“I should just give up. It’s never going to fit.”

Lexie Marshall surveyed the piles of clothing and camping gear spread out on her bed with a critical eye. She’d been mentally packing for this trip for months, but in her head this stuff hadn’t taken up nearly so much room.

James glanced up from where he was slumped against the wall texting his wife and pretending to pay attention to his sister. “It fit when we went to Vermont.”

He had a point. Somehow, she’d managed to stow all of this on her bike trailer when the two of them had done a tour of Vermont last summer—back before James had quit riding with her to spend more time with Amber, the woman he’d since up and married. Lexie liked her new sister-in-law, but she missed being on the road with James. The TransAm wasn’t going to be the same without him.<br>

“Maybe I should take this suit instead of the one-piece,” she said, dangling the top of an itsy-bitsy red polka-dot bikini from one finger. “Less weight.” She was deliberately trying to irritate him: James liked thinking about her in a bikini about as much as she liked imagining him getting it on with Amber.

He didn’t even look up. “Take the one-piece. That suit is asking for trouble.”

She stuck her tongue out—a fruitless gesture, as he was totally absorbed in his phone—and tossed the one-piece on the discard pile. The bikini would save her an ounce or two. Plus, she was turning thirty this summer. How many good bikini-wearing years did she have left in her?

Peeved with his inattention, Lexie needled her brother a little more. “If you’re so worried about me getting into trouble, why don’t you come along?”

James ignored her, which she took as her cue to launch into the spiel. Ever since she’d found out he wasn’t going to join her, she’d been giving him a hard time at every available opportunity. It was her sisterly duty. “You know you’re never going to get a chance like this again. It’s the TransAmerica Trail! Four thousand, two hundred and sixty-two miles of authentic American adventure from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado—”

“Yeah, Lexie, you can quit trying to sell me on the trail. I know exactly what I’m missing out on.”

“You damn well should,” she snapped, suddenly more put out than she wanted to be.

She and James had been raised on stories from the TransAmerica. Back in the summer of ’76, when the nation was celebrating its two hundredth birthday, their parents had numbered among the bold, the brave, and the foolhardy who’d joined in for the party on wheels known as BikeCentennial, an organized cross-country bicycle ride that had inspired thousands of Americans to dust off the ten-speed in the garage, throw on some knee socks, and hit the road. Mom and Dad met in the saddle somewhere in Kansas and had been inseparable ever since.

For as long as she could remember, Lexie had wanted to retrace that journey, to see the country, meet new people, and prove she had what it took to grind through the miles. James had wanted it too. But now he was married to a woman who didn’t ride, and he didn’t want it anymore—at least, not badly enough to leave Amber behind for three months so he could hang out with his sister. Hell, it was hard to get him to herself for an afternoon.

Not that Lexie could really blame her brother for wanting to be with his wife. If she’d had somebody to share her bed with, she might not be so keen to leave them behind either. But it had been a long time since she’d happened upon a guy worth inviting into her apartment, much less bouncing around on the mattress with. Every man she met these days seemed to be sizing up her hips on the first date, assessing her suitability to become the mother of his children and the mistress of his McMansion in the Portland suburbs.

No, thanks.

Somewhere along the way, Lexie had fallen seriously out of step with her demographic. While most women her age had kids and spent their weekends at soccer games, she took eighty-mile rides for fun. Maybe there had been a time when she’d wanted to do the whole marriage-and-family thing too, back when she’d first started teaching. She used to wake up in the morning brimming over with excitement to pass along her love of literature to eager young high-school students. But she wasn’t that girl anymore. It had been four months since she’d been on a date, and these days the job was all about getting through her classes, grading her papers, and counting down the days until the summer came back around. These days, all her fantasies had wheels.

None of which was James’s fault.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to bitch at you,” she said with a sigh, plopping down onto the floor next to her brother. “I just wish you were coming with me. It won’t be the same without you.”

“And I wish you would wait for me. Give me three years, four tops, and I’ll have Amber so in love with her bike that the two of us can join you.”

Amber had acrylic fingernails, and the last bike she’d owned had a banana seat and pink-and-purple tassles on the handlebars. Pigs would fly before she rode the TransAm. “I hate to break it to you, but that’s never gonna happen, Jimbo.”

