“Might be. Might not be,” she said. “It depends on my mood.” Her words exhilarated her.
He dropped his clothes, walked over to her, and dipped his index finger into the fabric between her breasts. With a single tug, the towel fell to the carpet. “Time to taste the forbidden fruit,” he said in a barely audible rasp.
Who was the forbidden fruit? Herself or him? She didn’t want to think, only to feel. He dipped his head to her shoulder, but she wasn’t going to be the only naked person in the room, and she tugged off his towel. It fell across their feet as their bodies met. His lips touched her collarbone. He nipped. Moved onto her neck. He hadn’t shaved, and his beard scraped lightly over her skin, leaving a trail of goose bumps.
She’d spent hours today pressed against his body, and now that she’d made up her mind to do this, she wanted to feel more of it. She splayed her hands against his chest. He lingered just below her earlobe. She didn’t want him to kiss her, and she turned her head before he could reach her lips. The movement exposed more of her neck, and he accepted the invitation.
Before long, his hand went to her breast, his thumb to the crest. Hot blood rushed through her. He flicked it, and she did the same to him. His breathing came faster, and so did hers. He hooked his arms under her bottom, lifted her, and carried her to the bed she’d staked out for herself. No kisses. No endearments. Nothing that would remind her of Ted.
He flipped the covers back with one hand. As they fell into the sheets she accidentally scratched him. She didn’t care. She dug her hands into his wild curls and tugged simply because she wanted to.
“Ouch.”
“No talking,” she said.
“Like it rough, do you?”
Yes. That was exactly how she wanted it. No solicitude or consideration. No tender caresses.
She slipped her hands between his legs and squeezed. Not hard enough to cause him pain. Just enough to make him feel the tiniest bit vulnerable.
“Watch it,” he said.
“You watch it,” she said.
He reared above her, one corner of those sadistic lips kicking up. “Aren’t you full of surprises …” And just like that, he’d pinioned her wrists to the bed and pressed her into the mattress with his body.
A dangerous thrill shot through her.
He dragged his unshaven jaw across her nipple. The deliciously painful abrasion made her gasp. He did it again. She twisted beneath him, a movement that left her open and vulnerable.
“I was hoping for a little more foreplay”—he ripped the foil around the condom with his teeth—“but if that’s the way you want it …”
She’d never imagined anyone could pull on a condom so fast. He recaptured her wrists. With one powerful thrust he drove inside her.
She gasped. Her legs fell open. He gave her no time to adjust to his size before he began to pump. He displayed no finesse. Only deep, powerful strokes that touched her very core. Strokes that required nothing of her but a submission she didn’t feel like offering. She wrapped her heels around his calves. Bucked beneath him. His teeth gleamed as he smiled.
Before long, sweat beaded on his forehead, but still he thrust. Refusing to give in until she did.
But she wouldn’t go first. She’d hold out forever. Die before she let him win this battle, which, like most wars, had lost its point. His dark eyes grew glassy. His weight heavy. A whimper slipped through her lips. Another. His grip slackened on her wrists. She curled both hands around his sides. Dug in her nails. She owed him nothing.
And with that knowledge, she gave him everything.
At the exact moment he lost his own battle.
His back arched, shoulders lifted, hips drove. Flurry. Quake. Flood.
“WANNA BEER?” HE SAID AFTERWARD, not looking at her, every bit the great Neanderthal.
“No. I want to sleep. Alone.” She pointed toward the other bed, as rude as she could be.
He didn’t seem to care.
THE SOUND OF THE MOTEL room door awakened her the next morning. She forced her eyes open. Panda stood there, holding two cups of coffee he must have picked up in the motel office. Being a skank was a new experience—not nearly as much fun the morning after. She wanted to pull the sheet over her head and beg him to go away. She left the sheet where it was and reached for a little attitude. “I want Starbucks.”
“Hurry up and get dressed.” He set the coffee on the dresser.
Pretending last night hadn’t happened would only make her feel worse. “Sex is supposed to be a mood enhancer. What happened to you?”
