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GAS, GRASS, OR ASS. NOBODY RIDES FOR FREE.
The message hit her like a shock wave. A warning she couldn’t ignore. But her body—her treacherous body—had taken control. Her hand tugged on the choir robe. One foot came off the ground. Her leg straddled the seat.
He handed her the only helmet. She pulled it on over her wretched bridal up-do and wrapped her arms around his waist.
They shot off down the alley, the choir robe billowing, her bare legs catching the edge of the wind, his hair flying, whipping her visor.
She tucked the robe under her legs as he cut from one alley to the next, took a sharp right turn and then another, the muscles in his back flexing under the cheap material of his suit coat.
They rode out of Wynette and down a two-lane highway that stretched along a craggy limestone bluff. The helmet was her cocoon, the bike her planet. They passed lavender fields in bloom, an olive oil factory, and some of the vineyards that were springing up across the Hill Country. The wind pulled at her robe, exposing her knees, her thighs.
The sun dipped lower in the sky, and the growing chill cut through the robe’s thin fabric. She welcomed the cold. She didn’t deserve to be warm and comfortable.
They barreled over a wooden bridge and past a decrepit barn with a Lone Star flag painted on its side. Signs for cave tours and dude ranches flashed by. The miles slipped away. Twenty? More? She didn’t know.
As they reached the outskirts of a one-stoplight town, he turned toward a shabby convenience store and parked in the shadows at the side of the building. He jerked his head at her, indicating she was to get off. She tangled her legs in her robe and nearly fell.
“You hungry?”
Even the thought of food made her nauseated. She eased her stiff legs and shook her head. He shrugged and headed for the door.
Through the helmet’s dusty visor, she saw that he was taller than she’d thought, about six feet, longer in the leg than the trunk. With his wild blue-black hair, olive complexion, and rolling gait, he couldn’t have been more unlike the congressmen, senators, and captains of industry who populated her life. She could see part of the store’s interior through the window. He walked toward the cooler at the back. The female clerk stopped what she was doing to watch him. He disappeared for a few minutes, then reappeared to set a six-pack of beer on the counter. The clerk tossed her hair, openly flirting with him. He placed a few more items by the register.
Lucy’s shoes were rubbing a blister on her feet. As she shifted her weight, she caught a glimpse of her reflection in the window. The big blue helmet swallowed her head, hiding the small features that always made her appear younger than her age. The robe hid the fact that prewedding stress had left her normally slender figure a little too thin. She was thirty-one years old, five feet four inches, but she felt tiny; stupid; a selfish, irresponsible waif.
Even though no one was around to see, she didn’t take off the helmet but lifted it slightly, trying to ease the pressure on the hairpins digging into her scalp. Normally she wore her hair almost to her shoulders, straight and tidy, generally held back with one of those narrow headbands Meg detested.
“They make you look like a fifty-year-old Greenwich socialite,” Meg had declared. “And unless you’re wearing jeans, ditch those stupid pearls. Ditto your whole stupid-ass preppy wardrobe.” Then she’d softened. “You’re not Nealy, Luce. She doesn’t expect you to be.”
Meg didn’t understand. She’d grown up in L.A. with the same parents who’d given birth to her. She could wear all the outrageous clothes she wanted, dangle exotic jewelry around her neck, even have a dragon tattooed on her hip, but not Lucy.
The store door opened, and the biker emerged carrying a grocery sack in one hand, beer in the other. She watched with alarm as he silently stowed his purchases in the bike’s scuffed saddlebags. As she imagined him drinking the whole six-pack, she knew she couldn’t let this go on. She had to call someone. She’d call Meg.
But she couldn’t summon the courage to face anyone, not even her best friend, who understood so much more than the rest. She’d let her family know she was safe. Soon. Just … not quite yet. Not until she’d figured out what to say.
She stood in front of the biker like a big, blue-headed alien. He was staring at her, and she realized she still hadn’t spoken a single word to him. How awkward. She needed to say something. “How do you know Ted?”
He turned back to fasten the clasps on the saddlebags. The bike was an old Yamaha with the word WARRIOR written in silver across the black fuel tank. “We did time together in Huntsville,” he said. “Armed robbery and manslaughter.”
He was baiting her. Some kind of biker test to see how tough she wasn’t. She’d have to be crazy to let this go on any longer. But then she was crazy. A bad kind of crazy. The crazy of someone who’d fallen out of her skin and didn’t know how to crawl back in.
His shadowed eyes, heavy with another kind of threat, slid over her. “You ready for me to take you back?”
All she had to do was say yes. One simple word. She pushed her tongue into the proper position. Arranged her lips. Failed to force it out. “Not yet.”
He frowned. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
The answer to that question was so obvious even he could figure it out. When she failed to respond, he shrugged and climbed back on the bike.
As they pulled out of the parking lot, she wondered how riding off with this menacing biker seemed less chilling than facing the family she loved so much. But then she didn’t owe this man anything. The worst he could do was—She didn’t want to think about the worst he could do.
Once again the wind tore at her robe. Only her hands stayed warm from the body heat radiating through his thin suit coat. Eventually he turned off the highway onto a rutted trail. The bike’s headlight cut an eerie pattern across the scrub, and she held tighter to his waist even as her brain screamed at her to jump off and run. Finally they reached a small clearing at the edge of a river. From a sign she’d seen earlier, she guessed it was the Pedernales. A perfect place to dispose of a dead body.
Without the roar of the engine, the silence was suffocating. She got off the bike and backed away. He pulled something that looked like an old stadium blanket from one of the saddlebags. As he dropped it on the ground, she caught the faint scent of motor oil. He grabbed the beer and grocery bag. “You gonna wear that thing all night?”
She wanted to keep the helmet on forever, but she took it off. Pins tumbled, and a wedge of oversprayed hair poked her in the cheek. The quiet was dense and noisy with the rush of river over rock. He lifted the beer in her direction. “Too bad
this is only a six-pack.”
