He wasn't merely a big man; he was huge. Shoulders like an eight-lane highway, enormous hands in black fingerless gloves, muscular legs that went on for miles. As he sat upright in the saddle of the big pearl-white Harley, his feet planted flat on the ground, his knees bent at enough of an angle that his thighs pushed up the folded flaps of the coat. How tall was he? He cut his engine and left the keys in the ignition, then flipped down the kick stand and dismounted with a deliberate swing of one of those endless legs.

I realized my heart was beating like a sledgehammer; I swallowed hard with a dry throat and nudged the revolver with my foot. A trickle of sweat ran down my cheek because the car was hotter than hell inside after sitting in the sun all afternoon, and I wiped it away. If I was going to get the gun out again I had better do it now, because the rider had tucked his sunglasses into his coat and was walking towards my car, his boots crunching on the gravel. He stood well over six feet—no, he stood well over six and a half feet, close to seven feet tall, and the long leather coat lent him the air of a caped highwayman, the flaps swinging with his lengthy strides.

I wondered if I should open the door at all—I tried to remember articles I had read on what women should do if they had car trouble. What kind of man was he: honorable or otherwise? Could I even tell from his outward appearance? His face was large-featured and fair-skinned, marked with a reddish goatee and mustache a little darker than his collarbone-length hair, the edges of which glowed flame-colored against the sunset sky. Something about that face frightened me aside from its owner's size, though its expression wasn't overtly cruel or degenerate. It was set and grim and…indifferent. Indifferent to what? I couldn't quantify that face, and I had little time to think it over. The rider had reached my car.

He tapped my hood with the fingers of one hand and glanced at the engine badging and the ruined tire, then came around to the driver's window and put a hand on the roof. He had to bend a long way down to look through the window at me, nearly squatting on his haunches, and I met his eyes.

Narrow and penetrating under light brows, they looked strangely acid green, but that was probably a trick of the fading light, I thought. Their gaze held mine through the glass for a long moment, then moved over the interior of the car and my body, the rider finally meeting my eyes again as I examined him. He might have been in his late thirties, about eight or nine years older than I. An open denim shirt showed the upper contours of his pectorals and he wore a gold chain around his neck. His face was either too heavy-boned and Irish slope-nosed for beauty, or its virile irregularities fell together into a strangely compelling mix—I couldn't decide on that aspect of it either. It wasn't a clean-cut face, or a simple face. The mind and personality and experiences behind it had been shaping and battering it for a lifetime. The rider raised his brows slightly as if to inquire whether I was planning to roll the window down any time soon, and I flushed and rolled it down.

The outside air was growing chilly and somewhat damp, moving the evening's scent past my face; I caught road dust and engine smell and something even warmer from the rider's body: sharp saltiness with a musky undertone. It was like worn leather or dried meat, something neither alive nor dead: in arrested decay. All the muscles of my thighs and pelvis tensed for a moment. I'd always noticed that if you liked a man's smell, the rest might not matter much. He could be a pipsqueak or a gun control advocate and still he could do just fine in bed if you liked his smell. And the rider wasn't a pipsqueak by a long, long shot.

"Evenin'," he said.

"Uh…hello," I replied.

"You've been sitting here a long time, girl."

My eyebrows went up—how did he know? "Your engine's cold," he said by way of explanation. Looking at me very carefully, he took a deep breath through his nose; I had the impression he was evaluating my scent the same way I had his.

"Oh. I got a flat about two this afternoon. See that lumber there, with the nails? I almost ran off the road and I'm not sure how I—" The rider silently asked a question again and I said, "There's no spare and I don't know this road, so I thought it was better to stay in the car. I might have tried to walk out if I'd realized how little traffic there is along here. You're the first person I've seen since I..."

Again my muscles tensed, the flutter in my stomach probably visible through my jeans, because admitting how alone I was seemed dangerous. I wished I had put the gun in my pocket, though a dinky .32 might not have made much impression on a near-seven-foot monster like the rider unless I hit dead center. I knew how to use a gun, of course, but I wasn't a hand-to-hand fighter, and even if I had been, my potential opponent's size advantage alone would have defeated me before I ever got started. A gun was an equalizer, the only one available to a small woman like me.

