He paid for his oil and filters, then walked back down the hallway. Sure enough, Erin Kent stood by a salesman, studying a bike.
Jack caught a glimpse of himself in the rain-streaked showroom window. The damp air and his helmet had plastered his hair to his forehead. His eyes were dark hollows in their sockets, his head lowered. The jacket and jeans added to his bulk. He looked like a big, broken brute. And there was Erin, dressed in another pair of wide-legged slacks that set off her slim hips, a deep green turtleneck sweater caressing the strong line of her jaw. It was the first time he’d seen her in good light. Her eyes were set wide in her face, and she studied the salesman intently as he spoke.
It was a good thing she turned him down. No way would a woman who looked like that have anything to do with a guy like him.
“It’s a lot of bike,” the salesman was saying. “I hear what you’re saying about not wanting to buy a starter bike, but if you buy too much bike—”
“You’ll learn how to ride it,” Jack finished.
Erin looked up, those already impossible eyes widening.
It was none of his fucking business. She’d turned him down for a drink. She could probably hold her own with the salesman, who was just trying to do the right thing and succeeding only in looking like a gigantic dick. But he crossed the floor anyway to stand beside Erin, the salesman, and a Ducati 696.
“That’s what I thought,” Erin said.
“We take trade-ins,” the salesman said a little desperately. “You can bring that Rebel back, and we’ll give you a good price toward a Duc, if that’s what you want.”
Jack felt a little sorry for the guy. He was trying to do the right thing by steering Erin towards a slower, safer first bike. But more and more women were riding motorcycles; the last thing this guy needed was his shop getting a reputation for being condescending to female riders. “Give us a minute,” he said to the salesman.
The guy vanished like he’d been vaporized.
“It’s a great bike,” Jack said. “I used to own one.”
“Before the Panigale?” Erin asked with a look at his bike, sitting outside in the rain.
She’d done her research, knew her bikes. “Yeah,” he said. “I bought that one a couple of years ago.” After a particularly exciting mission in Afghanistan, when he questioned neither his body nor his nerve. “Needs an oil change,” he added, in case he thought he was stalking her.
“I want this bike,” she said. Defiant. Like she wasn’t going to get it. He looked at it. It was a sweet, sexy sportbike, bright red, a year old but with fewer than two hundred miles on it. He flipped the price tag over. The price was good.
“Ducs are worse than drugs,” he said, startling a laugh out of her. “What do you own now?”
“I don’t,” she said, slightly defensive, as if it were a personal failing that she didn’t own a Ducati. “I’ve taken the motorcycle beginners course. That’s it.”
“This is a smaller bike,” he said. “Low frame and you’re tall for a woman, so you can probably get your feet flat on the ground. It’s nimble. Quick. It’s going to be a hell of a lot more responsive than whatever you rode in the training course.”
“A Suzuki,” she said. “I know all of that.”
“You can get something sportier, not a cruiser.”
“I don’t like the looks of those,” she said, a stubborn tilt to her chin.
“Okay, so here’s the worst part. You start riding, you’re going to lay it down. Once a week at least for a while, maybe more depending on weather, gravel, potholes, idiots who don’t see you coming. On a slower ride like the Rebel over there,” he said, nodding at basic model obviously traded in, “you’re going to lay it down less.”
“But I’m still going to lay it down,” she said. “You do, right?”
“Fact of life when you ride.”
“This is the bike I want to lay down,” she said.
He had to laugh. She looked mutinous, determined as all hell. “You’re going to scratch the paint. That pretty, shiny, flawless Ducati red paint is going to look like someone took sandpaper and claws to it.”
“My sandpaper, my claws,” she said. “On my bike.”
He shrugged. “Go for it.”
She looked at the salesman, loitering cautiously beside the reception desk. “I want to put down a deposit, to hold it for a couple of days, and come back when it’s not raining so I can give it a test drive.”
“Great,” the salesman said, obviously thinking Erin-the-Librarian would sleep on it and change her mind. “No problem. We just hold your check and tear it up if you decide not to … uh … not to…”