by Stacey Keith
He scraped one hand through his hair and felt his heart pick up speed. Hard to tell if it was the race or standing next to April. They both seemed to have the same effect on him.
At the start line, forty bikes waiting to race sounded like a demon army. And once the gate dropped, their collective banshee howl raised the hair on the back of Brandon’s neck. He’d stuck a piece of fluorescent orange tape on the side of Matthew’s helmet so that even in the mad rush for the corner, Brandon could see where he was.
Dirt sprayed up from all the wheels, making it impossible to find him at first. But then Matt took an early lead, nailing the holeshot and speeding toward the first jump. If he gave it too much throttle, he’d slip to the back of the seat and lose control of the bike. Not enough and he’d find himself mired in mud.
Brandon took another swallow of beer, remembering that they had a lot of laps to go. Then he saw April waving one arm and shouting, “Kill ‘em, Matthew! Make ‘em eat dirt!”
Oh, he liked this April. He’d never seen her before. By the look on his face, Long Jon liked her, too.
“Check you out,” Long Jon said, chuckling. “There’s nothing better than a blood-thirsty wench.”
Brandon didn’t think she knew how irresistible she was with her cheeks flushed and her eyes sparkling. She looked passionate and alive. And he felt that bass drum kick inside his chest again, the one that told him things he didn’t want to hear right now.
“I forgot how much I love motocross,” she said. “When you watch it on TV, you don’t get all the sounds and excitement.”
Brandon wasn’t thinking about the race. All he saw was the soft swell of her breasts underneath the blue sweater. The way her hair glowed in the shadow of the pines. The sound of her high, breathless cheer of support for his brother.
It was crazy, especially considering the women he’d been with—women in sky-high heels and little satin hot pants. Women who’d thrown themselves at him, who’d played hard to get. But it was homespun April Roby, a girl who had more than a little Texas in her voice, educated Texas, but enough of it to salt a margarita glass, who did it for him in ways he was only beginning to understand.
Maybe his mind wasn’t clicking right. Maybe she’d cast a spell over him—one with a heap of the vanilla she always smelled of mixed with the coconut scent of her shampoo. April managed to get under a man’s skin somehow and cause him to forget an important truth: lone wolves never travel in a pack.
Matthew took the first ramp clean and landed without coming up short on the backside of the jump. Last time, although he hadn’t broken anything on him personally, he’d bent the frame and smashed the crankcase, which had taken Brandon weeks to fix. Now Matt and the other racers zoomed toward the rest of the course, out of eyeshot of the spectators, which was usually boring until the racers came by again.
April glanced up at him with a shy smile, and Brandon found himself far from bored.
Noticing her perfect skin was another sign that he was losing it. Skin wasn’t special. It was just something that sat on top of the engine, like a saddle. But hers looked temptingly soft. He imagined running his thumb across it while he kissed those irresistible lips. There was one fantasy in particular that kept him busy in the shower these days: April with soap suds trickling down her glistening, naked body.
And here she was right in front of him. Touching her had become a painful, physical necessity, but they couldn’t leave and they weren’t alone. But when the time came, God, how he would savor it. He actually wanted to show her what her body was capable of. To explore it bit by bit, testing its sweet spots, angles, rhythms. Where another man might be tempted to gobble such a mouthwatering treat, Brandon would devour it with the kind of purposeful, agonizing slowness that drove women out of their minds.
Jesus, he had to stop thinking about this. If he didn’t, he’d be the one going out of his mind. He felt intoxicated—and hell, even after three beers, he could pass any field sobriety test.
“You seemed pretty sure I’d come out today,” April said.
“You look more surprised than I am.” Brandon leaned into his elbows on the fence. Some poor kid who’d crashed right out of the gate was now weepily walking his bike back to an angry-looking dad. “But then, you don’t see what I see in you.”
“What might that be?”
“I see someone who wants to wake up.”
Where that came from, Brandon didn’t know, but he felt the truth of it in his bones. “Way I see it, people who are that buttoned up are pure rebel on the inside. They’re trying to keep a lid on something they think is wrong or bad or just plain illegal. But at your age? That’s against the natural order. And it can’t last. At some point, you’re going to explode.”
Long Jon was drinking his beer and pretending not to listen. He loved road philosophy, so he was probably itching to throw in his two cents, but Brandon felt possessive of April’s attention in a way that should have rung the warning bells a lot louder than it did.
April glanced up at him with a look of guilty embarrassment. “You could be right about me. But what about you? What made you so…unbuttoned?”
He loved the habit she had of casting her eyes down before raising them to his face. The effect was like that of a window thrown open and the sun pouring in. She also had a social worker’s trick of turning the subject around to the other person.
What they said, all these stupid words, wasn’t even important. They were a distraction. Underneath the noise was a feeling he wasn’t yet able to identify. But it clawed at him like a wild animal.
“The bike changes a man,” Long Jon said. “But after he’s seen everything, done everything, that’s when the man himself changes. It’s like a sickness he has to get rid of first. Then he starts appreciating the love of a good woman. Going it alone don’t seem that much fun anymore.”
