Joy Ride: A Virgin Romance (Let it Ride Book 3) Read online

  “I don’t need a break.”

  “But you do.” I thought a minute, grasping for the words. I was fuzzy-brained from lack of sleep. “What’s really going on?”

  Iris shrugged. “I’m keeping busy.”

  “So you won’t think about Will?”

  “That was the plan,” she said pointedly.

  “Before I rudely interrupted? How’s it working out?”

  “How do you think?” She heaved a disgusted sigh.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault he’s a big, stupid butthole.”

  As a kid, Iris’s mother had washed her mouth out with soap once for using a bad word at the dinner table. Iris said it was a Bible Belt thing. As a result, she only cursed when really aggravated. And when it happened, the obscenities came out in a Tourette's-like stream of consciousness.

  I’d only seen her let loose on somebody once, but I loved it. Kate liked to provoke Iris, hoping for another show, but she’d resisted a repeat performance so far.

  “You should go back to bed.”

  “I can’t sleep.” She rubbed a palm over her chest, as though her heart hurt.

  I’d never gotten into a fight in my life, but I’d like to sock Will right in the nose. Nope, lower. The guy deserved a dick punch. And I’d love to be the one who did it.

  Right now, I had bigger problems helping Iris get through the rest of the night.

  “Then I’m going to help you.” I picked up her swordlike knife and started chopping celery.

  “Thank you.” Iris hugged me from behind.

  “Anytime.” I patted her hand. I wasn’t much of a hugger.

  We worked side by side for the next hour. By the time we finished, we’d made rice, pasta, chicken breasts, all the veggies anyone could eat, roasted red pepper hummus, and a yogurt sauce. I’d never cooked so much stuff.

  And I made myself a solemn promise. I’d never let a guy tie me up in knots like this.

  ***

  Later on that morning, I sat at my desk, paging through For Love or Money. The book featured a handsome older man, the contract killer, and an innocent young virgin, the waitress. Okay, so it was a bit clichéd, but I wrote the kind of books I liked to read.

  Naturally, I’d poured a bit of myself and a bit of Ian into it.

  Despite his disdain for my work, I inherited the writing bug from my father. I loved romantic suspense. I wrote my first book at the age of thirteen. Sure, it was awful, a romance, of course, about a cute boy in my class. It’d been all handwritten on notebook paper and organized by chapter in a folder.

  For Love or Money was much better. It’d taken me months to write, and I’d enjoyed every second I spent on my laptop, tapping on the keyboard, making myself laugh like a crazy person.

  I couldn’t help it. The characters spoke to me—bits of dialogue popped into my head. And no, I wasn’t cracked—it’s all part of the creative process. When you wrote about someone, you had to get into his or her headspace, figure out what made the person tick. I loved nothing more than getting to know my characters, watching them grow.

  At this point, I had a half-dozen ideas for other books. I’d downloaded a notebook app because the ideas were out of control at this point, and I had to put them somewhere before they overwhelmed me.

  Somehow, I’d tapped into the creative side of myself, which created an explosion of sorts. I wished Dad could be happy for me. He could’ve read my book, given me some honest feedback, and then encouraged me. Was that too much to ask?

  But it’s pointless. I’m not going to be an author. Instead, I’d be a professor. I’d spend my life talking about other people’s books, instead of writing my own. It wasn’t a terrible way to make a living. I loved literature.

  Yet the thought was depressing.

  But I shouldn’t be second-guessing my plans. So I shoved my manuscript back into the drawer and slammed it shut.

  Time to face the day.

  On the way to class, I stopped at the Starbucks near campus. I loved their green tea lattes and needed a boost this morning. Besides, I felt virtuous when drinking it, like it cleansed my body or something. My family introduced me to organic food, and the habit stuck with me.

  When I walked in the classroom, latte in hand, I found Ian standing by the chalkboard. Unlike most of the modernized rooms, this one had an old-fashioned slate board, and his trousers were dusted with a bit of chalk. His brow furrowed in concentration as he contemplated the board.

