Unbreak My Heart (Rough Riders Legacy Book 1)

by Lorelei James

  I tuned out her words and focused on the cadence of her voice. With her distracted, I seized the chance to study the face I’d only seen in memories the past seven years. The sharp angle of her cheekbones. The smattering of freckles across her nose. The line of her stubborn jaw. The tiny divot in her chin. She bit her bottom lip. A pink tinge crept up her neck.

  Would she jerk away if I covered her restless hand with mine? I had this…urge to smooth the frown lines between her eyebrows with a soft kiss. I thought about all the affectionate things I’d seen couples doing without thinking, without knowing that guys like me watched with envy.

  I’d never had that with any woman. Never wanted it before.

  But I wanted it now with Sierra.

  “No, I understand. But Greg led me to believe we’d discuss this when he returned next week. I wasn’t aware you were looped in and to be honest, I do have an issue with it.” She scowled. “No. I do not need to bring up my concerns with the CEO, who is my father, but I’ll also remind you that he is your boss and he does have more important things to do than deal with the security breach in your department.” Pause. “You brought it to my attention. We’re dealing with it today. Call Mr. Avila’s office and set up a meeting. I’ll have my assistant follow up in thirty minutes.” She ended the call and tossed the phone aside.

  “Problems?”

  “Greg the misogynist dick-cunt gave his fucking junior assistant a task list before he slithered off on vacation. Not only am I not ever under the supervision of a junior assistant, this little fuckwad thinks because Greg constantly remarks about me ‘running’ to my father with problems that he can too. Junior asslicker isn’t supposed to have the information that he’s following up on anyway. But it is a breach of protocol and now I have to speak with Greg’s supervisor, who respects me even less than Greg.”

  “Dick-cunt?”

  She glanced up with a sheepish smile. “The term covers both sexes insult-wise, so I can assure myself I’m not sexist.”

  I laughed.

  She shoved her plate of half-eaten cheesecake aside and drained her Red Bull. “I have to return to the office.”

  “I figured. You don’t want a to-go box for that?”

  She shook her head. “I lost my appetite.”

  I refused to let her pay for lunch.

  She was on her phone almost the entire drive back. After pulling up to the main entrance, she turned toward me. “Any questions?”

  “I want to see you again.”

  “Any questions about Phoenix,” she reiterated.

  “I want to see you again in Phoenix someplace besides your office.”

  “That wasn’t a question. That was a demand.”

  I shrugged. “We still need to have that talk.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about, Boone.”

  Fuck. That. I leaned across the console. “It sucked hanging out with me today so much that you don’t want to do it again?”

  “This was about business. That’s the only reason I agreed to help you.”

  “Sierra, you are so full of shit. Be honest with me, for Christsake.” Like you’re being honest with her?

  She opened her mouth—I braced myself for her denial, but she exhaled loudly. “Okay. Maybe it didn’t suck hanging out with you. Even when you fucked around with my radio because you still have crap taste in music. But I have other things—business things—to focus on today, so can you cut me some slack, please?”

  “Sure.” Maybe she’d grant me a break when I told her the reason I was pushing so hard to talk was so I could tell her the truth about how long I’d be in Phoenix. “Just understand I’ll jerk on that slack line and haul you in if it goes on too long.” I reached for the one section of hair that always ended up stuck to the corner of her mouth. “Thanks for taking time for me today and giving me a glimpse into the world you live in now. I always knew you’d do great things, Sierra Daniels McKay.” I twisted her hair around my finger and let it uncoil. “Brains and beauty and ambition. Intimidating for a lowly army grunt like me.”

  Sierra’s gaze cut to my mouth. Her eyes heated. She parted her lips. All clear signs she wanted me to kiss her.

  I had the control of a fucking saint, not yanking her forward and planting my mouth on hers.

  A fucking saint.

  Then she head-butted me and said, “Get out of my car, grunt. I’ve got names to take and asses to kick.”

  “See you around, McKay.”

  After two spectacularly shitty days at work, it was Friday night and I deserved to get my drink on.