There was a long silence where Brandon wanted to push Long Jon’s face into the muddy track for being such a buzz kill. April looked down at Long Jon’s cup, saw that it was empty and filled it from hers. “Bad breakup?” she asked sympathetically.
The hornet swarm of two-stroke motorcycles sounded like it was getting closer. Maybe this would make Long Jon shut up before he started yapping about his ex.
But Brandon was too aware of April standing next to him. Bringing her here was a terrible idea. He should have driven her straight to the nearest motel.
Matt whipped by in a pack of maybe five riders, ready to take the next lap. Instead of paying attention, Brandon moved closer to April. Long Jon was busy giving roadside advice to Matt, even though Matt was gone again. The sound of Long Jon’s drawling voice seemed to recede into the distance just like the bikes did, until all Brandon heard was the hum of his own blood pumping.
April gazed up at him with unmistakable longing in her eyes, so blue in the light of late afternoon. Like any right-thinking man, Brandon had strong opinions about public displays of affection—any emotions, really, except scorn and anger—but her lips were close. Too close.
He couldn’t help himself. He leaned down to kiss her because there was nothing else in the world he wanted more than to taste those lips.
Something hot and powerful drove straight through his gut. She made a noise of soft surprise, which allowed him to deepen the kiss. It felt as though he were drowning.
The sweetness of her teased over him, swamping his senses and making him forget what a blow it was to his tough-guy image to make out in public. Brandon sank his hands deep into her warm, silky hair and held her head right where he wanted it, feeling her melt beneath him.
He knew kissing her would be good, but not like this. He was already hard enough to crack a block of ice.
She didn’t know what she was doing, not really, which was a drastic change from the women he usually kissed. They were experienced at stirring up a man’s senses. But April’s innocence was a thousand
times hotter. He couldn’t even say why it made him so crazy. He may have fantasized what kissing April would feel like, but this was beyond any fantasy. It was everything he could do to keep from ripping her clothes off right there on the grass and making her forget her own name.
He kissed her deeper, dark and velvety, the tip of his tongue finding hers with blind need. The urge to fill his hands with her made sparks race up and down his spine. Long Jon cleared his throat by way of protest, but Brandon hardly knew who Long Jon was anymore. There was just April’s hot, greedy, little mouth and the noises she made telling him how much she wanted this. How much she wanted him.
The kiss grew hotter and more drugging. She pulled his hair maybe without meaning to and then gasped against his mouth, “Oh, God…oh, God…”
Without any conscious thought, Brandon pressed her back against the fence. Her eyes were heavy-lidded and hypnotic, and with her head tilted, he saw her pulse beating wildly in her throat. Her soft breasts were crushed against his chest, her hips pushed into his. She could clearly feel how much he needed her, but so far she hadn’t run.
This time he went in slower, dragging her lower lip between his teeth, teasing and licking and stroking. She met him, timidly at first, and then with a mindless hunger that sent the blood scalding through his veins. April may have been inexperienced, but she was obviously a fast learner.
He’d never wanted anyone like this before. Desire squeezed him tight as a fist, urgent and demanding. The white-hot edge of need made him savage. But at the same time he felt vulnerable, as if one wrong word might break him.
That vanilla scent…he tasted it at its source. Her tongue slid over his and he was lost again, trying to find his way back.
When it came to women, he figured he’d seen it all. The truth was, he hadn’t seen anything. What was left of his mind kept trying to make sense of his obsessive need for her. But something like this could never be understood.
With his jacket partially concealing him, he reached for her breasts.
April stiffened in alarm.
The prohibition set him on fire, but he would never rush her or make her feel as though he was only in it for the score. Because even he knew that wasn’t the case. This was more than just sex.
God help him, it was her.
“I’m not ready,” she whispered.
He leaned his forehead against hers, the breath sawing in and out of his chest. Her breathing was ragged, too, as though they’d both run a long way to get here.
Gradually the sounds and smells of the race track came drifting back to him, but something had changed. The world was different. He couldn’t say what it was exactly. Maybe colors were brighter. Maybe the breeze felt especially soft as it blew through his hair. His dick wasn’t having any of this wait-and-see crap, but he felt more in charge of it now.
Long Jon had disappeared, but then Brandon saw him ambling over with a big dopey grin on his face, like Long Jon knew a secret and planned to hold it over him as long as possible.
April kept gulping air. She looked the way Brandon felt: stunned.
Long Jon saluted them both with a fresh beer and said, “Congratulations. Matthew won his heat. Next time, just get a goddamn room, will you?”
Chapter 14
“What on earth did you do to Ryan?” Jacey complained. “I ran into him at the gas station and he wouldn’t stop bitching.”
April stood at her kitchen sink and ran water over a colander full of potatoes. She was making cheesy scalloped potatoes for Joanna and her family, the old family recipe kind with the cream of celery soup and extra butter.