“Real life,” he retorted, as prickly as his day-old stubble. “I’ll wait for you outside.”
So much for cozy chitchat, but what did she care? She’d broken one more link—the final link?—in the chain that bound her to Ted. He was no longer the last man she’d slept with.
Panda was standing impatiently by the bike, her helmet dangling from one hand, his coffee cup in the other, when she emerged from the motel room. A storm during the night had left the air heavy with humidity, but she doubted that was the reason he looked like a time bomb about to detonate. Trying to conjure up all the impertinence and bravado of her fourteen-year-old self—her fourteen-year-old virginal self—was useless in this case, but what about Viper, her biker chick alter ego? Her eyes narrowed. “Chill, dude.”
Ohmygod! Had she really said that?
He scowled and pitched his cup into an overflowing trash can. “It’s two weeks, Lucy. Time’s up.”
“Not for me, babe. I’m just getting started.”
She’d thrown him off balance almost as much as she’d thrown herself off. “Whatever you think you’re doing,” he said with a glare, “stop it.”
She grabbed her helmet from him. “Maybe you want to stand here all day and talk, but I want to ride.”
As she strapped on the helmet, he muttered something she couldn’t hear, and then they were off. It didn’t take them long to cross the Arkansas border and reach the Memphis outer belt. Until yesterday, Panda had stayed off freeways, but not today. He blew past a sign for Graceland, switched lanes, and merged onto another freeway. Before long, he pulled off at an exit. The triumph she’d felt over her display of bravado vanished when she saw the sign.
MEMPHIS INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
She squeezed his ribs and shouted, “Where are you going?”
He didn’t answer.
But she knew, and the scope of his betrayal was so huge she couldn’t take it in.
He pulled up in front of the airport departure area and stopped between two SUVs. “End of the road.”
He said it as if it didn’t matter, as if she should hop off, shake his hand, and breeze away. When she didn’t move, he took over. He grasped her arm, and the next thing she knew, they were both standing next to the bike. “It’s time for you to go home.” He tugged her chinstrap free, pulled off her helmet, and secured it to the bike.
Her lungs had collapsed. This was the way Ted had felt. Blindsided and deceived. “That’s my decision to make,” she said.
Instead of responding, he unfastened her pack and set it on the sidewalk. He reached into the saddlebags, withdrew an envelope, and pressed it into her hands. “Everything you need is in here.”
She stared at him.
“It’s two weeks, Lucy. Two weeks. Do you know what I’m saying? I have another job waiting.”
She couldn’t—wouldn’t—grasp his meaning.
He stood before her. Withdrawn. Indifferent. Maybe a little bored. She was one more woman. One more female body. One more job …
GAS, GRASS, OR ASS. NOBODY RIDES FOR FREE.
And then something shifted. The smallest furrow gathered between those dark eyebrows. His lids dropped, and when he lifted them again, she saw everything the man she knew as Panda had worked so hard to suppress. She saw the intelligence he’d kept so tightly veiled. She saw pain and doubt, remorse maybe. And she saw a soul-deep hunger that had nothing to do with smutty T-shirts and obscene bumpe
r stickers.
He shook his head slightly, as if he wanted to clear away those vulnerable emotions. But he couldn’t seem to do it because he lifted his arms and cupped her cheeks, his big hands as gentle as a butterfly’s wings, those cold blue eyes tender and troubled. He slanted his head and did what she hadn’t let him do last night. He kissed her. At first the softest touch, then something deeper, a hungry joining with her face protectively nested in his palms.
His mouth moved over hers as if he could never get enough. And then he let her go without warning, turned away before she could stop him. He straddled the bike and kicked the engine into life. A moment later, he was gone, roaring out of her world on a beat-up Yamaha Warrior plastered with bumper stickers that no longer fit the man she’d thought she’d known.
She stood on the sidewalk, her heart in her throat, her backpack at her feet, long after he’d disappeared. Car rental shuttle buses passed. Taxis pulled up. Eventually she gazed down at the envelope he’d handed her. She slipped her finger under the flap, opened it, and took out its contents.
