She Rode Behind My Husband

Everyone in town knew before she did.

Nell Trask had ridden behind her husband for sixteen years. Forty-one miles up Route 9, hands flat on his ribs, the President's wife, the best mechanic in four counties.

Then a stranger's phone at a swap meet showed her a photograph.

Her husband's bike. Another woman on the back. Her hands in the wrong place.

And nine men standing in a circle, all of them looking at the grass.

Because they knew. Fifteen adults in that county knew her marriage was over, and every one of them decided, every day, for six months, that she didn't need telling. Not out of cruelty. Because the club has a code, and the code says you don't take it out the door.

Nell knows that code better than anyone alive.

She spent sixteen years enforcing it on other women.

Now she has to decide what she's owed — and what she owes.

There's no villain here. Just a good man who never once chose it. A widow who can name the exact hour she did. A club that carried eighteen hundred people in sixty-four years and asked six of them for anything. And one woman who is going to walk into a room no woman has entered since 1973, and put fifty-one words on the table, and make sixteen men vote.

She loses the vote.

She loses the house, the seat, the name on the garage wall, and most of a county.

And a year after the divorce is final, a man from the state pulls up at her new shop with a wrecked motorcycle in a crate he built himself. He doesn't know who she was. He doesn't ride and never will. He notices she has no radio, and says so, and doesn't make it mean anything.

He is the first person in two years who doesn't have a face he makes at her.

She built four hundred motorcycles for other people and never once built one for herself.

That's about to change.

A slow-burn, closed-door love story about the seat behind a man, the woman who finally took the front one, and the day she found out that driving and being carried were the same skill all along.

One-click if you love: biker romance with real stakes; betrayed wife gets her life back; found family and small-town codes; slow burn over forty; a hero who waits; second chance at everything