Heated Leather Lover by Annabeth Leong

I'm still away. Just surprising a few friends by posting about their books. I yanked this info from All Romance Ebooks. heh:

When Tam Bouie rides into town on her motorcycle, she finds the welcoming committee of her dreams. In a bar called Issues, the beautiful femme Yasmin Miller seems to have been waiting for a butch on a steel horse to sweep her off her feet.

Yasmin has a serious fetish for women in leather and isn’t afraid to go after what she wants—until she discovers that Tam isn’t just passing through. Convinced that their town is too small for the explosive love affair that threatens to ignite, and the possible fallout if it goes sour, Yasmin drops Tam as quickly as she picked her up.

Tam, however, doesn't give up easily, and Yasmin’s resolutions to stay away from her won’t mean a thing if she can’t resist the sexy butch’s heated leather love.

A Romantica® lesbian erotic romance from Ellora’s Cave

Excerpt:

Copyright © ANNABETH LEONG, 2014
All Rights Reserved, Ellora's Cave Publishing, Inc.

Tam Bouie disliked the look of the town right away. Her bike purred down its unnaturally wide main street, and she felt exposed and stared at. The street seemed just as wide and flat as the bare blue Florida sky. Though she’d seen big old live oaks on the highway coming in, the trees on the main drag poked up too thin and skinny to provide much shade. A few people walked from one shop to another, but instead of rushing from air-conditioned building to air-conditioned building as Tam would have on a day like this back home in New England, they ambled as if pushing through water instead of air.

If she stayed here, she would never have any crowd to blend into. The heat would pour down on her one hundred percent of the time. In a town like this there couldn’t be second chances, because literally everyone would know about any failure. Tam had become an expert in starting over but that really wouldn’t work well in a place where she couldn’t change friends or start hanging out at a different club. She didn’t want to admit it but the idea terrified her.

Still, Tam had never been one to shy away from fate. If this town only provided one place to hang out she wanted to see what it was like. Tam leaned her body to the left, turning onto the side street where she’d seen the town’s main watering hole, a place called Issues. Someone had a sense of humor, but she couldn’t help reading the name as a succinct description of her situation.

She shut off the bike and dropped the kickstand with a sigh. The only thing her father had left her when he died was a dilapidated piece of property about three blocks from here. Since she’d just about bankrupted herself taking care of him at the end of his illness, it had seemed like a good idea to give up her Boston apartment and move down. In March in the Northeast, when she had to brave freezing rain practically every time she wanted to ride her bike, it had seemed like a great idea. The plan had sounded even better when she’d seen how much her landlord wanted to raise her rent for the next year’s lease.

Then she’d actually arrived in Florida, which she’d never visited because her dad didn’t like to go back. Try as she might, she couldn’t picture him walking down these empty streets, couldn’t see what role he could have had in this place.

She’d found the property he’d given her and faced a half-rotten pile of boards not quite covered by peeling paint and nesting mosquitoes, but almost completely buried by overzealous fernery. The place wasn’t wired up for air-conditioning, and a junked space heater she had to kick out of the way to open the front door suggested it didn’t have central heat either. Her dad apparently used to run a junk shop out of one half of the place and hadn’t bothered to clean it out before moving to New England with her mother.

Tam had taken a brief look around, her stomach knotting with dismay. Then she had dropped her air mattress in the middle of the dusty living room floor, along with her backpack and a bouquet of flowers she’d foolishly bought to make the place feel welcoming. She’d turned on her heel and gone back outside, where she’d unlocked the back of her U-Haul, retrieved her bike and gone out for a beer.

Issues wasn’t much to look at, but Tam knew from her experience of joints like this that the beer would still be cold and plentiful. With no glamour on offer, a place needed something strong on tap. If Tam got lucky she might even find company.

People in this town apparently got started as soon as possible. It was only early evening but already the parking lot had filled. A little knot of guys smoking by the door of the bar looked Tam up and down, then gave her brief, masculine nods. She returned one of her own, not bothering to suppress her grin of satisfaction. She enjoyed being recognized as one of the guys. It took work to go full butch, but Tam did the job well. She swaggered past them and pushed her way inside.

She meant to grab a beer, pick out a booth in a dark corner, take a seat, and drown her troubles. That plan disappeared when she met the big, dark eyes of the woman seated at the end of the bar.