Noise: A Forbidden Flowers Story

by Lynne, Donya

  “Ouch,” she said. “What happened.”

  He pulled a string of shredded pork from his sandwich and dropped it in his mouth. “I ran an in route instead of an out route and got dinged by a tight end even bigger than I am.”

  She had no idea what language he’d just spoken, but it was nowhere near as sexy as the one he’d spoken the day they’d met. She nodded anyway. That was probably safer than asking him to explain his football speak.

  He made an X with his corded forearms. “Our routes crossed, and since we were both looking for the ball and watching out for the safeties, we didn’t see each other.” He made a crashing noise like two semis hitting head-on, then calmly sized up his sandwich again. “But he got it worse than I did. Poor fucker’s shoulder dislocated.” He waved his hand dismissively as he grabbed a fistful of fries. “It’s all good, though. The trainers popped it back in.”

  Taylor winced, but Ryker seemed to take it all in stride. Then again, he had probably been playing football since he was kid. No doubt he had seen and experienced his share of injuries to the point that he accepted them as a job requirement he’d mastered ages ago.

  “So, what do you do?” he asked, glancing at her.

  “Nothing nearly as exciting and dangerous as your job.” She took a quick sip of her beer. “I run my own company.”

  “No shit?” He wiped sauce off the black stubble on his chin. “And here I thought you were some kind of heiress or something.” His gaze flicked to her house, then back down at the last bite of his sandwich.

  “Do I look like an heiress?” She straightened and faced him, holding her arms out to the sides.

  He stopped chewing as his gaze raked her up and down, paying particular attention to the ink on her arms and chest before sliding down her long legs, then back up to her face. Flashes of heat zipped up and down her spine at his intense inspection.

  His eyes narrowed seductively. “I have no idea what an heiress looks like, but you look pretty good to me.”

  Dropping her arms, she faced the fire again, her heart beating a little faster and harder. “Okay, pretty boy, you can stop right there. Just because I accepted the dinner you so graciously bought for me and let you come up here and sit down while we ate it does not mean you’re getting lucky tonight.”

  He laughed and sucked sauce off his thumb as he grabbed sandwich number two. “Who said anything about getting lucky?”

  “You did.”

  “I did not.”

  “You said it with your eyes,” she said defensively, nearly knocking her beer over as she reached for it. “And in your tone.”

  “Pah-lease.” He unwrapped the sandwich. Despite being bigger than a McDonald’s Double Quarter Pounder, it looked like a slider in his large mitts. “Show me.”

  “What?”

  “I dare you to show me how I said that I wanted to have sex with you with my eyes.”

  “I didn’t say you wanted to have sex with me, just that you thought you might get lucky.”

  “Same thing.” He wore a dubious and infuriating grin that sliced amazing dimples into his cheeks.

  “No, it’s not. And no, I’m not going to show you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m too pissed off now.”

  “Then why are you smiling?”

  “I’m not—” She huffed and looked away, because she was smiling.

  He laughed, and she laughed with him.

  “Asshole,” she said, pulling a bit of bread and shredded pork from her sandwich and stuffing it in her mouth.

  “I can be, but I’m starting to think that you like when I’m being an asshole.”

  “I do not.”

  “Oh, yeah, you do. You think it’s fun.” He scrunched his eyes into narrow slits as he leaned toward her, pointing his index finger at the bridge of her nose. “I can see it in your eyes.” His tone was adorably and infuriatingly mocking.

  “Whatever.” She gave his hand a swat and turned away, smiling at the way he’d thrown her words back at her.

  They ate in silence for a while as the tree frogs came alive and began singing loud enough to drown out the crinkling of the paper wrapper as he started on sandwich number three.

  She chewed on a bite of corn bread and swallowed, watching him make short work of the first bag of sweet potato fries and move on to the second.

  “Should you be eating all this food?” she asked, taking in their oversize spread.

  “Sure, why not?”

  “Aren’t you in training? Shouldn’t you be watching your diet or something?”