"Blew a tire on the curve and almost ran off the road." His voice was low and measured with a strong taste of Texas in it. I saw his brows crease and his tongue ruminatively push out his cheek, and he looked up and down the road and at the skid marks and the car and me as if he were visualizing what had happened. Glancing at the four white crosses, he seemed to come to a conclusion and nodded slightly to himself.

"Yes, that's what I said. So I guess that I've—"

"Been waiting just for me?" he said, straightening up without even the ghost of a smile. "Come on, get out."

"W-what?"

"Get out of the car, girl." He tapped on the roof with a note of mild impatience. "Fancy set of wheels, but it's not going anywhere right now. I'll take you where you need to be." Pointing his chin at his bike, he looked down at me. I didn't move. How could I put myself into the hands of a man like him, a formidable stranger whose trustworthiness was entirely unknown? He smiled slightly, the first time he had done so. The expression improved his looks considerably—all the angles of his face realigned, and my heart jumped. "Now, this is assuming you don't want to sit here until someone else happens to come this way, tomorrow or the next day. I could be wrong." When I didn't immediately reply he shrugged slightly and turned, heading back to his bike.

I made a quick decision and scooped up the .32 from under the mat, inserting it into my purse out of his line of sight, then unlocked the door and rolled the window up again before getting out. I turned off the headlights and put on my jacket. The rider had already started his Harley and rode it slowly up to the side of the BMW as if he'd known all along that I would agree. I locked the door and looked around.

The rider's eyes were directed at my rear end, but again I had the impression of indifference. "'Least you're dressed all right for a bike. Get on." I slung my purse over my shoulder and pulled it around to my back to avoid banging the gun against him and betraying its presence, then stood up against the bike and put a tentative hand on the saddle. The rider looked around at me. "You ever ridden before?"

I blushed a little; I knew I didn't look much like a biker babe, though I wore designer jeans and an expensive leather jacket. "Uh, yes. A while ago. With a helmet."

"Sorry; don't have one." He cocked a brow at me. "You could just say a prayer and trust that I'm the one to keep you safe."

I didn't feel the least bit safe with him, not in any respect, but I didn't have a lot of choice, so I put a foot up on a piece of chrome and struggled to mount the high back of the saddle; I was only five foot four in three-inch heels and obviously this bike hadn't been chopped low, not with a rider nearly seven feet tall. He turned and picked me up, lifting me effortlessly into place and flipping out the passenger foot pegs. I gasped a little, both in awe at his strength and in disturbance at his touch. Those hands were so large they completely spanned my admittedly small waist.

"Hang on," he said, pivoted the bike and took off in the direction from which he had come.

I grabbed him around the waist and hung on as he told me. Into the reddening sunset he rode, his hair whipping in the wind far over my head and the leather coat bellying like a spinnaker. "Where were you trying to go, girl?" he asked over his shoulder, raising his voice to be heard above the roar of the bike.

"My Papa's house. I was supposed to be there by four, so I'm hours late. He's probably tracking me with bloodhounds by now."

He grunted, which I felt more than heard, as I was pressed against his back and embracing his body with both arms. "Yeah? Where?"

"He lives more than a hundred and fifty miles southwest of here, so I'm not asking you to give me a ride there. All I need is to get to a phone." This sounded ungrateful. "Um, thank you."

The rider grunted again. "No, you don't need to get to a phone; you need to get to someplace to spend the night. No one's sending a tow all the way out here until morning, girl."

At the age of thirty, I thought I had outgrown being called 'girl', no matter how small I was. "My name's Irene." It wasn't, but I felt the need to introduce myself although he hadn't asked me to. I wanted to know his name in any case, though I wasn't willing to tell him mine for a number of reasons. "What's yours?"

"You can call me Deadman," he said after a moment's consideration. He pronounced it like two words run together, not like a surname. I laughed a little; a name like that must be a biker handle. He seemed to feel the laugh the way I had felt his grunt. "No, it's not my given name. But that isn't yours either."