  He’d written challenging questions for discussion group today. Ian believed in the Socratic method and encouraged us to defend our positions and dialogue about the readings.

  I sucked in a breath.

  His world-class mind was a great big turn-on. Okay, so I had a fascination with professors, well, this one, anyway. Who can resist an intellectual, eloquent older man?

  Like he could teach me a thing or two. In my fantasies, none of the lessons came from books, though I wanted hands-on tutoring.

  Yikes, wrong choice of words.

  “Good morning.” I took my customary seat in the front row.

  “Hi, Darcy. So how was the big birthday bash?” Ian took a sip from his Van Gogh travel mug.

  “Good.” I shrugged.

  “Just good?” He peered at me. “You don’t even look hungover.”

  “Because I’m not.”

  “You didn’t get pissed at a twenty-first birthday party?”

  Yet another reason for my crush: his cute British-isms. Instead of drunk, he said pissed. Things weren’t terrible. They were rubbish. Ian lived in a flat, not an apartment. You get the gist.

  “Not my style. Besides, the whole thing feels anticlimactic or something. I’m twenty-one. So what?”

  Like most things, it hadn’t lived up to the hype. Somehow, I thought I’d be different afterward—fully an adult or something. So far, it hadn’t happened.

  “Then you didn’t do it right.”

  “How’d you spend your twenty-first?”

  “In the UK, the legal drinking age is eighteen.”

  “That’s not fair.” I’d had to wait three extra years.

  He chuckled. “I turned eighteen my first week at university. My roommate and I went on an epic pub crawl, and I got so pissed, I woke up face down on the school lawn wearing a kilt, and it wasn’t even mine.”

  “How’d that happen?”

  He raised a brow. “No one knows, which makes it the stuff of legend.”

  “I’m not much of a party girl, so I won’t be having any legendary nights. I don’t need any incriminating photos popping up. Anyone with a cell phone could immortalize my stupidest moment.”

  “You’re so proper. There are other ways to make an evening special.”

  I swallowed. “Like?”

  He paused for a long moment. “I’ll leave it up to your imagination.”

  Hmm. What did Ian mean by that? Maybe Kate’s seduction plan messed with my head. I looked for hidden signals now.

  “Are you free later on today?”

  I gaped at him for a moment. “Oh, you mean the meeting.” I snapped my fingers and pulled out my cell phone to check. Of course, it’d been an innocent question. “Unfortunately, my schedule is insane. What about next week?”

  He shook his head. “I’ll have a round of papers to grade, so I won’t have any free periods. Sure we can’t squeeze some time in later on today?”

  “Hmm…” I paused, swiping through Google Calendar. “What about much later on in the day? Around five?”

  “Works for me.”

  Then I remembered my dad’s stupid book signing and groaned. I’d promised him I’d go. Although it was pointless, he hardly ever spoke to me at these things. But Dad enjoyed seeing “a familiar face.”

  Dad had probably asked my older sister, Elinor, and she hadn’t been able to sneak away from work. Elinor and I had been named after two of Jane Austen’s most memorable characters—Elinor Dashwood and Fitzwilliam Darcy. We were six ye
ars apart, but it might as well be sixty. We had a big nothing in common.

  She’d always be his first choice. I should accept it and move on. Yet I kept trying to gain his approval, again and again, like one of the time loops my dad wrote about.

  “Whoops, I forgot. I’m going to the bookstore down the street then…for supplies.” Ian didn’t need to know the details. “We’ll have to schedule another time.”

  But our conversation was cut short by a flood of students coming in. When I glanced up ten minutes later, his eyes were locked on me.

  Ian shook his head and then rounded the desk, while I shuffled the papers in my folder for no reason.

  Hmm. Interesting.

  I couldn’t stop smiling the rest of class.

  Chapter Four

  Darcy

  Time for another confession—I hated my father’s Desert Mystic series.

  In my dad’s mind, he was the literary equivalent of Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek. While his brand of writing wasn’t my thing, plenty of people disagreed with me.

  His latest book, Ethereal Sand, freaked me out. It had a terrible cover, with a half-naked woman sprawled on a throne, legs apart, with a phallic staff in hand and heaving breasts.

