About Last Night

by Ruthie Knox

  Jen had not been inside a bar for more than two years, and she was no more comfortable today than she’d been the last time she’d been out when her ex had made a point of announcing to everyone in the bar that she had only one breast. So the fact that she was here was amazing in and of itself. The loud music, the crowd, and the GIs mingling with the wannabe cowboys was not an ambience Jen typically sought out. The smoke grated on her lungs but wasn’t nearly as smothering in the seat she’d managed to snag at the edge of the bar. Still, anything was better than the sterile smell of the hospital, and she wanted to get back to feeling normal, really she did. Whatever normal meant nowadays.

  Laura was the one saying good-bye to her husband for the fifth time in seven years. Jen was just here for moral support, so the least she could do was put her own demons to rest and have a good time. She lifted the beer to her lips.

  “I can’t believe you dragged me here,” she shouted in Laura’s ear over the din of Kenny Chesney.

  “I can’t believe I found a babysitter. Trent’s whole company is here tonight.” Laura smiled and nursed a Corona while Jen sipped on her Heineken.

  “Shouldn’t you be molesting your husband? He’s the one leaving.”

  “I don’t want to leave you hanging out here, teasing all these horny soldiers with your fake boob.”

  “Ha-ha-ha. My fake boob and I are just fine, thanks. And speak of the devil.” Strong, wide hands slipped around Laura’s waist, yanking her back. Laura tipped her face up to her husband’s for a kiss and Jen offered Trent a mock salute with the tip of her beer.

  “Will you please take your wife to dance?” Jen shouted with a smile.

  “Gladly.” Trent pulled his wife into some convoluted line dance, leaving Jen alone at the bar where she was quite content to watch everyone else and sip her beer.

  She discreetly tugged at her blouse again. In a dark corner at the other end of the bar, a sensual flare of movement caught her eye. She looked closer and saw a couple kissing intensely, so engrossed in each other she couldn’t say where one person ended and the other began, lost in the heavy scent of lust and liquor. She looked away, studying the green bottle in her hand. She wondered if she would ever again know what it felt like to have warm, rough hands move over her flesh.

  Jen had come a long way, and it had still taken all of Laura’s persuasive powers to convince her to buy the breast form. But it didn’t mean that her scars no longer bothered her. She’d hesitated for a different reason. The round shape beneath her blouse now was just false advertising. She swallowed and pushed aside a brief flicker of melancholy.

  Someone solid and heavy knocked into her and sloshed beer down the front of her blouse. A strong vise latched around her arm to steady her. She glanced up into the lightest grey eyes she’d ever seen. Grey eyes that she’d seen before but never this close. In the dimly lit bar, they looked almost silver.

  Shane Garrison. A friend of Trent’s. Jen had seen him around before, but had never actually spoken to him. He’d always seemed big, but up close he was massive. Black tribal tattoos twisted up both of his wrists, writhing up his forearms to disappear beneath the frayed edge of a green T-shirt. And who knew that bald could be so sexy in the right lighting? Had to be the rough jaw that did it.

  “Sorry. You okay?” He leaned close to her ear so he didn’t have to shout. Jen shivered as his breath brushed across her skin. He stood closer to her now than any man other than a doctor had in over a year. The heat from his body caressed her skin, and she could smell him, a mixture of spice and smoke and something entirely male. She swallowed and tried to find her voice.

  “I’m fine. Thanks. This place is crowded.” She knew better than this. She pulled her arm free and tugged the clinging blouse away from her skin, suddenly afraid that he would see the scars on her chest through the wet material.

  As the words left her lips, someone jostled her into him again. He tried to steady her but she fell against him anyway.

  Time hung suspended and she stood in this man’s embrace, feeling protected and safe and deliciously unflawed. It was impossible to miss the hard angles of his body. For one brief fantasy moment, she imagined what it would feel like if this dangerous and sexy man lowered his mouth to hers.

  But the fantasy faded as quickly as it had come and Jen stepped back into reality. A reality in which a man like the one standing oh-so-close to her was just being polite to a woman he had met in a bar. Down girl.