He sighed. “Yeah, maybe not. But I don’t like you taking off on your own. It makes me nervous.”

“You know I’m not going to be on my own. I’ll have Tom.”

Tom Geiger was Lexie’s concession to her family’s insistence that choosing to ride across the country by herself was the equivalent of inviting someone to murder her in her sleep. Honestly, she’d had half a mind to make the trip solo just to prove she could, but she knew herself too well to make that mistake. Lexie liked people. She liked to talk. And she’d done the solo biking/camping thing a few times and found it too creepy. It was hard to fall asleep in a tent by yourself. Every little noise from outside put you on danger alert.

No, she needed someone to pitch her tent next to at the very least, and thanks to the Adventure Cycling Association, she had her someone. The organization responsible for publishing the TransAm trail maps also maintained a Companions Wanted space on its website to help lone riders find partners for their cross-country adventures. All Lexie had needed to do was place an ad, sift through the responses, and pick the right guy.

James wrinkled his nose in distaste. “Right. Tom the Mechanic. I don't like it, Lex. You’ve never even talked to him on the phone. How do you know he’s not trolling the Adventure Cycling website for willing females? He could be a total pervert.”

Lexie rolled her eyes. “Give me a break. Have you seen the site? Everyone who advertises is between fifty and seventy, male, and happily married to some woman who hates to bike almost as much as your wife does.”

“So what? Old married men are the worst perverts of all.”

Her only reply was a derisive snort. She’d been to some Adventure Cycling events. The membership consisted almost exclusively of well-off white guys with bulging calves, thinning hair, and pictures of their daughters in their wallets. They were about as frightening as Santa Claus.

No, Lexie wasn’t worried Tom Geiger would turn out to be a threat. They’d exchanged a lot of e-mails over the past few months, and he seemed like a pretty amiable guy. So long as he didn’t expect her to keep him warm in his tent at night, the two of them were going to get along just fine.

What did worry her was that Tom Geiger didn’t know she was a woman.

At first, it had been an honest mistake. Her full name was Alexandra Mitchell, and her parents had always called her Alex; she was Lexie to James and her friends. So when she’d set up the account to receive replies from the Companion Wanted ad, she’d done it as “TransAmAlex.” Only after the e-mails started coming in did she realize the men who were writing all assumed Alex was one of the boys.

Hating to be dishonest, she’d actually put up a new ad that identified her as a twenty-nine-year-old woman. But surprise, surprise: nobody answered it. Apparently, the fifty-something wives of the nation’s intrepid adventurers didn’t want their husbands crossing the country with a hot young thing.

Never one to bow to sexism, Lexie had simply gone back to the first pool of replies and plucked out Tom Geiger, quietly letting him assume whatever he wanted to about her age and sex. He’d figure it out soon enough. But by then, they’d be packed up and ready to ride, and it would be too late for him to back out.

No need to tell James that. Her family was worried enough as it was.

She stood up and nudged her brother with her foot. “Help me shove this stuff in my bag, Jimbo. Then you can go home to the little woman.”

He stood up and stretched lazily. “If you call me Jimbo one more time, I’m gonna walk.”

She gave him a one-armed hug. “Aww, you don’t mean that. You love it when I call you Jimbo. You always have.”

Smiling, he showed her the middle fingers of both hands. Then they started to pack.



Tom wiped the grease off his palm and answered the phone.

“I found you somebody.” His sister’s voice.

“What are you talking about?”

“For the bike ride 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 ride 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 through an Adventure Cycling ad who’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. 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 the sights. He didn’t want a buddy. He didn’t do buddies.

“I don’t need a babysitter, Taryn. I’m a grown man.”

“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.”

“I’m thirty-five years old, single, tattooed, and antisocial, Taryn. 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 loved me with your dying breath.”

