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“I think this room must cost more than my rent.” She stopped herself from asking again how he could possibly afford it.
He moved up behind her, and then his stubbled chin was scraping a tingling path along her neck as one powerful arm wrapped around her waist and drew her close. “I wasn’t always a bike mechanic,” he said, using his tent voice again.
“No?” she asked, giving in immediately to the urge to melt back against him.
“Nope. I used to be charming for a living.”
“Sounds like hard work,” she said, playing it light but wondering at the same time what that other Tom had been like. The Tom from before.
“It was, but it paid well.” His hand sneaked inside her jersey, found her bare stomach, and rested there, teasing only in its heat and its proximity to all the places she wanted it to go.
“So you were a professional escort? I hear the tips are good,” she joked, hoping he’d tell her something more.
“Worse. I was a suit. Vice president of development at twenty-five, with a good shot at running the company by the time I turned thirty.”
“Wow. You really must have been charming,” she said, covering while she scrambled to make sense of what he was telling her. Tom as a corporate guy was impossible to swallow. He had to be the most anti-corporate person she’d ever met … which made its own twisted kind of sense, right? Because something had obviously gone wrong to change him from the man he had been to the man he was now. Apparently, that something had to do with his job.
“So what happened?” she asked, knowing it was the wrong thing to say and still not able to keep her mouth shut. He stiffened behind her, withdrew his hand, and she fought back the feeling of abandonment that always accompanied Tom’s withdrawals.
She tried telling herself what she told herself every time. Tom wasn’t hers. He couldn’t abandon her if she’d never had him. She didn’t even want to have him. Tom was great at physical intimacy, but he was about the least likely candidate for emotional intimacy she’d ever met. Lexie would have to be a complete fool to want an emotionally intimate relationship with him.
She refused to be a complete fool.
He didn’t reply for so long that she’d finished shoring up her defenses and was fully braced for the return of Silent Tom when he finally spoke. “I grew up” was all he said, and she could hear in his tone that the conversation was over.
When she turned around to look at him, his expression was grave, but his eyes lacked the black anger she’d expected. He wasn’t going to tell her anything more, but he wasn’t going to freeze her out, either. For the fi
rst time in the six weeks they’d been riding together, he’d told her a tiny portion of his secrets. She decided he deserved a reward.
“I could really use a shower,” she purred, stepping closer to rub suggestively against him. “Want to join me?”
He didn’t bother to answer this time. Instead, he lowered his mouth to hers and backed her toward the bathroom.
12
The next step toward getting Lexie to embrace her inner wild child was going to take place in the shower.
Insisting on the Bismarck had been part of his plan. He’d wanted to knock Lexie out of her comfort zone. It was the same reason he’d ditched her bike computer and arranged for the detour. She needed to learn how to have more fun on the road, and that meant figuring out that some of the best times were the most spontaneous. Plus, after so many weeks pitching their tents on one patch of parched lawn after another, he figured they deserved a night in a nice hotel.
But the shower figured heavily into his plan, too. As did the bed. And the back of the couch. Not to mention the walls. There were a lot of things he wanted to do to Lexie that he hadn’t been able to do in his tent. The suite had been as much a concession to his overactive imagination as it was to their comfort.
Telling her about his corporate days had not been part of the plan. Not that he’d said much, but still—he didn’t talk about that time in his life. Ever. Hell, he tried not to think about it. So why bring it up with Lexie?
It would be the last time, he told himself as he found her mouth and ran his tongue along that delicious, plump lower lip of hers. His secrets were going to stay locked up nice and tidy. This was about pushing Lexie to be more open, more spontaneous. It had nothing to do with him.
Still backing her into the bathroom, he pulled her hair free of its ponytail as he kissed her. Her hands were inside his shirt, running lightly up his sides, down his stomach, over his back, firing him up the way her touch always did. “Get undressed,” he ordered. As she complied, he turned on several of the shower heads and stripped off his own shirt and shorts. Lex came up behind him and reached for him playfully, but he evaded her grasp. He had plans, and if she got her hands on his dick, they were going to go up in smoke.
“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.
