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He’d kissed her like a lover, and she’d nearly been ready to beg. Was he just messing with her? Most of the time, he treated her like an irritation, but then there were these moments where she thought she saw something in his eyes—something that sent her blood racing through her veins and made her knees a little wobbly.
Part of her wanted to think all that stood between her and Tom was the husband she’d invented, but then she reminded herself why she’d invented a spouse to begin with. Tom was off-limits. What on earth was wrong with her that she couldn’t seem to remember such a simple thing? It had been a long time since she’d had sex, but that couldn’t explain why her body and her brain turned to mush around Tom. She’d never met somebody who could make her fall apart like this.
It was just her luck that she felt this way about a guy she didn’t even really like, a guy she’d decided not to get involved with. A guy who thought she was married.
What a mess.
Even if she rode all the way across the country with him and back, she was never going to figure out Tom Geiger. But damn if she didn’t want him with every cell in her body.
7
White Bird, Idaho, to Grangeville, Idaho. 797 miles traveled.
With a rock the size of a baseball clutched in his fist, Tom pounded the tent stake into the hard ground. He always intended to buy one of those plastic stake hammers, but he never quite got around to doing it. It didn’t seem like a big deal when you were at home, but on a tour you found yourself pounding in eight stakes a day, day in and day out, and you cursed yourself for being an idiot. It was hard to get good leverage with a rock. Plus, every now and again you aimed wrong and ended up smashing a knuckle to pulp.
Lexie and Paul were in a huddle by her bike, swapping intel about tomorrow’s climb. She’d picked up Paul a few days after the incident in his tent. A hefty older guy in a bike jersey and the regulation tight black shorts, he’d come right over to them at the café in Richland where they’d stopped for lunch, making himself at home at their table. He and Lex had swapped stories all the way through the meal. Paul was a faux-humble retired insurance adjuster from Washington State, so full of himself Tom had wanted to throttle him inside of ten minutes.
Lexie seemed to like him though. She’d ordered pie for dessert and ended up in a three-way conversation with Paul and the waitress, whose mom had run a café in nearby Mitchell during the Bikecentennial days. Lexie had, of course, told the story of how her mom and dad met, and the waitress had shared her memories of those wild and crazy times, when at least fifty riders had come through every day in the peak months and the staff at the café had to mix up salad in garbage cans and bake two dozen pies every morning to keep up with the demand. Tom had pushed back from the table at this point, knowing that once they got started with the Bikecentennial crap they’d be talking for half the afternoon. “Where are we supposed to end up today?” he’d asked Lex, interrupting Paul in the middle of another self-important remark.
“Oxbow. There’s a commercial campground on the far side of town.”
“I’ll see you there.”
He hadn’t waited to gauge her reaction. It didn’t matter. He was through with being nice to Lexie.
That night in the tent had come so close to wrecking him, he flinched whenever he thought about it. He was no paragon of morality, but he had a few rules about women he’d never even considered breaking, number one being that you did not touch another man’s wife. Ever.
Better yet if you could manage not to covet at all, but he was only human. He coveted the hell out of Lexie.
He’d told himself she needed him to warm her up, but it was a feeble excuse. It wasn’t like she’d been close to hypothermia. He’d just wanted to get his hands on her. And the way she felt curled up against him with nothing but a thin sheet of silk separating them—the way she smelled, all minty shampoo and luscious woman—had driven him straight past the limits of his self-control.
He hadn’t been able to stop himself from tasting her. He’d needed to know if her skin would feel as soft against his mouth as he imagined. He’d needed to know how she’d respond to his touch, half-hoping she’d be outraged, that she’d put him in his place. But when she’d melted against him with a soft sigh, the knowledge that Lexie wanted him had nearly made him do something incredibly stupid.
Only the thought of her husband had stopped him. Tom hated the bastard, but he was never going to do to another man what Haylie and Craig had done to him. Moving away from Lexie had just about killed him, but he’d managed to recover. Sort of.
Being around her now was torture. He couldn’t stop watching her, thinking about her, wanting her. And hating her, too, for not loving her husband enough to tell Tom to take a hike.
Not that she was coming on to him or anything. In fact, she seemed pretty pissed off, and he aimed to keep her
that way. But even though she was angry with him, even though he could never have her, he still wanted her.
So when she’d shown up at the campsite in Oxbow with Paul in tow, he’d started thinking it was his chance to escape the whole sorry situation. Paul was an idiot, but he was a married idiot, and he was by all appearances a decent enough human being. Tom had been watching him over the past few days, and it seemed clear that he posed no threat to Lexie. When she’d changed into a little red bikini to soak in the pool at Zim’s Hot Springs the other night, he’d about had a heart attack, but Paul had barely given her a second glance. You almost had to wonder if the guy’s hardware was operational anymore. Tom was going to be thinking about Lexie in that bikini until the day he died.
The last stake finally in, he threw the rock aside and wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his wrist. Any way he looked at it, she and Paul made a good team, studying the map every night to get ready for the next morning’s ride, cycling along side by side and talking about daily mileages, cadence targets, hydration, and all that other shit that was so important to Lex. He’d have a talk with Paul tonight, make sure he was okay with taking over as her riding partner. She and Paul would be better off without him, and it would be a relief to put at least a hundred miles between himself and Sexy Lexie.
Within a mile of starting the climb, Paul’s face had turned the color of a tomato, and he was sweating buckets. Lexie managed to endure it for the first half-hour, but there was no way she was going to ride all seven miles to the top of White Bird Hill at a snail’s pace next to a guy who was huffing and puffing like a steam train. It was just … gross.
“I’m going to pick it up a little, okay? If I don’t see you at the top, I’ll catch you in Lowell.”
Paul just nodded, too out of breath to respond. He already looked totally defeated. It was going to take him a lifetime to get to the top, and she wasn’t planning to hang around waiting for him up there. She’d already heard all of his stories twice, some of them three times, and if she had to babysit him for another day she was going to lose her mind.
Tom was no help, of course. He’d dropped them within a couple miles of the campground this morning after asking where they were supposed to finish up. Ever since that night in his tent, she’d had this sinking feeling he was looking for a way to get rid of her. He’d stopped talking to her almost entirely, stopped riding with her, and at the campsites he either secluded himself in his tent or went off somewhere alone. Before—even after Prineville, when he’d gone back to being Angry Tom—he’d still usually eaten dinner with her. Now, he was a ghost.
So help me God, if he takes off and sticks me with Paul, I will track him down and kick his ass.
Not that Paul was such a bad guy. He was actually more or less what she’d imagined Tom would be like before she met him—older, jovial, and totally obsessed with all the details of how to have the optimal TransAm adventure. He bored her to tears.
What Tom had said to her at the bar in Prineville kept nagging at her. She could follow the rules or have fun, but not both. So far, she hadn’t been having much fun on her great TransAm adventure. Hanging out with Paul was giving her a taste of what she must seem like to Tom, and it tasted bitter. But she didn’t know any other way to be. Since Tom was hardly speaking to her, it didn’t look like he’d be giving her any pointers.
