by Ruthie Knox
Tom pulled her closer until she could feel him half-erect against her lower back. His hand smoothed a path down her stomach to tease at the curls between her thighs. “He sounds pretty unbelievable. You must really be missing him.”
“Uh-huh. I think about him all the time.”
“I guess I’ve been doing a pretty rotten job of distracting you from your misery.” He started kissing her in all the places he knew she most liked, brushing his lips against her neck and leaning around her to nip at her collarbone while his fingers caressed her breasts and skated lightly over her nipples. All the while, he was getting harder against her backside, proving how much he enjoyed giving her pleasure.
“Well, you do make me come pretty reliably,” she conceded a little breathlessly. Tom stopped what he was doing until she craned her head around to look at him. He raised one eyebrow, his lips pursed in discontent. “Okay, so you make me come every single time, too.” He didn’t move until she added, “Usually more than once.”
He gave her a small, superior smile of acknowledgment and went back to driving her crazy with his mouth and fingers. “But Dick can do something you can’t,” she said with what she hoped was just the right amount of regret.
“What’s that?” he asked, his voice muffled against her skin.
“He can vibrate.”
Tom chuckled, a low, sexy sound that set her to vibrating like a plucked string. “I can do a lot better than that.” His fingers dipped lower and started playing her tune.
“Yeah?” she asked, now so turned on it was hard to manage words of more than one syllable.
He rolled her onto her back and moved over her, his pecs scraping against her nipples, his erection pressing against her thigh, their legs interlaced. “Yeah. Dick’s just a silicone impostor. Whereas I have the real thing here.”
There was certainly something to be said for the real thing. “Show me,” she said, parting her legs and tilting her hips.
Tom shifted over and slid inside her with a groan, and there was no question, he felt much better than Dick. Bigger. Harder. And so incredibly hot.
“Plus,” he added, pulling back and driving into her again so slowly she thought she might lose her mind, “I’ve got two hands. And a tongue. All of them at your service.” Taking her mouth in a lazy, sensual kiss, he withdrew a second time and inched back inside her, once more with such languor she had to wrap her legs around him and dig in with her heels to urge him to go faster. Not that it worked. Tom always moved exactly as fast as he wanted to. The man had incredible self-control.
“Dick would never torture me like this,” she gasped.
“Mmm. Dick must not know how much you like it,” he replied. And then he proceeded to show her what two hands and a tongue could do to make her lose her ever-loving mind.
When she was close to coming, he put his index finger somewhere wicked and made her explode with pleasure. She was still panting, Tom buried deep inside her, when he whispered in her ear, “Tell me I’m better than Dick.”
He was a million times better than Dick. But no way was she going to say so, not when she was having such a good time making him prove it to her.
She shook her head. “I’m not sure yet … It’s really … close.” She was breathing so hard, it was difficult to string words together. Reaching up, she patted his arm condescendingly. At least, it was supposed to be condescending. Her hand was still trembling from the orgasm, which somewhat spoiled the effect. “You’re doing … a great job. It’s just … he vibrates.”
Tom laughed and bit her earlobe. “You’re going to pay for that.”
It wasn’t until he’d built her up to a second orgasm with his tongue, only to back off once—twice—three times, leaving her short of breath and achingly desperate, that she finally gave in.
“Yes, all right! Yes.”
“Yes what?” He pushed a lock of hair off her sweaty forehead, and the tender gesture all but did her in.
“Yes, you’re better. You’re the best, okay? The best I’ve ever had. Now let me come, please, or I’ll have to kill you.”
He scooted up to kiss her then, his fingers in her hair, and she forgot their game and gave herself over to him completely. Because only Tom had ever made her feel like this. Only Tom had ever lit her up body and soul at the same time.
When he broke the kiss, he whispered in her ear, “You’re my best, too. You’re absolutely perfect.”
Then he moved inside her and took them both exactly where they wanted to go.
