Lyric and Lingerie (The Fort Worth Wranglers Book 1)

by Tracy Wolff

  “It’s one thing to tell them we’re together, but another thing to actually tell them we’re engaged. What were you thinking?” Lyric threw her hands up.

  Maybe he could insane-logic Lyric enough that she actually believed him. “Your daddy was worried about dying on that table. I just wanted to give him something to ease his mind. Now he doesn’t have to worry about you. All he needs to do is concentrate on getting better.”

  “So you told him we were getting married?” she shrieked loud enough to drown out Neil Diamond singing about his Sweet Caroline. Cherry Cherry coughed in warning.

  “No, of course I didn’t. I swear. I just told him we were together. He extrapolated the rest.” That was mostly true. He pulled into traffic and prayed she wouldn’t hit the driver. Maybe he should ask her for some scary car crash statistics. That might distract her.

  “My father extrapolated that we were getting married?” She shot him a look that would have brought a lesser man to his knees. It was a good thing for both of them that his ego provided a lot of cushion. It would take a more than a couple dirty looks to penetrate its protection.

  “Well, extrapolate might be a little bit of an exaggeration.” Heath nodded. “Now that I think about it, I might have hinted that we were engaged.”

  “Hinted? How do you hint about an engagement?” She scrubbed her face with her hands.

  She had a point, but he wasn’t about to tell her that.

  She ground her teeth together. “Can you please, for once in your life, be straight with me?”

  “I am being straight with you.” Or at least, straight in a meandering kinda way. Straight was relative.

  “No, you’re talking in circles. Or ovals or octagons, I don’t even know at this point. But you aren’t being straight with me.” She was coming unhinged. It was a little frightening.

  “Octagons have straight lines,” he felt honor bound to point out. Especially since they had just pulled up at a stop sign. He was nothing if not helpful like that.

  “I don’t even know what to say. This is insane.” Lyric let out a little scream of frustration.

  He had no idea what it said about him that he found the sound incredibly sexy. So sexy, in fact, that he couldn’t help wondering if he could get her to make it again. Preferably when they were in bed together and she was underneath him. Or on top of him. Or trying number twenty-two in Cosmo’s list of best sex positions.

  Number twenty-two was a little bit more labor intensive than some of the other positions, but he had a feeling it would be totally worth it. Especially with Lyric’s killer legs. And especially if he could make her come hard enough to scream.

  Just the thought made him hard, which he normally considered a prodigious turn of events. But right now, with Lyric looking at him like she planned on chopping off whatever body part caught her attention, he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t a little concerned.

  Maybe it was that concern that finally prompted him to make a real overture to her. Or maybe it was the tears swimming in her baby blues, tears she was trying so hard to keep him from seeing. Suddenly this felt a lot less like they were playing a game and a lot more like he was just fucking with her.

  And he wasn’t that guy. Or, at least, he wasn’t that guy with Lyric.

  Pulling Cherry Cherry over to the side of the road, he turned to her and took her hand in his. And tried to be as genuine as he could be, something he didn’t have a whole lot of practice with. Not when he’d spent so much of his adult life bobbing and weaving and making sure no one got close enough to depend on him. And more, making sure no one got close enough that he depended on them.

  “Look, Lyric, I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be an ass. It’s just, I don’t know what to say here. When he woke up, lucid for the first time since we got there, and saw us cuddled on that damn chair together, he assumed we were together. I started to contradict him, but he was so damn happy. So excited that we had found each other after all these years and that we had come back to San Angelo together. Then he went on about how he’d always known we would get together.”

  “So you told him we were engaged?” She made it sound like the dumbest thing ever. Again, she had a point.

  “I didn’t know what to tell him. Not after all that. So I kind of just went along with it, and then things snowballed and the story got bigger and bigger—”

  “That happens every time you open your mouth.” She shook her head.

  He grinned. She had him there. He’d never seen the point of little white lies. If you were going to be damned for a liar either way, why not make it the biggest, tallest, most impressive lie ever crafted?

  If nothing else, it made everything a whole hell of a lot more fun.

  “We have to tell him the truth,” Lyric said after a minute. “You know that, right?”

  He did know it. He also knew that she was channeling a whole stern teacher thing and it was kind of doing it for him. Then again, right now everything about Lyric Wright was doing it for him. Maybe that was what happened to a guy when he got engaged.

  “Heath, tell me you know that we have to tell my daddy the truth.” Lyric still looked stunned and angry and sexy.

  “Of course we do. Absolutely.” He patted her knee.

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Wait a minute? Tomorrow? That doesn’t exactly give him much time to recover.” Heath wasn’t ready to give up the lie. Bowman had to make it. His family needed him, and if Heath was being honest, so did he. He needed the other man’s no-nonsense advice. Life without football was bad enough. He couldn’t lose the only father figure he’d ever had.

  “More like it doesn’t give you much time to run away and leave me stuck holding the bag.” Lyric shook her head like she couldn’t believe this was happening to her.

