Chapter 7 #2
“You’re gonna maintain yourself into the dirt if you don’t hold on.”
“I’m holding on.”
“You’re touching my shirt with two fingers.”
I looked down. He was correct. My hands rested on either side of his waist with the commitment level of a woman handling a suspicious package.
Before I could adjust, Mason reached back, took both my wrists, and pulled my arms around him.
All at once, my palms landed against his stomach.
Hard muscle shifted under my hands.
I forgot how to breathe like a normal citizen.
His abdomen was solid beneath the Henley, the kind of solid that came from lifting engines, throwing punches, and refusing therapy. My fingers spread before I could stop them, registering heat, fabric, the ridges of muscle beneath, the way his body tensed when I touched him properly.
He went still again.
So did I.
Regan coughed loudly. “Everyone alive?”
“Unfortunately,” I said.
Mason’s hand covered mine for half a second, pressing my palm flatter against him. “Hold here.”
His voice had dropped.
That did not help.
“I understand mechanics,” I said, because apparently when aroused, I became insufferable. “You don’t have to manually install me.”
“You were holding on like I had a disease.”
“You might.”
“Nothing you can catch through a shirt.”
Amber made a delighted sound from the porch.
I leaned slightly to the side and glared at her through the helmet. “I can still hear you.”
“I know,” she said cheerfully.
Mason started the engine.
The bike came alive beneath us with a deep, violent rumble that moved straight through my bones. I made a sound I would deny under oath.
Mason’s head tilted slightly.
“Don’t,” I warned.
“Didn’t say anything.”
“You thought loudly.”
He revved the engine once, and the vibration climbed through the seat, through my thighs, through the exact delicious spot between my legs.
I closed my eyes and breathed deep, mortified by how instantly my body responded.
Holy hell—who knew the low, relentless power of a motorcycle engine could make a woman this horny?
It combined with the clean Irish Spring and mint scent rising off him and the firm press of his back muscles right against my hardened nipples until every nerve ending lit up at once.
I was wet. Completely, embarrassingly wet.
It had been so long since I’d come that my body was staging a mutiny, slick and aching and ready to betray me in front of God and the entire desert.
And we had hours of this ahead—hours of being wrapped around him like this, thighs spread, chest flush to his back, the engine humming straight into my clit with every mile.
I was going to lose my mind before we even hit the highway.
My grip tightened around him on pure instinct.
His hand came down over mine again.
This time, he didn’t move it away right away.
“Better,” he said.
The word rolled through me, low and rough and entirely too intimate for a roadside departure involving cat logistics and mechanical failure.
I leaned closer, because I had to. Because if I stayed stiff, I would fall off and then everyone would be smug at my funeral.
My chest pressed more firmly to his back.
My thighs adjusted around his hips. My body settled into the shape the bike demanded, and I resented every inch of it because the bike was right.
Mason felt good.
Not emotionally. Emotionally, he was a locked shed full of rusty tools and unresolved damage.
Physically?
Catastrophic.
He looked back just enough for me to see part of his profile. “You good?”
“No.”
His shoulders moved slightly. Almost a laugh.
I squeezed his waist. “Not because of you.”
“Didn’t ask that.”
“I was preemptively clarifying.”
“Clarify less. Hold on more.”
“I still hate you.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I’m strongly committed to the project.”
He pulled on his sunglasses. “Then commit with both hands.”
The bike rolled forward.
I tightened my arms around him and tried not to think about the fact that my fingers rested just above his belt, that his body was between my thighs, that the scent of Irish Spring and mint and leather filled the helmet every time I leaned close enough to breathe.
The women called goodbye from the porch.
Regan yelled something about texting when we got there.
Amber told Mason not to kill me. Savannah shouted that if I changed my mind about the lesbian commune, applications were still open.
I managed to lift one hand long enough to flip her off, which made the whole porch erupt.
Then Mason turned us onto the dirt road.
The Airbnb slipped behind us.
The desert opened ahead.
At first, I hated everything.
The noise. The vibration. The lack of doors.
The feeling that my body had been drafted into an intimacy experiment without consent from my executive function.
The way Mason handled the bike with infuriating ease, his body shifting under mine in subtle movements that I felt everywhere.
