Tempting in Texas

by Delores Fossen

  Identical to the clothes he was wearing now.

  “Hayes?” Shaw questioned, also moving in closer for a look. “Hell,” he added when he verified that was actually his soon-to-be brother-in-law. “What happened to you?”

  “An accident of sorts,” he said while Mandy started in on that acid cleaning. Hayes did some wincing, too. “Say, don’t tell Sunny and my other sisters about this. I don’t want Sunny upset.”

  Since he’d named that specific sister, it meant that Hayes knew Sunny was pregnant. No surprise there. Even though Hayes rarely saw his sisters, their granny Em kept the family filled in on the news. Cait knew this because she was close friends with all of Hayes’s triplet sisters. That meant she also knew that Sunny was trying to keep her pregnancy hush-hush until after the wedding.

  “There’s no reason for my sisters to come running here to the hospital,” Hayes added.

  “I can relate,” Cait muttered, giving Shaw a glance. “But trust me, they’ll find out if they haven’t already. In between hacking up a lung, Anita Parker is sitting over there and texting as fast as her bony fingers can poke at letters.”

  She tipped her head to the woman who was likely sending out some kind of global information beam to announce that Heartthrob Hayes was back in town and that he was banged up to heck and back.

  “I won’t call Sunny or your sisters, yet,” Shaw assured him. “But Cait’s right. They’ll find out. What do you mean you were in an accident of sorts?” Shaw tacked onto that without pausing.

  Cait had been about to ask him that very question, along with others that she might need to include in a police report. She’d planned on waiting on that, though, until they had at least found out if he was all right.

  “I was on my motorcycle and someone ran me off the road,” Hayes said in that same lazy drawl that he’d used to greet her.

  Of course, Hayes had a habit of drawling that made the words seem like testosterone-drenched foreplay. She wasn’t alone in thinking this, either, and she’d read plenty of the social media posts from other women to prove it.

  “Someone ran you off the road?” Cait repeated. No drawl for her. Her cop’s voice kicked in.

  He attempted a shrug and ended up wincing instead. “More or less. Less,” he amended when his bloody forehead bunched up in thought. “I was on that curvy stretch of road just about a mile outside of town, and a car going way too fast came up behind me. It was going to hit me, so I tried to get off the road, but I ended up in the ditch.”

  Cait’s mouth dropped open. “And the driver just left you there, wounded and bleeding?”

  “I’m not sure he or she actually saw me,” Hayes answered.

  Cait and Shaw both muttered some profanity. “How’d you get to the hospital?” Shaw asked.

  “I dragged my motorcycle out of the ditch and rode it here.”

  That earned him stares from Shaw, Cait and Mandy. But Shaw stopped his staring long enough to give her a “big brother” glance to remind her that she’d done something similar by driving herself to the hospital. The difference was her injuries were minor compared to Hayes’s.

  “The front end of my motorcycle’s messed up,” Hayes added, shaking his head. “I’ll need to have it fixed.”

  “Your body needs repairs, too,” Mandy pointed out.

  Mandy was in nurse mode, but Cait also saw something else. The fawning. A flushed face, some lip nibbling, eyelash fluttering and the potential for drooling. It was something that happened a lot whenever Hayes was around. Not just in Lone Star Ridge, either. Cait had seen tabloid photos of fawning fans.

  “Uh, how long are you going to be back in town?” Mandy asked, eyelashes still fluttering, and since Cait didn’t think the woman was fending off gnats or gummed-up mascara, the fawning had moved to flirting. That question sounded like the start of Hey, maybe we can go for a drink or something? Emphasis on the or something.

  Cait narrowed her own unfluttering eyes to let the nurse know she wasn’t acting very professional.

  “I’m not sure how long I’ll be here,” Hayes answered almost idly. He was flexing his hand and had therefore missed the visual cues of Mandy’s attempted come-on.