14
Eureka, Kansas, to Marshfield, Missouri. 2,825 miles traveled.
No one had ever told Lexie she was constitutionally incapable of multitasking, but it was the truth. She was the kind of person who could only pay attention to one thing at a time. Her total absorption made her a great conversationalist and a lot of fun to be around. Sometimes, it also meant she ruined dinner.
He watched as she took the lid off the pot of Spanish rice and stirred, pressing her phone to her ear with her shoulder. It was hard to get the rice to cook through without burning. The portable stove was reliable, but it didn’t really do low heat. She started searching around with her eyes for a water bottle to raise the liquid level, but then her brother must have said something funny, because she laughed and walked away from the picnic table, spoon in hand, rice forgotten.
Tom grabbed the spoon and took over. Since he was going to be in charge of cleaning the pot, he was doing himself a favor.
Lexie gave him a grateful smile and sank down onto the bench while he added water. He cut thin slices of cheddar to mix into the rice after it finished cooking, along with some black beans for protein. It had become their default meal for days when they’d put in a lot of miles and were too tired to bother with going out to eat or cooking something that required thought.
“I don’t know,” Lexie was saying to her brother. “We were talking about maybe taking a detour, finding somewhere more interesting to ride.”
They still had a couple more days of Kansas left before they hit the Missouri border, and they’d been trying to think of ways to spice it up. Though the road had begun to roll a little with their arrival in the Flint Hills and had eased from farmland to the ranches of the state’s cattle-fattening belt, it was still nothing to write home about, and they were both getting a little weary of the daily grind. There wasn’t much to see or do in towns like Cassoday, Kansas, Prairie Chicken Capital of the World.
“Yeah, I had all the overnight stops worked out, but we’re not following that anymore,” Lex was saying. “It’s more fun to be spontaneous.” This made him smile. He’d really enjoyed watching Lex transform into a more spontaneous rider. Everything had changed since he’d ditched her computer in the field. She hadn’t asked for a new one, and she’d even let her little notebook drop to the bottom of her bag. Now they rode as far as they wanted to each day, stopped when they felt like it, and visited whatever sights caught their attention. Not to mention seeking out landscape features large enough to conceal two full-grown adults who couldn’t seem to make it through the day without getting into each other’s pants.
The spontaneous Lexie Marshall was a blast.
“That’s none of your business!” she exclaimed, then laughed. “Oh, now you ask me. Two months I’ve been riding with the guy and you had zero questions about him—” She paused. “Right, right, you did ask whether he was carrying an ax, but other than that you haven’t shown the slightest bit of curiosity.” She listened for a moment, smiling, then looked up at Tom. “James wants to know what you’ve done to the real me. He claims you must have brainwashed me, because I’ve never been spontaneous in my life.”
Tom dropped beside her on the bench and wrapped his arm around her waist, lowering his mouth to the ear that didn’t have a phone pressed against it. “You want me to tell him what I did?” he murmured, moving his fingers under the hem of her shirt and wiggling them down into her shorts.
She giggled and swatted at his hand. “No! G
o finish the rice, it’s going to burn.” He bit her earlobe and rose to give his attention back to the pot, leaving her to her conversation.
“What difference does it make?” she said after a bit. “Oh. Seriously? Wow, that’s really great! But don’t let them send anything heavy, okay? I’m not so sentimental that I’m going to carry a set of bookends to Virginia just because Mom bought them for me.”
When she looked over at Tom, he raised an eyebrow, and she explained, “My family wants to send me presents for my birthday. Can we commit to being somewhere in particular four days from now?”
“Marshfield,” he said. He’d been looking at the map earlier. There wasn’t anywhere more interesting to go.
When she got off the phone, he handed her a bowl of rice and a beer across the picnic table. “You didn’t tell me your birthday was coming up.”
She shrugged. “You don’t strike me as the sort of person who cares about birthdays.”
