Chapter 13

There were a lot of firsts.

The one that gut-punched Brandon the hardest was knowing how much he enjoyed being around April. As in, they weren’t having sex—yet—but he still liked having her with him.

That had never happened before. It had always been less talking, more taking your clothes off. You got in, you got out, you got gone.

The other first was trusting her not to turn psycho. Trusting any woman. That was tougher to figure out. He’d learned a long time ago that life was a fight for survival. You couldn’t depend on anyone. His mother, for instance. She’d never done a fucking thing for him and Matt.

But he couldn’t keep his eyes off April. That bothered him. Even now as she leaned her elbows on the security fence and watched the riders, he kept glancing at her, fascinated by the way her pale blond hair spilled over her shoulders. Maybe it was because she was so totally honest and had nothing to hide, she didn’t even wear makeup. She was one of those rare women—what did Long Jon call them?—soap-and-water beauties. Only in April’s case, she had no idea she was beautiful.

Brandon understood the type of woman who employed her beauty like a weapon. Who used it for power. But April never had that defiant gleam in her eyes, the one demanding that every man adore her.

Soap-and-water beauties. Long Jon always had a bit of the poet in him, Brandon thought in amusement. Hell, he was getting just as bad, thinking about this shit. It was like living out song lyrics.

Right now, he had a race to win, even if it was just the preseason. Brandon braced his elbows on the fence next to April. The smell of motorcycle fuel was almost better than the smell of sex. As crazy as it seemed, a feeling of deep contentment washed over him. His brother was racing, his best friend was buying the beer and his instincts about April weren’t telling him to run like hell.

A man couldn’t ask for much more than that.

“The beer line was one giant suck fest,” Long Jon said as he walked up with three foamy cups in his hands. “Fucking prices, too. They really bend you over in a place like this.” He darted his eyes toward April. “Beg pardon. I got a rough way of speaking sometimes.”

“I’m tougher than I look,” April told him, accepting her beer. “I’ve been told way worse right to my face.”

By my own brother, Brandon remembered with mild pride. Matt had come a long way from the scared, skinny kid he’d been three years ago.

April examined the contents of her plastic cup. “That’s a lot of beer. Someone’s going to have to finish this for me.”

“I had a buddy once who fixed himself up a motorcycle helmet,” Long Jon said. “Had a special hose on it that fed the beer straight to his mouth. Coulda made a fortune if he’d lived long enough to see it through.”

“What happened to him?” April asked, plainly horrified. Since Long Jon stood on the other side of her, Brandon could stare at her as much as he liked. And boy, did he like. What was it about a girl in jeans that made it impossible to keep your eyes off her ass?

“He got drunker’n usual one day and ate the asphalt,” Long Jon said. “Probably because of the hat.”

April turned to Brandon. “Have you ever wiped out?”

“If you rip her up and ride like there’s no tomorrow, there usually won’t be,” Brandon said. “But yeah, I’ve had a time or two when I did a little pavement surfing.”

“He’s still so pretty though, ain’t he?” Long Jon teased. “No scars on that boy.”

Brandon grinned. “Not ones you can see anyway.”

Someone closer to the starting line yelled, “Card’s up!”

As soon as the card was raised, riders had thirty seconds before the gate dropped. Brandon knew Matthew was already revving his throttle. With that scary-intense focus of his, Matthew would go tearing out of the gate and try to hit that first turn ahead of the pack. He’d done it a dozen times before at these events. And if Matt could make a name for himself in motocross, win some major championships and score a few million-dollar endorsement deals, Brandon would never have to worry about the kid again.

He scraped one hand through his hair and felt his heart pick up speed. Hard to tell if it was the race or standing next to April. They both seemed to have the same effect on him.

At the start line, forty bikes waiting to race sounded like a demon army. And once the gate dropped, their collective banshee howl raised the hair on the back of Brandon’s neck. He’d stuck a piece of fluorescent orange tape on the side of Matthew’s helmet so that even in the mad rush for the corner, Brandon could see where he was.

Dirt sprayed up from all the wheels, making it impossible to find him at first. But then Matt took an early lead, nailing the holeshot and speeding toward the first jump. If he gave it too much throttle, he’d slip to the back of the seat and lose control of the bike. Not enough and he’d find himself mired in mud.

Brandon took another swallow of beer, remembering that they had a lot of laps to go. Then he saw April waving one arm and shouting, “Kill ‘em, Matthew! Make ‘em eat dirt!”

