He laughed, throwing back his head—a solid, meaty, manly laugh. “What gives you that idea?” He mockingly ge
stured at his head-to-toe black leather.
“Just asking,” she said, with a hint of sulk.
“Do you like bikes?”
“Don’t know much about them…but yeah. I like bikes.”
“When do you get off?”
Flashing, bleeping, crashing, revving, all around the arcade and inside Flipp.
“Six.”
“Six is good. I’ll take you for a spin if you want.”
“Yeah?” She beamed. Spin me right round like a record, baby.
He winked. “Don’t forget.” She watched his back move amongst the coin fountains and race-car simulators until it was out in the bright sunshine beyond. Now, that was an arse to die for. Not to mention the rest of him.
Oh, yes, it looked as if Goldsands could be Flipp’s kind of town.
She was hiding around the back of Caesar’s Palace when she heard the distinctive roar of a motorcycle engine, just after six. Wasn’t it illegal to ride a motorbike on the pier? She clenched herself up and took one last look at the sea—so beautifully blue here, against the yellow sand and rolling green hills beyond. Then she smoothed her denim mini down over her leggings, adjusted the spaghetti straps of the two vests she wore on top, pulled her shades down over her eyes and strutted off to meet her fate.
Flipp’s fate was smoking a cigarette, leaning over the fancy ironwork and staring across the bay. The breeze kept blowing his hair into his face and he blew it back out irritably, dashing it back over his head with a hand in a way that struck her as smoulderingly sexy. He threw the butt into the sea and turned, catching sight of Flipp straightaway and smiling crookedly.
“Ready to ride?” he enquired, and her stomach churned at the sound of his voice, its low gravel tone overlaid with unmistakable desire.
She nodded, stunned at how much more handsome he looked out in the natural light.
“Don’t you have a jacket to wear? You can’t go like that. You’ll freeze.”
“Oh. But it’s not cold.” She hugged her bare arms to her chest. “I only live down the Esplanade, so I didn’t bother.”
Rocky sighed and shook his head disapprovingly, beginning to unbuckle the complicated fastenings of his own leather jacket. “You’ve never been on a bike before?” he surmised. “Even on a hot day, it gets cold. That’s why we wear leathers.”
“Oh.” She felt flushed and stupid, half annoyed and half titillated by his lecturing tone. Does it make me look less convincing if I’ve never been on a bike before? I do look a bit like a biker’s moll, with this hair and the tattoo I had done at Passionate Pain on the seafront. But the closest I’ve come is a Lambretta on holiday in Rome a few years back.
“Never mind. You can wear my jacket, just this once.” He shucked it off over broad shoulders and jerked his head, beckoning her over.
“There’s no need,” she said halfheartedly, but he was already slipping the sleeves up her too-short arms and reaching around in front of her to zip and buckle. The jacket felt enormously heavy to Flipp, and she almost stooped beneath its weight of leather and metal, but at the same time this was reassuring and rather captivating in its way. The smell and feel of it made her want to breathe it all in until she could breathe no more, and then hold it there, at the top of her nostrils, for as long as possible. She turned around to face Rocky, who was smiling crookedly as her short, slight form struggled under the bulk of the jacket.
She hugged her arms to her chest, which proved a little awkward in this stiff outer casing, and eyed him up from under her spray of white-blond fringe. Those arms. Brawny and sinewy and adorned with inky snakes and dragons, they were impossible to ignore, demanding attention as they rippled and corded in the early-evening sunshine. The phrase “all man” drifted into Flipp’s head, making her wonder if she had ever met somebody who embodied it in quite the way Rocky did. His tight black T-shirt, adorned with the insignia of a metal band she had never heard of—Charybdis—was like drum skin across a wide, flat chest that slanted inwards until it became a belted waist, snake hips and long, long legs wrapped in smooth leather.
He winked and walked across to his shiny red bike, removing a spare helmet from the storage compartment at the front. “Here. Something else you’ll need,” he said, handing it over to her. “Seems a shame to spoil that spiky hairdo,” he commented with a grin. “But a smashed skull isn’t a very good look either.”
“I don’t care about my bloody hair,” she said indignantly, wounded that Rocky might see her as a girly-girl. Okay, I am a bit of a girly-girl. My look is important to me. But adventures are more so. She fidgeted with the chinstrap to little effect until Rocky stepped in and tightened it for her. His fingers, long and smelling of engine oil, brushed against her skin, and his nearness accentuated their height difference so that she felt like a doll beside him, the top of her head reaching only just between his pectoral muscles.
“Good,” he said roughly. “Because there’s no way I’m letting my bike get messed up with your scrambled brains.”
She looked over at the sheeny scarlet beast. “Your pride and joy?” she asked lightly. “Do you take it to bed at night?”
Rocky’s eyes glinted and his eyebrows shot up. “Are you teasing me, Miss Flipp?”
“Course not,” she said airily. “It’s a nice bike.”
“Nice bike?” Rocky’s tone suggested that Flipp had committed an act of major sacrilege. “It’s a Ducati 1198, not a nice bike. It’s raw power and sleek design in one package.”