Cradling the back of his head with his free hand, Tom started pacing the small workspace, weaving around the bike stands. “I’ve toured alone before. There was the South America trip, Australia. The one in 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 of his plan to cross the Outback by bicycle, but it had been for her own good. He’d spared her months of fretting about him—and saved himself a lot of nagging. He’d have done the same thing this time, too, only she’d caught him studying the TransAm maps at his kitchen table one afternoon and wormed the intelligence 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 non-estranged family member and pretty much his sole friend, he hated to make her unhappy. When the trial had come along and detonated his family, Taryn had stuck by him through the worst of it, 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 manifestoes 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 the guy who owned the bike shop didn’t ask Tom to work the counter unless he absolutely had to. He’d be the first to admit his social skills were pretty rusty, and combined with a low tolerance for bullshit, this meant 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 to Major Tom,” she said. “We’re having a conversation here, remember?”

“Right.” Another hazard of being a loner—you tended to lose the knack for polite discourse. “There are no dingoes to worry about on the TransAm,” he assured her. “And I’ll call you from the road every few days if you want. But I’m not going to ride with a partner, Taryn. It’s not a vacation for me if I have to talk to people.”

“Yeah, well, here’s the thing. 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 more creative in her meddling than his sister, and her self-satisfied tone told him she’d concocted something special this time.

“What did you do?”

“Like I said, I found you a guy. Alex Mitchell. You’ve been e-mailing him since April, and he’s really excited to start the ride tomorrow. In fact, he sent you a message this morning to confirm he’d see you on the beach in Seaside at 6:00 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.”

“So call him off.”

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

“No way. Alex is at a hotel in Astoria as we speak, totally stoked to meet you in the morning and start on this great adventure. 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 up--unless Tom drove a hundred miles out of his way to accompany him. Taryn certainly wouldn’t be coming to the rescue. Once his sister made her mind up, she was stubborn as a pit bull. She would be perfectly happy to leave Alex dangling on the beach as bait for Tom’s heroic impulses.

Tom put the phone down and leaned over to bang his head against the workbench a few times.

People saw a hard-ass when they looked at him, and for the most part the impression was accurate. But Taryn knew his weakness: ask him to rescue a hopeless case, and he fell for it every single time. Achilles had the Heel, and Tom had this unshakeable compulsion to champion the underdog.

It never worked out for him any better than the heel had 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 and 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 wouldn’t wash out. Not that he’d wish himself back to where he was six years ago. But still, it would be nice to feel like he had choices.

“Why are you always backing me into corners?” he asked his sister.

“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 reluctantly. “And you’re going to drop me off. But I swear, Taryn, 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.”

He doubted it. With the very occasional exception of his sister, Tom didn’t like much of anybody.

## END OF SCENE ##



## SCENE FROM CHAPTER 4 -- characters aren't speaking to one another ##

She caught his eye as the waitress departed, holding his attention with a mischievous twist of her lips. Raising one elbow high, Lexie let her hand hover dramatically over the selection of hot sauces on their table before plunging her fingers down to pluck out a tiny bottle. She studied the label with great concentration, then set it down in a carefully selected spot midway between the two of them.

What was she up to? This performance was clearly for his benefit, but Tom couldn’t make heads or tails of it. He leaned back in the upholstered booth, cradling his head in both hands, and watched.

Lexie went through the whole ritual again, making sure she had his attention as she selected another type of hot sauce, read all the claims on the label, and found it a place on the tabletop a few inches to the left of the first bottle.

Whatever she had planned, she was finding it highly amusing. Her lips kept twitching with the tiniest of smiles as she worked, and she glanced at him every now and again, a twinkle in those whiskey eyes, to ensure he was still paying attention. She kept it up until she’d examined all the bottles and lined them up deliberately, seven little soldiers in a row dividing his side of the table from hers.

Then she brought her eyes to his and raised an eyebrow. Ready?

He shrugged. Knock yourself out.

Lexie picked up the bottle at the far end of the line and presented it to him in her palm for inspection. He knew this one. It was a pretty tame West Indian picante, really more of a salsa. She made a big production of unscrewing the lid, selecting the perfect chip from the basket, dribbling on the hot sauce, and eating it. When she’d finished, she squinted her eyes and compressed her lips in a remarkably good likeness of Clint Eastwood’s steely expression from the Spaghetti Westerns, aimed at the hot sauce bottle with her index finger, and shot it. Pow.

Caught off guard by the playful gesture, Tom smiled. He hadn’t seen this side of her before. Who knew Mrs. Annotated Route Map could be funny?

