Erin stood at the desk to write out the check. Jack, now loitering without a clear reason, watched her elegant handwriting. Erin Kent. No other name on the account, no ring, but all that meant was that they hadn’t gotten to the point of merging financials.
He held the door open for her. The only car parked in front of the showroom was a Honda Civic, dark green, gray cloth seats, obviously high miles because the door still unlocked with a key, not a clicker. Keys in hand, she stood watching the rain stream from the under the shallow metal awning.
“Thanks.”
“For what?”
“For helping me make the decision.”
“I owed you,” he said. “For last night.”
“I was doing my job,” she said.
“Yeah, about that. I’m sorry. I didn’t think about the librarian slash student thing.”
“It’s fine,” she said.
“It probably happens all the time.”
At that she laughed, throwing her head back. “No,” she said. “It doesn’t.”
“Kids these days,” he said, shaking his head in mock-consternation. “I don’t understand this generation.”
“Based on the used condoms I occasionally find in the study rooms, a lack of sex drive isn’t this generation’s problem. It’s that I … I used to be married.” She held up her left hand, bare of a wedding ring, and rubbed her thumb over the base of her ring finger, an unconscious gesture he often saw from married men. “Very few people hit on librarians, and no one hits on a married one.”
The rain misting her hair into a gentle wave condensed into a droplet that trickled down the side of her face. “I hit on you,” he said. “But I shouldn’t have, and I’m sorry.”
She looked at him for a long moment, her face clearly reflecting two things he knew very well: desire and hesitation, then blew out her breath, shook her head. “I’m thirty-four.”
“How do you know I’m not thirty-four?”
She cut him a no bullshit, please glance, then continued. “I’m thirty-four, and newly divorced, and on staff at the college where you are a student, and this is a really bad idea.”
He said nothing, because he recognized the tone of a woman trying to talk herself out of something. His best move was to keep his mouth shut. She had her umbrella in one hand, her car keys in the other, and her car was nosed up to the yellow curb in front of the Ducati dealership. But she wasn’t moving.
She slid him another look out of those incredible hazel eyes, sidelong, assessing. Weighing upsides and downsides. “Want to get a coffee before I go to work? As my motorcycle purchase advisor,” she clarified.
Oh, hell no. He turned the full heat of his gaze on her. “You can call me your motorcycle purchase advisor. I can tell you I’m not enrolled as a degree-seeking student at Lancaster College, that I’m just taking a couple of classes. But that doesn’t suit a woman who just walked into a Ducati dealership with her eye on a Monster and straight up told the salesman to fuck off when he tried to talk her into a Rebel. Which, for the record, only pussies and girls ride. You’re neither.”
Her lips parted in surprise. Then her chin lifted. “You’re right,” she said. “Do you want to get a coffee?”
He leaned toward her. “Do you think coffee will keep us out of trouble?”
“No,” she said, then turned her face so her lips were inches from his ear. “My place. In or out?”
Chapter Two
For a moment Erin listened to the rain plunk against the shallow metal awning over their heads, and tried to place the feeling roiling inside her. Her entire body felt charged up, a dangerous combination given the drenched air and the high-voltage current flowing through the man in front of her. Her brain misfired in a dozen different directions. How dare that salesman try to talk her out of buying the bike she wanted? What on earth had she done to deserve the vision of the as-yet-unnamed student riding a Ducati 1099 through a driving rain and walking into the dealership straight out of her dreams? The hummingbird whir and dart of her heart indicating a chemistry unlike anything she’d felt before. But one thought stayed on the surface of her overheated brain. He’d called her attempt to justify getting a cup of coffee together.
Then she’d called his bluff that “coffee” actually meant “coffee.”
Could she be like this, a woman who rode a motorcycle and propositioned hot guys?
“In,” he said. “Always in.”
Apparently she could. It took her a moment to identify the swoop and plummet of her stomach as the feeling of walking a very fine tightrope of control over a chasm. A crazy longing rose inside her, not lust, but something gut deep, aching for that feeling of hope and possibility and a future that would surprise her.
She looked at his bike, then at her car. “I live about ten minutes from here,” she said. The rain, pattering steadily on metal, asphalt, glass, diluted her words but not her tone.
“Address?”
She gave it to him.
“I’ll meet you there.”