  With Greg’s absence this week I thought I’d have a reprieve from the corporate crap. No such luck. I wish I could’ve taped the conversations as proof that men were as catty and cutting as women. Worse maybe.

  At one point I had to bite my tongue to keep from demanding that Greg’s junior assistant, Peterson, drop his trousers so I could affirm that he did, indeed, have balls. I’d never dealt with such a whiner. He expected management to listen raptly as he relayed how his coworkers’ actions made him “feel.” Evidently his emotional outbursts didn’t make him feel like a whiny douchebag who needed his ass kicked. That’s when I’d drifted into my Fight Club fantasy and imagined choking him out with my knee in the spot where his balls used to be.

  The one upside to the week—besides seeing Boone twice—was using my frustration to move mountains. Literally. Lu had claimed a corner of the backyard as a place to showcase her landscaping design work. I agreed to buy the raw materials but we had to take delivery of the truckload of river rock on Wednesday. Between Lu’s classes and her job, she didn’t have time to fill a wheelbarrow, push it across the yard, dump it and repeat two hundred more times. Not really that many times, but it’d sure felt like it. Surprisingly, physical labor turned out to be awesome therapy for me—better than baking. Anger gone, muscles so sore I fell into a near coma after soaking in the hot tub. Plus, I had actually shocked my normally unflappable roommate. She’d expected to come home to a pile of muffins, cookies, pies, cheesecake and brownies—baking was my go-to stress reliever.

  But Lu hadn’t let me off the hook when I’d mentioned that spending time with Boone had been the only upside to my Wednesday.

  She’d reiterated her “bone Boone and bail” stance and then she’d gone to bed. Leaving me to wrestle with figuring out what he wanted to talk about.

  Why couldn’t Boone just say, “Hey McKay, let’s have a beer after you get off work, swap stories about what we’ve been doing the last seven years and I’ll tell you what’s on my mind?” I might’ve said what the hell. But the way he kept saying, “We have to talk,” I heard the dun dun dun of ominous music in my head and wanted to run the opposite direction.

  After this week’s sensitivity sessions, an even worse scenario tormented me: that somehow, Brooding Boone had become “in touch” with his emotions like that fucker Peterson. That Boone might expect me to finally “vocalize” my hurt and disappointment to him about his decision to go off in pursuit of his life goals and dreams.

  Screw that. Maybe we oughta discuss how much of a dickhead move it’d been when you’d given me, oh, half an hour notice before you skipped Wyoming for good.

  Because how I felt about it now? Immaterial. How I’d felt back then? Brokenhearted and pissed off. But that wasn’t news to either of us. So what purpose did talking about it now serve? None for me. Guilt was his issue; he could deal with it.

  Right now I didn’t want to think about anything but tracking down the keg. If I got slam-a-lammered, my cousins would let me crash with them. Apparently I amused them in that state, which was pretty rare for me.

  I parked down the street from the house my cousins lived in. They’d had a rough freshman year living in the dorms. Over the summer I’d debated on asking them to live with me; I had enough room and we all got along well. Then Ky’s cousin Mase Morrison had relocated to Phoenix to play hockey professionally for the Scorpions and he’d bought a McMansion with his signing b
onus. So the pro hockey player, the football player, the rodeoer and the chess clubber all coexisted happily in McJock Central. And seeing the clusters of people filling up the driveway and spilling out the front door…I couldn’t imagine living with this mess. I might love parties but it’d drive me batshit crazy to face the after party destruction the following day. I was about two steps away from having OCD because I couldn’t function without orderliness in my personal space.

  A few of the freshman chickies gave me the stink eye when I passed by. Especially when Tug Breckenridge shouted my name from across the yard and made a beeline toward me.

  The brute picked me up, tossed me over his shoulder and sprinted with me hanging upside down like a chunk of meat. Tug shouted, “Lookit I found.”

  I smacked Tug on the ass—not that he felt it. At six foot six and three hundred odd pounds the center for the ASU Sun Devils defined massive. Tug had a thing for me, which I didn’t exactly discourage. We flirted constantly but if I ever took him up on any of his outrageous suggestions, the man would blush as red as his uniform.