The waitress arrived then with their drinks, and Lexie relaxed back into the booth as Tom ordered, busying herself with squeezing the lime into her Corona and taking a long swallow of the beer. When it was her turn, she requested a burrito with the works and handed the waitress her menu—for once without engaging her in conversation.

As soon as the waitress departed, Lexie turned her attention back to Tom. She leaned forward and gave the bottle of hot sauce she’d just shot a push in his direction, raising both eyebrows at him in an obvious dare. You man enough for this?

Now he got it. Lexie was challenging him to a duel.



The glimmer in Tom’s eyes and the set to his jaw said, You’re on. Lexie could barely restrain herself from doing a little victory dance in the booth. He didn’t know it yet, but she had his number now. She had never met a hot sauce she couldn’t handle. Sooner or later, they’d get to one too hot for him, and then he’d slip up and say something, and she’d win.

Smirking, Tom found himself a chip, sauced it, and took a bite. He obviously rated his chances of coming out on top a lot higher than Lexie did. She couldn’t detect any signs of discomfort as he chewed, but then this first selection hadn’t been anything to write home about. It had a little bit of pop, hardly enough to merit inclusion on the table. She supposed the weenies deserved condiments too. Tom leaned forward and knocked over the bottle with a flick of his finger against his thumb, then glanced at her with a cocky curve to his lips.

Lexie got the message: You shot it. I killed it.

Next up.

The second bottle in the row was a chipotle-garlic novelty sauce called Bite Me. It was just hot enough to make her mouth water, with a nice roasted garlic aftertaste. She’d have to remember to put some on her burrito later. After she swallowed and put an imaginary slug through the bottle, Tom took his turn and knocked it flat.

Next.

Number three, which claimed to be “pure death,” was a big disappointment. She’d tried to rank the sauces from wimpiest to hottest, but it was difficult: hot sauce manufacturers were such a bunch of braggarts. Because this one had let her down, Lexie shot it with both guns and blew the smoke off her index fingers before reholstering at her hips. That coaxed a full-size smile out of Tom, which upset her equilibrium a heck of a lot more than the first three hot sauces had. There was something so infectious about Tom when he smiled, she beamed back at him without even thinking about it, feeling the tension that had been coiled tight in her chest for the past three days start to unwind.

It was a wonderful, heady sensation. And then she came to her senses and realized she was sitting there grinning at Tom like a toddler with an ice-cream cone. Whoops. This was serious business. She couldn’t let him dazzle her with those white teeth and laughing eyes of his when there was a battle to wage.

Give the man his hot sauce.

Tom smiled a little wider, shaking his head at her antics, and prepared his chip. While he ate it, she tried not to look at his mouth. And failed. Then he tipped back his head and drank from his beer, and she willed herself not to stare at his throat. And failed. She wanted to reach over and run one fingertip along his jawline, testing the rasp of his midday stubble against her skin. He was the most hypnotically attractive man she’d ever met.

Snap out of it, Lexie. Head in the game.

Number Three hit the tabletop with a thud, spinning in lopsided circles for a few seconds. Clearly Tom hadn’t thought much of it either.

The fourth sauce vaulted them from the farm team straight to the big leagues. The bottle promised a “venomous extract,” and once she’d chewed enough to bring the flavor into contact with her taste buds, she did indeed feel as if she’d been snake-bit. Her mouth watered, which was no big deal, but her eyes watered too, and Tom noticed and smiled again, damn him. Lexie drew a deep breath into her lungs, her sinuses as roomy as they’d ever been, and swallowed the tasty, fiery lump. Pointing her finger, she dispatched the bottle to the grave with a silent Bam. She even managed to count to ten before picking up her beer and draining what was left of it in five long swallows.

Your turn, cowboy.

After the snake-bite chip passed through those fine lips of his, depositing a bit of salt at the corner of his mouth, she waited for Tom to faint, flap his hand in front of his face, turn red, something, but he ate it as impassively as if it had been covered in cheese. His eyes didn’t even water. Possibly his nostrils flared slightly, but that could just as easily have been her imagination. And once he’d swallowed the chip, he pursed his lips, scratched his chin thoughtfully, and reached for another one. If they’d been speaking to one another, he’d have said “Mmmm” as the second chip loaded with snake sauce made its way into his mouth. Instead, he said it with his eyes. Mmmm.

