banff in the north to the border at New Mexico—he’d assured her the section they’d be following was all dirt roads she could manage easily on her touring bike. So she’d agreed to take the plunge, though part of her couldn’t help but fret about detouring around more than a hundred miles of the TransAm.
Guessing what she was worrying about, he’d laughed at her. “We’re still going all the way across the country. It counts even if you don’t follow the exact mapped route every single step of the way, you know.”
It went against her nature, but she had to admit he had a point.
Tom was starting to have a knack for working out what she was worrying about and offering just the right reassurance. It was disarming to realize how well he knew her. Certainly better than any of her friends back in Portland. Probably as well as any member of her family. It made her nervous to admit they shared that sort of intimacy, but she liked it, too. To a point.
He was right about the Great Divide detour, at any rate. It had totally been worth it. A few miles out of Steamboat, they’d started winding through the woods on a narrow, isolated dirt road. The canopy of shady hardwoods overhead made Lexie feel as if she were passing through a fairytale of the rural West. It was different than anything they’d seen on the wide-open highways of the TransAm, and she’d found herself as enchanted with the route as she was with the stories she’d managed to coax Tom into telling her about some of his adventures with black bears, hair-raising descents along narrow single-track trails, and emergency repairs in the middle of nowhere.
She’d let go of her inhibitions about touring almost as easily as she’d dropped her inhibitions in the shower, with equally amazing results. It turned out she liked not really knowing where the road was going to take them next, not keeping precise track of how many miles they put in or how fast they were going, not having an exact destination figured out for the day. When you toured Tom’s way, it was perfectly okay to stop in the middle of the morning and make love under the shade of a willow tree by a stream, because stopping suddenly wasn’t a delay on the way to their destination, it was the whole point. It was fine to take a break for milkshakes at the bottom of the pass just because a huckleberry milkshake sounded really good.
And it was okay to admit you were starting to feel something for your riding partner that was maybe a little bigger than infatuation. Scary, but still okay. Especially when your riding partner was more relaxed and open—even flirtatious with you, surprise, surprise—than you’d seen him in all the miles you’d traveled together.
She supposed that explained how, after almost two months in shorts and outdoor sandals, she found herself in a ruffled black skirt, a short-sleeved white blouse, and the heels, being escorted to dinner at Silverthorne’s finest restaurant by a handsome stranger in black slacks and a gray pinstriped dress shirt. She’d grown so used to Tom in beat-up shorts and a T-shirt, she actually found herself nervous and blushing around this charming, urbane guy who selected wine off the list with confidence born of experience and who looked at her across the table like he wanted to eat her for dessert.
“I want to know more about corporate Tom,” she said as they lingered over coffee. “Did you travel much?” She’d found she could get him to tell her a bit about those days, so long as she didn’t ask anything too direct.
He nodded and took a sip of wine. “A fair amount, yeah. I got to take the company plane. You ever fly on a private jet?” She shook her head. “It’ll spoil you for commercial travel forever.”
“That luxurious, eh?”
“Nah, it’s just a plane with leather seats. What’s great about it is you don’t have to check in or go through security or sit next to some old lady who smells like talcum powder and wants to show you pictures of her grandchildren. The food is pretty good, too.”
She laughed. “Sounds perfect for a Scrooge like you.”
He smiled in response, but then he caught sight of something over her shoulder and the smile faded. For half a second, surprise, dismay, and regret played over his face in rapid succession. Then the steel cage he usually kept his emotions in slammed shut so hard she could practically hear it clang, and he went completely blank.
Lexie turned to see an attractive blond woman making her way to their table with a sunny, social smile. By the time she arrived, Angry Tom was back. He introduced the woman to Lexie as Beth, but that was about as far as he ventured into the realm of polite conversation. Though Beth struck Lexie as a perfectly nice woman who was genuinely pleased and excited to see Tom, he froze her out with curt replies to her questions and an expression so humorless that her cheerful smile soon cracked, faltered, and gave out under the pressure. When Beth finally encouraged Tom to keep in touch and fled to the safety of her table, Lexie was furious.
Not so much because he was being rude, though he was, and it was embarrassing. No, she was furious because she was sick of Tom walling her out, sick of letting him get away with retreating behind silence and a bad temper whenever anything happened that he didn’t like. He was acting like a spoiled high school student, and she wasn’t having it this time.
