Page 7 of Nitro
She was skittish as hell, especially around men. I’d clocked it the second day—flinches she thought she hid and the way her body went rigid if someone got too close, too fast. Instead of making me back off, it just made me focus harder on her.
Hell, I’d even skipped a club barbecue at Axle’s new house just to keep watch over her while she worked. Which Kane had given me shit over when I called to let him know I wasn’t going to make it.
Jana didn’t trust men in general. Fine. I preferred it that way. But she was gonna trust me.
The trouble was, she kept brushing me off. Pretending the thing between us was just smoke instead of the fire that wanted to eat the whole fucking garage.
And I was getting close to my limit. Closer than I liked.
The name they’d slapped on me when I prospected wasn’t about being reckless. It was about being volatile in all the ways that mattered. Controlled burn and precise detonation—the guy who knew exactly how much to load before something blew sky-high. But with Jana, I was one inch away from flipping the switch and lighting us both up.
I wasn’t built to chase unless there was a finish line. But Jana…she made my hands itch. With her, restraint felt like an act of violence I was doing to myself.
Which was how I ended up in the shop tonight, jaw tight, already half-pissed before I saw her.
The Pit smelled like hot oil, singed rubber, and ozone. The Florida air pressed down humid and sticky, the overhead fans doing jack shit to cut it. Fluorescents buzzed, throwing hard light across the concrete floor, glinting off chrome and the steel racks stacked with spare parts. Somewhere in the corner, a radio muttered classic rock, static fuzzing between verses. Metal ticked as a bike cooled in bay two. I cataloged torque wrenches on their pegs, tried to ignore the itch, and failed when a backup bike barked to life in the dyno room behind the glass.
The rev wasn’t abuse. Not yet. But it was harder than I liked for a motor that had just been rebuilt. The note went sharp, then sharp again. I wiped my palms on a shop rag, more to give my hands something to do than because they needed it, and crossed the floor.
And there she was.
Through the window, she straddled the backup ZX in coveralls shoved to her waist, her tank top clinging to a body I’d been seeing in my sleep. She had her hair tied into a high knot,but strands of fiery red escaped, curling damp at her temples and sticky against her neck. Freckles dusted the bridge of her nose and the bare skin of her shoulders. New ones the sun had painted there since she’d come to us.
She had one foot up on the peg, her knee cocked, her eyes fixed on the digital readout as if it owed her money. Working the throttle like she had something to prove, she pushed the machine too hard against the rollers, making the gauges tick red.
My gauges ticked red right along with them.
I popped the door open. The sounds rolled over me—engine singin’, chain humming, and the thrum of the drum. The heat hit me in the face. Jana didn’t look back.
“You tryin’ to impress me or break my dyno?” I pitched my voice mildly because I wanted the first thing she heard to be control.
“Neither,” she replied without turning, words clipped by focus and the fan’s white noise. “Just mapping the torque falloff at high load. Your notes are fine. I like my own.”
She kept the throttle pinned another two beats, eased it off in a slow, disciplined roll, and let the drum coast. The readout graphed the sweep: clean, consistent, and—if I was being fair—pretty.
But I wasn’t done being pissed. “Really? And what part of ‘backup’ screams beat the shit out of it to you?”
She straightened slowly, lifting her chin stubbornly, but still not looking directly at me. The freckles scattered across her nose caught the light, and her green eyes narrowed into a challenge. “It’s not going to do me any good if it’s sitting in the garage collecting dust, is it?”
“Does me even less good if you fry the engine before we need it,” I countered, stalking closer. My boots echoed sharply on the concrete. “You push a backup like that, you’re askin’ it to blow when someone’s depending on it.”
She planted a hand on her hip, the coveralls gaping just enough for me to see the line of her waist and the swell of her tits under that thin tank. “So what, I’m supposed to just baby it? Wrap it in a blanket and sing it lullabies?”
I stopped a foot from her, just close enough to smell the faint citrus in her shampoo under the heavier notes of grease and fuel. My blood roared. “You don’t baby it. You treat it like what it is. A weapon. You don’t use your last bullet on target practice. You save it for when you need it most. Your ‘mapping’ just shaved a week off that motor’s lifespan,” I muttered, stepping in behind her. “Rules about the backups exist for a reason.”
She killed the ignition, sat still a second with her head tipped down, as if listening for some whisper only she could hear. Then she toed the kickstand and swung a leg over, hopping to the floor with a cat’s balance. She turned and finally looked at me.
That green. It always hit first. Layers of sea glass, new leaves, and a deeper, older shade around the outer ring that made me think of forest shadows. And when she focused, they went blade sharp. Like they were now.
“The bike’s an asset,” I countered, feeling the edge creep into my voice. “Assets get respect.”
“I respect her enough to learn her tells,” she shot back, telegraphing that this wasn’t just a bike. She’d already made it personal. “If she coughs at high load, I want to hear it before she does it on a road with no runoff and a county deputy who thinks he’s John Wayne.”
“You’ll run the one assigned to you,” I snapped. “You don’t get to fall in love with the backups because they flirted nicer on the rollers.”
The corner of her mouth hitched like she couldn’t help it. “Jealous?”
I scoffed. “Of a bike?”