  With my hair tangled in my face, I couldn’t see, so I smacked Tug again harder. “Put me down, brute.”

  “Stop tickling me, Nevada.”

  Nevada. Since Ky lived with two other McKays and was considered “the” McKay with his teammates, the rest of us had nicknames. Hayden was “Vader”, Anton “Cowboy” and I’d been saddled with “Nevada.” At least a few guys on the football team knew what the Sierra Nevada Mountains were.

  Kyler said, “Put her down, Tug.”

  “Man. Do I have to? She’s warm and soft and smells good.” Tug sighed and lowered me to my feet. He even brushed my hair out of my face; those gigantic mitts of his were surprisingly gentle. He grinned at me. “There’s the gorgeous face I was missing. Girl, where you been?”

  “Out of town, sick, and trying to catch up.”

  Hearing the word sick, Tug jumped back. “Whoa. Sick? Contagious kind of sick?”

  “Not anymore.” I slowly sauntered forward. “Unless you wanna swap spit or exchange other bodily fluids.”

  Just as I suspected, big, tough Tug…stammered and took off.

  Behind me, a deep, sexy voice said, “I’ll test the bodily fluid exchange theory any time you want…Nevada.”

  I whirled around and was face-to-face with Boone.

  My heart leapt and my pulse rate quadrupled.

  What was he doing at a college party?

  What are you doing here? You’ve been out of college for two years.

  Goddammit.

  Boone had his sexy brooding face on. “Where’d your boyfriend lumber off to?”

  The he’s not my boyfriend denial died on my lips. Instead I tossed out, “Probably to get me a beer.”

  More of his dark-eyed stare.

  “I wasn’t expecting to see you here.”

  “Wish I could say the same.” He frowned at whatever he saw happening behind me. “This reminds me of that party we were at in high school. You remember.”

  “I try not to think about that party, for so many reasons.”

  Boone’s focus returned to my face. “I see it still doesn’t bug you to have hair stuck to your mouth.” He swept his thumb across the corner of my lips, loosening a few strands.

  My lungs seized up. Boone used to do that all the time, usually while complaining that my spit had glue-like properties. That simple touch had seemed so intimate back then. It still did.

  Then his questioning eyes were back on mine.

  “What?”

  “Why is it I get this close to you and I forget what the hell I wanted to say? Oh right, because you’re usually chewing my ass about something I already said or did wrong.”

  I smiled. “You usually deserve it.”

  He smiled back and I had that cartwheeling sensation again.

  “Maybe you’ll get lucky and meet someone who doesn’t annoy you like I do.”

  “You don’t annoy me, Sierra. You frustrate me, but that’s another conversation.”

  Not going there. “Have you met many people?”

  “This chick asked if I was in her art history class. I said no and she still hung around.”

  Well yeah, have you looked in the mirror lately? “Some girls only come to these parties to bang a football player. And before you piss me off, no, that’s not the reason I went to jock parties.”

  “Tug is the exception?”

  “Tug and I are just friends. I let him go He-Man on me because he’s shy around women and our back-and-forth bullshitting builds his confidence. The rest of the guys on the team are cocky. That’s probably what Miss Art History recognized in you; that cockiness.”

  His shrug said: it is what it is.

  Props to him for not denying it.

  “I’m surprised they’re partying tonight when they have a game tomorrow.”

  “None of the starters are drinking booze.” I pointed out a dozen team members in our vicinity. “Water or energy drinks. Ky kicks them out early and he’s in bed before midnight.” When I noticed Boone looking at me oddly, I said, “What?”

  “I said it before but I’ll say it again. It’s weird to think you’re hanging out with Kyler. He used to bug the crap out of you on the bus. You’d hide from him in the back seat, remember?”

  Wrong. I sat in the far back because that’s where Boone always sat. “There’s nothing more obnoxious than a twelve-year-old boy, so anything is an improvement.”

