Lyric and Lingerie (The Fort Worth Wranglers Book 1) (12 page)

“What do you think the approved topics of conversation are for a coma victim?” She chewed on her top lip.

“How about prime numbers?” He held up his phone. “I’ve got the list right here in case we need it.” He sat back in his chair. “What do you think? Can he hear us?”

“The popular theory is that coma patients can hear and understand those around them. There is quite a bit of research. I should look it up. I wonder if it’s the sound of the voice or the actual words that a coma patient responds to?” Looking around for her purse, she realized that she’d left it in Cherry Cherry. “Can I borrow your iPhone?”

“Nope.” He shoved the phone in his front shorts pocket. “There is vital information on this phone, and I don’t want you snooping around, or worse, reconfiguring the damn thing.”

“That was one time in high school. Your laptop was a mess and only running at fifty percent capacity. I simply cleaned it up—”

“I lost half my chemistry notes.”

“No you didn’t. I put them in a file called ‘chemistry notes’ on your desktop. The reason you almost failed chem was that you didn’t take notes or study or read the notes I lent you. No matter what you think, charm and football won’t actually get you everything in life.”

He smiled his crooked smile. “Maybe not, but it got us in here, and Nurse Jeannie is bringing us dinner too. Admit it—I’m good.”

She raised a brow at him. “Do you want me to leave so you and your ego can be alone?”

“No, just try not to make too much noise and you won’t bother us.” He grinned.

“As long as it doesn’t smother my father, I’ll keep my voice down.” She glanced at his phone. “Cut the crap, Heath. We both know the reason you don’t want me to see your phone. I promise I won’t be offended by the overabundance of sexting and porn sites.” No one knew better than she how much Heath loved women … lots and lots of women. And she was totally fine with it. After all, she’d gotten over her crush on him a long time ago, and it wasn’t like she expected the most famous quarterback in the NFL to live like a monk.

So the only question was why was he being such a prude about it?

“That’s right, I’ve got an entire harem on speed dial.” Despite the flippant answer, he kept a tight grip on his phone.

She rolled her eyes. “Good for you. I swear, I won’t call any of them and try to seduce them away from you. I just want to look up some research on coma patients that I read a few months ago.”

He still looked reluctant, but seriously, what was he going to do? Deny her the chance to read about her father’s condition? Heath might be a man-whore, but his heart of gold had always been his best feature.

Sure enough, he handed her the phone. But she pretty much had to pry his fingers off the thing.
And
he kept a close eye on her as she brought up Google.

“Would you stop?” she demanded when she couldn’t handle being the object of his eagle-eyed stare for one second longer. “I’m staying clear of the contacts icon, and even I’m not gutsy enough to pull up your messages.” She shuddered. “All those misspelled words would drive me crazy.”

“What can I say? Sexting is a slippery slope. One minute you’re talking about touching your nipple, and the phone changes it to torching your Nippon. Or tickling your Newton. Or …”

“I get it,” she interrupted before he could get the ridiculous all ramped up again.

“I’m just saying. Sexting is for people with smaller fingers.” He spread his fingers out wide. “I’m cursed with clumsy hands that would really like to torch your Nippon.”

She shivered. “Trust me. I don’t want to know about your nipples or Nippons. And I promise not to pull up your pics either. I have the feeling I’d learn things about the birds and bees that would make seasoned sex workers blush.”

After all, knowing he had a sports hero’s sex life was one thing. Seeing it up close and personal was altogether another.

He tilted his head to the left like he was sifting through memories. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you blush.”

“Exactly.” Just as she pulled up Google, Heath got a text. He lunged at her like a hungry lion at a gazelle, all in an effort to get the phone before she could read message. She couldn’t help but catch a few words as they scrolled across the top of the screen. Words like
unrecoverable injury
,
contract, regret
—

That was about the time he ripped the phone from her hand … and her heart from her chest. Because while she’d made a number of jokes about his bionic knee since this trip began, especially in her own head, it had never occurred to her that he’d injured something modern medicine couldn’t fix. Had never occurred to her that Heath “Deuce” Montgomery might be going through a crisis of his own.