He didn’t care about birthdays. He cared about Lexie. It was something he’d only recently admitted to himself, and he’d only done so because he’d decided he wasn’t going to let it turn into a problem. He could care about Lexie and still leave her when the trip was over. This thing between them had an expiration date, which protected him from doing something stupid like suggesting they get together after they returned to Oregon. Tom figured the TransAm had its own rules. On the trail, he could care about Lexie. Once he got back to Salem, it was back to the woods for him, and she could get on with her life. She deserved better than him, anyway.
“Are you kidding? I love birthdays,” he lied smoothly. “Taryn and I always get together and whack a piñata in the backyard.”
She knew him too well to buy that. “Yeah, right. I bet you buy her a gift certificate online and send it to her by e-mail, and then she has to nag you to take her out for a drink.”
Pretty close. “Ouch, Marshall.” He shook his head and pointed his fork at her. “You’re just sensitive because you’re getting old. What are you, forty-five this year?”
“Very funny. I’ll have you know I’m about to reach the ripe old age of thirty.”
He winced and sucked air in through his teeth. “Ooh, sorry. You must be mature for your age.”
“Thanks for that. Don’t think I don’t know you have a few years on me, old man. I’ve seen that Nirvana concert T-shirt on you enough times to know you were flailing around mosh pits in Seattle when I was still in middle school. How old are you, anyway?”
“Thirty-five. I couldn’t even drive yet when I saw that concert. My brother took me.” The memory stung a little, but he pushed it out of his mind.
“Must have been a good show. You hung on to the shirt long enough.”
“It’s a guy thing. You wouldn’t understand.”
She stuck her tongue out at him and tucked into her dinner. Tom laid back on the bench of the picnic table and studied the clouds, wondering what sort of thirtieth birthday celebration he could pull together in Marshfield, Missouri.
Lexie loved sleeping with Tom, but she sure hated waking up with him.
At home, she liked to snooze her alarm three or four times, nestling in the quiet cocoon of her sleep-warmed bed before finally wandering out to the kitchen in her flannel pajamas. She’d make a cup of tea and settle down in the coziest chair in her living room with a book, reading and sipping while the hot drink warmed her and woke her up.
It wasn’t a routine you could replicate when you were sleeping in a tent. Even if you let yourself drift slowly awake in the comfort of your sleeping bag, sooner or later you had to strip off your clothes and expose your cringing skin to the morning air as you fumbled with zippers in the dark, your tender ears assaulted by the sounds of half a dozen different space-age fabrics swooshing and scrunching against one another. And then there was the necessity of dismantling your bed while you were still in it, stuffing your sleeping bag into the compression sack with fingers that felt fat and stiff with sleep, sitting on the sleeping pad to squeeze all the air out and rolling it up over and over again until you managed to get it small enough to fit into its slippery storage bag. Before you were even fully awake, you were sitting on the bare floor of the tent, surrounded by your packed luggage, tumbling headfirst into the day.
Tom was well aware she hated it, and he only made it worse. He was an early riser, which meant she usually awoke to the sounds of him getting dressed. Once he knew she was conscious, he liked to tease her by pretending they were racing to see who could pack up the fastest, leaning over to tug her sleeping bag back out of the compression sack she was trying to stuff it into, messing up her piles of clothes when she wasn’t looking. He usually managed to get her laughing eventually, but it was the helpless laughter of capitulation.
She’d have much preferred a slower, gentler morning routine.
So it was a pleasant surprise to wake up on the morning of her thirtieth birthday to find Tom beside her, awake but still, propped up on one elbow in the gray light of the dawn.
“Good morning,” she said sleepily.
“Good morning.”
“You’re not moving.”
“Yeah, I thought we could try it your way.”
She snuggled closer to tuck her head against his shoulder. “For my birthday?”
“For your birthday.” He kissed her forehead, and she closed her eyes, breathing him in as she drifted back to sleep.