"Huh? How did you know?" I felt my hands tense around him.

"I knew."

"Oh." This was not a guy who let anyone put anything over on him, obviously, not even minor details of fact. "Well, 'Irene' is going to have to do."

"Suit yourself," he said. We rode in silence for a while, the sun's glow disappearing entirely over the rim of the world, though we chased it at high speed. The night was entirely dark but for the beam of the Harley's headlight on the road ahead and a dim glow from the stars that outlined the crest of the hills. I had dreaded spending the night alone in the dark; alone in the dark with an enormous biker named Deadman wasn't less frightening, though so far he had at least been charitable.

"Um…" I ventured.

"Yeah?"

"Where are we going?"

"Place I know."

"A motel? Someplace with a restaurant?"

"No," he briefly replied.

"I…I'm really thirsty. And I haven't had anything to eat today, except a candy bar."

He grunted as if surprised. "Hungry?"

"Yes. I was sitting there a long time!" Why would it seem strange that I was hungry and thirsty?

For a moment Deadman twisted to look over his shoulder, though it was so dark I doubted he could see my face. He turned back again to keep his eyes on the road. "I'll be damned," he said softly. His body shifted in my arms as if he were testing their grip. "Say, girl. When you blew your tire…you remember getting, uh, hurt?"

"Huh? No." Hadn't he seen I wasn't injured? Did he think I'd hit my head? "I stopped before I hit the ditch. I'm fine. Aside from being thirsty."

"I'll be damned," he said again.

"What's the matter?" He shook his head slowly without saying a word. "If we're going a long way, I'd appreciate it if you could stop somewhere and let me get something to—"

"Right saddlebag," he said with a shrug. I looked down at it hanging behind my thigh. "Don't go spilling everything out."

"I won't." I leaned over, holding him with my left arm, and unbuckled the flap. Inside I felt a few cans of beer, warm, and something that felt like a package of beef jerky. I reached a little farther and my fingers encountered something cooler, something that shifted and clanked: a length of heavy chain. I didn't care to probe further into the belongings of a man who carried around a length of chain, so I retreated and pulled out a can of beer. I didn't much like beer, especially not when it was warm, but I was so thirsty it didn't matter. I would have drunk out of an oily mud puddle in the road right then.

I put the can down on the saddle in front of me, between my legs where it wouldn't fall and buckled the saddlebag again, trying to figure out how to open the beer. Only one hand was free, and I didn't want to let go of the rider to pop the top of the can—the bike was going at least eighty miles an hour and I didn't feel secure.

Before I could say a word, Deadman reached back and took the can from between my legs. His knuckles brushed the inside of my left thigh; my sharp intake of breath might have been audible to him, and my breasts pressing into his back with the sudden expansion of my chest certainly was noticeable. Steering with his elbows for a moment, the rider opened the can and handed it back to me. "Th-thanks." I gulped the warm, bitter beer and felt the thirst ease a little. At least it was wet. "How much farther is it?"

"Not too far." We topped a rise and I saw lights down in the hollow; a small cluster of buildings by the road. We had come about twenty-five miles from where my car had broken down, so I was glad I hadn't tried to walk it. My boots had three-inch heels and I wasn't much of a hiker in any case. One of the buildings was a gas station, one was a bar, one was a garage. Several houses sat back from the road with lighted windows here and there; a few scraggly trees grew at the side of the gas station, silhouetted against the lights.

It took a few minutes to reach the bottom, and my spirits rose higher on the way. Civilization it wasn't, but it was lights and other people and food and drink. I needed food—one beer on an empty stomach may not sound like much, but when you barely weigh a hundred and five soaking wet it can go to your head fast. I felt a little dizzy. The rider pulled into the bar's parking lot; both the gas station and the garage were dark. When we rolled into the lighted area, he stopped the bike, turned and took my chin in one hand, tilting my face to the glare. My eyes went wide and I trembled; he looked at me again very carefully, brows down low with a speculative frown moving over his face.

"What?" I said faintly, head spinning.

The rider had a rueful grin. "Damn, you didn't run off the road after all."