Page 1 of Come Ride With Me
Chapter 1
Mica
She needed some mood music.
Mica dug into one of the three duffel bags she’d tossed into a corner of the small bedroom on the second floor and pulled out a case full of CDs. Of course, she might be one of the few people left who, one, still owned a portable radio/CD player and two, liked to pop in a CD and listen to her favorite tunes, versus having a playlist set on her phone. She didn’t care, Mica loved her old-fashioned ways, in some respects. And besides that, there were so many artists and/or companies removing their older music from streaming services that having her collection was a saving grace.
Closing the top of the CD player on the dresser she waited until the familiar strands began and when they did, she started to dance. Aretha Franklin’sRespectblared through the room and probably down the stairs and throughout the first floor of the huge colonial brick house she’d inherited, along with the garage in the backyard and all the land surrounding it. She also now owned a motorcycle dealership, which she had no clue what she was going to do with. All courtesy of the father she’d just met two years ago. The man who had died before she’d been able to make it back to the States to get to know him better.
That was the sad part.
It was also the part of this situation that Mica was doing pretty good at keeping a distance away so that she could deal with everything else. Today was the first day.
…of the rest of her life. That’s what Pam would have said.
Pamela Edmunds, Mica’s best friend for the past five years, had stayed in Paris where she was now working on her master’s degree in Global Communications. Mica and Pam were roommates freshman year at The American University of Paris and continued to live together the following year in an apartment that Mica’s mother, Cecile, helped finance. Cecile was born in France and lived there until she was sixteen and her mother met an American movie producer, who moved his new wife and stepdaughter to L.A. Cecile’s teenage hobby of photography quickly led to a renowned career when her first internship after graduating high school, led her around the world. Ten years later, Cecile became pregnant and moved to Paris to settle down.
The original plan for Mica, once Cecile decided to move back to L.A. to be closer to her ailing mother, was for Mica to study International Finance and then travel the world until she found the place that best suited her to settle down. Cecile was adamant about a person having their perfect space and doing exactly what their heart desired.
“It’s the only way to ever truly be happy,” Cecile said on more occasions than Mica wanted to recall.
Now, at twenty-five years old, Mica wondered if her mother’s happiness had come at a higher price than Mica would’ve wanted to pay. Cecile never told Mica who her father was. If not for the postcard from a place called Destine, Virginia and a man’s tender words of acknowledgement, two years ago, Mica would have never known a thing about Bellamy Anderson.
Today, she stood in the house that was still in his name, about to drive one of the cars that he’d purchased, to travel to a motorcycle shop that he’d loved with his last breath.
Even Aretha’s liberating lyrics couldn’t take the weight of that knowledge away.
Still, Mica danced around the room—even if she were moving to her own rhythm, as Pam would undoubtedly say. Mica wiggled her hips as the black slacks slid easily up her slender legs. Her blouse was ivory and sheer, so before putting that on, she found a camisole that wasn’t too wrinkled and pulled that over her head. When the blouse was buttoned and tucked neatly into her pants, she added a belt and then stood in front of the floor-length mirror. Still moving as if she really believed dancing were her true calling instead of crunching numbers, Mica surveyed the outfit. It was professional…no, wait, it wasn’t. She reached across the bed and grabbed the black jacket she’d remembered to take out of her suitcase last night and hung in the bathroom with the hope that the wrinkles would fall out by morning.
Surely there had to be an iron somewhere in this house, but she hadn’t found the time to look for it in the two days she’d been here. It didn’t matter anyway; her goal wasn’t to be pretty and perky—that was much more of Pam’s style. Mica was the quiet one, the smart and inquisitive one and she was fine with that because it freed her from all the pretenses and other nonsensical things that she thought women went through to impress, not just men, but other women as well. Mica wasn’t into impressing anyone, or at least she hadn’t been before.
Today was different. It was the first day in a new life that she was committed to succeeding in, no matter what.
“You cannot go in there with your tortoiseshell glasses, even if they are Burberry, and slick business suits, expecting those bike guys to respect you as their new boss,” Pam had told her just a week ago as she’d packed her suitcase.
“Why should how I look matter? I own the company now, that’s the bottom line. They can either like it or leave it,” Mica replied, still not thinking too much on the subject.
Pam shook her head and long raven black, bone straight weave moved with the motion. Her friend had paid almost four hundred dollars for the hair, which had originally blown Mica’s mind. But it was gorgeous and made Pam look more like a five foot, eleven-inch mocha skinned goddess than she did normally. Mica had immediately run her fingers through her own shoulder length hair that tended to frizz when it rained, curl when it was wet, and look otherwise bland if she didn’t stand in the mirror with a flat iron each morning—something she rarely did.
“It matters because men are basic and how they decide to treat you from the first moment they meet you is based on your looks.” Pam said this in the way that she said everything about men, dating and relationships, as if she were one of those single TikTok gurus with all the expertise.
“I don’t need them to like how I look,” was Mica’s comeback. “I simply need them to tell me how a thriving motorcycle sales and maintenance shop is now swimming in debt and almost nearing a bankruptcy declaration.”
Since the terms of her father’s will had been revealed, Mica had read every financial statement from the start of Bellamy Motors twenty years ago, up until last month. She knew their steady sales customers had names like Night Hawks, Classy Cougars and Platinum Ryders and that their best sellers were the Suzuki and Yamaha sports bikes, with BMWs and Ducatis rising in the last six years. She also knew that in the last three years, the dealership had begun losing more money than they earned and that most of the repairs were now being taken care of by a third-party shop, which, in actuality, translated to another liability for Bellamy Motors.
“They’re not going to tell an outsider anything,” Pam told her frankly. “Especially not an outsider that’s just inherited a business she knows nothing about. They’re going to either feel intimidated by your new title or insulted that your father chose to leave the business to an inexperienced daughter he barely knew, instead of one of them that’s been there for years.”
Pam was right. Mica decided that when she was on the plane. Nobody at Bellamy Motors was going to welcome her with open arms, so she had to come up with another plan. Grabbing her crossbody purse, she slipped it over her shoulders and headed out of the bedroom.
The stairs creaked as she stepped on each one, her hand trailing down the thick glossy banister. The front door was a few feet away from the bottom of the stairs. To her left was a mudroom, while to her right was the huge living room with a television big enough to serve as a movie screen for at least half the neighborhood. She grabbed the briefcase she’d just bought yesterday and filled with all the papers about the company and headed out the door to her first day of work.
Nash
One of the buttons to her blouse was undone giving Nash a clear view of the black bra that snapped between two palm-sized breasts. He swallowed hard and forced himself to look away, or at least to act like he was looking away.
Her face was angular, high cheekbones, glasses with frames that were way too big and lips just thick enough to make his dick jump with anticipation. She’d pulled her brown hair back from her face and she wore a black pant suit that fit her well but hid too much. He wanted to see more. Now.
He frowned because he was acting like a teenage idiot.