Oh, he liked this April. He’d never seen her before. By the look on his face, Long Jon liked her, too.

“Check you out,” Long Jon said, chuckling. “There’s nothing better than a blood-thirsty wench.”

Brandon didn’t think she knew how irresistible she was with her cheeks flushed and her eyes sparkling. She looked passionate and alive. And he felt that bass drum kick inside his chest again, the one that told him things he didn’t want to hear right now.

“I forgot how much I love motocross,” she said. “When you watch it on TV, you don’t get all the sounds and excitement.”

Brandon wasn’t thinking about the race. All he saw was the soft swell of her breasts underneath the blue sweater. The way her hair glowed in the shadow of the pines. The sound of her high, breathless cheer of support for his brother.

It was crazy, especially considering the women he’d been with—women in sky-high heels and little satin hot pants. Women who’d thrown themselves at him, who’d played hard to get. But it was homespun April Roby, a girl who had more than a little Texas in her voice, educated Texas, but enough of it to salt a margarita glass, who did it for him in ways he was only beginning to understand.

Maybe his mind wasn’t clicking right. Maybe she’d cast a spell over him—one with a heap of the vanilla she always smelled of mixed with the coconut scent of her shampoo. April managed to get under a man’s skin somehow and cause him to forget an important truth: lone wolves never travel in a pack.

Matthew took the first ramp clean and landed without coming up short on the backside of the jump. Last time, although he hadn’t broken anything on him personally, he’d bent the frame and smashed the crankcase, which had taken Brandon weeks to fix. Now Matt and the other racers zoomed toward the rest of the course, out of eyeshot of the spectators, which was usually boring until the racers came by again.

April glanced up at him with a shy smile, and Brandon found himself far from bored.

Noticing her perfect skin was another sign that he was losing it. Skin wasn’t special. It was just something that sat on top of the engine, like a saddle. But hers looked temptingly soft. He imagined running his thumb across it while he kissed those irresistible lips. There was one fantasy in particular that kept him busy in the shower these days: April with soap suds trickling down her glistening, naked body.

And here she was right in front of him. Touching her had become a painful, physical necessity, but they couldn’t leave and they weren’t alone. But when the time came, God, how he would savor it. He actually wanted to show her what her body was capable of. To explore it bit by bit, testing its sweet spots, angles, rhythms. Where another man might be tempted to gobble such a mouthwatering treat, Brandon would devour it with the kind of purposeful, agonizing slowness that drove women out of their minds.

Jesus, he had to stop thinking about this. If he didn’t, he’d be the one going out of his mind. He felt intoxicated—and hell, even after three beers, he could pass any field sobriety test.

“You seemed pretty sure I’d come out today,” April said.

“You look more surprised than I am.” Brandon leaned into his elbows on the fence. Some poor kid who’d crashed right out of the gate was now weepily walking his bike back to an angry-looking dad. “But then, you don’t see what I see in you.”

“What might that be?”

“I see someone who wants to wake up.”

Where that came from, Brandon didn’t know, but he felt the truth of it in his bones. “Way I see it, people who are that buttoned up are pure rebel on the inside. They’re trying to keep a lid on something they think is wrong or bad or just plain illegal. But at your age? That’s against the natural order. And it can’t last. At some point, you’re going to explode.”

Long Jon was drinking his beer and pretending not to listen. He loved road philosophy, so he was probably itching to throw in his two cents, but Brandon felt possessive of April’s attention in a way that should have rung the warning bells a lot louder than it did.

April glanced up at him with a look of guilty embarrassment. “You could be right about me. But what about you? What made you so…unbuttoned?”

He loved the habit she had of casting her eyes down before raising them to his face. The effect was like that of a window thrown open and the sun pouring in. She also had a social worker’s trick of turning the subject around to the other person.

What they said, all these stupid words, wasn’t even important. They were a distraction. Underneath the noise was a feeling he wasn’t yet able to identify. But it clawed at him like a wild animal.

“The bike changes a man,” Long Jon said. “But after he’s seen everything, done everything, that’s when the man himself changes. It’s like a sickness he has to get rid of first. Then he starts appreciating the love of a good woman. Going it alone don’t seem that much fun anymore.”

There was a long silence where Brandon wanted to push Long Jon’s face into the muddy track for being such a buzz kill. April looked down at Long Jon’s cup, saw that it was empty and filled it from hers. “Bad breakup?” she asked sympathetically.