  He lowered his mouth to her ear again. “Since I nearly crushed you twice now, can I buy you a drink?”

  She smiled and sipped from the sweating green bottle. “I still have some of this one left. Thanks, though.”

  “Jen, right?” He retrieved his own beer. “Are you here with Laura and Trent?”

  “Yeah. How did you know?”

  “I’ve seen you around. How long have you known Laura?”

  Jen ticked off numbers on her fingers. “Ethan is almost six, right? Almost six years. We met right after she had him.”

  A shadow flickered across his face and was gone before she could truly say she’d seen it. Instead of letting it go, she chased it. “What?”

  “I’ve known Trent a long time. That’s all.”

  Why would that make him sad? She wondered at the man who scanned the bar, splitting his attention between her and the crush of bodies on the floor. With each question, he leaned in close to her, sending a shiver down her spine. A shiver that chased away her awkward discomfort and, for one brief moment, made her feel whole and feminine. There had been a time when she would have acted on impulse and pursued this man, but those days were long gone.

  “Yeah. Going away party and all that. Are you deploying tomorrow, too?” God but she loved how he smelled.

  “Yeah.” He took a long pull from his beer.

  “For how long?”

  He shrugged. “A year, with an option for fifteen months.” She caught a glimpse of a black tattoo around the edge of his collarbone and wondered just how much of his body was covered by the twisting dark lines of ink. Tattoos didn’t usually do it for her. She wondered at people who would permanently color their bodies. But on Shane, they worked. They worked well.

  She sniffed and sipped her beer even as Shane shifted, resting one arm on the bar behind him and angling his body slightly toward her so that he could see the dance floor. Jen turned in time to see Laura dragging Trent away from the Copperhead Road line dance. They wove through the crowd, heading toward her, and Jen felt a sense of guilt creep up the back of her neck like a flush. Laura was spending too much time worrying about her—she should be focusing on her husband instead.

  Trent’s face split into a wide grin when he saw Shane. “Miracles will never cease. Carponti actually got you to come out?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Jen, you didn’t tell me you knew Shane,” Laura said, twining her arm with Jen’s.

  “I don’t. He bumped into me.”

  Laura leaned close, so that the men couldn’t hear her. “Shane is one of Trent’s platoon sergeants, but they’ve been friends for years. And he’s divorc—”

  “Not another word. Not one.” It didn’t matter that she’d been wondering if he was single. Her friend’s words shattered her fantasy and brought reality into sharp, silicone-shaped focus.

  Laura feigned innocence with widened eyes and a wicked smile that fooled no one. “What?”

  “I know where you’re going with this, and it’s not even close to possible.”

  Laura shrugged, a smile painted on her lips, and danced away with Trent, leaving Jen alone at the crowded bar with brooding, sexy Shane. She sipped her beer and studied him. He was watching the crowd, his jaw flexing in the shadows.

  What did it feel like to know that tomorrow he was going off to war?

  Read on for an excerpt from Ruthie Knox’s

  Ride With Me

  1

  COMPANION WANTED. TransAmerica Trail. Will start in Astoria, OR, on June 1 and wrap up in York
town, VA, by the end of August. Camping as much as possible, with the occasional hotel. I’m easy to get along with and am looking forward to a grand adventure! E-mail TransAmAlex@gmail.com.

  Tom wiped the chain grease off his hand and answered the shop phone. “Salem Cycles.”

  “I found you somebody,” his sister said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “For tomorrow. I found you somebody to ride across the country with.”

  They’d had this argument months ago, when he’d first told her about his plan to bike the TransAm this summer, and he’d thought they were done with it. He should’ve known she was merely engaged in a strategic retreat.

  “Taryn–”

  “Just hear me out. I found a guy, Alex, through an Adventure Cycling ad. He’s taking the same route you want to take, and he needs somebody to ride with him. You don’t even have to talk to him if you don’t want to. He cooks, and he’ll pay half on the camping fees. How bad could it be?”