Oh God, what had she seen? Heath glanced down. The message was from Fort Worth Radiology. The only words he saw before he closed the message were—
never play football again
. Right now, he couldn’t stand for her to see him as broken. Not her. The rest of the world be damned, but he couldn’t face Lyric knowing the truth. That he was washed-up before he hit thirty-five.

But as her huge blue eyes locked onto his, his heart shriveled up to the size of a raisin. It was written all over her face that she had seen plenty.

“Am I supposed to forget what I just saw?” Her tone suggested that there wasn’t a chance in hell of that happening.

“Actually, yeah, that’s exactly what you should do.” He grabbed her father’s hand, trying his damnedest to ignore the sweat rolling down his spine as he asked, “How about those prime numbers?”

Lyric crossed her arms and just stared at him. Goddammit.

“I hear hospitals are full of bacteria. I’d sure love to hear some horrifying statistics of deaths caused by drug-resistant MRSA.” He smoothed down the hair at the back of his neck. Did his damnedest to keep his voice, and his hands, from shaking. “Or better yet, how many meteorites strike hospitals every day? What are the chances of me being hit by one on the way back to Cherry Cherry?”

She shot him a look that told him she wasn’t going to let him distract her, and that’s when he got desperate. Even went so far as to consider pulling up some of those sexting pictures she seemed so okay with and showing her things that would make
him
blush.

But before he could do any more than swipe his thumb across the screen, Lyric had picked up her chair and set it down beside his.

“We’ve known each other a long time, Heath. You just spent four hours getting me here so I can be with my father—after buying the pimp-mobile to end all pimp-mobiles and chewing me out of the tightest duct-tape dress known to man.”

He shrugged, even as he made sure he was looking anywhere but at her. “That’s what friends are for.”

“Exactly. You helped me over and over again today. Now I’d like to repay the kindness.” She was all business, no sympathy anywhere to be seen. He knew her well enough to know that she wasn’t coming from a place of pity, but that knowledge didn’t make him feel any less pitiful.

He glanced out the door at Jeannie, who was typing furiously on the desktop computer in front of her. The last thing he needed was for this to get out before his agent and the team had agreed how to handle it. Then he leaned into Lyric, his pulse hitting marathon runner speed as he forced himself to say out loud what he never had before. “My knee is better, but I’ll …” He swallowed the flood of spit in his mouth. “I’ll never play football again.”

Oh God. Hearing himself say it out loud made it real like nothing else could. Not the surgeries. Not the meetings with one specialist after another. Not even the phone calls and texts from his agent that he’d been dodging for days. Saying it out loud made him realize that the one thing he’d always been able to count on, the one thing that made him
him
… was gone. He had nothing, he
was
nothing, without football. Just that scared little boy dodging his father’s fists, waiting to be noticed as something more than a punching bag.

Lyric took her time digesting what he’d told her. Then she leaned back and crossed her mile-long legs in front of her. “Good.”

“Good?” he sputtered, certain he’d misheard her. He’d just spilled the greatest tragedy of his life, and all she could say was
good
?

“I heard that every game is like a car wreck to your body. Have you never heard of post-concussion syndrome?”

Of course he’d heard of it. He was a huge Will Smith fan. She didn’t seem to get the gravity of the situation. He. Couldn’t. Play. Football. EVER AGAIN.

“What if you were injured and couldn’t be an astronomer?” He had to make her understand that his life was over.

“What kind of injury are we talking about?” She looked intrigued. “To be honest, I can’t imagine any kind of injury that I would sustain that would end my career. Even if I lost both of my legs and my arms, with today’s advances in technology, I could still work. I guess maybe some sort of traumatic brain injury would prevent me from analyzing the necessary data, but because of the brain damage, I’m not sure I would know enough to miss it.”

He closed his eyes, shook his head. And tried not to be annoyed—and endeared—by the fact that Lyric was a scientist first and a human being second. Or maybe third.

If he’d wanted a shoulder to cry on or a cheering section for his pity party, he should have chosen someone else to hear his deepest, darkest secret. Somehow, that knowledge didn’t make him feel as bad as it could have.