The morning was hot, the air thick enough to drink. She’d hadn’t been prepared for this much humidity, having only traveled this far east a few times when she was younger. Missouri turned her normally wavy hair into a giant, unruly bush that challenged the staying power of her ponytail holder.
The hills were fun, though. The terrain alternated between flat pastureland and sections of short, steep climbs through shady woods. She and Tom treated the climbs like roller coasters, pedaling as hard as they could on the way down so they could fly up the other side and hammer over the top, standing up on the pedals. Compared to the flat wasteland of Kansas, Missouri was an amusement park.
By the time they hit Marshfield in the early afternoon, Lexie had noodle legs, but she couldn’t stop smiling. Tom mumbled something about secret birthday errands and left her at the post office, promising to return in an hour or so. She retrieved her package, which had come general delivery, and opened it beneath a tree outside. From her mother, there was a silver bicycle pendant on a chain. James had sent Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the classic psychedelic account of the Merry Pranksters’ cross-country bus journey, with a note saying he hoped her trip was just as exciting, even minus the LSD. She leaned back against the tree, contented, and read her new book, pausing now and then to watch people come and go from the post office.
Tom rode up eventually. She could see him coming from a long way off, peering both ways before he zipped across the street, smiling when he finally spotted her. She loved to watch him, the power in his body, the masculine grace of his movements. Somewhere in Kansas, maybe even back in Colorado, without her even realizing it, her whole world had slipped off its axis and reoriented itself around Tom. She could deny it twelve ways to Sunday, and she’d spent a good month doing just that, but it didn’t make it any less true. She was in love with him, deeply and hopelessly in love with her riding companion, and she didn’t even have the good sense to be worried about it. Instead, she pretended it would always be this way, state after state, mile after mile, night after night. No declarations of love, no negotiations about the future, no messy breakups, no fighting, no recriminations. They’d just ride, and be together.
It was her birthday, so she didn’t have to acknowledge what an absurd fantasy that was.
Marshfield was on what used to be U.S. Route 66, the country’s first interstate thoroughfare turned repository of kitsch, which explained the old-fashioned drive-in restaurant where they had an early dinner. She and Tom pulled into the car bay on their bikes, much to the amusement of the folks in the nearby vehicles. Aft
er they’d polished off their cheeseburgers, fries, and milkshakes, Tom led her to the Kit Carson Motel, where an elderly woman named Ramona with a lopsided bouffant winked at him and gave them the key to what she called “the bordello room.”
When Tom unlocked the door, all Lexie could do was stand there and gawk. Two full-size beds covered in shiny pink satin bedspreads dominated the room, flanking a side table that sported a huge lamp with a tasseled red silk shade. The carpet was a marled walnut shag, probably as old as Ramona. At least two dozen framed pictures hung above the headboard of each bed, plus another fifty or so on the remaining walls. Closer inspection revealed them to be photographs of various landmarks along Route 66, each picture carefully labeled with a typewritten slip of paper slid beneath the glass.
While she considered a photo of the barbed wire museum in McLean, Texas, that hung by the door, Tom asked, “What do you think?”
“I’m pretty sure this is the most horrible room I’ve ever seen.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said seriously. “This is a vintage American auto court. I’m pretty sure it’s on the National Register of Historic Places.”
“The carpet, maybe. I’m afraid to take off my shoes.”
“Aw, come on. It’s tacky, but it’s clean. Maybe I’m not doing this right—it’s supposed to be romantic. Here, let me set the mood.” He crossed to the bedside table and switched on the lamp, then pulled the blinds over the windows, plunging the room into red-tinted gloom.
“Ooh, that’s much better. Now I’m really feeling the bordello vibe.”
“Thirty is the bordello birthday. Didn’t you know?” He crossed back over to slip his arms around her waist, and she pressed her cheek against his chest.
“I’m woefully uninformed.”
“You want your presents now?”
“I don’t know. What if they’re not up to the standards of the room?”