He was mocking her. He knocked the bottle down.

Number five promised enough heat to burn the paint off a Sherman tank. The first four sauces had awakened her senses, and now as Lexie dressed her chip she felt curiously on, aware of the conversations taking place at the tables around them and the cool, smooth feel of the glass bottle under her fingertips, the smell of onions on a grill back in the kitchen and the scent of Tom across the table, all clean sweat and something spicy that made her want to lean over and breathe him in while she licked that stray grain of salt off the corner of his mouth. Weren’t chili peppers an aphrodisiac? Was that why she was finding this whole exchange positively titillating?

Hard to say. Doesn’t matter. Focus on the chip, girl.

The paint-stripper sauce was incendiary. As soon as it touched her tongue, she broke out in a sweat, sucking air into her lungs and squirming in her seat while she chewed, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of squealing Omigod omigod omigod, even if she wanted to. She did bounce up and down in the booth a little bit, but only because if she hadn’t she’d have passed out. Chew, chew, chew. Jeezy Pete, this was the world’s largest chip, how many more times was she going to have to chew the freaking thing before she could swallow it? Breathe in, breathe out, chew some more, and . . . there. She got it down. With both hands flat on the table and her eyelids squeezed shut, she focused on breathing and counted to twenty.

When she opened her eyes again, Tom caught her expression and burst out laughing. It was a low, rumbling laugh, as dead sexy as the rest of him. Yum. In a remarkably kind gesture under the circumstances, he passed his beer across the table to her. Lexie grabbed at it gratefully and knocked it back, a smile on her face as her mouth wrapped around the lip of the bottle where his tongue had recently been. She killed the beer, shot the paint-stripping sauce, and waited for Tom to take his turn. Her chest was heaving, her skin flushed, but she’d eaten the chip without saying a word, so she was still a contender.

Tom signaled the waitress, who quickly brought them another round along with their burritos. They ignored the food, both knowing the unwritten rules of this challenge forbade recreational eating until the contest had come to an end. Solemn as a gravedigger, Tom sauced up his chip and ate it. She waited. At first, nothing. Seriously? Nothing? He wasn’t going to react at all? But then she looked closer and recognized what was happening. Tom had turned to stone. His jaw was moving, his nostrils definitely flaring this time, but every other part of him had gone rigid, his biceps drawn taut and his fingers clamped tight around the edge of the table. He was in agony.

And forgive her for being a sadist, but it was sexy as all get-out. While Tom fought to keep his reaction on a tight leash, sweat beading at his temples, all she could think about was how much fun she could have being the one doing the torturing, how fantastic it would feel to be responsible for pushing this man right past the bounds of his self-control. This is what Tom would look like right before he came. Yum.

He swallowed, and this time he did reach for his beer, drinking about half of it in one go. Then he flicked the paint-stripper sauce onto the table to join its fallen compatriots, leaving two men standing.

Slightly apprehensive for the first time since this little showdown began, Lexie picked up Steve’s Ultra Hot Death Sauce. It the label spoke true, this stuff was eight hundred times hotter than a jalapeno chile. That was a lot of hot. But Tom was over there—rather a lot of hot himself—and he was smirking at her again, and she’d be damned if she’d back down now.

Lexie had a hard time getting the Death Sauce out of the bottle, and in the end she had to hand her chip to Tom and make him hold it while she whacked the glass with the heel of her hand. The result was a larger-than-strictly-necessary glob of hot sauce on the chip, but she forged ahead. Surely an extra eighth of a teaspoon wasn’t going to decide her fate. Tom fed the chip directly into her mouth, his dark eyes positively dancing with amusement.

As soon as the sauce hit her tongue, her taste buds dropped dead. You’d think that would be a good thing, but it didn’t make any difference, because on their way out those taste buds had rung the alarm, and now every nerve ending in her body was positively writhing in pain. Somewhere in the vicinity of her brain stem, a siren was going off so loudly she thought it might deafen her. Tears streaked down her face as she flapped her arms up and down helplessly like a giant flightless bird. Nose running, mouth full of napalm, she looked over at Tom and saw him watching her with his hand covering the bottom half of his face in a completely vain effort to conceal how very entertaining he was finding her predicament.