  He nodded, chewing through another massive bite. “Do you wanna know what I had to eat today?”

  “Not particularly, but I have a feeling you’re going to tell me anyway.”

  He shot her a cockeyed grin like he got a kick out of her feisty attitude. “Two protein shakes, two bananas, six hard-boiled eggs, a large salad, three grilled chicken breasts, and all the Gatorade and water I could drink.”

  “That’s all?” she asked dubiously. All that food would have been more than enough for her, but she had to concede that it would probably have been nothing more than a snack for Ryker.

  He downed a swallow of beer, then flexed one arm. His biceps popped out like a cantaloupe. “Coach has got us on a restricted diet to lean down before preseason.”

  Even as he lowered his arm and reached for another square of corn bread, she couldn’t take her eyes off those muscles. Ryker was one man who wouldn’t have any trouble pinning her quite nicely to the bed—or the couch, the floor, or even a wall—with those big guns. But would what he had between his legs be just as exciting? Or just another dud like all the rest? Did she even want to take the gamble to find out? Eh, it might not be worth the effort. Maybe he was only meant to be eye candy and nothing more. Nothing wrong with that. Every woman needed eye candy to make time with her vibrator a little more fun.

  He shoved a bite of corn bread in his mouth.

  “Would you call this a restricted diet?” she asked, glancing pointedly at all the food he’d bought for himself.

  He took a bite. “This is my free meal for the week.” He grinned out the side of his mouth at her, making that sexy dimple crease his cheek. “I thought it’d be nice to share it with you.”

  “Gee, how lucky for me,” she said with a playfully sarcastic roll of her eyes and a kick in her tone. “I’m sure every woman with a fetish for gluttony is sobbing into their cartons of Ben & Jerry’s right about now, wishing they were me.”

  “There she is.” He barked out a full, rich laugh and pointed a sauce-smeared finger at her, grinning from ear to ear as if she’d just made his day. “That’s the Taylor I know.”

  She sighed and downed the rest of her corn bread, dusting crumbs off her hands. “I’m not always a smart-ass, you know.”

  She didn’t want to spend too much time examining why she suddenly wanted him to see her as more than just a woman with a brazen mouth. Either she was growing soft on Noise, or her rough day had kicked not just her snappy comebacks out of her, but also her will to be snappy. Maybe after a good night’s sleep, she would be ready to swing the verbal baseball bat again.

  “Yeah, I know, but I like that about you.”

  “What? That I’m a smart-ass?” She pushed aside the remainder of her sandwich and leaned back in her chair after grabbing her second beer from the bucket of half-melted ice.

  He shook his head, still eating. “Naw, your moxie.”

  “Moxie?”

  “Yeah, you know . . . verve. Courage. Not many people—let alone women—have had the guts to charge up on a big guy like me and tell me to fuck off the way you did the other day.”

  She nearly choked on her beer, spitting it out before shooting him an accusatory glance. “I didn’t tell you to fuck off.” She used one of the hundred or so napkins that had come with their dinner to wipe off her chin and arms.

  “You may as well have. You had balls. I liked it.”

  “Ple
ase . . .” She tossed the spent napkin into the empty paper bag.

  “No, really.” He caught a piece of pork as it fell from his sandwich. “I’ve never met a woman like you.”

  That earned him another eye roll and a suspicious tilt of her head. “You can stop right there with the cheesy lines.”

  “It’s not a line. It’s true. Most women can’t bend over fast enough to kiss my ass—”

  “Is that supposed to impress me?”

  He held up his hand. “If you would let me finish.”

  “Fine.” She crossed one leg over the other as if she were merely tolerating him. “Finish.”

  He angled his head as if to ask if she was really going to be that way. “You’re such a ball-breaker.”

  She swung her leg, casually sipping her beer. “I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.” She gave him the same fake sycophantic smile she’d always given her parents when she wanted to pretend to be the good little dedicated daughter, except it felt different with Ryker. More like she was flirting, not placating.

