Thirty minutes later, after a lesson and brief training about things like jumping and tacking—which supposedly was the art of slowing down by steering into the wind—Piper was in her own trike and doing a great job of pretending not to be terrified. Then she was flying along the beach while seated only a few inches off the ground, the wind in her face, whipping her ponytail, and she felt like she was going faster than she’d ever gone in anything ever before. Up and over the sand hills she went, no longer bothering to hide her whoops of sheer adrenaline-rush joy every time she got a bit of air beneath her tires.

To her left, another trike came into her view. Cam. She glanced over and found him looking hot as hell in dark sunglasses and a wicked smile.

She smiled back.

He kept pace with her for a long moment, then pulled ahead to lead her into a series of hills. There was a gust of wind and she felt the trike hurtle forward. She heard a roar from the tires on the sand and the wind around her, and found herself grinning from ear to ear at the rush.

When it was time to return to the shack, she pulled in next to Cam, who helped her out.

“Well?” he asked.

She grinned. “That was possibly the most thrilling ride of my life.”

He pulled off her helmet, the look in his eyes saying that he knew he could give her an even more thrilling ride.

She had no doubt. But she hadn’t managed to raise her siblings and give them all relatively decent lives by following a whim, sexy as that whim might be. She’d been afraid of commitment with Ryland because . . . well, she still wasn’t one hundred percent sure. But she thought it had something to do with the knowledge that committing to him would mean becoming something she wasn’t—a person capable of further dividing her heart, handing yet another chunk of it off to someone and in turn giving them power to hurt her.

But looking into Cam’s gaze, she couldn’t see him ever trying to make her into something she wasn’t. Life with him would only get better.

But they weren’t going to go there. And if that caused a little teeny, tiny spark of sadness, she shoved it aside. This wasn’t the time to dwell. She needed to live in the moment, which normally she could do only by writing a reminder in a journal. Easy enough to do, since her journal was ever present. Right now it was in her purse. “Do you have your keys to the truck?”

“Yeah. What do you need? I’ll get it for you.”