  “Hey. I resent that. I may be a lot of not-so-great things, but I’m not a runner. And I sure as hell don’t leave anyone holding the bag on my screwups. If you think we need to tell your father tomorrow, then I’ll tell him tomorrow.” He threw Cherry Cherry back into gear so hard that she shuddered, and Neil Diamond—who was now singing about blue jeans—flickered for a second.

  The car whined and started to stall out in protest, but a smooth foot on the accelerator solved everything. Everything but the fact that Lyric didn’t trust hm. And the fact that it gutted him that she didn’t.

  They spent the rest of the car ride to Lyric’s family ranch in silence. It had been over a decade since he’d been there, but that didn’t seem to matter. He knew the route like the back of his hand. Much like he used to think he knew Lyric Wright.

  But time changed everything, and it had been a long time since Lyric and he were friends. A long time since they had hugged out in her tree house or swam at the river or gone for ice cream together at the Dairy Queen. And this woman sitting next to him, with the tattoo high on her thigh and distrust in her heart, he didn’t know her. And she sure as hell didn’t know him.

  Why then was he still thinking about getting her naked? Thinking about kissing every inch of her beautiful body until she begged for more.

  Thinking about giving her more, about splaying her out in the middle of her childhood bed and making her come six ways from Sunday.

  And why the hell did he feel so rejected? It wasn’t like he’d woken up this morning in love with her or anything. Wasn’t like he actually wanted to marry her.

  As he made the final turn onto the long, private road that led to the Wrights’ house, Lyric finally broke the silence.

  “Look, Heath, I know that you care about my father and that you were only trying to help in your own way. But …” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “This is major. When we go our separate ways, my parents are going to be devastated. I’ll be dealing with the consequences of this for a very long time.”

  She made it sound like being engaged to him came with nuclear fallout.

  “I’ll make it right, I promise.” He had no idea how.

  He did what he did b
est in situations like this. He shot her the grin that his PR team said polled best with hot women between the ages of twenty-one and forty and waited for her panties to hit the car floor.

  You could take the player out of the Wranglers, after all, but you couldn’t take the Wranglers out of the player.

  * * *

  Chapter 15

  * * *

  Not much at the ranch house had changed through the years, at least to his eye. Oh, sure, the couch in the front parlor was fussier and the art on the wall more expensive than it had been twelve years before. The brown leather furniture in the family room had been replaced with different, bigger brown leather furniture, and the Persian carpet Livinia was so proud of in the dining room was a bit more worn than it had been. Other than that, it was like stepping back in time, where the only things that had really changed were himself … and the woman he’d once considered his best friend.

  “I’m beat,” Lyric said as she walked straight through the main part of the house to the back staircase. “Make yourself at home. You know where your old room is, right?”

  When Heath’s father had started staying out all night instead of cooking supper for his eleven-year-old son, Bowman had given Heath the guest room, and it had been his ever since.

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. If you need food, obviously help yourself.” She was so tired, the words were beginning to blur together. “I need to crash.”

  She sure as hell did. And he did too. Partly because he was almost as tired as Lyric was, and partly because all the flying and driving and sitting he’d done over the last couple of days had really aggravated his knee. He was afraid if he didn’t lie down soon, he was going to fall down.

  Not that he was about to tell Lyric that. She’d probably insist upon carrying him up the stairs, or at least spend the next half an hour trying. And since he outweighed her by at least a hundred pounds, he was pretty sure her attempts would be nothing but an exercise in futility.

  Besides, he was injured, not permanently disabled. As long as he took it slow going up the stairs—and avoided thinking about how much this whole thing fucking sucked—he’d be okay.

  “Sounds good to me,” he said as she made her way up the long, circular staircase. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  She gave a careless, drunken-looking wave. “Yes. Tomorrow.”

  From his spot on the bottom step, he watched as she climbed the stairs. And while he knew he shouldn’t be checking her out—they had just clarified the fact that they were only friends—he couldn’t help the way his eyes were drawn to her very shapely ass. Any more than he could help the way, as he watched her ass sway back and forth, his brain immediately kicked into gear with a whole host of sexual fantasies he was better off not thinking about.

  But knowing what he should do and actually doing it were two very different things, especially when he was stretched out on his bed hours later, staring at the ceiling and willing himself to go back to sleep, all to no avail. It was early yet—really early, according to the old-fashioned alarm clock next to his bed, but he’d been listening to Lyric move around her room for the last half an hour.

  The sounds were muffled, like she was trying to be quiet, but it was very obvious that she was doing something. Their rooms did share a common wall, after all. Just more proof, he knew, that Livinia had always trusted him with Lyric. When he’d been a teenager, he’d spent more than one night under this roof—when his dad was on an angry bender, when he was sleeping it off in jail, and one unforgettable night when he’d decided to wave Heath’s granddaddy’s prized Colt pistol in Heath’s face.

  Each time, Livinia had put him in this room, next to Lyric, instead of in the one down the hall that shared a common wall with Harmony. Guess it had been obvious back then how he’d felt about Harmony … and how he’d thought she’d felt about him. Right up until they slept together and, somehow, he’d ruined everything.

