looked like in his head from his own school days, thirty or so years ago. Although he wracked his brain, he couldn’t remember having any teachers who looked like this one. He’d been precocious and he was sure he would remember.
More to the point, most women he met, even attractive, sexy women, didn’t grab his attention immediately the way this one did. He felt embarrassed thinking that it had to have shown in his face from the moment he took her hand. At that first touch, he wanted her. He lusted after her. And then, when she spoke, he felt something else, something potent and powerful.
They’d talked about nothing, just the commonplace, yet it felt intimate. An intimate encounter. Far more intimate and interactive than the one-night stands he’d had since his wife died. And that shocked him. Melanie Wilford had woken something in him that was long dormant. Something more than lust.
How could it be?
Greg pulled to a stop at the garage and Carly hopped off the back of the bike and eagerly tore off her helmet. She gave a cheerful wave to a huge, broad, big-handed man with dark, wavy hair, slightly heavy features, intense dark gray eyes and a bit of scruff to his chin. He wore his biker colors and stood by the door with his arm around the waist of a small but curvaceous woman.
“Hey Cutter, hey Audra.”
“Glad to see you’re here Grease Princess,” Cutter said. “My bike needs some of that mechanical magic. It’s running like shit.”
Carly frowned. “You know I can’t work on bikes until after I do my homework.” She looked in Greg’s direction. “I’m not allowed to. I would if I could.”
Greg shook his head slowly. “Priorities, kid.”
Carly snorted. “He’s just being hard-assed because I saw him get soft talking to Miss Wilford, my teacher. I think he likes her.”
“You aren’t allowed to say hard-assed, brat,” Greg said. “Stick to proper English for a few more years at least.”
She made a face. “Then no one around here would understand me.”
“Then suffer in silence. Now it’s homework before anything else time. Off to the office.”
Cutter laughed. “Well, Wrench, if you are sidelining the club’s best mechanic because she told on you, spread the word about a new woman in your life, then I guess I have to settle for whatever you can do.” Cutter looked at Carly. “Sorry Princess, but homework is important shit.”
Carly sighed, grabbed up her backpack and headed for the office. “Audra, when you were my age, did you do your homework?”
Audra chuckled. “There are some things one woman just doesn’t ask another, Carly.”
“I thought we were friends.”
“We are. I’ll get us each a soda and you get to work. You love the schoolwork anyway.”
“So, Cutter, what terrible thing did you do to your bike now?” Greg asked as Carly went inside.
“Me? I rode it. Audra and I were going fast down the highway. That’s what I did to it. I rode it. So there we were zipping down the Pacific Coast Highway, passing Nissans and Toyotas and all those other American cars, just digging the way the ocean gets all blurry if you go fast enough, and then, all by itself, my bike decides that slow is almost as good as fast. Audra and I don’t think so—I want fast again, Wrench. Fix my machine. Convince it of the right working of things.”
Greg smiled. “We can do fast, man.” He walked over to the bike and squatted beside it.
Cutter squatted beside him. “See anything?”
“Not yet. My x-ray vision takes time to warm up.”
“How’s Jake?”
“So, so. If he actually starts doing the physical therapy they scheduled him for, and takes his meds, they say he’ll stay able to walk fairly well. He won’t be riding again. He could do it, but any big jolt to the spine, even a hard bounce over a railroad track, could paralyze him.”
“Sorry to hear that. At least he’ll be able to move.” Cutter watched Greg run his hands over the engine. “Sometimes I think you