  Mandy cleared her throat. “Uh, I’ll get you set up with X-rays,” she said, and abracadabra, she became the nurse again. “And I’ll call the doctor—”

  The loud wail stopped the reformed Mandy from continuing and had all four of them turning toward the ER doors. A tall blonde in a very short blue dress came rushing in. Cait was reasonably sure she’d never seen her before. She certainly wasn’t from around Lone Star Ridge, but judging from the tabloid pictures Cait had seen of Hayes, the woman was very much his type. Boobs galore, mile-long legs and the kind of face that you could only get from many hours of cosmetic surgery followed by more hours of pampering.

  Cait hated her on sight.

  And she hated that she hated her. Crap. She clearly had to work on more white noising when it came to Hayes.

  “Is he dead?” the blonde howled. “Oh, God. I saw his wrecked motorcycle outside. Is he dead?”

  Hayes groaned, shook his head. “Shit.”

  The woman’s gaze zoomed right in on Hayes, and she sprinted toward them. “Oh, thank the sweet baby Moses in a basket. You’re alive.”

  “I take it you know her?” Cait asked him.

  “Of course Hayes knows me,” the blonde answered before Hayes could speak. She hurried to him and threw her arms around him. “I’m Shayla Weston, the love of his life.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  HAYES COULD THINK of many things to describe Shayla Weston. But love of his life sure as hell wasn’t one of them.

  He didn’t like putting labels on people, but if he had to come up with one for Shayla, then dingbat stalker was a pretty close fit. Unfortunately, this particular dingbat had way too much time and money on her hands. A bad combination when she had her attention homed in on him.

  “Uh?” Cait said, and it seemed to Hayes that it’d taken some mustering for her to come up with just that one questioning sound.

  Hayes first peeled Shayla off him, and despite the jabs of pain it caused him physically, it was worth it to move her back so that she was no longer plastered against him. He cut off what would have no doubt been a loud sob and another dive toward him by shaking his head and holding out his hand in a stop gesture. The fact that his hand was coated with blood hopefully added a sinister element to it.

  “Shayla mistakenly believes we’re soul mates,” Hayes explained to Cait, knowing his truthful remark would elicit a whine of protest from Shayla.

  It did.

  “Hayes is my soul mate,” she insisted. “I’ve had more than a dozen psychics and even a monk tell me that.”

  Hayes figured the monk was a dingbat, too, and the psychics, well, they had told Shayla what she’d paid them to tell her.

  “But I knew we were soul mates before that,” Shayla went on. “I knew from the first time I watched you on TV, and you said Climb on, bitch, and kiss me.” She sighed and pressed her hand to her heart as if to steady it.

  “Shayla, I didn’t say those words to you,” Hayes grumbled, trying to keep his voice level. That was always hard to do with her. “They’re written in a script, and I say them because that’s what I’m paid to do.” And he was wasting his breath again. So he narrowed in on the gist of the matter. “Remember, I have a restraining order against you, so you shouldn’t be here.”

  “But I have to be here,” Shayla protested. “I might have nearly killed you.”

  Well, that last part was news to Hayes, but when he gave it some thought, things got a whole lot clearer. “You were in the car that caused me to run off the road?” he asked.

  Shayla’s eyes widened and filled with tears. Hell, not tears. It was hard to stop her once she got started. “I didn’t know,” she insisted. “I mean, I was
driving on the road that leads to Lone Star Ridge.”

  “A white car?” he pressed.

  Shayla nodded, cried. “When I was on one of the curves, I thought maybe I heard something like a thud, but I had the volume on the music turned up high, so I figured it was part of the song. But then I spotted your banged-up motorcycle in the parking lot of the hospital, and I came in to check if you were here.” She motioned toward his bloody face, and, yeah, the tears started dripping down her cheeks. “Am I responsible for this?”

  Hayes didn’t have positive proof that she’d been the one behind the wheel, but right now Shayla was the most likely candidate. Apparently, Cait thought so, too, because the look she gave Shayla was all cop.

  “I’m Deputy Cait Jameson. You didn’t see Hayes on his motorcycle when you were driving?” Cait asked, and she tapped the badge that she had clipped to her belt.