The hornet swarm of two-stroke motorcycles sounded like it was getting closer. Maybe this would make Long Jon shut up before he started yapping about his ex.

But Brandon was too aware of April standing next to him. Bringing her here was a terrible idea. He should have driven her straight to the nearest motel.

Matt whipped by in a pack of maybe five riders, ready to take the next lap. Instead of paying attention, Brandon moved closer to April. Long Jon was busy giving roadside advice to Matt, even though Matt was gone again. The sound of Long Jon’s drawling voice seemed to recede into the distance just like the bikes did, until all Brandon heard was the hum of his own blood pumping.

April gazed up at him with unmistakable longing in her eyes, so blue in the light of late afternoon. Like any right-thinking man, Brandon had strong opinions about public displays of affection—any emotions, really, except scorn and anger—but her lips were close. Too close.

He couldn’t help himself. He leaned down to kiss her because there was nothing else in the world he wanted more than to taste those lips.

Something hot and powerful drove straight through his gut. She made a noise of soft surprise, which allowed him to deepen the kiss. It felt as though he were drowning.

The sweetness of her teased over him, swamping his senses and making him forget what a blow it was to his tough-guy image to make out in public. Brandon sank his hands deep into her warm, silky hair and held her head right where he wanted it, feeling her melt beneath him.

He knew kissing her would be good, but not like this. He was already hard enough to crack a block of ice.

She didn’t know what she was doing, not really, which was a drastic change from the women he usually kissed. They were experienced at stirring up a man’s senses. But April’s innocence was a thousand times hotter. He couldn’t even say why it made him so crazy. He may have fantasized what kissing April would feel like, but this was beyond any fantasy. It was everything he could do to keep from ripping her clothes off right there on the grass and making her forget her own name.

He kissed her deeper, dark and velvety, the tip of his tongue finding hers with blind need. The urge to fill his hands with her made sparks race up and down his spine. Long Jon cleared his throat by way of protest, but Brandon hardly knew who Long Jon was anymore. There was just April’s hot, greedy, little mouth and the noises she made telling him how much she wanted this. How much she wanted him.

The kiss grew hotter and more drugging. She pulled his hair maybe without meaning to and then gasped against his mouth, “Oh, God…oh, God…”

Without any conscious thought, Brandon pressed her back against the fence. Her eyes were heavy-lidded and hypnotic, and with her head tilted, he saw her pulse beating wildly in her throat. Her soft breasts were crushed against his chest, her hips pushed into his. She could clearly feel how much he needed her, but so far she hadn’t run.

This time he went in slower, dragging her lower lip between his teeth, teasing and licking and stroking. She met him, timidly at first, and then with a mindless hunger that sent the blood scalding through his veins. April may have been inexperienced, but she was obviously a fast learner.

He’d never wanted anyone like this before. Desire squeezed him tight as a fist, urgent and demanding. The white-hot edge of need made him savage. But at the same time he felt vulnerable, as if one wrong word might break him.

That vanilla scent…he tasted it at its source. Her tongue slid over his and he was lost again, trying to find his way back.

When it came to women, he figured he’d seen it all. The truth was, he hadn’t seen anything. What was left of his mind kept trying to make sense of his obsessive need for her. But something like this could never be understood.

With his jacket partially concealing him, he reached for her breasts.

April stiffened in alarm.

The prohibition set him on fire, but he would never rush her or make her feel as though he was only in it for the score. Because even he knew that wasn’t the case. This was more than just sex.

God help him, it was her.

“I’m not ready,” she whispered.

He leaned his forehead against hers, the breath sawing in and out of his chest. Her breathing was ragged, too, as though they’d both run a long way to get here.

Gradually the sounds and smells of the race track came drifting back to him, but something had changed. The world was different. He couldn’t say what it was exactly. Maybe colors were brighter. Maybe the breeze felt especially soft as it blew through his hair. His dick wasn’t having any of this wait-and-see crap, but he felt more in charge of it now.

Long Jon had disappeared, but then Brandon saw him ambling over with a big dopey grin on his face, like Long Jon knew a secret and planned to hold it over him as long as possible.

April kept gulping air. She looked the way Brandon felt: stunned.

Long Jon saluted them both with a fresh beer and said, “Congratulations. Matthew won his heat. Next time, just get a goddamn room, will you?”