Page 76 of Cruz

He’s giving me an out. Again. He’s given me about ten since we walked downstairs.

I glance at the bike. It’s big and black and gleaming, with enough chrome to catch the weak late winter sunlight and throw it back at the street. It looks like trouble. It looks like freedom. It looks like one more step into a life I never imagined having.

I should be terrified.

I am terrified.

But I’m also excited enough that my stomach keeps flipping. “Yes,” I say. “Before I think about it too much and talk myself into having an extremely sensible cup of tea instead.”

His mouth twitches. “We can still have tea after.”

“Good. That’s the only reason I’m doing this.”

That earns me the dimple. The rare one. The devastating one. The one that should probably come with a warning label, because it has the power to make all my good sense take a nosedive straight off a cliff.

Cruz swings one long leg over the bike and settles in. He moves like he belongs there. He always does. In my café. In my kitchen. In my bed. On this bike. In my life. That last one still gets me sometimes. In the two months since we decided that we were going to do this—whatever this is—it’s been easy. Not the easy that makes you scared that it’s too good to be true. More the easy where you feel like someone’s always been in your life.

He looks over his shoulder and holds out a hand.

I take it.

Getting on the back of a motorcycle is not graceful. At least not when you’re me and you’re wearing thick leggings, boots, a leather jacket, and a helmet that makes you feel like an astronaut who wandered into the wrong movie. Cruz braces the bike easily while I climb on behind him. The seat is wider than I expected, but there’s still nothing between me and the whole rest of the world except Cruz.

That thought lands with weight.

Not just physical weight, though I immediately understand how literal this is. My thighs frame his hips. My chest presses to his back. My arms go around his middle because that’s where they belong. He’s warm and solid under my hands, and when the bike rumbles beneath us, the vibration travels straight through me.

Oh.

Okay.

That’s a thing.

“Arms tight,” Cruz calls back.

I tighten them. His hand covers mine where they’re locked together against his stomach. He squeezes once, then lets go. It’s not lost on me, what this means. I might not have been raised around motorcycles, but Hart is Hart, and the Satan’s Angels aren’t exactly a secret. Everyone knows that riding on the back of a biker’s bike isn’t nothing. Maybe for some people it’s casual. Maybe there are women who climb on and off without thinking about it.

But this is Cruz.

Nothing with him feels casual.

This feels like a statement. Like I’m letting him carry me, not because I can’t stand on my own two feet, but because I choose to hold on. For a woman who spent most of her adult life being the only person she could count on, that’s not a small thing.

The bike rolls away from the curb, and my breath catches. For the first few minutes, I’m all panic and sensation. The engine. The cold air. The lean of the bike as Cruz turns. The strange, vulnerable awareness that there are no walls, no doors, no roof, no seatbelt. Just motion and sound and Cruz’s body steady in front of me.

Then something loosens. Not all at once. Not magically. I’m still me. I still have a brain that likes to present seventeen worst-case scenarios before breakfast. But the longer we ride, the more the fear starts to change into something closer to exhilaration.

The wind pushes at us, but Cruz is steady. The bike moves beneath us, but he knows how to handle it. I learn the rhythm of leaning with him instead of fighting against it. I stop gripping him like I’m trying to compress his ribs into powder and start holding him like this is what we do.

Like we’ve always done it.

By the time we’re out past Patterson’s diner and on the back roads outside Hart, I understand why he loves this. It’s not just speed. Cruz isn’t reckless. He doesn’t ride like he has something to prove. He rides like he’s listening. To the road. To the machine. To the wind. To me, even though I haven’t said a word.

The fields open on either side of us, winter-bare and silver under the muted sky. The mountains sit in the distance, dark and permanent. The whole world feels washed clean, stripped down to its essentials.

Road. Sky. Breath. Body.

Cruz.