He didn’t jerk the machine around. Didn’t show off.
Didn’t ride like a man trying to impress himself.
He was controlled.
Precise.
Almost elegant, if elegance could wear boots and smell like motor oil.
The dirt road gave way to pavement, and he accelerated.
My stomach dropped. My arms tightened. My cheek nearly hit his shoulder blade, and I felt his hand briefly cover mine again, not restraining, not mocking.
Steadying.
“You’re fighting it,” he called over the engine.
“I’m fighting many things.”
“Lean with me.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“You’ll feel it.”
“I hate instructions that sound like trust exercises.”
He tilted the bike into the first curve.
My body panicked, then followed his because physics did not care about my trust issues. The movement was terrifying for half a second, then strange, then smooth. The road bent beneath us. His body guided the machine. Mine, despite my objections, learned the rhythm.
Oh.
I hated the oh.
The desert air rushed against my arms, warm now where morning had been cold.
Sunlight spread over sand, rock, scrub, and distant mountains.
The world widened until it felt like there was more sky than earth.
I had spent days driving through the desert, but on the bike, it was different.
There was no windshield turning the landscape into a scene.
No cab. No dashboard. No illusion of separation.
The desert touched everything.
Wind pulled at my clothes. Heat moved over my skin. The scent of dust and sage threaded through the mint and soap clinging to Mason. The engine’s rhythm traveled up through my bones until my thoughts began losing their hard edges.
I didn’t relax.
That would be too generous.
But at some point, I stopped bracing for disaster and started feeling the ride.
Mason noticed immediately.
His shoulders loosened under my chest. One hand dropped briefly from the bar and tapped my clasped fingers where they rested against him. Approval, maybe. Or warning. With him, the difference seemed mostly semantic.
I should have pulled back.
Instead, I let myself stay.
Just for the curve.
Then the next one.
Then the mile after that.
The sun climbed higher, and my body kept registering every point of contact like data I didn’t want but could not stop collecting.
My thighs against his hips. My breasts against his back.
The hard flex of his abdomen under my palms when he shifted.
The faint taste of mint in the air when he turned his head to say something I couldn’t hear over the engine.
I tried to think about anything else.
Watershed contamination.
Rent.
Bandit’s rabies shot.
Whether my apartment had decent locks.
Whether Dolores would survive long enough to become a charming anecdote instead of a financial crime scene.
None of it worked.
Mason was too present. Too solid. Too warm. Too annoyingly good at making danger feel structured.
That was the worst part.
Not that he was hot. Hot was manageable. Hot could be categorized, mocked, avoided, and reduced to chemical response.
It was the steadiness that got under my skin.
The way he watched the road. The way he adjusted before bumps so my body didn’t take the worst of them. The way he slowed over gravel without making a production of it. The way his hand came back once, briefly, when a gust hit hard and my grip shifted.
Protective, but not performative.
I did not know what to do with that.
So naturally, I got mad.
I leaned closer to his ear at the next stop sign. “For the record, I still think this is a terrible idea.”
He turned his head slightly. Close enough that I caught green eyes behind the sunglasses when he lifted them onto his head. Close enough that mint hit me again.
“Your truck’s dead.”
“Temporarily deceased.”
“Your cat hates travel.”
“My cat hates existence.”
“You needed a ride.”
“I needed a safe, climate-controlled ride with cup holders and emotional distance.”
His gaze moved over my helmet, my face, my mouth. Slowly enough to make my skin tighten. “You got me instead.”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s the complaint.”
The light changed.
His mouth curved.
“Hold on, scientist.”
“I am holding on.”
“Better.”
Then he opened the throttle.
The bike surged forward, and my body slammed tight against his. My arms locked around him, thighs clenching instinctively, chest pressed so firmly to his back there was no pretending he couldn’t feel every traitorous inch of me.
Mason’s hand covered mine for one brief second, hard and warm.
I heard him laugh.
The bastard.
I tucked my helmet against his shoulder and smiled where he couldn’t see it.
Not because I was enjoying this.
Absolutely not.
I was simply gathering data.
Very thorough, inconvenient, dangerously compelling data.