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This time, when I squirmed on the seat, it had nothing to do with how badly my ass was aching.
A soft tap on my knee was his indicator that I needed to stop wiggling—I’d learned that as we rode.
I wished like hell I hadn’t left my cell phone back at the clubhouse because I could have listened to music, but instead, I was inside my head and would be for the foreseeable future.
I didn’t know the exact number of hours we’d be on the road, butlogic dictated it had to be upward of thirty-five.
This time, I shuffled about because my ass was back to hurting.
Deciding that I had to do something about this state of affairs, I leaned into him. Before, I’d placed my hands on his waist and used my legs to grip him, but this time, I slipped my arms around him and slumped into him so that I could redistribute some of the pressure. I didn’t care that it was forward. I just needed to help my ass out.
With a sigh, I turned my head to the side, wishing the clunky helmet wasn’t getting in the way as I pressed it against his back.
I could smell the road—gas and dust and engines—but I could also smell the detergent from the hoodie he wore over his leather jacket.
When I’d watched him drag on the layers, I hadn’t understood why he’d put them on backward until he’d explained about needing to cover the club’s insignia on the back of his leather jacket once we left the MC’s territory.
He still wore his cut, a name I’d learned from the one or two (hundred) MC books I’d read since I’d first seen him, but it was beneath the outerwear.
The way he’d refused to take it off made me think it was like a second skin to him.
Without thinking, I rubbed my cheek against his back as my eyes drifted shut, trying to imagine our route, each mile moving me closer to safety, taking me farther away from Bill Murphy.
I squeezed his waist in silent thanks and shuffled ever nearer to him so that there wasn’t a sliver of space between us.
His hand settled on my thigh for a second, and the heat from it sank into my bones before he returned it to the handlebars.
He was a stranger, so I shouldn’t have found that reassuring, but I did.
I really, truly did.
9
DIGGER
She lasteda lot longer than I thought she would.
Not once did she complain as I pushed us hard down the I-80, taking us through Pennsylvania and Ohio.
We stopped for gas, and she didn’t say a word. I felt her tense up around Pennsylvania, so I made sure to keep taking short breaks. Even so, she was as stiff as a board by Indiana but had turned into a bag of limp spaghetti in Illinois.
Still, I carried on, pushing ahead.
Not because I was a mean bastard but because my phone was buzzing away like a motherfucker, which meant nothing good was happening at home.
I doubted it was because I was AWOL. I wasn’t important enough for my absence to cause that much of a fallout.
No, it was probably that some shit had hit the fan. Both the shit and the fan likely took the shape of a small-boned Irish-American woman who wasn’t about to accept the future her father was gifting her.
By Iowa, I knew I had to take a break, which meant she’d get some respite, but that also meant her bones would settle and she’d feel it even worse when we started the journey again.
For a first-time rider, this was testing her body’s limits, but it couldn’t be helped.
We stopped off at a diner, and the second I cut the engine and the vibrations ceased rumbling, I heard her soft whimper.
Jesus, that tiny noise got to me.
I heard her discomfort, heard her pain, and expected her to whine.