And she still hadn’t managed to start chewing.

All of her senses now pulled it together to deliver one urgent message: Spit it out spit it out spit it out spit it out!

No way was she spitting it out.

Eyes locked on Tom, Lexie took a deep breath, pinched her nostrils shut, and ground the chip to pulp between her molars. When she swallowed, the Death Sauce bolus incinerated her throat and blazed a trail toward her intestines, finally settling into position in the vicinity of her lungs, where it continued to send out steady licks of flame despite her attempts to douse it with the rest of her beer and a full glass of water.

It was now abundantly clear: this hot sauce duel was the stupidest idea she’d ever had. But on the plus side, it was Tom’s turn. She drew her six-shooter on the Death Sauce bottle, curled her lip in disdain, and plugged it full of lead.

Tom had relaxed back in the booth, arms spread out along the top of the seat in a posture of sated sensuality. He couldn’t seem to stop smiling: every time his face returned to neutral, his eyes sparked with a memory—presumably unflattering to Lexie—and his lips slowly curved their way upward again, his teeth peeking out, the laugh lines around his eyes crinkling. It was almost worth having choked down the Sterno chip to see him so happy for a change. Which was crazy, because she didn’t even like the guy, right?

Right. And now he was going to pay for mocking her. Leaning forward, she pushed the Death Sauce toward him.

Tom shook his head. “Oh no. I’m not eating that. I’m stubborn, but I’m not stupid.” He stuck his hand out. “You win. Well played, Marshall.”

“What?” Her voice came out a raspy croak. “You can’t quit now. It’s your turn!” She wasn’t ready to declare victory, not until she’d seen Tom brought to his knees. If he refused to eat the Death Sauce, he would be ending the contest on his own terms, which was the same as winning. True, she had him talking again. But he still had taste buds, which hardly seemed fair.

“I’m withdrawing,” he replied smoothly. Taking back his hand unshaken, he set the bottle of Death Sauce back in the caddy and picked up the seventh and final selection, Steve’s Stronger than Death Hot Sauce. “I’ll eat this instead. It’s tasty.” And then he slid his plate over from the edge of the table, dispensed a small puddle of hot sauce onto his plate, dipped the corner of his burrito into it, and started to eat, his appetite apparently healthy as ever.

“But that one’s supposed to be worse!”

“Nah, it’s all smoke and mirrors. Number six was the real killer.”

Lexie glared at him. “You knew.”

Tom chuckled in response. “Uh-huh. I’ve been here before, lots of times. And I come from a family of chile lovers. My dad is from Oaxaca. They like their peppers down there.”

“Why didn’t you say something? I can’t believe you let me eat that!”

Tom shrugged. “You’re a grown woman. Besides, I wanted to see if you could hack it. You should be proud—I’ve seen that stuff bring men to their knees. Anyway, now you have a good story from the trail to tell all those other bikers we meet.”

“This is not a good story,” she grumbled. “This is a humiliating story.”

“All the best stories are humiliating, Marshall. If you’re not getting humiliated pretty regularly, it’s not an adventure.” He paused to take another bite out of his burrito, adding after he’d swallowed, “See how much fun it is to ride off the map?”

“I think I’ll stick to the route from now on, thanks.”

He clucked his tongue at her. “That would be a real shame.”

“You’re horrible,” she complained, though she didn’t really mean it. The man sitting across from her was turning out to be a good deal more likable than she ever would have imagined.

Tom sipped his beer and set it down on the table, his eyes never leaving her face. “I can be nice,” he said, his voice pitched low and intimate. And then he smiled again, slow and sexy this time, and she realized she was in really big trouble. Because this wasn’t Angry Tom; this was somebody else. Somebody he’d kept under wraps for three days. And she was more than attracted to this Tom. She wanted him bad.

It wouldn’t do at all. She couldn’t ride across the country with Tom if she wanted to jump his bones. She needed Angry Tom back. Angry Tom she could totally handle. He wasn’t much fun, but he was no threat.

The problem was, she didn’t know how to put the hottie back in the bottle.