Chapter 12
Alice
Carter took the road toward the mountains, and Alice found herself starting to see the point of motorcycles.
She was learning to lean as he leaned, anticipate the turns, trust they weren’t going to tip right over or skid into an oncoming truck.
And yes, it felt a little dangerous, but also that she wasn’t so much traveling through the countryside as experiencing it.
She could smell earthy things—mud, cattle, milkweed, road dust, exhaust. She could almost feel the ground beneath her in the vibration of the tires, and sense the temperature dropping as they climbed and the forest closed in, the sun flickering through the pines as it lowered.
By the time they pulled into a country store for supplies, Alice’s legs were a little shaky.
“I’ll go in,” she said, climbing off the bike and unclipping her helmet. “They’re less likely to shoot me on sight.”
“You’re sure?”
“About being shot on sight, or about going in? Doesn’t look like the kind of place where they take self-defense too seriously.”
“I wouldn’t have stopped if they had external security cameras.”
“You think of everything.”
“Use your manners and you’ll be fine. Wait.
” He got off the bike, opened a saddlebag and removed an empty backpack.
He also drew out a cap and a pair of reading glasses with thick black rims. “Here. Just a precaution. If they have to describe you later, they’ll remember the cap and glasses first, though there’s not much we can do about your hair.
I’d give you the fake beard, but that’d make you memorable. ”
“Are you saying I’m not memorable?”
“In my experience, that’s an advantage.”
“Huh.” She shoved the cap onto her head. “You travel everywhere with costumes and party tricks?”
“For my PI work. Tailing, surveillance…”
“How do you do stakeouts—if that’s what you call them—on a motorcycle?”
“I also have a car—not an Aston Martin. It’s so forgettable it’s practically invisible.”
“Just like me!”
“No, not like you,” he said, laughing. “It’s an urban camo car. Looks like every other car in the supermarket parking lot. Sometimes even I lose it.”
Alice came back ten minutes later with the groceries in the backpack, the slight magnification in the lenses messing with her distance vision. “I didn’t get a whole lot, since we’re carrying everyth—”
She stopped still. The bike was there, but he was gone.
“Holt?” she said, her voice squeaky. “Holt?” she repeated, a little louder. There was a rustling in the scrub beside the bike and he emerged, buttoning his fly. “Oh, thank goodness.”
“What did you call me?”
“What do you mean?”
“You called me Holt.”
“Uh, did I? Sorry, it’s just—I’ve known you so long as Anderson Holt.
” He cocked an eyebrow as he reached for the backpack.
“Yes, I know I only met you a few hours ago, but Holt was real to me, okay? You spend enough time with a character and you start thinking you see him at the store or the dry cleaners.”
“So how do I shape up in reality?” he said, as he slipped the backpack on.
“You’re more … 3D than I’d imagined.”
“Just the compliment every man wants to hear. I was pretty kickass in the book. Even I was a little turned on. Jesus, how wrong is that?”
“So very wrong.”
“No more so than you thinking he was real.”
“But it turned out I was right, so…”
“And if you’d seen real me at the dry cleaners, would you have recognized me?”
“Possibly. There are certain similarities.”
“The honeypot allure?”
“The main difference between you and Anderson Holt is that his ego would never need to be stroked. He wouldn’t fish for a compliment.”
“Who says I expected a compliment? Holt wasn’t perfect—maybe I expected criticism.” He grinned in that cheeky way that was becoming oh so familiar.
“Sure you did.”
He raised his eyebrows, deepening the lines in his forehead.
“A guy like you? I bet you’ve been showered with compliments your whole life. And you obviously like to take care of yourself. It’s not for nothing, right?”
“What about my laid-back, unshaven, fresh-from-the-beach appearance?”
“Your carefully cultivated laid-back, unshaven, fresh-from-the-beach appearance. Crucial difference.”
He stepped right up close. She caught the caipirinha scent—sweet and sour, and woven in with aged leather—but resisted the urge to inhale deeply.
He’d breached her personal space and he knew it, but no self-respecting teacher backed down from a blatant challenge, so she forced herself to stare up into his eyes, rendered in precise detail by the lenses she wore.
He gently removed her glasses and then her cap and, good God, it was like being undressed. She fisted her hands by her sides.
“You thought I was fishing for a compliment because you knew you’d give me a compliment.” His voice had dropped to that sexy rumble. “If you thought I was repulsive, you wouldn’t accuse me of fishing.”
“Unless you were so obviously unaware of how repulsive you were. Or so insecure that you crave approval. Either way, your logic is messed up.”
He leaned in, ever so slightly, and the skin between her eyes prickled. His lips touched together and then separated slightly and even that micro-movement threatened to derail her breathing. “You don’t seem repulsed.”
She flicked her focus back to his eyes, the irises warmed to russet by the low sun. “And you seem … arrogant.” It wasn’t her best-ever comeback.
He chuckled—not his usual giggle but a deep-throated resonance. “And I thought dragging a small-town high school teacher along with me would be a pain in the ass.”
“And?” Her mouth had gone so dry, the word came out croaky.
“And there you go, fishing for a compliment.”
“You did that on purpose. You set me up.”
He slowly tut-tutted. “Just like earlier, when you wanted me to say you were memorable. Not craving approval, are we?”
“I liked you better when you were fictional.”
He laughed, properly this time, with all his teeth, and just as Nika had cautioned, it sent Alice’s stomach into backflips. “Come on,” he said, backing away, which gave her a dueling sense of triumph and disappointment. “It’s getting dark. I might struggle to find this cabin at night.”
“Cabin? How do you even know about a cabin around here?”
His smile fell as he returned the glasses and cap to a saddlebag, and sat on the bike, readying his helmet. “Long story,” he said eventually.
One he evidently wasn’t planning to get into. Curious. She climbed on behind him, his backpack putting a little distance between them. Which was just as well—she was getting way too comfortable with cozying up.
And worse, she was about to spend the night with her book boyfriend.