She sighed and settled on the edge of the bed just out of his reach. “You must know that I thought I was dreaming… I’m trying really hard to keep the promise I made to my brothers about not getting involved with any more men who have no intention of sticking around… We know going in that as soon as I fix your car, you’re as good as out of here.”
“Come with me,” he found himself saying. As he said the words, he began to warm to them. “I sort of fed my Ma a line of garbage about being married in order to make her happy and keep her from worrying about me. She expects me to bring my wife with me, and I don’t have the heart to tell her the truth. You and I have a lot of natural chemistry, Laurie. We could pull it off easily. It would do you good to get away from your brothers interference for a few weeks… What do you say? Will you be my pretend bride?”
Laurie’s eyes were wide and she clung to the edges of her shirt which was still hanging open. “Are you serious?” she asked in disbelief.
“I am,” Travis said, nodding his head in confirmation. “Okay…” she had no idea if it was the right decision to make or not, but after the heated scene in her bed, she knew she had to take the chance. She’d never met a man who could leave her that desperate so quickly.
“Really?” he asked, feeling floored that she had actually agreed. “Sure. But for now, I need to get some sleep. Now that I know the parts will be here soon, I need to get the rest of the car ready for me to put them in. That means an early start for me tomorrow. I’ll just leave you here for the day… If you need to go anywhere while I’m at work, you can borrow my bicycle. It’s in the garage, hanging from a hook on the wall by its tire. You can’t miss it. This… what almost happened here… can’t happen again, Travis. At least not for the next few days.”
Travis was sad, but he understood. They’d jumped more than a few steps, coming so close to having sex. He could have patience with her for a few days. The craziest thing about this whole mess was that he respected her even more for putting her work and her sense of duty to her brothers ahead of her own longing. Even if it meant he had to climb onto her couch bed for the second night in a row with a hard-on the size of the great State he was currently in, with no hope of any relief any time soon.
Knowing he had to do as she asked, Travis left her room and headed towards the bathroom. If he had any hope of getting a few hours of sleep that night, he needed a nice long cold shower. As he climbed into the shower stall, he reassured himself. It was only a matter of time before Laurie gave in to the desire he knew she felt for him. When that happened, he would be able to breathe again; and with any luck, he’d be able to sleep without spending hours in a cold shower with his old friend Rosy Palm.
Chapter 6
The next couple of days went much the same, with Travis hanging out at Laurie’s house while she worked on his car. When she came home at night, they ate a quiet supper together and then they made out for a while before she retired to her room and he spent an hour in her shower cooling off before falling onto her sofa bed for the night.
It was late Friday evening when Laurie finally got the car put back together and she climbed behind the wheel, turning it over. It had been a long hard week full of work, but the payoff was well worth it. The beautiful sound that only a muscle car could make, rumbled beneath her and she knew she just had to take it for a nice long test drive. Thinking about how long it had been since she’d stopped by her oldest brother’s house to check on his very pregnant wife, she decided that Eric’s house would be the perfect place to take Travis’s car.
As she pulled into her brother’s driveway, she saw both of them look up. Surprise filled both of their faces when they saw her climb out of Travis’s car. She walked over to them like a woman with a purpose. When she stood beside Jeff, she held her hands out to Eric’s son, Brian and the toddler anxiously went to her.
Laurie looked at her big brother. “Sorry I came out without any notice. I just finished rebuilding the car and had to take it out for a test drive. Figured I hadn’t seen either of my brothers for a while. Thought it was time. I also thought perhaps I should check on my sister-inlaw.”
Eric grinned at the mention of his wife. “She’s working, Laurie.” “I can’t believe you allowed her out of your sight … or anywhere near a car for that matter. As far along as she is…”
“My wife has a mind of her own, Laurie.” Jeff laughed and crossed his arms, leaning against a fence post. “What he means is that he has no control over Madeline.”
“Why would I want to control her? She’s a smart woman… Besides, there is no safer place on the planet for her to be than the hospital where she works. She’s two floors from the maternity ward and she’s surrounded by doctors. As to driving, I took her to work myself and when her shift comes to an end, I have every intention of going to pick her up if she can’t get a ride with a friend.”
“Quite frankly, I’m amazed you let her out of your sight at all,” Laurie said, juggling the excitable toddler on her hip. She looked up where Lillie Rose was giggling as the pony she was riding sped up. “Nor can I believe you actually allowed your daughter to climb on a horse without you.” “What can I say?” Eric asked, shrugging his shoulders. “Maddie has taught me how to let go of my need to control everything. I have to trust my wife and her ability to take care of herself, and I have to show my daughter that I trust her… She has to have confidence in herself and she’s not going to get that if I’m hovering over her, acting like she’s going to fail at every little thing.”
“When’s the last time you went to Victoria’s grave? Or do you even bother now that you’ve got this new family?” Laurie asked, searching Eric’s eyes for the truth.
“I took the whole family to go see her just last weekend. I’m not ignoring my past, sis… I just came to the realization that I can’t let it consume me or control how I live my life in the present.”
“Madeline has been really good for him, sis,” Jeff said, resting his hand on Eric’s shoulder. She turned her head to look at her little brother and arched a single eyebrow at him.
