Romance At Random: Ruthie Knox - Ride With Me - Excerpt/Giveaway

Today I am welcoming Ruthie Knox to Fictional Candy.  She is kind enough to share an excerpt from Ride With Me with us.  Afterwards, be sure to enter the giveaway for a copy for yourself!!

*~~**~~**~~**~~*
Ride With Me

In this fun, scorching-hot eBook original romance by Ruthie Knox, a cross-country bike adventure takes a detour into unexplored passion. As readers will discover, Ride with Me is not about the bike!

When Lexie Marshall places an ad for a cycling companion, she hopes to find someone friendly and fun to cross the TransAmerica Trail with. Instead, she gets Tom Geiger — a lean, sexy loner whose bad attitude threatens to spoil the adventure she’s spent years planning.

Roped into the cycling equivalent of a blind date by his sister, Tom doesn’t want to ride with a chatty, go-by-the-map kind of woman, and he certainly doesn’t want to want her. Too bad the sight of Lexie with a bike between her thighs really turns his crank.

Even Tom’s stubborn determination to keep Lexie at a distance can’t stop a kiss from leading to endless nights of hotter-than-hot sex. But when the wild ride ends, where will they go next?

*~~**~~**~~**~~*

Setup: 

Tom and Lexie are in their shared tent, and at Tom’s request, Lexie’s telling Tom about her ex-boyfriends. She’s just mentioned a particularly unpleasant relationship.

Tom put his arm around her and pulled her back against him, kissing her shoulder. “Sorry. You don’t have to talk about this.”

Lexie shrugged. “It’s okay now. I mean, he’s not on the Christmas card list either, but he didn’t do any permanent damage. I took a year off from relationships before I let my friends set me up on a few blind dates, but lately I’ve pretty much given up on that, too. It just doesn’t seem worth the effort anymore. I want to ride, you know? I want to go places and do things. Most of the guys I meet, their idea of an adventure is a cruise in the Caribbean. Which is fine if that’s your thing, but . . . ”

She looked up through the screen in the ceiling of the tent. The sky was deep blue-purple, and thunder was rumbling somewhere nearby, but the air remained still. Lying here naked beside Tom, watching the weather arrive, it was hard to remember Portland or to formulate an acceptable explanation for why she wasn’t married and living an entirely different life. She wasn’t doing that because she’d wanted to be here, doing this. She’d wanted Tom before she’d even met him.

But wanting was wanting—you had to balance it against reality. In reality, the painful end of whatever this was between them was coming at her just as surely as the rain and lightning were on their way. She and Tom were in the calm before the storm. The only thing she could do was enjoy it while it lasted.

So she shrugged, sloughing off the gloomy turn their conversation had taken with one gesture. “I stopped looking for Prince Charming and bought a vibrator.”

Tom perked up at the word “vibrator,” making her smile. What was it with guys and sex toys? “Don’t get too excited. I didn’t bring it along.”

“Why not?” he asked, his eyes sparkling with amusement.

“Too much weight,” she deadpanned. “Dick is huge.”

“You call your vibrator ‘Dick’?”

“It seemed appropriate.”

Tom opened his mouth as if to say something, then closed it again, shaking his head.

“What?”

“I can’t decide whether to be turned on or jealous,” he said ruefully.

This made her laugh again. “You didn’t mind hearing about my ex-boyfriends, but you’re jealous of my vibrator? You’re a weird one.”

“Your ex-boyfriends all sound like jerks. And I did mind hearing about them. The last one, anyway. But why be jealous when they’re out of the picture? This Dick fellow, on the other hand—I don’t like the way you light up when you talk about him.”

*~~**~~**~~**~~*

Ruthie Knox figured out how to walk and read at the same time in the second grade, and she hasn’t looked up since. She spent her formative years hiding romance novels in her bedroom closet to avoid the merciless teasing of her brothers and imagining scenarios in which someone who looked remarkably like Daniel Day Lewis recognized her well-hidden sex appeal and rescued her from middle-class Midwestern obscurity. After graduating from Grinnell College with an English and history double major, she earned a Ph.D. in modern British history that she’s put to remarkably little use.

These days, she writes contemporary romance in which witty, down-to- earth characters find each other irresistible in their pajamas, though she freely admits this has yet to happen to her. Perhaps she needs more exciting pajamas. Ruthie abhors an epilogue and insists a decent romance requires at least three good sex scenes. 

http://www.ruthieknox.com

Giveaway is open Internationally to anyone age 16 and older.  
Winner will have 48 hours to respond to winning notification or a new winner will be chosen.  Winner will be able to pick up their book through NetGalley

a Rafflecopter giveaway