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.
* * *
Chapter 11
* * *
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.
After stopping to talk to a nurse for a few seconds, Heath disappeared around the corner that led to the waiting room—and the exit. She hadn’t bought the whole he-had-an-interview thing, but she hadn’t wanted to let him know that. The man had his pride, and the fact that she knew about his knee was obviously messing with his head.
There was a part of her that still couldn’t believe Heath was never going to play pro ball again. In her head, Heath was football … and he always had been. Even in the years when she’d hated him, she had followed his career. Not obsessively or anything like that, but if a Wranglers game just happened to be on television and he just happened to be running around in those skintight pants, she might have paused to check him out. Or, you know, drool a little bit. But no one besides her ever needed to know that …
And now, now here he was back in her life, and she didn’t know what to think about that. Or what to feel about him. He’d been so kind this entire trip, had gone way out of his way—like three hundred miles out of his way—to make sure she was okay. And though her brain knew it was a bad idea to start thinking about him as anything but a friend, it wasn’t so easy for her heart to get on board with that.
Her stupid, stupid, stupid heart, which melted a little bit every time she thought about him on his knees in front of her, chewing his way through that damned duct-tape dress. Or putting her tired, abused feet on his lap and rubbing them until all she felt was a warm pleasure that tingled along her every nerve ending.
God. Leave it to her to make the situation around her father’s illness even more messed up. It would be a miracle if she didn’t give her father another heart attack while he was still comatose from his first.
Reaching out, she took her father’s hand in her own, then laid her forehead down on the edge of the bed. “You need to get better, Daddy. You need to get through that surgery tomorrow, do you hear me? Heath already broke my heart once when I was seventeen, and it looks like he’s fixin’ to do it again. Don’t you go breaking what’s left of it. Do you hear me, Daddy? You have to get better, because I don’t think my heart or any other part of me could take it if something happened to you.
“I love you, Daddy. I love you so much. And I promise, as soon as the doctor clears you after the surgery, I will make you the biggest, healthiest chocolate cake on the planet. Okay? So just get through this, do you hear me? Just get through it.”
“He’s going to be just fine, Lyric.” Her mother’s voice sliced right through the room, and Lyric turned to find her mom and sister standing in the hall, watching her. “I keep telling you that. So stop crying and show me some steel in that too-long spine of yours.”
Trust her mother to take any opportunity to swipe at her about her height. And everything else, for that matter. Then again, if she didn’t, she wouldn’t be Livinia Wright. And that would be a shame because, for all her mother’s faults, Lyric’s daddy loved her like
a quasar loves a supermassive black hole—dense, overpowering, and completely defying logical explanation.
As her mother continued to snipe at her from the door, Lyric tuned her out. Now wasn’t the time to fall into old behaviors, especially since she already felt like she’d been rode hard and put up wet. Not in the good way, unfortunately, like say if Heath had been the one doing the riding …
With that uncomfortable, and tantalizing, thought in her head, Lyric pushed to her feet and went to meet her mom and sister in the hallway. She wanted nothing more than to stay by her dad’s bed until he woke up, but she’d been in here long enough. She knew she had to share him. Besides, it wasn’t like she was going to win an argument with her mother. The woman was relentless and played dirty. Columbian drug cartels weren’t as vicious as her mother. All of her loving-advice-turned-terrorism was done with a smile and a “don’t slouch, dear,” which made no sense, because she’d always thought Lyric was too tall. Harmony was exactly the same height, and she was never too anything.
Sharing him, however, didn’t mean caving to her mother’s demands. Which was why, two hours later, when Livinia insisted she go back to the house with her sister, Lyric dug in her heels. Her mom was paler than Lyric had ever seen her and looked like a stiff breeze would blow her over.
“I’ve got this, Mom. You and Harmony have been here twenty-four hours already. Go home, get some sleep, and then you can be here in the morning to talk to Daddy before the surgery.”
“I’m fine, Lyric.” Her mother made each word sharper than the last. “You’re the one who looks like a working girl at some Fort Worth Wranglers brothel.”
Lyric didn’t take offense—partly because criticism was as close as Livinia got to showing affection, and partly because her mother was right. The TexAss boxers really did send a message all their own.
“All the more reason for you and Harmony to be the ones to go home. You can’t have me wandering the hospital looking like this. Just think what your friends will say. I’ll spend the night in here with Daddy, and you and Harm can bring me clothes when you come back in the morning.”
Livinia grimaced as she looked Lyric up and down, the expression on her face revealing just how much she hated the idea of her daughter going anywhere dressed in a man’s athletic tee and crude boxers. Harmony attempted to mimic the look—her sister knew which side her bread was buttered on—but couldn’t disguise the gleeful gleam in her eye. The one that said she was enjoying every second of their mother’s discomfort.
Or maybe it was just that she wanted a pair of TexAss boxers too … and a matching set of wrist cuffs. You never could tell with Harmony. On the outside she looked like the perfect lady, but underneath the coordinated linen separates, she was all badass ink and even more badass attitude.
Maybe Lyric should try to find her a pair of boxers that read BadAss. Then they could match.
“The sooner you get out of those clothes, the better.” Livinia looked down at Lyric’s shoes, probably because they were the only thing she approved of. “Your hair looks like it was attacked by vultures looking for two-day-old roadkill. And your—“
“I think Lyric’s right, Mom.” Harmony wrapped an arm around their mother’s shoulders and started guiding her toward the waiting-room door. “You’ve been here round the clock. Why don’t I take you home and get you some of your special tea?”