A foil-covered turkey already sat on her kitchen table in its roasting pan. There were two pies, one peach and one apple, which her sister Maggie had taught her how to make. A white ceramic baking dish brimming with green beans and onions waited in the oven. She wanted to bake the scalloped potatoes with it to save time.
But no matter how much chopping, baking and broiling she did, guilt continued to gnaw a hole in her stomach. And now Ryan was going around telling everyone what a horrible person she was.
April gouged the eyes out of a potato with the sharp end of her peeler. “I’m not in love with Ryan. And the last time I checked, that was our private business. I can’t believe he’s talking to everyone about it.”
“He said you were hot for somebody else,” Jacey replied. “But how can that be true? I’m your best friend. If there was some other guy, you would have told me.”
The peeler slipped and skidded over her finger. April gave a yelp and then the water at the bottom of the sink ran red. Jacey ran over to see what had happened.
“What is wrong with you?” Jacey asked, with her usual eye-rolling lack of sympathy for physical affliction. “You just dropped a glass, like, ten minutes ago. Are you drinking lattes again?”
April wrapped a paper towel around her thumb and applied pressure. “A little help for the wounded here? I have Band-Aids in the bathroom cabinet.”
The sound of Jacey’s voice receded as she went to find the Band-Aids, but it was all variations on the same theme: Why was April so clumsy all of a sudden, was she drinking lattes, and why would Ryan keep insisting there was some other guy she was hot for?
April stared at the blood seeping through the towel on her thumb. The pain hadn’t set in yet, but it would, just as the pain hadn’t set in yet with Brandon, but it would. Yesterday was…God help her, she couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Everything about yesterday had already taken on a dreamlike quality, including the ride back to her car. Matthew was sitting with Long Jon in the truck, waiting to follow Brandon the rest of the way home. She hadn’t wanted the day to end. With a heavy heart, she’d climbed off the bike.
But as she turned to go, Brandon grabbed her by the arm and said, “When can I see you again?”
“I can’t,” she’d replied, her voice catching.
“Baby, come on. We passed that exit miles ago.”
“You don’t understand. I took an oath of service.”
“That means you can’t have a personal life? Do they fucking own you even when you’re off?”
“If it means dating a client?” She bit her lip and looked down at the dull gleam of the road in the moonlight. “Yes.”
“I don’t accept that.”
“And they won’t accept this.”
Even in the darkness under the bridge, she could feel desire radiating off him in waves. Ignorant as she was of men, she knew Brandon’s interest was sincere. No, it was more than sincere. It was personal. And that was what made it impossible to resist.
All those women. All those nameless encounters. Few of them had been personal.
But this was.
“Then come to the house on Monday,” he said. “You can say you’re there for Matthew.”
She shuddered at the thought. It was bad enough that she was doing this at all. But to use her job as an excuse?
“Are you going to make me come get you at your house?” he asked her, and she knew he wasn’t joking.
The taste of him was still on her lips. In her blood. She must have been drunk with it when she said, “I’ll drive over after work on Monday and we can talk about it. But that’s as far as I go. Don’t expect more from me.”
Back in the real world, Jacey rattled the box of Band-Aids in her face. “April! I’ve been calling to you for five minutes. And here I thought I was the deaf one.”
“Sorry,” April said. “I’ve got a lot on my mind.”
Jacey peeled open a plastic bandage and then smoothed it around April’s thumb. “You’re probably just tired from all this stupid cooking. Who on earth is going to eat all this?”
“My boss,” April said. “She just had a baby and has a ton of other mouths to feed.” She returned to the sink and went to work on the potatoes again, more carefully this time,
making sure she kept her fingers away from the peeler.
Jacey plopped down at the kitchen table, crossing long perfect legs that were tan even before summer, and scrolled through her phone. Her dark hair was in its usual glossy ponytail, thick enough so that the ends formed a clean, trimmed wedge. April couldn’t get her hair to do that because it was too straight to stay in the elastic band.
“Why does Ryan keep going on and on about this other guy?” Jacey asked her. “He went crazy about it for five minutes, which was a real drag because I hate all those fumes at the gas station and I really had to pee.”
April thought with a pang, I love the smell of gas stations. And now they will always remind me of Brandon. “I don’t know,” she said. “But Ryan won’t return my phone calls. I wish you would talk him out of hating me. It’s why I didn’t want to date him in the first place. I knew it wouldn’t work out and then he’d resent me for it.”
“Ryan’s not so bad.”
“I didn’t say that.” April glanced over at Jacey to make sure she heard her. Jacey couldn’t read her lips if her back was turned. “Please. Take him to lunch or something and explain that I’m just not ready to date anybody right now.”
As far as lies went, that wasn’t the worst. But it was her best friend she was lying to, just like it was her boss she was cooking dinner for, all to appease her guilt.
But which was worse? Saying no to a man she had the strongest imaginable attraction to—and would regret not being with for the rest of her life? Or telling a few lies?
She sliced a few more strips off the potato and felt her stomach tighten. Maybe the answer depended on which part of her body she asked.
