Lyric and Lingerie (The Fort Worth Wranglers Book 1) (13 page)

He sat up and looked around, alarmed by the vehemence in her voice. And the volume of it. “Don’t say that too loud. We still need to get home.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Cherry Cherry can’t hear us in here.” Still, she leaned in close to his ear. He couldn’t help but notice that she’d lowered her voice.

“You think I smell good.” That knowledge made him grin hugely as he mentally picked the canary feathers out of his teeth.

“Gloating is
so
unbecoming. Just because you’re one of the shiny, pretty people, doesn’t mean you need to rub it in to the rest of the ninety-nine percent.” Lyric rolled her eyes so far back in her head, she probably saw her first day of kindergarten.

“What the hell does that even mean?” God, he loved to see how her mind worked. “Shiny, pretty people?

“You know … the perfect people … the popular kids who always end up smelling like a rose.” She shot him a
come on, you have to know what I’m talking about
look. “You could fall in a swimming pool full of mud and come out looking charmingly disheveled, while I’d come out looking like that chubby kid who fell in Willy Wonka’s chocolate river.”

“That’s the craziest thing I ever heard. I get dirty.” At that moment, feeling the heat of her body against his as he looked into her big blue eyes, he wanted to show her just how dirty he could be.

“Not the embarrassingly sloppy kind of dirty.” She shook her head. “You get sweaty. Maybe you even get muddy. But you’re never actually a mess. That’s why you smell like sandalwood and expensive shower gel, while I smell like pot and pleather. There are two kinds of people in the world—the cool kids and the rest of us.”

“That is so not true.” He watched her, looking for signs that she was joking. But she was dead serious. He knew there were more than two kinds of people in the world, because Lyric was in a league all her own. “You’re the coolest person I know.”

He really hadn’t meant for his voice to go up so that it kinda sounded like a question, but he had all kinds of thoughts and feelings bombarding him right now. Thoughts and feelings that had very little to do with friendship or football or anything but how much he cared about Lyric.

She didn’t know that though, and as she unlinked her fingers from his, he knew he’d made a tactical error. “Thanks, but I know exactly who I am and where I fit in. And I’m okay with it.”

It didn’t sound like she was okay with it.

“I’m okay with it …” She uncrossed her legs and then crossed them again. Her stripper high-heeled leopard shoes really showcased her fantastic legs. Her left foot wiggled a mile a minute as she sucked in her bottom lip. “Most of the time.”

He had a feeling that something else was going on here. This wasn’t about being popular.

“You never did tell me why you are wearing those.” He pointed to the shoes.

If memory served, Lyric was more of a jeans and Converse kinda girl.

“Cocktail party from hell.” She smoothed a wrinkle out of her boxers. “My ex was there with his new fiancée.” She wouldn’t make eye contact. “I thought wearing a little black dress would make him think twice about his new life with Mistress Kailana.”

She didn’t sound sad as much as she sounded broken, like her confidence had been torn to shreds just like her little black dress. “Who’s Mistress Kailana?”

“Rob’s fiancée. He’s known her all of two months.” She pulled at a loose string on the hem of the boxers. “She’s an astrologist.” The last sentence sounded a lot like “she’s a crack whore.”

“How long were the two of you together?” He really didn’t want to know. This man had hurt Lyric, which meant he was an asshole. Lyric didn’t deserve an asshole. She deserved someone who understood her quirky sense of humor and her need to spout facts as a means of self-soothing. Not to mention someone who thought her double Ds and mile-long legs were the sexiest things he’d ever seen.

“A little over two years.” She slipped her feet out of her high heels and massaged her right pinky toe. “Why do cute shoes always have to hurt?”

“It’s a mystery. But after the day you’ve had, you deserve a foot massage.” Gently, he picked up both of her bare feet and settled them onto his lap. He started with the arch of her left foot and worked his way from her heel to her toes and then back down again. Little by little, inch by inch, he felt her body relax. And since he’d spent his life knowing when to hold onto the ball and when to pass it, he asked, “Want to tell me about Rob?”

He needed to know if she’d ever loved him. Or worse, if she still did. Had that little astrology-loving creep broken her heart?

All of the tension in her body had migrated over to his. He didn’t know Rob, but he wanted to kick the little weasel’s ass, then use him as a hood ornament in the closest demolition derby before kicking his ass again.

