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
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 bumper 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.
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.
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.