  She was supposed to be a powerful sorceress, the heroine of his series. So why’d she look like a geek’s version of a Playboy centerfold? Pfft. Maybe her real power was to inspire magical masturbation.

  Then again, it was typical of the sci-fi genre. Princess Leia in the slave bikini inspired an entire generation of men. Maybe I was a hypocrite. After all, I wanted half-naked male models on my romance novel covers.

  So I stood in the back of a meeting room at the bookstore, watching as my father read a passage aloud. He was in his mid-fifties with a pudgy middle, salt-and-pepper hair, and a full beard. Alan pushed the glasses up his nose and continued reading. A crowd of men in their twenties and early thirties sat in front of him, and they hung on his every word.

  I tried not to be jealous, but it was difficult.

  We had a complicated relationship, to say the least. My father could be frustrating and a tad condescending, but he wasn’t all bad. He instilled in me a love of literature. When I was a child, and his career hadn’t taken off yet, he took me to story hour at the library and read me Dr. Seuss.

  Back then, he’d been a stellar parent. Since he worked from home, he’d been the one who got me dressed for kindergarten and braided my hair. Sure, more often than not the braids were crooked, and once I went to school with my clothes inside out, but he made an effort.

  Sometimes I wondered what happened to the kind, gentle man I used to know. Had the success gone to his head? Why’d he resent my interest in writing? There were many unanswered questions.

  What was I even doing here? I shouldn’t have come. Right now, I could be doing something useful with my time, like studying.

  “Sounds like a self-important toff, if you ask me.”

  I glanced up to see Ian standing beside me, and I jumped. Somehow, I hadn’t heard his approach.

  “Oh, uh…” Words failed me. I swallowed the lump in my throat and tried to get a grip. Seeing him unexpectedly gave me a case of butterflies. “Did you come here looking for me?”

  “I came to pick up a book or two.”

  At a place, I’d casually mentioned? Hmm, it didn’t add up.

  “You came to the book signing?” Ian cocked his head to the side. “Funny, I wouldn’t have pegged you for a sci-fi fan.”

  “Because I’m not.” I nodded to the podium. “Talin Zed’s my father.”

  Yeah, that’s my dad’s pen name. To be fair, he’d chosen it in his late twenties, so now he was stuck with the moniker. But it sounded so…uber-manly? Fake? Why not pick Cyber-Ninja Codpiece and be done with it?

  If I ever got the chance to publish, I’d choose something romantic, befitting my genre, but believable.

  “Well, blimey, I really stepped in it, huh?” He sank down into the empty chair beside me like the wind had been knocked out of him.

  I leaned over to whisper, “Maybe I agree with you.”

  He snickered. “Yet another secret about you I’ve discovered.”

  “I thought I mentioned it in passing.” I smiled.

  “You didn’t. Something tells me the oversight was deliberate.”

  “Could be.”

  “Regardless, I know where your talent comes from.”

  Funny, my dad didn’t think so. And neither did I, lingering doubts about my work plagued me.

  Last summer, I’d taken a creative writing workshop with Ian. He encouraged us to pen a series of short stories. Mine had been mini murder mysteries with romantic overtones, two cops falling in love while they solved crimes.

  “What really brings you here?” I asked.

  Didn’t most people use Amazon? If it weren’t for my dad’s publicity tours, I wouldn’t have a reason to set foot in a bookstore.

  “Call me old school, but I like to hold an actual book in my hand. I love the weight of them, the smell.”

  “You smell books?” Somehow, I had this image of him roaming the through the aisles, sniffing the pages.

  “Yes, which you can’t do on an e-reader. Today, I’m looking for a volume of famous love letters, the ones Keats wrote to Fanny. Besides, I’m craving cheesecake, and they make an excellent chocolate one here.”

  The man liked love letters and cheesecake? I felt a bit weak in the knees. Unbidden, a fantasy came to mind, the two of us spending lazy Sundays perusing bookstores, walking hand in hand.

  So it was official.My crush had gotten out of control.