By tea, she meant three fingers of good Kentucky bourbon. If Lyric had to spend her entire adult life living in the same town as their mother, she certainly would have done her best to keep the woman nice and lubricated too.
It was funny. She’d wanted nothing more than for her mother to leave, but as soon as Livinia did—and, bless her heart, took her cutting Southern manners with her—Lyric didn’t quite know what to do with herself. Everything seemed off without her mother’s criticisms ringing in her ears. Maybe this was what victims of Stockholm syndrome felt like.
Wishing she had her phone for about the millionth time in the last few hours, she sank down into the visitor’s chair with the copy of Cosmopolitan Jeannie had managed to find for her. After skimming the table of contents, she turned to page one hundred forty-four. Just because she didn’t currently have a boyfriend didn’t mean she shouldn’t know about the thirty-one tricks to giving a good blow job. She turned to the page. Trick one had a diagram. She laid the magazine flat in her lap. With her left hand she was supposed to make the “scissors” gesture from rock, paper, scissors. With her right hand she was supposed to make the Hook ’em Horns sign, which in some Latin American countries means your wife is sleeping with someone else.
So … how did this make for a good blow job?
Thirteen tricks later, some of which she really doubted were anatomically possible, there was a soft knock on the door. She looked up to see Jeannie leading two orderlies carrying a sleep chair into the room.
“Just put it over there in the corner,” the nurse instructed. “It’ll be a tight squeeze, but it should fit.” She turned to Lyric with a grin. “It’s not the most comfortable place to sleep in the world, but it’s a lot better than that chair you’re in now.”
“Thank you so much, but you really didn’t have to do this—”
Jeannie cut her off with a wink. “It’s no problem. Just tell Heath I’ll be expecting that signed football before he heads back to Fort Worth.”
Heath. Of course. Lyric’s knees trembled a little as it registered that the reason she had a sleep chair to spend the night on was because Heath had made sure to get her one. Even running out of the hospital like his hair was on fire, even running away from news about his knee that he couldn’t deal with, he’d thought to do this. He’d thought to take care of her.
One more tie to the resentful seventeen-year-old she once was slipped away as Jeannie and the orderlies made their way back out of the room. It was getting harder and harder to stay bitter when every time she turned around, Heath was doing something to make this whole situation just a little bit easier on her.
It didn’t mean anything, she tried to tell herself as the magazine trembled in her hands. Or, more specifically, it didn’t mean what the Lyric who was once in love with Heath wanted it to mean. He was just being kind. Just taking care of her because he was a good friend. He would do this for anyone. It was just the kind of guy he was.
It was a valid argument, one that made perfect sense. But as the evening wore on, she kept sneaking glances at the sleep chair, in between finishing the article on the perfect blow job and starting one on how to rock his world with one quick set of Kegels. And each time her eyes fell on the sage-green fold-out, she couldn’t help thinking about Heath any more than she could help the way her heart fluttered.
A little while later, there was another knock on the door. This time, when she looked up from an article on the top twenty-five most popular sex positions, it was to find Heath standing at the nurses’ station, shopping bag in hand.
“Whatcha reading?” he asked, strolling into the room like he owned the place.
“Nothing.” Her cheeks flamed as she dropped the magazine on the rolling table next to her.
Heath wasn’t just the top quarterback in the NFL because he could throw like a bullet. He also had razor-sharp reflexes, and he snatched the magazine out of midair before the thing could even close.
A huge grin spread across his face as he read the title of the article. He flipped to the blow job page. “That looks good.” His finger moved down the page. “Done that, would like to do that, hated that, wouldn’t try that even on a dare. Oh … I like number twenty-two … only …” He turned the magazine upside down. “I think it takes more than two hands.”
She grabbed the magazine and tossed it onto the chair. “I was reading 101 Hair Tips, if you must know.”
Dying to change the subject—partly because she was completely humiliated at this point, and partly because Heath’s teasing felt way too familiar—as did the feelings stirring inside of her—she glanced around a little d
esperately, looking for something, anything, that might distract him.
“What’s that?” she asked, pointing at the shopping bag he was carrying, a reusable bag that had the Fort Worth Wranglers logo emblazoned on one side and Heath’s face emblazoned on the other. “Do you seriously carry bags around with your own face on them?”
“It just so happens that I have the entire collection of Fort Worth Wranglers grocery bags in my suitcase. They’re collector’s items.”
“Of course they are.” She rolled her eyes.
“But this one was a gift. I was shopping at Super Walmart—pretty much the only place to shop on a Sunday evening in San Angelo except for Paula’s Porn Palace, and I figured we already had that covered.” He shot a pointed look at her TexAss-covered ass. Then he extended the bag toward her. “This is for you.”
“For me?”
“It’s nothing fancy—nothing like I could have picked up at the Porn Palace, but I figured you’d probably like a pair of yoga pants, a toothbrush, a bra, and a shirt that’s your size. Not that the boxers aren’t attractive, but …”
Just that easily, her heart melted. While the scientist in her knew that wasn’t actually possible, the rest of her felt so warm and fuzzy and endeared that she didn’t even care. No wonder women everywhere threw themselves at Heath like he was Tom Hardy. He was actually better looking than Tom, and a really nice guy. She’d spent so much time hating him during the last twelve years that she’d forgotten about the nice-guy part.
“Thanks.” As she reached for the bag, her voice broke, and the tears that had threatened all day burned behind her eyes.
“Oh, darlin’.”
The next thing she knew, Heath was dropping the bag and picking her up. Then they were settled on the sleep chair together, her cuddled on his lap and his arms wrapped tightly around her.