Unbreak My Heart (Rough Riders Legacy Book 1)

by Lorelei James

  My phone buzzed with a text from my younger sister.

  Oakley: I’m bored. Tell me you’re doing something fun.

  I set my beer on the ground. I sucked at texting and had to totally focus to do it.

  Me: At a party.

  Oakley: Jealous!

  Me: Don’t be. It sucks. I want to leave. Why r u bored?

  Oakley: I’m babysitting. The kid crashed and there’s nothing to do in this house.

  Me: Homework?

  Oakley: Oops. I forgot to bring it but I’m not failing any classes. Yet.

  I snorted. My sister had been born with one of those brains that found anything science related fascinating and easy to understand.

  Me: U done with college apps?

  Oakley: My counselor has been really cool, so yeah. She’s making me apply everywhere.

  I had a brief moment of panic. Applying for college wasn’t free. How was she paying for it?

  Oakley: STOP freaking out about where I’m getting the money to apply.

  I laughed. Brat knew me so well.

  Oakley: As much as I hate being a charity case, most admissions programs are waiving the fees, due to my “financial hardship and living in a rural area” reality.

  Me: Did u hear my huge sigh of relief all the way in Montana?

  Oakley: Yeah. It smelled like beer and farts.

  Me: Brat. Later, Twig.

  Oakley: Same to you, Coon.

  “Must’ve been a fascinating conversation,” Sierra said.

  I glanced up and said, “What?”

  She pointed at the ground. “Your beer tipped over and you didn’t even notice.”

  “It didn’t tip over. I kicked it over because it tasted like shit.”

  “Are you a beer snob now, West?”

  “When it comes to cheap, warm beer? Yep.”

  “Then I won’t offer to get you another.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest. “Couldn’t find anyone who wasn’t a judgmental dickhead?”

  “It’s better to stick with the dickhead you know, so I’m back with you.”

  “I should be offended by that.”

  “And yet…you’re not.” Sierra sipped her beer and a foam mustache clung to her upper lip.

  Jesus. I wanted to swipe my tongue over it. Lick and suck and taste her mouth for hours. When our eyes met again I swear to fucking god she was testing my control by just leaving it like that.

  “What?” she asked innocently.

  “So this Lex guy is a dickhead?”

  “No. He’s a friend of Hayden’s I’ve been trying to hook—”

  “I do not want to hear about your hookups, Sierra,” I snarled.

  She laughed. And kept laughing.

  I leaned in and squinted at her. “Are you high?”

  “What? I’d have to be high to find something you say funny? Piss off. Getting high is for squares.”

  “You are such a dork, McKay. Who even says squares anymore?”

  “My dad. His vernacular is da bomb. He’s totally on fleek.”

  I laughed. I wanted to grab her and get right in her face and tell her how goddamned much I missed this. This part had always been so easy with her. Didn’t she remember?

  “Anyway, growly caveman, if you would’ve let me finish instead of cutting me off, I could’ve told you that Lex has applied for an internship at DDG next semester. I’ve been trying to set up a meeting between him and Marty in personnel for two weeks. Hookup was a bad word choice.” Sierra took another drink and licked her lips. “Not that it matters. Given the intense way you were texting, I figured you were making hookup plans of your own anyway.”

  So she wouldn’t come right out and ask who I’d been texting, but she clearly wanted to know. “Sierra. I’m not interested in just a hookup while I’m in Phoenix.”

  The way her gorgeous eyes widened and then went soft…please let that mean she read between the lines since I was still feeling my way around this thing with her.

  Still lying about it you mean.

  “I was texting my sister, Oakley.”

  “Oh. How old is she now?”

  “Sixteen.” I clicked on the photos icon and scrolled until I found the one I’d taken last month. I held the phone out to her. “During my stint in Wyoming I drove up to Bozeman. I almost didn’t recognize her, it’d been so long since I’d seen her in person.”

  “She’s really pretty. She looks nothing like you.” Sierra’s startled gaze met mine. “That came out wrong. I meant—”

  “I know what you meant.” I pocketed my phone after she handed it over.

