Page 4 of Ride with Me

Two syllables. Score!

It wasn’t funny—though she had to admit this thing with Tom had all the makings of a farce. For months, she’d exchanged guilty, careful e-mails with him, avoiding any hint of personal detail lest he ask her some question that forced her to come right out and admit she was a woman. Now it seemed she needn’t have bothered with all that self-recrimination, because the “Tom” she’d been planning the trip with wasn’t Tom any more than the “Alex” his sister must have pictured was Lexie.

Which meant that this Tom—the real one—had been played by two women. No wonder he was grumpy.

Probably she ought to apologize for her part in the charade, but she doubted it would help. And anyway, it wasn’t as though she’d lied to the man. I’m easy to get along with and am looking forward to a grand adventure! E-mail [email protected] No outright deception there. Only a single—albeit critical—omission.

And she hadn’t even done it on purpose. Not at first. Until the e-mail responses started to arrive, she hadn’t realized she’d left her name off the Adventure Cycling ad. Unfortunately, when her correspondents found out “TransAmAlex” was a twenty-nine-year-old woman, they’d backed out. Four of them, one right after the other. Apparently, the wives and girlfriends of the nation’s intrepid adventurers didn’t want their menfolk crossing the country with a strange woman. In the end, she’d quit mentioning her complicating gender altogether, assuming she could talk her way into her companion’s good graces once they’d met face-to-face.

It had all sounded better in theory. The reality of Tom was rather discouraging.

“So what’s the plan?” she asked.

He shrugged.

“You know, it would help a lot if you would speak.” And say more than three words at a time when you do.

With a sigh, he said, “I want to do the TransAm by myself, but my sister thought I needed a partner, so she set me up with Alex Marshall, who is apparently you.”

“Why’d she think you need a partner?”

“She doesn’t want me to die in a ditch and rot unmourned.”

Had that been humor? She couldn’t tell. Tom’s expression didn’t really suggest he had it in him.

“Sounds like a good sister.” Her parents and her brother, James, had made pretty much the same argument in favor of her finding someone to ride with.

“Yeah. But she’s a pushy pain in the ass.”

She’d have to be, to boss you around. Lexie practiced diplomacy and kept the thought to herself. “Okay, so I’m not sure I’m getting the full picture. You didn’t choose to be here, but you are here. And you don’t want to ride with me because …”

“Because I don’t want to spend the summer dissecting your relationship problems and fixing your flat tires and cheering you up the passes.”

His casual misogyny rendered her temporarily speechless. “Wow,” she said after she’d recovered. “Don’t pull your punches on my account, Tom.”

“I don’t pull punches on anybody’s account.”

Lexie took a deep breath and let it out slowly, gazing past him to the ocean. This wasn’t working. It really wasn’t even coming close.

But the thing was, it had to work, because she didn’t have a backup plan. It wasn’t as though Tom had been her first choice. Until last summer, she’d planned to do the trip with her brother. Then he’d gone and married a woman who didn’t ride, and Lexie had decided to take on the TransAm solo.

Only, her family had hated that idea, and she’d had second thoughts of her own. She’d hoped to find a woman to ride with, but the pool of ads was small, and no other woman had advertised for a west-to-east TransAm companion this summer—nor had anyone female responded to Lexie’s ad.

Really, Tom was her fourth choice. How pathetic to think she’d been reduced, on Day One of the TransAm, to clinging to her fourth-best hope for companionship.

“Well, here’s the deal,” she said. “You don’t have to talk to me, and you don’t have to ride with me. Just because I advertised for a companion doesn’t mean I need help fixing flats. I can handle any pass that comes along without you holding my hand, and I can save my womanly yammering for someone who’ll appreciate it. All I want from you is a warm body to pitch my tent next to at night.”

“I’m not going to sleep with you, either,” Tom replied, flat and condemning.

Damn, what was it about being twenty-nine and in possession of ovaries that made everyone assume you were desperate for a man? Her friends fixed her up with earnest pharmacist types who wanted to discuss the compatibility of their Life Goals, which interested her not at all, and now she was stuck with Tom, who apparently translated “ride with me” as “fix my flat tires and service my delicate lady parts.”

She couldn’t win.

The worst thing was, he was such an obnoxiously attractive man. The Tom Geiger in her mind’s eye had looked exactly like her father. And okay, maybe that hadn’t been very realistic, but who’d have predicted this guy with the south-of-the-border complexion, the black hair, and the chocolate eyes? Who’d have expected him to have a jaw you could crack walnuts on, or those long, thick eyelashes that would’ve looked girly on a less masculine face?

And then there was his body. The man had a serious Lance Armstrong thing going on under his T-shirt. His muscled forearms alone were drool-worthy, and the wide black bands tattooed around both of his biceps made him look dangerous and interesting, as if he had hidden depths.

Too bad his hidden depths concealed piranhas.