“He has PhDs in both astronomy and astrophysics. We met at work.” Lyric leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. “You are really good at that.”

It took every ounce of self-control he had not to growl. So lover boy was smart. Heath really couldn’t compete with smart. He was no dummy, but he was no Lyric. Not by a long shot.

He gritted his teeth as he pictured Lyric bouncing on top of some Coke-bottle-glasses-wearing, no-muscle-tone-having, elbow-patch-jacket-wearing professor type. Of course that was who she’d go for. Of course that was who she’d want. Not a washed-up quarterback without a future whose idea of higher math was balancing his very big checkbook.

He moved to her right foot.

What would it take for her to look twice at him?

He wasn’t an idiot. Christ, he had an MBA from LSU, but he wasn’t Lyric smart or goddamn Rob smart. Fuck it, he could run circles around Rob. He was willing to bet ole Robby-boy didn’t know a trap drill from a fire drill.

“Ouch.” Lyric flinched. “That’s too hard.”

“Sorry.” He eased up, told himself to cool off.

Lyric sucked on her bottom lip again. He knew it was her thoughtful pose, and he’d seen her do it a thousand times through the years. Why the hell hadn’t he ever noticed how sexy it was when they were in high school? He’d been an idiot, obviously. Because right now, there were few things in life he wanted more than to suck on her full bottom lip for a while.

She did it again, and he nearly groaned. Make that one thing. Only one thing he wanted more than to suck on Lyric. And when her tongue darted out to lick that lip, he knew kissing her was running a
very
close second.

“I think I always knew he was a jerk,” she finally said. It might have been the only thing she could have said that would get his attention away from that sinful, luscious mouth of hers. He would pay good money to watch her eat a popsicle or a lollipop … or, well … he could think of several things he’d love to watch her suck on.

“Yeah? So why’d you date him?” Not that he hadn’t dated some women who were less than Lyric quality simply because they had some very obvious … uh … charms, but somehow he’d expected better of her. But when she shot him a look, brows lifted, he wondered if maybe he was wrong. “So, uh, Rob the Knob had a very big … knob, huh?”

He choked a little saying it. Not because he was squeamish about the size of another man’s dick. He was secure enough in his own that he didn’t have any need to overcompensate. But he sure as hell didn’t like the idea of Rob’s knob being anywhere near Lyric’s luscious mouth—or any other part of her, for that matter.

“Oh, God no.” She rolled her eyes. With a frown curling on her mouth, she was all sexy teacher. He’d be lying if he said he didn’t feel his own knob stir after that. Which … there had to be some special place in hell for men who got hard-ons over a woman while sitting at the bedside of her comatose father. Could coma victims read minds? He’d read that they could hear everything going on around them, but since her father was straddling that line between death and life—was he having an out-of-body experience? Heath looked around. Was Bowman watching them right now?

If Bowman could read minds, he’d probably rise up out of bed and strangle Heath with his IV line. He sent Bowman happy, mellow thoughts that had nothing to do with getting his baby girl naked on the floor right now.

Was it his imagination or had Bowman’s hand moved?

“Not that it matters,” she continued, lowering her voice to a whisper as she glanced at her sleeping daddy. “There are a lot more important things than the size of a guy’s penis.”

“Jesus, Lyric. Are you really going to say the word—” he dropped his voice to a whisper, “—penis, with your daddy lying there?”

She thought about it. “I’m pretty sure my daddy knows I’ve seen a penis before.”

“Yeah, well, that doesn’t mean you need to rub his nose in it. Some things fathers don’t need to hear about.” Or best friends for that matter. He knew he was the one who’d brought this whole nightmare-inducing topic up for discussion, but that didn’t mean he wanted to think about Lyric touching anyone’s penis but his. Not Rob’s and not any other guy’s either. Lyric was hi—

He cut the thought off before it could fully form. If he was going to hell for getting a hard-on in her daddy’s sickroom, he sure as shit was going to a deeper level of hell for thinking about tossing those million-dollar legs of hers over his shoulders and sliding deep inside of her.

His phone buzzed again. He had every intention of ignoring it like he had every other message that had come his way in recent days. Ignorance really was bliss, after all. At least when it came to busted-up knees and broken-down spirits.

