worry. We won’t go fast,” he assured her. “No one will see us. I’ll take you up the back way to the lookout on Horsehead Bluff. Never rode a motorcycle, my ass. Jesus! It’s just not right!”
He sounded so outraged that she had to laugh, but her laughter broke off abruptly when he grabbed her hand and pulled her across the lawn. His hand was so big and warm, rough calluses scraping her soft skin. It sent a delicious rush of energy and quivering heat through her body. “Simon, I don’t know if this is such a good—”
“Shh,” he soothed. “Just a ride on my bike. It’s so minor, El.”
He swung his leg over the bike and waited for her. His patient stillness was a challenge in itself. Just like old times. Simon twiddling his thumbs while scaredy-cat El gathered her nerve.
But if she thought a glass of iced tea on her porch was dangerous, how much more perilous might a moonlit motorcycle ride be?
It occurred to her that motorcycle rides by moonlight would not be part of her future as Brad Mitchell’s wife. It was now or never.
She shoved the thought away. She couldn’t handle the concept of never tonight. Never was just too sad, too final. Too awful.
This was just a secret little side trip to nowhere. It meant nothing, changed nothing, and Brad would never know. She climbed on.
Simon reached back, grasped her hands, and wrapped them around his waist, pulling until she was flush against him, her breasts pressed against his back, her nose buried in his satiny hair.
He uncurled her cold, clenched fingers and splayed them against his hard belly. He gave them a reassuring pat. Oh, he felt good. Hot and firm and vibrant. His big body practically thrummed under her hands.
A gorgeous male animal.
“Hang on,” he advised her. The motorcycle surged forward.
Chapter 5
He was so high. His blood raced with wild euphoria. It pulsed through his body, fizzed in his brain. El clung to him, her fingers tightening on him every time they swooped around a curve. He wondered if she were torturing him on purpose by leaving off the bra. It didn’t seem her style, but after all this time, it was unlikely that she could still be that naive about her effect on men.
But then again, El had always been a case apart.
The other question in his mind burned even hotter. When she threw on her T-shirt and cut-offs, did she leave her panties off too? Was her ass completely bare in those low-slung shorts? He wanted to wrap those cool, trembling fingers of hers around his dumb handle. He guaranteed it would hold firm. Solid as a goddamn rock.
Yeah, it was sleazy, but he had his limits, and he’d zoomed right past them a long while back. She was so beautiful, and the moon was full, and he felt raw and naked after showing her the e-mail, spilling his guts about Gus. El saw right through his bravado. Always had.
She was wasted on Brad. The arrogant prick would flaunt her beauty like a trophy and never even know the real treasure that he had in his grasp. He wondered what their sex was like, and shoved the thought away too late. Red rage coiled inside him, ready to strike.
Let it go. Don’t think of it. He had a part of El that Brad would never know. He had their childhood bond. He had her virginity, and she had his. Their night in the flowers. A secret treasure. This ride in the moonlight was his, too. Life was short, and pain was long, and to hell with the future. If she took him to her bed tonight, he was going for it.
The motorcycle climbed steadily up the Horsehead Bluff mountain service road, switching back in long, lazy zigzags. The landscape widened below them as they climbed. He topped the rise and they bumped along the gravel road that followed the crest of the ridge.
A moonlit panorama fell away on either side of them. Hills segued into jagged mountains on one side of them, and the broad sweep of the river valley spread out on the other. LaRue was a glittering triangle below them. The moon blazed over them in an immense expanse of sky.
Wind lifted their hair. He killed the motor at the highest point and coasted to a stop. “This is my favorite spot,” he told her. “You can see everything. All the big volcanoes, every town for forty miles.”
“Even the moon looks different, with so much sky around it,” she said. “I’ve never been up here at night. It’s another world.”
He turned to look at her. “There’s a lot of things you’ve never done, aren’t there?”
She stiffened, and pulled her soft warmth away from his back. “Just what is that supposed to mean?” she snapped.
He held her gaze and let his silence answer her.
She scrambled off the bike and pulled off the helmet as she backed away. “Maybe I haven’t traveled the world, and dodged bullets and laughed in the face of death, but that doesn’t mean I’m a coward!”
“I never said you were a coward,” he said. “You’re brave and honorable and kind. You defended me even when I didn’t deserve it.”
“Of course you deserved it! Don’t be silly.” She backed into the middle of the road and spun around, arms wide, helmet dangling from one hand. Drunk on the moonlight, just like him. “This is the first time in so long that I’ve looked up into the sky and seen infinity,” she said. “Usually I’m looking at the inside of a blue glass bowl.”
Inexplicable tension gripped him. “It’s dangerous outside that glass bowl.”
She laughed at him. “Are you trying to scare me? Weren’t you the one who just implied that there are too many things that I’ve never done? Make up your mind, Simon. You can’t have it both ways.”
He shook his head. “I just don’t want you to get hurt.”
“Oh, come on. Who wants to hurt me?” She lifted her arms to the sky, supplicating the moon. “How could I get hurt?”
He himself was the obvious answer that leaped to mind. Brad was a close second. The list stretched out from there, endless and ugly. He’d seen so many ways that people could get hurt. It was his trade.
“I hope you never know,” he said.
She made a disgusted sound. “Oh, don’t even!”
“Don’t what?”
“Get all remote and mysterious on me. That tone in your voice says, oh, wise Simon with his vast experience of the world must protect poor clueless Ellen who doesn’t know her ass from her elbow. Spare me, please. I hate being condescended to. Hate it, hate it, hate it.”
He laughed. Her words freed him, and his mood floated up. “You’re finally loosening up, thank God. Now you sound like the El I used to know. Always scolding me. Bursting my bubbles.”
“Was I such a snot?” Her voice was uncertain.
“I loved it,” he told her. “That was how I knew you cared.”
The silence grew thick again.
El turned away, and gazed out at the mountains.