  “What’s your brother doing? Crockett, right?”

  Speaking of high…our mother had to be smoking a big bowl when she picked our names. “He goes by Rock. He’s fifteen. Plans on joining the marines. For Rock I suspect it’s boot camp or jail.”

  Sierra shifted her stance. “Was boot camp as horrible as the movies and TV make it out to be?”

  “The physical challenges weren’t as bad as the written tests. I sweated bullets about my instructors finding out I’m dyslexic, since there’s no special dispensation for soldiers with a handicap. I either had to keep up or they’d discharge me. It’s another ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy.” Until they wanted to exploit you as a success story—even when they had nothing to do with your success. My only option was to spend a shit ton of money on tutors.

  She blinked at me. “Whoa. Back up. I didn’t know you were dyslexic. You told me you had learning issues but I thought that was when you were younger.”

  “The dyslexia was undiagnosed until I started high school, so that’s why it took me so much longer to catch on to reading and learning when I was a kid.”

  “We spent weeks going over the boxes of family paperwork for my school project. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  I rubbed the back of my neck. “Gee, Sierra, I don’t know why I didn’t want to share another embarrassing thing about myself.”

  She got in my face. “I wouldn’t have cared. And I wouldn’t have blabbed to anyone either. It sucks that you didn’t trust me. But then again, you didn’t need my empathy weighing you down, did you?”

  We stared at each other.

  Then Sierra realized we were chest to chest and retreated.

  I snagged her hand before she could get too far. “Can we just keep talking like this?”

  Her eyes searched mine. “Why do you keep hinting that there’s some big thing we need to talk about?”

  Here was my chance. My heart rate jumped two dozen points and my hand turned clammy. Before I opened my mouth, I heard footsteps on the rocks behind us.

  “Nurse West, you got a sec?” Kyler asked as he approached us.

  Never failed. “What’s up?”

  “Some drunk chick started to fall out of her chair on the patio and Hayden tried to catch her. He ended up twisting his ankle and smacked his face into the concrete. He refuses to go to the hospital. Can you take a look at him?”

  “Typical stubborn McKay,” I muttered. “Where is he?”

  “Upstairs.” Ky threw a look over his shoulder. “Tug has already started kicking everyone out.”

  As soon as I started toward the patio door, Sierra fell into step beside me.

  “How often are you asked to administer first aid at a party?”

  “Damn near every one of them I’m at.”

  “I’m surprised you still go to them.”

  “And miss the chance to stitch up drunk guys after a fist fight or have a random chick barf on my shoes?” I said dryly. “Woman, that’s what I live for.”

  She snickered.

  “You’re out of college, McKay. Why do you keep partying with the underclassman?”

  “I graduated early so I still know people in school. So far this year I’ve just been to parties here. It’s weird. Maybe I have outgrown them.”

  People still milled around in the house. As I started up the turn in the stairs, I saw we had rubber-neckers trailin
g behind us.

  I found Hayden stretched out on the floor in the hallway in front of his room with a bag of frozen tater tots pressed to his face. “So chivalry ain’t dead after all, huh?”

  “Fuck off.”

  “I’ll take a look at your face first.” I stepped over Hayden and lowered to my knees to get closer. “Where’d you hit?”

  “The ground.”

  “No, what part of your face hit?”

  Hayden lifted the bag of frozen potatoes.

  I hissed in a breath. An angry-looking cement burn scraped his cheek but hadn’t started weeping fluid yet. A bruise had already welled up on his cheekbone beneath the scrape. I didn’t see that any part of his face had been split open, so there wasn’t any blood. “Does your head hurt?”

  “Sudden, massive headache.”

  “Over-the-counter pain meds will help. You can take eight hundred milligrams of Tylenol or Advil every six hours. Keep icing it. But if the swelling increases? Go to a clinic.”

  “Fine.”

  I slid over and picked up his foot. “Let me know if it hurts when I start poking around.”