  It could be a nightmare. What Tom wanted was to spend a few months on the road alone, listening to the pavement under his tires and taking in forty-two hundred miles of sights. He didn’t want a buddy. He didn’t do buddies.

  “I don’t need a babysitter.”

  “Please, Tom. You can’t ride your bicycle across the country alone. It’s insane. You’ll end up being slaughtered by a serial killer.”

  “Taryn, I’m thirty-five, single, tattooed, and antisocial. I’m the serial killer.”

  “Okay, point taken. But you could get hit by a car and bleed to death by the side of the road.”

  “How would riding with another person prevent that?”

  “It wouldn’t, but he could call me on his cell phone so you could tell me you love me with your dying breath.”

  Tom started pacing the small workspace, weaving around the bike stands and massaging his temple with the fingers of his free hand. He recognized Taryn’s tone of voice. There was something she wasn’t telling him, and whatever it was, he wasn’t going to like it. “I’ve toured alone before. There was the South America trip. Australia. Death Valley last winter. Why worry about me now?”

  “I always worry about you. Worrying about you is my job. But for those trips, you didn’t give me enough notice to do anything about it. You just called me from the road to say, ‘Ta-ta, Taryn! I’m off to pedal across the Outback like a crazy person! Try not to lie awake at night imagining dingoes eating my corpse!’ ”

  Tom winced. It was true, he’d deliberately left the country before telling Taryn about his plan to ride the Canning Stock Route in Western Australia, but it had been for her own good. He’d spared her months of fretting—and saved himself a lot of nagging. He’d have done the same thing this time, too, if she hadn’t caught him studying the TransAm maps at his kitchen table one afternoon and managed to worm the information out of him.

  Tom wasn’t about to let his sister’s irrational fears stop him from doing what he wanted to do, but given that she was his only nonestranged family member and pretty much his sole friend, he hated to make her unhappy. Taryn had stuck by him through the trial, and he owed her for that. She was probably the only reason he wasn’t living in an unheated cabin in the woods by now, composing paranoid manifestos about secret government conspiracies and mailing them off to The New York Times.

  Not that she’d managed to turn him into a ray of sunshine. There was a good reason why the guy who owned the bike shop didn’t ask Tom to work the counter unless he absolutely had to. Tom would be the first to admit his social skills were rusty, and he tended to intimidate the customers. He spent his days alone, getting paid to fix bikes and riding them for free, and that was the way he liked it. But Taryn at least made sure he went out to eat now and then, even threw the occasional date his way, and he appreciated her efforts to keep him connected to the land of the living—however tenuously.

  “Ground Control, Major Tom,” she said. “We’re having a conversation here, remember?”

  “Right.” Another hazard of being a loner—one tended to lose the knack for polite discourse. “There aren’t any dingoes to worry about on the TransAm. It’s thoroughly civilized. Paved, even.” He considered his options, then offered a concession. “I’ll call you from the road every few days if you want. But I’m not going to ride with a partner. It’s not a vacation for me if I have to talk to someone.”

  “Yeah, well, here’s the thing. I knew you were going to say that, so I didn’t exactly wait for your permission.”

  Bracing a hip against the cluttered workbench, Tom resisted the urge to stick the phone in the stand clamp and press down on the handle until the plastic handset shattered. No one was a more creative meddler than his sister, and her self-satisfied tone told him she’d concocted something extra special this time.

  “What did you do?”

  “Like I said, I found you a guy. Alex Marshall. You’ve been e-mailing him on and off since April to hash out your plan for the tour, and he’s really excited to start the ride tomorrow. In fact, he sent you a message this morning to confirm he’ll meet you on the beach in Seaside at six A.M.”

  “You set me up on a blind date with a riding buddy?”

  “Oh, I’d say you’re a little more committed than that. Alex is counting on you to go all the way with him. To Virginia, that is.” He could practically hear her winking over the phone. Taryn was pleased with herself.

  “So call it off.”

  This was absolutely not his problem. But he had the sinking feeling he was going to have to be the one to solve it.