“I’m glad about that… but I have to ask. If you are so supportive of our big brother moving on with his life, when are you going to follow his example? When are you going to give up your adolescent way of life and grow up already?”
“I don’t have to allow a woman to trap me into a marriage in order to grow up, Laurie.” She rolled her eyes and Eric laughed. “As much as I agree with you Laurie, you’re hardly one to talk. Last I checked, you’re so busy fixing people’s cars, no man has ever come onto your radar.”
Before Laurie could answer, Eric’s phone rang and his lips curved in a wide smile. “That would be my wife… if you’ll excuse me…” he walked away, lifting the cell phone to his ear. He stilled in his steps and froze. Both of his siblings rushed to his side, putting a hand on each shoulder in support.
He was shaking when he hung up and he swallowed hard. “I need a ride to the hospital… now. I’m not sure I can drive right now…”
“What is it?” Jeff asked at the same time as Laurie asked “What happened?”
“Maddie…” was all he uttered, his knees going weak. Laurie rushed to the truck where the car seats were, placing Brian in one of them while Jeff called out to the ranch hand to keep an eye on Lillie Rose. Eric got in the passenger seat and stared out the side window as Laurie drove.
She hadn’t even brought the truck to a full stop before Eric jumped out and ran inside. He was long gone by the time Jeff and Laurie made their way inside with Brian. There was a group of women sitting in the waiting room and Jeff recognized them as Madeline’s friends. He went over to them and asked what was going on.
“All I know is that she was working and she wen t into labor… I got the call telling me that she’d passed out in the middle of the contraction that had sent her to her feet. Maddie had listed me as her next of kin before she met and married Eric … I guess the woman who went into her file to see who to contact was new or som
ething. She had to have pulled an old contact sheet. I was at the restaurant with everyone else when I got the call. I swear, that’s all I know.”
Laurie sat with Jeff for what felt like forever before they heard confirmation that Madeline had given birth to a healthy baby girl. Rocking the fussy little boy in her arms, she turned to her little brother with a smile. “I need to get the car back to its owner… would you mind coming back to Eric’s with me so I can take the car back to the shop and then bring his truck and Brian back here?”
Jeff nodded his head in agreement and happily went with her, waving goodbye to her as she climbed back behind the wheel of the muscle car. Before he could take off again, Laurie cleared her throat. “Jeff… I need to ask you a favor… You can consider it payback for keeping your confidence about your excursion to get your bull and any further secrets you want to keep from Eric.”
“Okay… now you’ve got my full attention,” he said laughing. “I’m taking off for a much needed vacation. I’ll be gone for a few weeks. I need you and Eric to leave me alone and not pester me every five minutes. I really need this time to myself, little brother.”
“There’s a man involved… isn’t there ?” he asked suspiciously.
“Yes,” she admitted quietly. “But he’s a really good man, Jeff. He’s not a biker and he’s gainfully employed. You need to trust me with my own life sometime, little brother … Please?”
“Fine… but I swear to you, sis; if this yahoo so much as touches one hair on your head and then dumps you, breaking your heart, I’ll kill him with my bare hands; got it?”
Laurie sighed heavily. “Yeah, yeah… and I also know you’ll have to get in line behind Eric. It’s no wonder I’m still single. With the two of you threatening any man who so much as looks at me sideways, I’ll never get married.”
“I thought you weren’t worried about things like settling into the staid life of a married woman,” Jeff teased her. “No… that would be you,” Laurie said, laughing. “I’m just working hard at what I do best to keep myself busy since my overprotective brothers refuse to let me have a normal romance like every other single woman on the planet.”
Jeff laughed and crossed his arms. “The only reason Eric and I are so protective, is because you insist on sleeping with the lowest of the low… the ones who have no intention whatsoever of making an honest woman of you.”
“And what would you do if I scared off every woman YOU are interested in sleeping with because I know that you have no intention of marrying them, Jeff?”
“You wouldn’t dare,” he said, squinting at her in a threatening manner.
“I assure you, I would,” she said, nodding her head. “If you refuse to back down and let me make my own choices for myself. You can’t have it both ways, Jeff. You want me to be quiet and stay out of your nonexistent love life, that’s fine … but you need to do the same for me.”
“You drive a hard bargain,” Jeff said, rubbing his hand over his chin. “Take it or leave it, little brother; but know this. If you mess this up for me, I’ll never forgive you. Not for as long as I live.”
Jeff nodded his head and climbed back into Eric’s truck. “I’ll keep quiet and tell our big brother that you’re out of town for a few weeks, and that I have no idea where you went or why. Just remember this later on down the road, sis; because after this, you’re seriously going to owe me. You know how Eric can get when he’s worried about one of us.”
Laurie nodded her head and waved to him as he pulled out of the driveway and left her alone. With a smile, she climbed back into Travis’s car and turned it back towards the garage. Before she could go home, she had to lock things up at the shop.
She could hardly wait to see the look on Travis’s face when she told him the car was ready.