Her driver’s license. Her credit cards. And directions to the security office inside, where someone would be waiting to handle her trip back to D.C.
The evidence of her parents’ wonderful, suffocating love stared back at her. She’d known they could find her if they wanted to. Now she understood why they hadn’t. Because they’d known from the beginning exactly where she was. Because they’d hired a bodyguard.
Two weeks, Lucy.
She should have realized they’d do this. Over the years there’d been a few incidents where people had gotten too aggressive around her … A couple of wacko letters … Once she’d been knocked over—nothing serious, but enough to put them on edge. After she’d lost her Secret Service detail, they’d ignored her objections and hired private security for big events where they felt she’d be too exposed. Did she really think they’d allow her to go unprotected through a highly publicized wedding? Panda had been on her parents’ payroll from the beginning. A short-term contract they’d extended to two weeks after she’d run off. Two weeks. Enough time for the worst of the publicity to fade and for their anxiety about her physical well-being to ease. Two weeks. And the time was up.
She gathered her pack, pulled on her ball cap and sunglasses, and made her way into the terminal. Let her have the freedom she needs, she imagined them telling him. But keep her safe.
Now she saw what she should have comprehended from the moment he’d so conveniently shown up in that alley. He’d never left her alone. Not once had he taken the boat out by himself. He’d dogged her whenever they’d gone into a store, and in restaurants he’d been lounging by the door when she’d emerged from the ladies’ room. As for those motels … He’d insisted on one room because he was keeping guard. And when he’d tried to scare her into going home, he’d only been doing his job. Considering how much private security cost, he must have gotten a real kick out of the deal she’d struck to pay him a thousand dollars.
She stopped at a bench inside the terminal doors, her thoughts bitter. With no effort at all, Panda had picked up a great job perk last night. Maybe sex was a service he always provided his female clients, a little something extra to remember him by.
If she didn’t get to the security office soon, someone would be out looking for her. They probably already were. But still, she didn’t move. The memory of that kiss kept intruding, those troubling emotions she’d seen in his eyes. She only wanted to feel anger now, not this uncertainty. Why had he looked so troubled? So vulnerable? Why had she seen a need more complicated than desire?
Nothing more than a trick of the light.
She thought about the way he’d cradled her face, kissed her. His tenderness …
A self-created illusion. She didn’t know anything about him.
So why did she feel as though she knew everything?
He should have told her the truth. Regardless of what his agreement was with her family, he should have leveled with her. But that would have involved being straightforward, something of which he was incapable.
Except just now, as they’d stood at the curb, he’d told her the truth with his eyes. That final kiss had told her these past two weeks meant more to him than a paycheck.
She grabbed her backpack and walked out through the terminal door just as she’d walked away from her wedding.
Half an hour later, she left Memphis in a rented Nissan Sentra. The clerk at the rental car desk hadn’t recognized her name when she’d passed over her driver’s license, but then he’d barely been able to operate the computer, and she knew she couldn’t count on that kind of luck again.
She glanced over at the map spread out on the seat. On top of it lay the phone she’d just used to text her family.
Not ready 2 come home yet.
Chapter Six
LUCY STOPPED FOR THE NIGHT at a Hampton Inn in central Illinois. She registered under a phony name and paid with cash she’d withdrawn using the ATM card that had been tucked in the envelope and that she had no doubts her parents could trace. Once she reached her room, she pulled the detestable pregnancy padding out from under her shirt, tossed it in the trash, and withdrew the purchases she’d made a few hours earlier.
The idea had come to her at a rest stop near the Kentucky border where she’d watched two goth girls climb out of a beat-up Chevy Cavalier. Their dark makeup and crazy hair gave her an unexpected, but vaguely familiar, stab of envy, a feeling she remembered from high school when the alternative girls had passed her in the hallways. What if …
Mat and Nealy had never made her feel as though she needed to conform to a higher standard than other girls her age, but even before the drinking incident at the party, she’d known, so she’d sublimated her desire to pierce her nose, wear funky clothes, and hang around with the more disreputable kids. It had been the right thing to do then.
But not now.