  “You just want to see if I scream like a girl,” he retorted.

  “Dude. I already know that you scream like a girl.”

  His lips twitched. “Asshole.”

  I slipped my hand beneath his calf. The area around his ankle was swollen. “Did you hop or hobble into the house?”

  “Hopped up the stairs, tried to hobble down the hallway and when that hurt, I crawled.”

  “Did you feel anything pop?”

  “No.”

  “When you put weight on it, did you feel anything grinding?”

  “No.”

  “Ooh, are you a doctor?”

  I glanced up to see a brunette with an enormous rack dropping to her knees across from me.

  “No, I’m not,” Hayden drawled, “but if you wanna play doctor, hot stuff, I’m game.”

  “Not you,” she said, wrinkling her pert nose. “Him.” She batted her eyelashes at me. “I just love doctors.”

  I’ll bet you do.

  “And you’re hot. Like really hot. And young too,” she said in whispered wonder, leaning over Hayden’s head.

  “You’ll have to move back,” I said to her. “You’re blocking the light.”

  “No problem, Doctor.”

  Curling my fingers over Hayden’s toes, I gently pushed until his foot was at a right angle. “Any pain with that movement?”

  “Some. Not bad though.”

  When I pushed the foot up more, Hayden hissed in a breath. Same reaction when I shifted his foot side to side.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Perky Tits asked. “Does he need an operation?”

  “He just needs to rest and let the swelling go down.”

  “Maybe your helpful assistant oughta check the swelling in my groin,” Hayden suggested.

  Jesus, Hayden, really?

  Perky Tits looked confused.

  “What’s the diagnosis?” Hayden demanded.

  “It’s sprained. Elevate it and ice it fifteen minutes every hour is about all you can do. If the swelling isn’t down by Monday, go in for X-rays to make sure it’s nothing more serious.”

  I stood and so did the brunette. I saw Sierra leaning against the wall, her lips curled into a smirk.

  “Is there anything I can help you with, Doctor? Like shouldn’t we be in bed?”

  “We?”

  “Oops.” She giggled. “I meant he. Shouldn’t we get him in bed?”

  “He crawled this far, he can crawl the rest of the way.”

  “Oh. Okay.” Then she beamed a smile at me. “Where’s your office? I’m between doctors right now.”

  No, you’d like to be underneath a doctor right now. “Look, I’m not a doctor. I’m a nurse.”

  Another confused look. Then she tittered. “Oh, you are a funny one.”

  “What’s funny about that?”

  “Everyone knows that men can’t be nurses. That’s a woman’s job.”

  Be a waste of breath to try and set this bimbo straight, but I’d try. “I am a nurse. An army nurse, actually.”

  Her lips formed a pout. “If you weren’t taking new patients, you could’ve just said so,” she said with a girlish pout.

  Sierra sidled up to her. “Okay, Donna Reed. The 1950s are calling. Why don’t you toddle on back there?”

  Perky Tits spun around to face her. “My name is not Donna.” She stomped off in a huff.

  “Dammit, Boone. Why didn’t you tell her the best way to help you would be to take care of me? Letting me rest my weary, injured face in the soft pillows of her chest?” Hayden said with a whine.

  “For shame, Hayden McKay,” Sierra said on a mock gasp of outrage. “You’d take advantage of her giving nature?”

  “I would’ve given her back plenty, trust me. Now I’ll be dreaming about those tits, crying in my pillow that they’re forever lost to me.”

  “Poor baby.”

  Hayden crawled the last ten feet to his room.

  The hallway had cleared out, leaving Sierra on one side and me on the other.

  “You had quite the little fan group there, Doctor.”

  I scowled. “You mean Perky Tits?”

  “I mean the half a dozen other women hovering while you examined numb nuts.”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  “Don’t bullshit me, West. You didn’t feel the lovesick looks they shot your way?”