  He grinned. “Why didn’t we throttle the McKay-kateers every day when we had the chance?”

  “We?” I poked him in the chest. “You stopped riding the bus. I still had to deal with them.”

  “I would’ve preferred being on the bus to working two jobs.”

  Hayden caught my eye and started to jog over.

  “Speaking of the McKay-kateers…”

  Hayden draped his arm across my shoulder for a one-armed hug. “S’up?” He saw both my hands were empty. “You’re not drinking tonight?”

  “I’ve yet to reach the keg and I’m in dire need of a beer.”

  “I’ll grab you one,” Boone said, and he was gone.

  Hayden caught me watching Boone walk away. I bristled. “What?”

  “You two are acting awfully cozy.”

  “Cozy is not the word that comes to mind with Boone. He’s as cozy as a grenade launcher.”

  “He said the same thing about you.” Hayden stepped in front of me. “Just watch yourself with him, okay?”

  “Sex it and exit” Hayden had the balls to issue me a warning? Asshat.

  Formerly the shiest of the McKay-kateers, the lone blond of the trio had shot up and bulked out. Now a super-hottie with charisma and brains galore, he’d made a name for himself as the sweet talker who could charm any woman into his bed.

  “Aw, look at you, manwhore, concerned for my virtue.” I patted Hayden on the cheek. “Don’t worry that pretty head of yours, brainiac. The only thing I’m making with Boone is conversation.”

  He laughed. “Right. I give it a week before you getcha some of that, ’cause he is as hot for you as you’re pretending not to be for him. Just keep it casual, true?”

  “Whatever.”

  “You coming to the game tomorrow?”

  “Have I missed a home game yet this season?” I’d become a huge football fan over the years. Watching my talented cousin killing it on the field just kicked up my excitement level.

  “No, football fanatic.” He punched me in the arm. “I can’t wait to see how bloodthirsty you get at Mase’s hockey games this year.”

  Since the Scorpions were consistently at the bottom of their division, we scored great season tickets for fairly cheap. Mase had blushed when I showed him the Scorpions jersey I’d bought sporting Morrison on the back and asked him to sign it.

  “There’s an extra ticket floating around to tomorrow’s game. You should invite Lu.”

  “Lu has to work.” I returned his punch to the arm. It was our thi
ng from our school bus days. “And dude, stop bird-dogging my roomie. She will chew you up and spit you out.”

  “Or she might prefer a taste of Wyoming sage in her man-meat.” He smirked. “Anyway, I came over to tell you it’s Meat-topia weekend.”

  “It is? Good thing I didn’t get tickets to Sunday night’s game.”

  “Don’t bring that up with Kyler. His ticket deal fell through.” Hayden frowned. “It’s killing him his beloved Broncos are in town and he can’t be in the stadium.”

  “Ky is the ASU quarterback! Why isn’t he just given tickets to every damn event?” I huffed. “That is so not fair. Sun Devils stadium is his home stadium. He plays on that field. He deserves—”

  “Simmer down, big cuz.”

  Boone returned with the beer before I could retort. His gaze winged between me and Hayden. “Is everything all right?”

  “Sierra just gets het up when it comes to family.” Hayden squeezed my shoulder in a half-hug. “That’s why she needs a beer.” He plucked it from Boone’s hand and passed it over to me.

  “That was fast,” I said to Boone.

  “I told Tug it was for you.” He sipped his beer. “Both cups actually. Then he said he admired ‘a chick who could drink like she had a dick.’”

  “Tug’s been influenced by Lex,” Hayden complained. Then he looked at me. “Have you talked to Lex tonight?”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t know he was here.”

  “I saw him inside. He asked about you.”

  What was Hayden doing? Trying to piss me off and warn Boone away?

  The exact opposite happened.

  Boone growled, “Who the fuck is Lex? Another football player who’s so freakin’ shy with all the grid-bunnies that he needs your special help too?”

  “And…I’m done here. I’ll find people to talk to who aren’t judgmental dickheads.”

  My first thought as I walked away? Don’t stop until you get to your car.