  “No way. Alex is at a motel in Astoria as we speak, packing up his gear and getting totally stoked to meet you in the morning. I’m not going to be the one to disappoint him.”

  Ah, hell. She was going to play it like this. Now he had a picture in his head of friendly old Alex Marshall waiting on the beach in his best jersey, map at the ready, panniers all packed, hopes high, looking around for a riding partner who wasn’t going to show—unless Tom drove a hundred miles out of his way to meet him. Taryn certainly wouldn’t be coming to the rescue. Once his sister made her mind up, she was as stubborn as a pit bull. She would be perfectly happy to leave Alex dangling on the beach as bait for Tom’s heroic impulses.

  He kicked the corner of the workbench with one boot-clad toe, causing a few boxed tubes to tumble to the floor.

  Taryn knew his weakness for hopeless cases. Achilles had that bum heel, and Tom had an unshakeable compulsion to champion the underdog. It never worked out for him any better than the heel had worked out for the Greek. If Tom hadn’t insisted on playing the hero, he wouldn’t have ended up testifying against his own father, destroying his family and his marriage in one disastrous blow. He’d still be a suit, rather than a guy with grease ground so deep into his fingertips it didn’t wash out.

  It’s not like he wished he could be that other person again. But it would be nice to feel as though he had choices.

  He sighed into the mouthpiece. “Why are you always backing me into corners?”

  “It’s the only way I can make you do things my way,” she countered, sounding amused.

  “You’re such a pain in my ass.”

  “Ha! I knew it would work. You’re going to Seaside, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah,” he admitted. “And you’re going to drop me off. But I swear to you, I’m not riding with this guy all the way across the country. I’ll meet him and keep him company until we can find somebody else to be his riding partner, and then I’m taking off.”

  “You could change your mind,” she said brightly. “Maybe you’ll like him.”

  Tom already hated Alex Marshall. Six A.M., and he was standing around on a beach in Seaside waiting for the guy instead of sleeping in his own bed.

  According to Taryn, Marshall had insisted they needed to begin the ride by dipping the wheels of their bikes in the Pacific Ocean. The moron was actually going to be riding in from Astoria to ensure he didn’t miss any of the officially
mapped miles. Which was particularly stupid because it was only just now getting to be light out. Alex must have left Astoria in something close to darkness. Tom hoped the guy had flashers and a headlight, at least.

  He’d just as soon have met up with Marshall at his own place in Salem. It was only a few miles off the route. What difference did skipping the first hundred miles make when the trail was more than four thousand miles long? No difference at all, except to people who were totally inflexible or inexcusably sentimental. He didn’t know which Alex was, but neither possibility inclined him to like the guy.

  It didn’t help that he was late. There was nobody on the beach this early but Tom and some woman who’d rolled up at the other end of the parking lot a few minutes ago. She was obviously about to start the TransAm herself—she had a sweet steel-frame touring bike and a trailer for her gear. Looked like she was waiting for someone, which made sense, since women tended not to ride alone.

  He was tempted to say to hell with Marshall and take off. Taryn had already fled the scene. A quick hug, a peck on the cheek, and she’d driven away mere minutes after he’d unpacked his stuff from her SUV. Having set this plan in motion, the last thing she’d wanted was to stay here and watch it unfold—not when the odds were good that Tom would tell Alex all about her meddling and make her look as manipulative as she was.

  With Taryn gone, the only thing keeping him here was the knowledge of how guilty he’d feel if he knowingly stranded a complete stranger on his first day of the TransAm. But wouldn’t that wear off? How many miles could guilt chase him across the country?

  He knew the answer, though. Thousands of miles. Dozens of months. Guilt never gave it a rest.

  The woman started pushing her bike slowly toward him. Fantastic. Now he’d have to make small talk with a stranger about how excited he was to be starting, what he thought about prevailing headwinds, blah blah blah.

  He made up his mind. Marshall had five minutes, and then Tom was out of here.

  “Sorry to bother you, but are you Tom Geiger?” She smiled uncertainly.