  The badge tap only caused Shayla to wail louder, cry harder and start shaking her head. “I was freshening up my makeup. I wanted to look nice when I saw Hayes, so I might not have been paying enough attention to the road.”

  Clearly, Shayla had missed some steps here. Not with the makeup. That was applied with abundance as usual. But Shayla had whizzed over the fact that she shouldn’t have been anywhere near him.

  Hayes didn’t want to know how she’d found out his location, either, but it was possible she had hacked into his computer again. Also possible that she had just followed him to the airport where he’d boarded a friend’s private plane with his motorcycle. From there, she could have bribed someone in the airport and then followed him in her own private plane. Or rather the one that belonged to her mother. It was that whole “too much time and too much money” thing that’d brought her here.

  “There’s really a restraining order?” Cait asked him. She sounded like a cop, too. A pissed-off one. But that was the norm. Cait was usually riled or a smart-ass whenever she was around him.

  “There’s a restraining order,” Hayes verified just as Shayla insisted, “It was all a misunderstanding.” She would have tried to sidle up to him again if Cait hadn’t interceded.

  “Don’t touch him,” Cait warned the woman, and she took hold of Shayla’s arm.

  Hayes didn’t miss the grimace of pain that Cait made, and he spotted the fresh stitches on her arm. And her ripped-off shirtsleeve. Obviously, he wasn’t the only one who’d had a run-in with things that could gouge the skin and tear the clothes. Other than that, though, Cait looked pretty much the same as the last time he’d seen her about eleven years ago.

  When she’d turned him down after he had asked her on a date.

  Yep. Turned him down without so much as blinking an eye.

  Hayes wanted to believe that he hadn’t been trying hard to convince her to have dinner with him. Dinner that he’d thought might lead to sex. But he had indeed been trying. Heck, he had doled out a couple of gallons of charm, and it hadn’t affected her one little bit. He was still trying to figure out (a) why she’d done that and (b) why it still mattered to him.

  Tonight, her long dark brown hair was pulled up into a ponytail, and she had on only a light smattering of makeup. The jeans and plain blue shirt she was wearing seemed more suited for doing ranch work than cop stuff. Over the years, he’d heard some say she was on the plain side, but there was no way she could ever be plain. Not with that interesting face.

  “I’ll walk your friend here up the street to the police station,” Cait said to Hayes. “I’ll hold her on a possible violation of a restraining order and reckless driving. Depending on your statement, there could be other charges.”

  “The police station?” Shayla howled. “You’re arresting me for trying to be with the man I love?”

  “You bet your Sunday britches I am,” Cait said without hesitation. “I’m not being overly judgy when I say that love doesn’t give you the right to violate a restraining order and break the law.”

  “But I had to come,” Shayla insisted. “Hayes is grieving, and he needs me.”

  He was indeed grieving, but in no way could Shayla help with that. And just by bringing it up, she was actually making things worse. Hayes didn’t want Cait or anyone else asking him about that.

  “Is she talking about your girlfriend?” the nurse asked. “The one who died a couple of months ago?” Apparently, the nurse Mandy Culpepper read the tabloids.

  “His ex-girlfriend,” Shayla promptly provided, and, yeah, she added some territorial snark to it through her continued sobs. “Hayes hadn’t been with Ivy Malloy in years.”

  Hayes tried to let the conversation pass right over him. Tried not to think about it at all. He needed some steel to deal with the memories of Ivy, and the pain from his injuries wasn’t going to let him pull up much steel right now.

  When Shayla tried to latch on to Hayes again, Cait huffed and led her away from the examining table and a few yards farther into the ER waiting room.

  “Sit,” Cait ordered, putting Shayla in a chair, “and if you try to resist or run, I’ll restrain you.”

  Shayla’s chin came up. “You don’t have handcuffs,” she pointed out in a whiny protest. “Or a gun. Are you even a real cop? Where did you get that badge? It could be fake. It looks fake,” she amended, her questions and comments spewing together in a babble fest.