  “Yeah, sure you don’t,” he said, flirting back with a smooth smile of his own before leaning closer and burning his intoxicatingly dark gaze into hers. “My point is, you don’t kiss my ass or give me free passes just because I’m a professional athlete and have money. You didn’t hold back that first day. You put me in my place like a sledgehammer driving a spike through concrete. And I think that’s hot as fuck.”

  Taylor’s bottom lip briefly gave way to gravity as the breath escaped her lungs, then she quickly pressed her lips together and looked away. “Well, I just like it quiet.” It was a lame thing to say after the bomb he’d just dropped on her, but It was the only thing that came to mind.

  “Apparently.” He went back to eating.

  She stared down into the mouth of her beer bottle. Who knew being the world’s biggest bitch could be a turn-on?

  After a short stretch of silence, in which he finished off his third sandwich, the cornbread, and sweet potato fries, he kicked back in the chair beside her, beer in hand, and said, “What I can’t seem to understand is how a fine catch like you hasn’t already been gobbled up.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to be gobbled.”

  “Why not?”

  Did she really want to get into this with him? “Mostly because of my parents.” Looked like she did.

  He guzzled the last quarter bottle of his Heineken and set aside the empty. “Did they get divorced or something?”

  “I wish,” she said with a short laugh. “That would have been a lot better.”

  His expression grew uneasy, concerned shadows filling his eyes. “They didn’t stay together for the kids, did they?” He shook his head as if he’d heard that reason for marital disharmony before. “I hate that excuse.” He reached down for his second Heineken and twisted off the cap as if he thought he might need it to hear this story.

  “No, their reason for staying married wasn’t that noble.” She couldn’t hide the biting sarcasm from sinking into her words, which brought out a hint of the southern accent she’d worked hard to get rid of. “My parents stayed married for the church.”

  His thick eyebrows knitted into a frown. “Come again?”

  She reached across the space between them and touched his forearm. “Just wait, it gets better.” His skin was warm and smooth, the flesh beneath firm.

  “Do I even want to hear this?”

  She took back her hand. “No, but since you made me listen to what you had to eat today, I’ll tell you anyway.” Noticing a dusting of seasoning from the fries on her shirt, she brushed it off. “My parents are evangelicals.”

  He shrugged like that meant about as much to him as Einstein’s theory of relatively, like he’d heard of it, but couldn’t explain it. “What’s that mean?”

  “That they belong to a cult, more or less.”

  Many would disagree with her, but they hadn’t grown up in her shoes. If they had, they’d be all like okay, yeah, I get it now, because this is some fucked-up shit right here.

  “My parents didn’t make a move without the church’s approval. It was all ‘God says this’ and ‘God is watching you’ and ‘you’re a sinner, he’s a sinner, she’s a sinner, we’re all going to hell unless we repent, repent, repent!’” She raised her arms to feign beseeching God for forgiveness. “Oh, and of course they wanted those weekly offerings.” She looked at him as if he were going to love this next part. “And they weren’t about a ten percent tithe. Hell no. Fifteen percent, twenty percent, twenty-five. If you had disposable income, you weren’t giving enough to the church, goddamn it!” She pretended to pound her fist on a pulpit. “Give, give, give.” She glanced down, remembering the hell of growing up in a home that proclaimed to be all about getting to heaven. “I wore the same five outfits to school every week. The same five fucking outfits every goddamn week, because my parents didn’t have the money to buy me new clothes.” She shook her head and swigged down a gulp of beer.

  “Were you poor?”

  She huffed out a brittle laugh. “Hell no. That’s just it. I mean, my family wasn’t wealthy, but my dad made good money. They just gave it all to the church.” She rolled her eyes. “Of course, my mom didn’t work, because a woman’s place is in the home and on her back with her legs open anytime her husband wants to use her body.”

  He winced as if he were beginning to understand why she didn’t have a boyfriend.