“But this isn’t about me. It’s about you.” She looked like she was getting ready to take notes on some kind of mental notebook. “We just need to figure out what you should do now. So … besides football, what are you good at?”

He racked his brain and came up with absolutely nothing. Breast signing wasn’t actually an employable skill. Neither was drinking beer or charming women. Not that he really needed money, but he couldn’t just sit on his ass for the rest of his life. Sloth wasn’t really his style.

“I know …” Her eyes lit up. “You’re really good at sex.”

“I am?” He cleared his throat. “I mean, I am. Yes. But how do you know?’

Her face clouded for a second, but then she pushed the darkness away. “Everyone knows, Deuce. It’s not exactly a well-kept secret.”

It felt like there was more to the story, but before he could explore it, she’d already continued. “Which means … porn. You could totally get paid for having sex.” When Lyric was excited, her voice tended to carry … like all the way to Mexico.

Jeannie looked up.

He caught Jeannie’s eye and hunched his shoulders. “Tourette’s. It takes a little time for the meds to kick in.”

Slowly Jeannie nodded and went back to typing.

“Why don’t we talk about this later?” He wasn’t much of a praying man, but he was willing to hit God up right now if it meant Lyric would change the subject.

“What about Hugh Hefner?” Lyric’s eyes scrunched up in concentration.

“What about him?” He’d never met the man.

“He’s really old. You could take his place.” She was dead serious. “Someone has to be the next Hugh Hefner—why not you?”

She looked like she was actually giving him valuable vocational advice.

“I’m going to have to take a pass on that one. Silk pajamas give me a rash.” He laced his fingers through hers. She was taking his new life very seriously. It was sweet in a really odd, really Lyric kind of way.

“You’re making this difficult.” She sucked on her bottom lip in concentration.

“Now you know how I feel.” He appreciated her help, even if he didn’t want it.

She sat silently for a couple of minutes, and he swore he could practically see the wheels turning in that great big brain of hers.

Her eyes grew wide as she sat up. “What about your daddy’s ranch?”

“What about it?” He hadn’t given the land much of a thought in years.

Lyric glanced at her father, her voice breaking. “I know Daddy’s kept an eye on it for you all these years.”

And that was when it hit him. She needed to talk about something other than her father. Other than her fears. Which meant he was just going to have to bite the bullet. Because if she needed to focus on something else, he was happy to let her. Even if it sliced him into ribbons in the process.

“I’ve never really thought about ranching.” The land had been in his family for generations, but his father’s heart hadn’t been in it. Or it might have been in it, before his mother had ripped it out and run over it with her Caddy on the way out of town. After that, he’d started the tequila diet and forgotten all about how to be a rancher and a father.

“I haven’t been home in a while, do you still have cattle?” Lyric looked like she was making a mental list of things he needed to do.

“Yes, five hundred head … give or take.” He’d hired a caretaker who’d been seeing after the ranch ever since he got his signing bonus.

“Good. Then you should at least give it a try. I bet you’d be good at it.” She sounded like the decision had already been made.

“How do you know?” Sure, he’d sort of worked the ranch, but it wasn’t his passion. Not like football was.

“Because you’re good at everything you do.” Her confidence in him was humbling and—not going to lie—a huge ego boost. He felt like he could leap a tall building in a single bound.

He leaned into her, thinking that he’d plant one on her cheek. Her hair smelled nice … really nice.

“Did you just sniff my hair?” Confusion muddled her Wranglers blues.

So kissing her was probably out. “Umm, no?”

“Yes, you did.” Her eyes turned the size of Oreos. “Oh God, it smells bad … right?” She pulled a lock of her blonde hair to her nose. “It’s smells like Cherry Cherry.” She grabbed the neckline of her shirt and brought it to her nose. “Shit. All of me smells like Cherry Cherry. I hope the cops don’t show up here. The last thing I want right now is to be dragged to jail for excessive pot use. Especially since I’m sober.”

“Don’t worry, sweetheart.” The endearment slipped out, felt surprisingly right when he applied it to her. “I won’t let them take you.”

She leaned over and put her nose on his bicep. “How come you smell good and I smell like Neil Diamond’s sticky pleather hell beast?”