  Again, no hesitation from Cait. “Yes, I’m a real cop, and I got the badge from the badge store. I have a gun secured in the locked glove compartment of my SUV, but I don’t need it right now because I have three older brothers who taught me how to kick butt. As for restraints, I’m sure I can find some duct tape around here that I can use to keep you in that chair. Stay put,” Cait added as a last warning before she made her way back to Hayes.

  Shaw took up guard duty, moving closer to Shayla, but Cait continued to make glances back at her soon-to-be prisoner. The nurse stepped aside, too, and he heard her contacting the doctor on call.

  “Is that woman anywhere near the ballpark of being sane?” Cait asked Hayes as she tipped her head to Shayla.

  “No.” But that was a knee-jerk reaction. Legally, Shayla was sane. She probably was, anyway. “She really does believe in psychics and such and is convinced we’re soul mates and should be together. That happens sometimes, but Shayla’s taken that to a whole new level.”

  “That happens sometimes?” Cait repeated. “You get a lot of women who think you’re their soul mate?”

  If he answered honestly and said yes, it would make him sound cocky. Or a magnet for weirdos. Which he often was. Still, if he complained, it made him sound like a spoiled Hollywood dick who didn’t appreciate that he got paid obscene amounts of money for pretending to be someone he wasn’t.

  So, yes, women wanted him, and men—well, some men, anyway—wanted to be a motorcycle-riding ballbuster like the one he played in Outlaw Rebels. All that adoration and shit came with a price tag, and sometimes it caused situations like Shayla.

  “Fan is sometimes short for fanatic,” Hayes settled for saying. “Usually, though, those fanatics don’t follow me over a thousand miles and cause me to wreck my Harley.”

  Hayes went to reach in his pocket, but the pain stopped him cold. Hell, his shoulder throbbed like a bad tooth, and the pain radiated all the way down to his fingertips.

  “I have the contact info for her mother on my phone,” Hayes explained to Cait. He kept his voice low so that Shayla and anyone else in the waiting area wouldn’t be able to hear. “If you call her, she’ll make arrangements to come and get her. Her mom will put her back in therapy.”

  Hayes angled his hip toward Cait. Again, more pain, and he was betting most of his right thigh and ass cheek were one giant bruise. He motioned for her to take out his phone.

  Cait reached right in. Then she froze. Probably because her seeking hand came very close to his crotch. He was pretty sure she gave his dick an unintentional finger graze.
r />   One that his dick definitely noticed.

  He might have been all beat to hell and back, but he apparently wasn’t hurting enough to stop lust from kicking in. Lust that he should in no way be feeling for Cait Jameson, who didn’t want him anywhere on or near her radar.

  Cait whipped out his phone from his pocket and handed it to him so he could pull up Shayla’s mom’s number. “Frances Weston. She’s sane, mostly. And if she gives you any lip about her daughter, just tell her that you think Shayla and I are hooking up. That’ll get Frances running here to stop it. She definitely doesn’t want her little girl with the likes of me.”

  “The likes of you,” Cait muttered.

  Hayes wasn’t sure if that was a question or not, but he gave Cait an answer anyway. “An actor with nudity credits. Of course, if the nudity had been in an art film, that’d be okay with her. And that’s a long-winded way of saying she’s a snob who wants only snob-approved men who keep their asses covered.”

  Crap, could he possibly break Shayla’s babbling record? Apparently so. But he was nervous, and that didn’t happen to him very often. There was just something about Cait that made him want to try.

  Cait tore her gaze from him, perhaps because she realized he’d finally finished, and used the camera on her phone to take a picture of the woman’s contact info. “I’ll need you to come to the police station when you can,” Cait instructed before she handed him back his phone.

  She turned to Mandy, who’d finished her call to the doctor and was now assembling some supplies. Hayes recognized the tools of the trade for cleaning and giving stitches. Apparently, he was in for another round of pain.

  “Any idea just how bad Hayes is hurt?” Cait asked the nurse.

  Mandy shook her head. “Sorry, but I can’t get into patient stuff.”

  Cait rolled her eyes. “This isn’t gossip. His condition plays into what kind of initial charges I dole out to his soul mate.” She gave said soul mate a quick glance to make sure she was staying put. She was.