Then he reaches for my bag. “Long flight?”
“You could say that,” I say, falling into step beside him.
“You eat?”
“A little on the plane.”
He’s already leading me toward the truck, lifting my bag and swinging it into the bed of the truck.
“Hey! Be careful with that, it’s a Louis Vuitton.”
He turns and looks at me with a slight frown. “A Louis what?”
I wave him off. “Don’t worry about it.”
He shakes his head slightly and makes his way around to the driver’s side while I head for the passenger door, only to find him already there, pulling it open before I can reach the handle.
“Well,” I say, raising my eyebrows. “Chivalry lives.”
He gives me a look and walks around to his side.
The moment he starts the engine, the air conditioning hits me like a blessing, cold, immediate, and absolutely perfect. I nearly groan out loud with the relief of it.
“You always dress like that for Vegas in summer?” Tate asks, glancing at my long-sleeved pullover.
“This is my first time here,” I admit.
He stares at me. “Seriously? Everyone comes to Vegas.”
“Well, I hadn’t gotten around to it.”
“Clearly.” He pulls out of the lot and into traffic, the truck’s engine a low, steady rumble beneath us. “It’s summer, in case that wasn’t obvious.”
“It’s very obvious now,” I say, and start wrestling the pullover over my head right there in the passenger seat, emerging slightly disheveled in my white tank top. “Much better.”
Tate’s mouth curves. “Hope you packed more summer clothes than winter ones. Come morning, the desert heat is a whole other thing.”
The drive takes us through the city first, with neon lights blazing on every side, the Strip lit up like something from another world entirely, with color, movement, and noise in every direction. I watch it through the window as it slowly gives way to wider roads, then quieter roads, then roads with no lights at all, just a dark stretch of highway cutting through open desert with the mountains rising black and jagged in the distance.
The city shrinks behind us.
The desert opens ahead.
Glancing over at Tate, I notice one hand is resting loosely on the steering wheel, and the other arm is stretched along the back of my headrest, completely at ease and in his element. The dashboard lights catch the line of his jaw, the dark curls of his hair, the mocha skin, and the three-day growth on his face.
He looks like Ryan.
Not exactly, but enough to make my chest ache every time I let myself look at him for more than a second. It’s the same bone structure underneath, the same quality of stillness, and the same sense of a man who never needed to raise his voice to fill a room. Wonderful and terrible in equal measure, and I’m not sure yet which one is going to win.
I realize I’ve been staring when he turns his head and catches me.
“Everything okay?”
“Sorry.” I look away quickly, back out into the dark. “I was just… yeah. Fine.”
He doesn’t push it.
The truck turns off the main road and onto a narrower track, then another, the headlights picking out pale dirt and scattered rock on either side. And then lights appear in the distance, warm, low, and steady against all that darkness.
