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I took the duffle from the sissy bar and threw it to the road before going into my saddlebags for the few bungees I carried with me.
We hopped off the tailgate after tying the bike down as best we could with the bungees, I threw my duffle into the back with the bike and headed for the passenger side of the truck.
I had to wait for Noah to unlock the door, and when he did, and I opened it, he was staring at me with a look…
His eyes, to me, looked heated, his stare said more than caution, that he was watching me because of the lack of trust. There was something else, intense and hot.
If I didn’t know any better, he was cruising me, but an older guy like that, living in the rural area where he did, I knew better than to cruise back. If I was wrong, I could get the shit beat out of me, and that was looking on the bright side of things. Fact was, I’d likely get killed and buried under a mound of horse manure.
I got in and we took off; me checking over my shoulder out of the back window now and again on the bike. He had little to say on the drive but asked me about my tags. “You serve?”
I felt them absently, finding they’d fallen out of my shirt to lie over it. “Yes, sir, Army. You?”
“No, not me. I wanted to, but I had other obligations.”
The way he said it, the statement wasn’t open for discussion.
“I didn’t want to, but it was that or college, and I was pretty sick of school.”
“And those two were your only options?”
I looked over at him, and he was staring in front of him at the road as he drove, but somehow, I felt his eyes on me, anyway. I felt scrutinized, but not in a judgmental way, strangely. It felt to me like he was sizing me up for something personal.
Then I had to laugh inwardly as I was likely projecting. There was something about the guy, toughened by life in the country, maybe. His good looks didn’t hurt, of course, but it was much more than that.
Or, maybe I was just horny, lonely, and on the fucking rebound from a shitty relationship that had very little sex, and what there was of it was vanilla and boring. That was one thing Noah didn’t radiate was boring.
We drove for nearly half an hour, which worried me some. How far out was Noah’s place? How would I get out if the guy was a psycho and my bike wasn’t working?
Like he read my mind, he soothed, “I’m not taking you to kill you.”
“How’d…?”
“You got jumpy, like a colt who’s come on a snake in a field. You reached for the door handle three times.”
I hadn’t realized I’d done that, but that was beside the point. He had been watching me. That was the point. “You never know, I guess.”
“Nope. You never know.”
The drive was long, but it was beautiful. Off the main highway, the roads wound through places that I’d only seen on postcards and calendars. Being surrounded by mountains, driving through valleys rich with green, it was sedating. I found myself more at ease after he’d promised I was safe, and I took his word for it.
Green. Well, there was a little color, sure, the rocks alone were colorful. Red ones, those that looked like huge gold nuggets, and there were startling silver ones too, like they were driving through an open mine filled with precious metals and gemstones.
The grass was tall in the fields and shorter across the hills, and the pines reached to the cloudless sky like they were trying to catch the flocks of birds flying close by. I’d never seen such beauty in my life, and I’d seen a lot of places.
To think that Harvey looked out of his window and loved the skyline of a city, when he could have lived here, amongst the natural beauty, it was unfathomable to me.
We stopped at a tall wooden gate. Over it in metal was writtenDouble O Ranch.
“Oliver,” I whispered, trying to decipher the meaning of the double Os.
“Otto Oliver was my dad, Olivia, my mom. They bought this place before I was born. And… the passenger opens the gate.”
It took me a second to realize what he was saying, as I was musing on his mother’s name being Olivia Oliver, and I grinned as I opened the door. “Right. Good system.”
There was a latch that I could barely wrap my hand around, but I pulled up and over and then pushed the gate inward so Noah could drive through. As soon as he was clear, I closed it, latched it on the inside and got back into the truck.
I noticed there were no houses that I could see, but we were still moving up and through a forest, so I thought the house was likely small and tucked away in the trees.