She consulted the directions on the packages and started to work.
DESPITE HER LATE NIGHT, SHE awakened early the next morning, her stomach sour with anxiety. She had to turn the car around and go home. Or maybe travel west. Maybe search for enlightenment on one of those mythic road trips along what was left of Route 66. Her psyche was too fragile to probe the mystery of a surly, enigmatic bodyguard. And did she really believe that understanding more about him would help her understand herself?
She couldn’t answer that question, so she climbed out of bed, took a quick shower, and pulled on the clothes she’d bought. The bleeding red rose that adorned her tight-fitting sleeveless black T-shirt clashed perfectly with her short, lime green tutu skirt, which was strapped at the waist with bands of black leather and a pair of buckles. She’d traded in her sneakers for black combat boots and applied a couple of coats of sloppy black polish to her fingernails.
But the biggest change was her hair. She’d dyed it a harsh coal black. Then, using the directions on the special jar of wax, she’d formed half-a-dozen random dreadlocks that she’d sprayed orange. Now she lined her eyes top and bottom in smudgy black, then clipped in a nose ring. A rebellious eighteen-year-old stared back at her. A girl who looked nothing like a thirty-one-year-old professional lobbyist and runaway bride.
Later, as she passed through the lobby on the way to her car, she pretended not to notice the covert glances of the other lodgers. By the time she’d backed out of her parking place, the tutu skirt was already making the back of her thighs itch. Her boots were uncomfortable, her makeup over the top, but she began to relax.
Viper, the biker girl.
PANDA TOOK A MORNING RUN along the lakefront path. Normally, the beauty of the Chicago skyline cleared his head, but that wasn’t happening today.
Two miles turned into three. Three to four. He swiped at his forehead with the sleeve of his sweat-soaked T-shirt. He was back where he belonged, but after the quiet of Caddo, the city was too loud, too fast.
A pair of weekend idiots on Rollerblades blocked the path ahead of h
im. He swerved into the grass to pass them, then cut back onto the pavement.
Lucy was a smart woman. She should have seen it coming. But she hadn’t, and that wasn’t his fault. He’d done what he needed to.
Still, he’d hurt enough people in his life, and knowing he’d hurt one more—knowing exactly how far he’d stepped over the line—was something he couldn’t forgive.
A biker sped past. Panda ran faster, wishing he could outrun himself.
Out of nowhere, an explosion ripped through the air. He threw himself off the path and hit the ground. Gravel scraped his chin and dug into his hands. His heart slammed against his ribs, and his ears roared.
Slowly he lifted his head. Looked around.
Not an explosion at all. An old junker of a landscaping truck had backfired.
A dog walker stopped on the path to stare at him. A runner slowed. The truck disappeared, leaving a trail of exhaust hanging over Lake Shore Drive.
Shit. This hadn’t happened to him in years, but two weeks with Lucy Jorik and here he was. Flat on the ground. Dirt in his mouth. Something to remember the next time he tried to forget who he was and where he’d been.
AS THE MILES ROLLED BY, Lucy kept glancing at herself in the mirror, taking in the harsh makeup, dead black hair, and orange dreadlocks. Her mood began to lift. But was she really going to keep going? Even Ted, who was smart about everything, wouldn’t be able to figure this one out. Neither could she, but she loved this feeling of slipping into a new skin.
Before long she left Illinois behind and headed into Michigan. Would Ted ever forgive her? Would her family? Weren’t some things beyond forgiveness?
Near Cadillac, she abandoned the freeway for the secondary roads that led to northwestern Michigan. By evening, she was waiting in line with half a dozen other cars to drive onto the day’s last ferry to Charity Island, a place she’d had difficulty locating on a map. Her muscles were stiff, her eyes scratchy, and her good mood fading. What she was doing was crazy, but if she didn’t follow through, she’d wonder for the rest of her life about Panda and that kiss and why she’d fallen into bed with a virtual stranger two weeks after she’d run out on a man who’d been too good for her. Not an entirely logical reason to make this trip, but she wasn’t exactly in the best shape these days, and it was the best she could do.