  “Yeah, it was all very romantic,” she said, dropping her head back to stare up at the stars. “I hated it. All of it. I never felt like I fit in. Like I’d been born into my family by mistake. It was like I knew from birth how full of shit they all were. How crazy and maniacal and ass-backward their whole system was. That it was built not on true faith and forgiveness, but on greed and corruption.” She took another drink, then rested the bottle on her thigh. “The pastor couldn’t keep his dick in his pants, having one affair after another and then begging the congregation for forgiveness, vowing to do better. It got to be a joke. At least to me, anyway. He would have an affair, then when he got caught, he stood in front of all of us in this church that felt like the size of the Roman Coliseum, whining, sniveling and making up excuses about being a weak man who needed God’s guidance—”

  “And larger offerings, right?”

  She looked over at him to find him wearing a surprisingly sympathetic smile, as if he understood where she was coming from.

  She smiled back. “That’s right.” She turned her gaze back to the star-dappled sky and the Big Dipper directly above her. “It became our fault that he’d slept with a nineteen-year-old prostitute. Our fault that he screwed a crack addict in his office under the guise of giving her spiritual guidance. Because we weren’t giving him enough money. He would say stuff like, ‘Your generosity gives me hope that I can be saved. Your offerings allow me to focus more on the righteous word of God so I can heal myself of my sins.’ Blah, blah, blah. Bullshit. Our offerings were bankrolling his sex addiction, as well as the chemical addictions of the prostitutes he was hiring.

  “Of course, a year or two later, it was all just wet, lather, rinse, and repeat when he got caught again. He even got caught with another man once, and don’t tell me that was the only time that ever happened—and then he’d unload another fake apology . . . and so on, and so on, and so on. And the congregation always forgave him. They were nothing but a bunch of followers, not a solid, honest-to-God leader among them. If the pastor told them they all needed to drink poisoned Kool-Aid, they would have.”

  She kicked back and propped her feet on the concrete ledge, crossing her ankles. “Every Sunday morning, I would tune out that asshole’s stupid sermon, the fake calls for compassion, and his guilt trips about how each of us needed to give all our money or risk the fires of hell. All to keep the philandering pastor and his drug-addicted wife fat with cash. They were all hypocrites, liars, and cheaters filled with unquenchable hate.” She glanced across the space between them, me
eting his gaze. “That’s why I want to get my little sister out of there. They’ve only grown more extreme since I escaped, and I worry about her.”

  He shifted his weight and crossed a heavy foot over his other knee. “How did you escape, if you don’t mind my asking.”

  She reclined her chair, getting good and comfortable. Ryker was a lot easier to have a serious conversation with than she thought he would be. She never talked to anyone about her childhood, and here she was spilling her guts to him as if she were in a confessional. Oh, the irony.

  “I knew when I was eight years old that I was getting out of there as soon as I got the chance. I spent every minute dreaming about leaving and making my own way. During those ungodly long sermons, I would close my eyes and see myself all grown up and living my own life. I was going to make something of myself. I just knew it.”

  And she had made something of herself. She’d made her dreams come true and now lived by her own rules.

  “Every Sunday after church, my family went to lunch with a few other families at this restaurant down the road. They were all stingy fake Christians and never left a decent tip—”

  “Of course not,” he added. “They’d already given all their money to that bastard pastor.”

  She nodded her approval and held up her fist. “Amen, brother.”

  He bumped her fist with his while taking a slug of beer.

  “So, yeah,” she continued, “I saw how the servers all glared at our table as the adults went on and on about ‘praise be to Jesus’ and couldn’t even offer up a thank-you to them for giving us their blood, sweat, and tears for a couple of hours. I always felt so bad for those servers.” She sadly shook her head, still seeing those overworked, underpaid, and underappreciated civil servants running back and forth, bringing out plates of food and endless drink refills. “But it was those same servers who inspired me to start my first company.”

  “How so?”

  She rested the bottom of her beer on her amply fed stomach. “First, you have to understand how incredibly bored I was during those lunches. I mean, it was a major yawn fest. I was the only kid among at least a dozen adults and a handful of teenagers who were just as fanatical as their parents.”