So after Tom paid the check in silence and guided her outside, she grabbed his elbow and asked him, “Who was that?”
“That was Beth,” he said gruffly, his eyes warning her he didn’t want to pursue the subject.
“That’s not what I’m asking, and you know it,” she shot back. She wasn’t afraid of Tom, and she didn’t have to handle him with kid gloves just because he was being an asshole.
“It’s none of your business,” he warned, stepping closer until he towered over her.
“I’m making it my business.” She kept her chin high and looked him in the eye, intending to hold him there until he told her something, anything to give her some insight into the secrets that made him so defensive. Because why should Tom get to hide when he was forcing her to be so vulnerable? How could she trust him if he was going to shut down every time he felt threatened?
But when their eyes met, she didn’t see the brick wall she’d expected to find there. Instead, for just a second, he let her see he was scared. And of course, because she was a sap for the guy, all she wanted to do was comfort him.
And of course, because he was an emotional icicle, when she softened, he froze up. “Don’t,” he said.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t look at me like that. Don’t care about me.” He threw the words at her, as if caring were the worst possible betrayal.
“It’s too late,” she whispered. But she didn’t think he heard her, because he was already walking away.
Not knowing what else to do, she teetered back to their room on her three-inch heels, wishing she could throw them at him. The stupid, selfish, stubborn jerk.
He didn’t turn up for an hour. By then, she’d put on her pajamas, stared at the TV for a while without really seeing it, and finally switched off the light. Lying stiffly under the covers with her back to the door, she heard him come in and resolved not to be awake. He didn’t want her to care about him, so why should she talk to him? Why should she keep humoring him? Why should she let him touch her? It was humiliating to feel so much for a man who could toss her aside so easily.
But as soon as he slid between the sheets and pulled her closer with both hands at her waist, she responded automatically, as if her body and his had worked out a truce in the dark that her rational mind had no part in. He kissed her for a long time, holding her flush against him, the gentle stroke of his hands down her back and the soft play of his tongue against hers telling her wordlessly he was sorry, he wanted to be different, he wanted her to understand.
It wasn’t good enough, but she let him make love to her even knowing she shouldn’t, because no matter which Tom he was, she wanted him. Hard and fast and intense, slow and lazy and lighthearted, and every way in between, she always wanted him. And Lexie honestly didn’t know if that meant she was cheap or loyal or what. It didn’t really matter what it made her, because she couldn’t seem to do anything about it. Her mind was her own, but her body belonged to Tom.
The truce only held in the dark. In the morning, he still wasn’t saying much, and Lexie refused to make it easy for him. If he wanted her to be friendly, he was going to have to let her in.
He didn’t.
And it stayed that way to Breckenridge and up the switchbacks over Hoosier Pass, the highest point on the TransAmerica Trail at 11,532 feet. On through Cañon City to Pueblo. Along the Arkansas River from Pueblo to Or
dway, from Ordway to Eads, where the Rockies eased away to nothing and took the trees with them, leaving a brown and flat and desolate landscape in their wake.
From Eads to Scott City.
And then they were in Kansas, and they were still at war.
13
Beeler, Kansas, to Eureka, Kansas. 2,563 miles traveled.
Tom hadn’t been looking forward to Kansas, but it was worse than he’d expected. They were supposed to ride from Scott City to Ness City today, and there wasn’t a single turn on the route. Just a straight push east that sent them past farm after manure-smelling farm, silo after silo, with nothing but the occasional unimpressive hill to relieve the tedium of the parched, drought-ridden landscape.
He was going to have to tell her.
He hated that she was mad at him. He hated that she cared. But mostly he hated that he wanted so much to unburden himself to her, to reveal every sordid, unpleasant detail of his past. Because what was the point? What did he want her to do, absolve him? There was nothing she could do to change any of it, nothing she could fix. He had the same reaction whenever Taryn wanted to talk about the past. Why bother? Digging it up and crying over it would only give it more power than it already had.
What was done was done. The only thing you could do was move on.
So this impulse he had to spill everything to Lexie—which, much to his irritation, had been growing stronger since they left Steamboat instead of fading away as he’d hoped it would—really ticked him off.
The truth was, he wanted to tell her because he wanted her to know him. And that wasn’t the sort of impulse a man ought to feel toward his riding-companion-with-benefits. It was the folly of a man who had already dug himself in too deep.