Lyric obviously didn’t feel the same way—or maybe she just hadn’t gotten the memo that he wanted to wallow in his own self-pity a little longer. Either way, she reached into the pocket where he’d shoved his phone and pulled it out. He tried not to concentrate on the fact that she’d very nearly found a lot more than a phone in that pocket, but it was hard to think about his dick when he knew Lyric was reading a message about his knee.

Some people might say he was being paranoid, but he could tell that was what the text was about. Her whole face had turned soft and sympathetic, and he hated it. No, hate wasn’t strong enough. He fucking detested it. Lyric in full-on problem-solving mode, trying to help him figure out what to do with his life, was one thing. Lyric looking at him like she wanted to give him a hug and a pat on the head was something else entirely. And he wasn’t fucking having it.

Pushing her feet off his lap, he snatched his phone out of her hands and then stood before she could do anything more than gape at him with that mouth he was absolutely, positively refusing to think about anymore.

“I’ve got to go,” he told her, shoving the phone back into his pocket. Only, much deeper this time. Then he shoved his hand in his pocket as a kind of barrier—he didn’t trust Lyric not to go diving back in for the phone and end up with a handful of him instead. Not that he didn’t twitch at the idea, but now wasn’t the time or the place.

“Go?” she asked. “Where?”

“I have a thing,” he said. “Sit down. Reporter. Interview. Now.” When he could finally stop babbling, he made a point of looking at his watch.

“In San Angelo?” She sounded like he’d just told her that he, too, had fallen for a hula-dancing astrologer. “You didn’t even know you were going to be here before you bought Cherry Cherry at the Austin airport.”

“Yeah, well, I have a very efficient agent. Most of the time, he knows what I’m going to do before I do. I think he’s psychic.” Heath knew how to throw her off the scent. “He’s into astrology.”

“Isn’t everyone?” Her top lip curled, and then her face softened and her eyes turned sharp. “Is he descended from gypsies? I’m not usually one to buy the whole psychic world, but I hear Romany gypsies have insight that can’t be explained. I’ve done some reading on the idea of a cosmic consciousness and how some people are more tapped into it than others. It’s said that the gypsies are descended from the most ancient people on earth. Lucy,you know, the
Australopithecus
skeleton that’s 3.2 million years old, has more DNA markers in common with Romanichal gypsies than any other ethnicity. I always wanted to meet a gypsy and see if they really can tap into the cosmic consciousness. Not like Mistress Kailana, who was about as Romany as I am.”

Heath pictured Josh Leland, his agent, who was blond-haired, green-eyed, and six foot two. He needed to make sure the two never met, or Lyric was sure to ask him for a cheek swab to see how much Australopi-whatever DNA he had. “I don’t know who Josh is descended from, but I’ll be sure to ask him next time we talk. Inquiring minds and all that …”

She looked like she had more questions, but he took off at as close to a run as his injured knee would let him. He loved Lyric’s inquisitive mind, loved everything about her, really, but he was two very small steps from losing his shit, and the last thing he wanted was for her to witness it. Bad enough he’d already lost football. No way was he losing what small bit of pride he had left.

No, he had to get out of here, and fast. He needed to get as far from the hospital, and from Lyric, with her bizarre and pornographic plans for his future, as he possibly could. Because the longer he stayed here, the longer she looked at him with that halfway-pitying gaze, the harder it was for him to ignore the new texts from his agent and the Wranglers’ owner and general manager. The harder it was for him to pretend that, somehow, some way, he was going to be okay.

It took every ounce of willpower he had not to make a mad dash for the exit. It was still close, freedom beckoning to him just beyond the clear glass sliding doors. But he had one thing to do first, just to make sure Lyric had everything she needed for the night.

For long seconds after Heath left, all Lyric could do was stare after him as he all but ran out the door. She didn’t know what was wrong with him, didn’t know what she’d done to have him running like the hounds of hell were after him, but obviously she’d done something.

Not that that was exactly a surprise. Men had been running from her since she’d learned how to talk, much to her mother’s disappointment. When she’d grown breasts, boys started paying attention to her, but as soon as she opened her mouth, they moved on over to Camp Harmony. Her sister had never repelled people the way Lyric did. She discreetly checked her breath. It smelled okay, but maybe she was noseblind to her own case of chronic halitosis.