  But it wasn’t Harmony he was lying here thinking about right now. Wasn’t Harmony that had his head spinning and his dick aching. No, that was all Lyric. All brainy, bold, beautiful Lyric.

  His teenaged self must have been an idiot, because there was no other explanation as to why he would have fallen for Harmony back then when Lyric was around. Sure, Harmony had always been the one with the short skirts and high heels and sexy perfume, but Lyric had been the one with the wicked sense of humor. The one with the crazy ideas that always got her into trouble. The one who was so full of life that she was constantly tripping or falling or causing one disaster after another because her body could barely contain all her joie de vivre.

  And she still was.

  He’d spent the day in that waiting room with both of them, and for a moment—just a moment—he had wondered if his old feelings for Harmony and their shared past would rear their ugly head. But he hadn’t felt so much as a twinge, even when he was sitting right next to her. How could he have when he’d spent the whole day unable to so much as look away from Lyric?

  Even know, when he should be sleeping, he couldn’t keep his mind off of her. Or the fact that at this very moment she was in the shower, hot water streaming over her pinup-star body. Hands rubbing soap along all that glorious skin. Washcloth sliding between those glorious thighs of hers …

  And fuck. He had just gone from turned on to really fucking turned on in the space of a couple of seconds. But who could blame him when he wanted nothing more than to bury his own hand, face, cock, between Lyric’s gorgeous thighs.

  Sweaty, groaning, and more turned on than he could remember being in a long damn fucking time, Heath slid his hand under the covers. Fisted his hand around his rock-hard dick. And began to stroke himself as images of Lyric bombarded him from every side.

  Lyric in that ridiculous excuse for a duct-tape dress, her gorgeous breasts all but falling out the top of it.

  Lyric in the airport restroom doing the potty dance as he was on his knees in front of her.

  Lyric upside down in Cherry Cherry, her long, curvy, million-dollar legs right in his face as she spouted some ridiculously little-known fact or other at him.

  Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Who the hell could have guessed he’d find the fact that forty gazillion meteors hit the earth every day… so damn sexy. Then again, it wasn’t the meteors he found sexy. It was Lyric. It was all Lyric.

  He stroked himself faster, harder, as he thought of her. Then closed his eyes and pretended it was her hand, her mouth, that was on him. That it was her body stretched out next to him instead of a pillow.

  He came seconds later, head swimming and hips arching off the covers in one of the most powerful orgasms of his life. He wasn’t sure what it said about Lyric, or more accurately his feelings for her, that just the thought of her had him coming harder, deeper, than he had since he was a kid.

  After a couple minutes of recovery time, he stumbled into the en suite bathroom, his head still a little messed up with the pleasure of it all. He took a couple of minutes to clean himself up with the towel he’d used after his shower last night, then slipped back into his room and pulled on his jeans with hands that still shook, just a little.

  Next door, the water had stopped, and he forced himself not to think about Lyric getting out of the shower dripping wet. Forced himself not to imagine her toweling herself dry or smoothing lotion over all that silky skin or—

  He broke off with a groan. Jesus, he was acting like a horny kid with his first girl, his dick rising again and again at just the thought of her.

  Deciding he needed to do something to take his mind off of the delectable Lyric and her too-perfect everything, he grabbed a shirt from his suitcase and yanked it over his head. Then made his way downstairs to the kitchen to start cooking breakfast.

  After the day they had had yesterday, he was starving, and he was pretty sure Lyric must be feeling exactly the same way.

  Livinia’s fridge was fully stocked, as always, and he pulled out the makings for a Denver omelet and quickly got started making
it. There was something soothing in the act of chopping up the onions and peppers and ham, something mind-numbing, in the best way, in grating the cheese and beating the eggs.

  It had been a rough couple of days in every area of his life, and it was nice to just concentrate on something normal for a while. Something besides the fact that his career—and his life—were pretty much over.

  Oh yeah, and he was engaged … to be married … to Lyric.

  Actually, that seemed minute compared to everything else.

  But no one liked a pity party, certainly not him. And if his knee twinged more than a little while he was walking around the kitchen making toast and coffee to go with the omelet, then no one needed to know about that shit but him.

  Lyric had enough on her plate.

  Fifteen minutes later, he slid an ooey gooey omelet bursting with meat and veggies and cheese onto a plate and divided it into two pieces. Then he poured a couple cups of coffee, doctoring one to sickly sweet, just the way Lyric liked it.

  Then, after putting everything on a cookie sheet he’d found in the cabinet next to the oven, he headed up the stairs to serve Lyric breakfast in bed. Or at least breakfast on a bed, considering she had already showered and was probably completely dressed by now.

  Except, when he knocked on the door, she didn’t answer immediately. Had she passed out on the bathroom floor after slipping when she was getting out of the shower and hitting her head on the tub? Or the vanity? Or—let’s face it, this was Lyric—the edge of the toilet?

  She’d actually done that in fifth grade. He still remembered finding her lying prone and calling 9-1-1.

  Freaking out now even as he told himself he was being insane, he managed to twist the knob on the door even with his hands full and then shove the door open.

  “Jesus Christ, you scared the hell out of me.” Lyric put a hand to her chest.