Chapter 7
Laurie had no sooner walked in the door and Travis swooped her into his arms, swinging her around making her laugh. “I figured you’d be in a good mood once I told you I finished your car and it’s good to go… but I hadn’t even told you yet. What’s with the exuberant welcome?” she asked when he lowered her to the floor, clutching her tightly around the waist, keeping her body pulled tightly against his own.
“I was just glad to see you,” he answered huskily. “But now that you’ve told me that you worked a miracle with my car, I feel even more of a need to kiss you,” he told her honestly, lowering his head and doing just that.
Her body slumped against his chest and she moaned as he swept his tongue into her mouth. He made behaving herself very difficult when he insisted on holding her in his powerful arms and pressing his thick lips against hers. He devastated her completely when he touched her with his big hands the way he had the other night when they’d come so very close to being intimate. She knew it wouldn’t take much for them to get right back to that position again. Almost as well as she knew that when that happened, there would be no stopping a second time around, and that when she did give in to him, she’d be ruined for any other man. The way he made her feel just kissing her as he was now, told her that much. Most likely no other man’s kiss would ever be more than just pleasant or “nice” after the heat and need that she experienced when Travis touched his lips to hers.
Travis sensed her panic rising within her and reluctantly broke the kiss, stepping away from her. He ran his big hand over his head, making his hair stand up on end. “You should probably pack a bag,” he told her in a husky murmur. Clearing his throat to bring his voice back to normal, he went on. “In order to keep from picking you up and carrying you to your bed, I think it would be best if we were on the road before night fall. Because I know myself well enough to know that I’m pretty much at the end of my rope here. One hot look from you, and it I would have you flat on your back with my body fully imbedded in yours before you knew what happened. I can tell that you aren’t ready for that…”
Laurie trembled, thinking she may never mentally be ready for the reality of Travis making her his in the most intimate way a man could. Shaking her head in confusion, she walked away from him back to her room. She’d never known it was possible to be nervous, excited, afraid and desperate all at the same time. It was a very exhausting, exhilarating and baffling state of mind.
Before she had a chance to change her mind, their things were packed away in the trunk of his car and they were driving down the road. He swung in to a drive-through and bought them some hamburgers, French fries and soda for the road, filled the gas tank and had the car powering down the freeway in no time.
They were almost to the border between Texas and Oklahoma before Travis pulled in to a hotel parking lot to get some sleep. “I’ll get us separate rooms,” he told her as he climbed out of the car. Laurie didn’t know if it would make much of a difference or not. After riding in such close quarters with him for as long as she already had, her pulse was sporadic at best and her libido and her adrenaline were both kicked up so high, she highly doubted she’d get any sleep any time soon, no matter how close or far from Travis she slept.
When Travis came knocking at her door the next morning, Laurie was still wide awake. Her eyes were bloodshot and had huge dark circles under them. Once again, she wished she was the sort of woman who indulged in buying such frivolous things as makeup. She hated the idea of letting Travis see her like this… he’d know the second he saw her that she hadn’t slept a wink the night before.
Sighing in resignation, she held her back erect and opened the door to her room, walking out into the bright sunshine as if it was no big deal for her to walk around looking like death warmed over. She looked across the street at the convenience store and cleared her throat. “I need to make a pitstop over there,” she said, nodding in the store’s direction. “We left in such a hurry; I didn’t think to grab sunglasses.”
Travis nodded his head in complete agreement. She hadn’t noticed the signs of exhaustion in his eyes and on his face yet, and if he could continue to hide them from her beneath his cowboy hat and under a pair of sun
glasses, that would be great. She didn’t need the guilt of knowing that thoughts of the two of them together had kept him wide awake with a raging erection all night long. It would be his little secret. As would the fact that even now, all soft and sleepy looking, he found her to be the sexiest, most desirable woman he could remember ever having looked at.
She’d made it pretty clear that hearing such things made her nervous. Seeing proof of it would most likely only make things worse, and that was the last thing he wanted to do. He knew when they got to his mother’s house, they’d be stuck sharing a bedroom… one with only one queensized bed in it. It would be close quarters, and he knew that when that time came, there would be no more hiding how much he wanted her. With his Ma believing they were married, there would be no sleeping in separate rooms at her house, and the guest room; otherwise known as his old room, was barely big enough for the bed and the dresser that were in it. There was no chance of him offering to sleep on the floor. It wasn’t large enough to hold his big body even if he curled into a tiny ball.
The rest of the drive to his mother’s house was made in awkward silence, up until they were about a mile away. Travis cleared his throat. “Um… there’s something I think you should know, before we get to my Mom’s place.”
Looking over at him, Laurie wondered what he was so worried about. He gulped and glanced nervously over at her. “In order to pull this whole married life farce off, we’re going to have to act the part of a couple of love birds… My Ma is going to expect us to share a bedroom… and a bed. For us to touch… and kiss. A lot.”
“I kind of figured as much when you told me that you had told her that you were married and didn’t have the heart to tell her the truth.”
“Oh… Good. I’m glad you understand.” Travis pulled into the driveway and ran around to her side of the car to open her door for her. His mother was standing on the front porch with her arms crossed, tapping her toes, watching them closely.
Texas Heat (Stubborn Texas Siblings Book 2) Page 4