  I locked my gaze to hers. “No. I didn’t notice. Know why?” I started toward her, prepared to tackle her ass to the carpet if she attempted to run. “When I’m around you, Sierra, you’re the only woman I see. And before you toss out a smartass retort, I want you to really think about what I just said. Because you know damn well it’s true. How many hot little coeds were flitting around here tonight?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Neither do I.” I paused to let that sink in. “I didn’t come here for them. I came here for you.”

  Her breathing had gone choppy. Her face and neck were flushed.

  I pressed closer. “How long you plan on playing this game of cat and mouse with me?”

  “That’s what you don’t understand; this isn’t a game to me. You blow into my life and act like you have every right to be here.”

  “I do have every right.”

  “Wrong. You don’t know me anymore. Not like you think you do.”

  “I am trying like hell to change that. You shut me down at every turn. Every. Turn.” The way I’d gritted that out sounded as if I’d swallowed gravel.

  But my gruff tone put fire back in her eyes. She slapped her hands on my chest hard enough I felt the sting as if I was shirtless.

  “Every turn? Really? We’ve seen each other three times. That’s it. Just two days ago you swore that you came to see me in a professional capacity. So you don’t get to act all growly and frustrated with me, fucker, because I haven’t thrown myself at you.”

  “Is everything all right?” Ky asked from the middle of the hallway.

  “It’s fine, we’re fine,” Sierra answered. “We’re discussing what came first, the chicken or the egg. It’s always been a hotly contested debate between us.”

  Her unique way of deflecting things hadn’t changed—totally smartass. Still made me smile.

  “So what’s the definitive answer?” Ky asked.

  I said “chicken” the same time Sierra said “egg.”

  “You two are so full of shit,” Ky said.

  “Some of us more than others,” she retorted.

  “Boone, before I kick you out, I forgot to ask if you need a ticket to the game tomorrow? I have an extra one.”

  “Wish I could go, but I’m working the day shift tomorrow and Sunday.”

  “Working,” Sierra repeated with a frown. “Why are you working when you’re on leave?”

  Fuck. Me.

  In my peripheral vision, I saw Kyler backing away, shaking his
head at me, and Sierra saw it too.

  “Answer the question, Boone.”

  “Because I’m not on leave anymore.”

  “Then why did you tell me you were?”

  “Tuesday when I saw you I was on leave. Wednesday when I saw you I’d made some changes so I wasn’t on leave.”

  “You can change your military duty status just like that?” she snapped. “Bull.”

  “It’s complicated.”

  Her eyes turned hard. “Are you even in the army?”

  “Yes, I’m in the army.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “I’m based out of Fort Hood. But as of this week I’ll be living in Phoenix.” I took a step toward her. “This is what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “Because it’s some big secret?” Realization dawned on her face. “Did everyone know about this but me?”

  Jesus. This was spiraling. “No, just Kyler.”

  “So, you managed to tell him the truth, but you fucking lied to me?”

  “Look, it’s not what you think—”

  “I think nothing changes with you.” Her bitter laugh sliced through me. “You manipulative bastard. The tour of Phoenix was to check out housing areas for you, wasn’t it? Not for a friend.”

  “My army buddy Raj and I will be sharing a place, so technically…” Don’t offer excuses; offer her an apology. “Sierra, I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to find out this way. I told you we needed to talk—”

  “Omigod! You are not blaming this on me.”

  The hurt in her eyes was more than I could take. “I’m not blaming you. Let’s go someplace private where we can hash this out.”

  “No. I can’t do this with you, Boone. Not again.” She started to back up. “I have to go.”

  “Now? In the middle of our goddamn conversation?”

  “It’s not a conversation. It’s you trying to justify your dishonesty.”

  “You’re right. I—”

  Sierra silenced me with talk to the hand as she brushed past me and disappeared down the stairs.

  I waited, half-hoping she’d storm back up after remembering something else she wanted to knock me down a peg for.

  But I heard the distinctive sound of a door slamming hard enough to rattle the rafters.

  Then I heard nothing but the silence of my own stupidity.

  I slid down the wall until my butt hit the carpet. I rested my forearms on my knees, tempted to hang my head between my knees too.