Except for the baby her sister was carrying. The baby she didn’t yet know about, no matter how much he bugged Winnie to tell her. And while he’d promised not to give away the secret, he wouldn’t, couldn’t lie outright to Piper. She didn’t deserve that. And as always when his mind went down that path, he deeply regretted giving Winnie his word. Holding back from Piper didn’t feel good, but when he factored in how attracted to her he was, how much he wanted her, it felt even more wrong.
Piper apparently took his silence as the need for a subject change, so she turned to the window and her brows went up as they exited the highway at Pismo Beach.
“Why do I feel nervous?” she asked, when he pulled into a parking lot.
He got out of the truck and came around for her, taking her hand. “Maybe it’s me. Maybe I give you butterflies.”
“You don’t,” she said, so quickly that he grinned, because now he knew that he totally did. “Whatever,” she muttered. “It’s not like you don’t know that you melt bones when you kiss.”
And now he kept grinning, because he was incredibly flattered that he could melt her bones. But it was more than that. When he touched her, kissed her, he got flashes of the real Piper, the one she liked to hide from the world. The real Piper was softer, sweeter, and reached him in a way no one else ever had. “You’re good for my ego.”
“Like you needed help in that arena.”
He laughed as they walked to the beach. Hills made of sand spanned in either direction, making this a beach people tended to come to for four-wheeling rather than sunbathing.
“What are we doing here?” she asked, eyeing the choppy deep-blue water and heavy surf. “Don’t tell me we’re going swimming.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m”—she appeared to fight herself for a moment—“not super comfortable around the water, which I know is ridiculous, since I live on a lake.”
“For the record, I’d never say that. But what are we talking about here, a general light fear of the water, or full-blown phobia?”
“Just a light fear,” she said, her breathing a little fast from just talking about it.
Okay, then. Phobia it was. He thought back and realized he’d never seen her on the docks at the marina. Earlier, she’d remained on shore, not taking a single step onto the dock at all. “We’re not going in the water,” he promised, leading her down the stairs to the beach and then about a hundred feet to a small shack with a huge sign that read:
CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE!
“Oh, boy,” Piper whispered. “Um—”
“Are you . . . uncomfortable with sand?” he asked.
“No.”
“Are you uncomfortable with wind in your hair?”
She bit her lower lip again, possibly to hide a smile now. But he wasn’t sure; it could be to hide her urge to murder him. “No,” she finally said.
“Are you uncomfortable having a good time?”
She turned to him, utterly serious. “I’m not sure I’d recognize a good time.”
He smiled and cupped her face as he leaned in and gave her a soft kiss. “Then trust me to show you one. One hour, Piper. Yeah?”
She stared at his mouth for a beat, like maybe she wanted it back on hers—which made two of them—and then nodded. “Yeah.”
Chapter 10
“That was possibly the most thrilling ride of my life.”
Piper had no idea what she thought she was doing. She didn’t treat herself to fun very often. Or ever. But it was on her list of things to do, so that made her feel better, because tonight she’d be able to check off a box. She loved checking off boxes.
“That looks good on you,” Cam said.
“What?”
“The smile.”
She nearly tripped over her own feet. She was starting to realize that he saw her as someone far more adventurous and fascinating than she really was. Maybe . . . for this little while at least, she could be the woman he saw.
The guy standing at the shack waiting for them looked like every cliché of a surfer dude Piper had ever seen, sun-bleached hair to his shoulders, sunglasses, no shirt, board shorts, and no shoes. He grinned at Cam and gave a smart-ass salute. “Got your text. Your adventure awaits.”
“Piper, meet Brodie,” Cam said. “We were in initial training together, eons ago.”
Brodie smiled at Piper. “Did he tell you that I beat him in every training exercise?”
“No,” Cam said. “Because that’s a lie. And anyway, who tapped out after his four years?”
“Guilty,” Brodie said easily. “Wasn’t cut out for the life. Or for walking about battle rattle when just trying to grab grub.”
“Battle rattle?” Piper asked.
“Yeah. When you, like, have fifteen minutes to get food, so you run into a takeout place with so many weapons and tools that you rattle. Get it? Battle rattle.” He smiled at the look on her face. “Yeah, you’re in the presence of two serious badasses.”
She looked at Cam, who shook his head, like he was nothing but a sweet teddy bear.
Uh-huh.
“Your chariot awaits,” Brodie said, gesturing to the two . . . vehicles . . . off to the side on the sand. They were three-wheeled buggies that looked like they went really fast. She swallowed hard. “Um.”
“They’re trikes,” Cam said. “Don’t worry, they stay on the sand.”
“Well, unless you take a jump and get some air,” Brodie said. “Which I highly recommend.”
Thirty minutes later, after a lesson and brief training about things like jumping and tacking—which supposedly was the art of slowing down by steering into the wind—Piper was in her own trike and doing a great job of pretending not to be terrified. Then she was flying along the beach while seated only a few inches off the ground, the wind in her face, whipping her ponytail, and she felt like she was going faster than she’d ever gone in anything ever before. Up and over the sand hills she went, no longer bothering to hide her whoops of sheer adrenaline-rush joy every time she got a bit of air beneath her tires.
To her left, another trike came into her view. Cam. She glanced over and found him looking hot as hell in dark sunglasses and a wicked smile.
She smiled back.
He kept pace with her for a long moment, then pulled ahead to lead her into a series of hills. There was a gust of wind and she felt the trike hurtle forward. She heard a roar from the tires on the sand and the wind around her, and found herself grinning from ear to ear at the rush.
When it was time to return to the shack, she pulled in next to Cam, who helped her out.
“Well?” he asked.
She grinned. “That was possibly the most thrilling ride of my life.”
He pulled off her helmet, the look in his eyes saying that he knew he could give her an even more thrilling ride.
She had no doubt. But she hadn’t managed to raise her siblings and give them all relatively decent lives by following a whim, sexy as that whim might be. She’d been afraid of commitment with Ryland because . . . well, she still wasn’t one hundred percent sure. But she thought it had something to do with the knowledge that committing to him would mean becoming something she wasn’t—a person capable of further dividing her heart, handing yet another chunk of it off to someone and in turn giving them power to hurt her.