  “Let’s take a quick spin through the shelves, then get a cup of tea? Maybe a dessert?”

  I glanced up at the crowd again. A long line had formed near the table where Dad was seated. My father would be occupied for a while, and I’d fulfilled my daughterly duty.

  “Sure. Why not?”

  Eventually, Ian and I found a volume containing one of Keats’ love letters to Fanny. He’d written several over the years—all of them were filled with a passion and pining I related to.

  “She married another man.” Ian ran his fingertips over the spine. “Keats had neither love nor fame in his lifetime.”

  It happened to many creative types. Their work had been discovered after they died. They never got to enjoy the fruits of their labor or accolades, which must be demoralizing.

  Yet another reason I should stay the course and not pursue a career as an author. While I had my trust fund to fall back on, I’d never be happy living on my father’s money. I wanted to do something meaningful.

  “How awful to watch the person you’re in love with marrying someone else,” he said.

  “Yes, it’s devastating to want someone you can never have.”

  His gaze lit on me, and my heart skipped a beat. Like earlier this morning, we found ourselves in a moment thick with tension.

  And I couldn’t decide if I’d lost my mind, or if there was something here.

  “Listen.” Then, in his soft British accent, Ian read the words aloud. “I cannot exist without you—I am forgetful of everything but seeing you again—my Life seems to stop there—I see no further. You have absorb’d me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving—I should be exquisitely miserable without the hope of soon seeing you.”

  Exquisitely miserable indeed. I could’ve written those words myself. When I wasn’t with Ian, I thought about him. No, I obsessed about him.

  It’d been slowly building for years, but it was coming to a crescendo. I could feel it. And it would end painfully. I could see it coming, barreling toward me like an out-of-control train, and I’m the stupid girl who stood on the tracks.

  All of this was senseless, anyway. Ian probably considered me a student, and nothing more.

  “What do you think?” Ian closed the book.

  For a moment, I stood there, with no idea how to respond. I was afraid I’d let something sli
p, tell him how much I admired him.

  “I think we need some cheesecake.” I turned my back to Ian and made a beeline for the eatery.

  We ate in uncomfortable silence. I searched for a safe topic but came up empty.

  My dessert probably tasted delicious, but I hardly noticed. It was a shame, too, since I didn’t often indulge myself. Ian seemed preoccupied too—I’d never seen him so subdued.

  “Darcy?” My father walked up to the table.

  Oh, no.

  “I wondered where you’d run off to.” Dad placed a hand on the back of my chair, and my entire body clenched, bracing for impact. He extended a hand to Ian. “Don’t believe we’ve been introduced. I’m Talin Zed. And you are…?”

  Seriously? He used his nom de plume?

  “My father’s real name is Alan James.”

  “Pleasure to meet you, Mr. James. I’m your daughter’s English professor, Dr. Sterling.” Ian politely shook hands with Dad. “Quite a crowd you’ve got here.”

  “Isn’t it?” My father beamed. “These events keep getting larger and larger.”

  I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. Modesty wasn’t a quality my father possessed.

  “Are you a fan? I’ll sign your book.” My dad retrieved a Sharpie from his pocket.

  “Actually, I came here looking for a book and ran into Darcy.”

  “Oh.” My dad’s face fell.

  Talk about awkward. I didn’t know what to say, so I kept my mouth shut and prayed this would be over soon.

  “Darcy took my creative writing class last summer. Her short stories were riveting. Now I know where she gets her talent from.”

  “Yes, well, Darcy writes romance. It’s a good hobby, I suppose.” Dad’s lips pressed into a thin line.

  A hobby? I enjoyed reading and writing about relationships instead of spaceships. Why did he consider it less prestigious?

  “How fortunate for her. Romance is half of the fiction market. The remaining genres share the rest.”

  I could’ve kissed Ian, and not only for the remark.

  Dad narrowed his eyes. Uh oh. I recognized the look. He was about to lose it.

  “Um, Dad, I’m actually about to head out—Dr. Sterling, too.” I gave him a one-armed hug. “Good seeing you. Bye!”