The Good, The Bad And The Wild. Heidi Rice

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      No wonder she was such a coward.

      But maybe adventure didn’t always have to be bad. Or contained within the pages of the romance novels her parents had always insisted were ‘a foolish indulgence’.

      She blinked furiously and clung tighter as they edged down another steep incline. The man in front of her felt so solid, his broad back sheltering her from the lengthening shadows. Then the bike hit a major road. Suddenly they were leaving the picture-postcard houses, the steep slopes and stepped pavements behind. Trees and parklands sped past and then Eva gasped, her eyes widening in wonder as the Golden Gate Bridge reared up before them, a huge geometric monolith of rusty red steel lit by the dying sun.

      The bike thundered through the fingers of fog drifting over the road, the rush of air and noise both cold and thrilling as they zipped past the occasional car, and a monstrous shiny yellow eighteen-wheeler. Squeezing her eyes shut, Eva hugged the only still thing in her universe and felt them both take flight through the traffic, hurtling across the water. The ball of emotion broke lose. Firing up her torso, it burst out of her mouth and she let out a gleeful yell that whipped away on the wind.

      She’d been walking through a fog her entire life but now the cloying veil of conformity was being ripped away—making every colour more vivid, every scent more acute, every sense more vibrant.

      To think she had lived her whole life and never experienced anything as thrilling as a sunset ride across San Francisco Bay?

      Adrenaline and affection blossomed as she clung to Nick Delisantro. How could she ever thank him enough, for giving her this?

      CHAPTER THREE

      AS the bike wound through the nature reserve on the Marin headlands, taking the climb towards Hawk Hill, Nick glanced at the fingers knotted round his waist and smiled.

      He’d hazard a guess that Eva the gorgeous anthropologist had never ridden pillion before, given the way she was attached to him like a limpet. Not that he was complaining. Once she’d got the hang of leaning into the turns, the feel of her clinging to him had been very nice indeed. Her shocked little gasp when they’d hit the Bridge on 101, and her spontaneous shout as they’d raced across it had only added to the heat. Seemed the prim and proper Miss Eva had a wild side. When you factored in the familiar adrenaline kick of being on the bike and the awe-inspiring view as they topped the rise and drifted to a stop at the overlook…

      No, he definitely didn’t have a single complaint about his split-second decision to invite her along. It had been far too long since he’d enjoyed the city like this—or the feel of a woman’s soft, pliant body plastered against his.

      He felt her expel another sharp breath as he cut off the bike’s engine.

      ‘Wow.’ Her hushed murmur sent a delicious tingle through the short hairs at his nape. ‘It’s so beautiful.’

      He tilted the bike onto its stand, flattened his feet onto the ground. ‘Yeah. This is the best view of the bridge.’

      They sat for a while in silence, admiring the majestic span of the Golden Gate, blazing a trail across the bay in the sunset, the fog sitting like a carpet of mist over the water and the lights of the city laid out behind.

      Reluctantly, he placed a hand over hers, glanced round at wind-stung cheeks and wide violet eyes. ‘It’s safe to let go now.’

      Pulling her hands out from under his, she sprang back. ‘I’m so sorry. Was I holding on too tight?’

      Her cheeks flushed a becoming shade of pink, and, despite the camouflage of his leather jacket, he caught a tantalising glimpse of her cleavage.

      With a figure like that she couldn’t possibly be as innocent as she seemed. Guys would have been all over her since puberty. But it was still an intriguing act.

      ‘You’ve my permission to hold on as tight as you like,’ he murmured. ‘But if you want to stretch your legs for a minute and enjoy the view…’

      ‘Yes… Thank you, I would,’ she said in that very proper London accent, but didn’t budge.

      He waited a beat. ‘You’ll have to dismount first,’ he prompted, stifling a grin when the colour highlighting her cheekbones flared again in the fading light.

      ‘Oh, yes, of course.’ Shifting back on the seat, she gathered her dress and then bit into her bottom lip as she concentrated on her dismount. It took a moment for her to execute the manoeuvre, during which he got an eyeful of lush thighs and trim calves displayed in silky nylons. He held back a groan, the clumsiness of her dismount making the view even more enticing as her many curves jiggled. Clearly it had been far too long since he’d had that much lush, scented female flesh within touching distance.

      Swinging his leg over the bike, he stood behind her as she lifted the helmet off. With her back to him as she gazed out across the city, the top of her head barely reached his chin. Curls of reddish-brown hair, no longer contained by the arrangement at the top, fell in disarray around the graceful column of her neck. Would her hair look all soft and rumpled like that straight out of bed? He stepped close enough to hear the staggered rise and fall of her breathing and to catch a whiff of her through the scent of sea-salt and earth. Spring flowers and soap, the fresh, unsophisticated scent seemed somehow exotic. He wanted to caress the back of her neck so badly he could almost feel her skin against his fingertips.

      Burying his hands into the back pockets of his jeans, he tried to recall for about the fiftieth time since he’d spotted her in the gallery why he’d sworn off romantic entanglements a few months ago. Something to do with a script that wasn’t happening, a looming production deadline and the unpleasant scenes when Lisa, his last girlfriend, had finally figured out that he’d meant it when he’d told her he wasn’t that interested in her. But as the once convincing reasons swirled through his mind again, they didn’t stop the urge to reach out and touch.

      ‘It’s really an astonishing feat of structural engineering,’ she said.

      ‘Uh-huh,’ he replied. Although it wasn’t the bridge’s astonishing feats of engineering that he was admiring at the moment.

      He caught the words ‘truss arches’ and ‘cantilevered suspension’ as she continued to talk, the words rushing out as if she’d swallowed an architectural textbook, and he found the grin tugging at his mouth again. He’d crashed out of school at sixteen and never gone back, so why did he find that serious, studious tone so damn sexy? He let his gaze drift down to the round swell of her backside lovingly spotlit by the bike’s headlamp in rich red velvet—and decided maybe it wasn’t so much the tone, but the contrasting packaging that was so appealing.

      As the four-syllable words continued to tumble out she hugged the helmet to her midriff like a long-lost child. She was nervous. The thought added a nice little ego-boost to his attraction. It was kind of intoxicating to get the chance to do the chasing for a change.

      As he waited patiently for her to wind down and look at him, something he suspected her lecture on the Golden Gate Bridge was being used to avoid, he pulled one hand out of his pocket.

      Time to refocus her attention.

      Angling his thumb under the line of dangling curls, he skimmed it across the whisper-soft skin of her neck just above the collar of his jacket.

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