Tourmaline lifted her chin, jaw jutting forward, and heartbeat pounding in her head. Why had she been calling him the conscript? He wasn’t her conscript. He wasn’t anything but a man who’d lost his dad and who had stood on a dark road asking what she might want for herself. And that man’s name was . . .

“Cash Hawkins,” Tourmaline repeated, meeting Virginia’s eyes only because she didn’t have the nerve to meet her father’s.

The food was served. The conversation flowed.

Virginia started talking with Tourmaline’s father about someone they both knew whom Tourmaline didn’t.

Jason openly stared. Or glared. It was always hard to tell.

Tourmaline’s stomach churned. She needed to get out. Get some air. A lot of air. “Excuse me.” She pushed away from the table, eager to leave.

No one noticed. Her father’s phone started ringing and he got up to answer. Jason kept his gaze fixed on Virginia. Virginia winked back. Cash put pots in the sink. No one was following. No one cared.

Tourmaline left the house dizzy. One minute she held all the keys and all the doors and the world was all hers, as long as she stayed in her place, and the next moment she’d been tossed out with nothing of her own. Neither felt like what she wanted.

She pulled on her boots instead of flip-flops. Her stomach was alive and trembling as she dug through her father’s truck for a smoke, and tried to decide whether to give in to the urge to scream. Shuddering, she lit it and took a deep breath.

Why ride a biker when there was a bike she’d already put some work into?

She flicked the smoke into a puddle and stalked toward the garage. Hello, Shovelhead.

Her heart beat wildly at the thought of someone seeing her. As if they were catching her with one leg in her pants and her head stuck inside her shirt.

But no one did.

The evening light spilled into the shadowed garage. The stretch of concrete between her and the outside was clear. Tourmaline put her head down and pushed, legs straining to roll the Shovelhead outside and hauling back to keep the long, low monster of iron from rolling away.

Taking a deep breath, Tourmaline turned the bike on, pulled out the choke cable, and twisted the throttle a few times to open up the lines. Come on, she prayed with a furtive glance toward the house, and threw her whole body into a vicious kick.

The engine barked to life—a deep, ripping bellow that unzipped a rush of blushing fear and excitement through her body. She threw her leg over, torn between embarrassment at doing this and embarrassment at being embarrassed.

They’d seen her now—Dad and Jason. They shouted over the engine. Coming to drag her back while Virginia and Cash looked on.

Tourmaline bit her cheek and pretended they weren’t there. If she got held up here, she’d be held here forever—always afraid of the spaces where she wasn’t allowed to go. She eased the choke cable back to the sweet spot in the engine and began to feather the clutch.

The road materialized from the raindrops left on the leaves. The shimmer of evening sun. The heat rising off the drying asphalt. Her heartbeat rocketed along with the RPMs. The bike moved forward, putting the noise, the confusion of people, and the whole world behind her.