Text copyright ©2019 Lani Lynn Vale
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Dedication
This story was inspired by my husband. A long time ago, when we met, it was during football season. You can thank him for what you’re about to read! <3
Acknowledgements
Quinn Biddle- Model
Golden Czermak- Photographer
Ellie McLove- My Brother’s Editor & Ink It Out Editing
Cover Me Darling, LLC
My mom- Thank you for reading this book eight million two hundred times.
Diane, Kendra, Kathy, Mindy, Barbara & Amanda—I don’t know what I would do without y’all. Thank you, my lovely betas, for loving my books as much as I do.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Epilogue
Other titles by Lani Lynn Vale:
The Freebirds
Boomtown
Highway Don’t Care
Another One Bites the Dust
Last Day of My Life
Texas Tornado
I Don’t Dance
The Heroes of The Dixie Wardens MC
Lights To My Siren
Halligan To My Axe
Kevlar To My Vest
Keys To My Cuffs
Life To My Flight
Charge To My Line
Counter To My Intelligence
Right To My Wrong
Code 11- KPD SWAT
Center Mass
Double Tap
Bang Switch
Execution Style
Charlie Foxtrot
Kill Shot
Coup De Grace
The Uncertain Saints
Whiskey Neat
Jack & Coke
Vodka On The Rocks
Bad Apple
Dirty Mother
Rusty Nail
The Kilgore Fire Series
Shock Advised
Flash Point
Oxygen Deprived
Controlled Burn
Put Out
I Like Big Dragons Series
I Like Big Dragons and I Cannot Lie
Dragons Need Love, Too
Oh, My Dragon
The Dixie Warden Rejects
Beard Mode
Fear the Beard
Son of a Beard
I’m Only Here for the Beard
The Beard Made Me Do It
Beard Up
For the Love of Beard
Law & Beard
There’s No Crying in Baseball
Pitch Please
Quit Your Pitchin’
Listen, Pitch
The Hail Raisers
Hail No
Go to Hail
Burn in Hail
What the Hail
The Hail You Say
Hail Mary
The Simple Man Series
Kinda Don’t Care
Maybe Don’t Wanna
Get You Some
Ain’t Doin’ It
Too Bad So Sad
Bear Bottom MC
Mess Me Up
Talkin’ Trash
How About No
My Bad
One Chance, Fancy
It Happens
Keep It Classy
Snitches Get Stitches (4-9-19)
F-Bomb (5-14-19)
The Southern Gentleman Series
Hissy Fit
Lord Have Mercy (4-23-19)
Blurb:
He is the one that never looks her way.
He’s handsome and strong.
He is rough around the edges and mean.
He is everything she’s ever wanted.
He doesn’t even know she exists.
Her life is a joke.
***
She doesn’t step on cracks in the sidewalk.
She laughs at inappropriate times.
She talks when she shouldn’t.
She is clumsy and trips on air.
She’s finally on his radar.
God help her now.
Chapter 1
Women my age are supposed to be able to look suave and sophisticated while walking in heels. Me? I manage to trip over thin air.
-Raleigh’s inner thoughts
Raleigh
If there was one thing in this world that I never wanted to do, it was embarrassing myself in front of him.
Ezra McDuff, the town bad boy, high school football and baseball coach. was everything I was not.
Suave. Cool. Coordinated.
Then there was me.
My name conjured fear in the hearts of all residents of Gun Barrel, Texas.
Why, you ask, would an innocent woman like me, the woman that every single kid in town screamed a hello to because she was the ‘best teacher ever,’ strike that kind of fear?
That’d be because I, Raleigh Jolie Crusie, was the clumsiest person in four counties.
And normally when I went down, I took people with me.
For instance, moments before, I’d been walking.
Sure, I’d been looking down at my phone because I was reading…but that’s beside the point.
Who the hell put clearance Christmas shit in the middle of a godforsaken aisle?
Target, that’s who.
There I was, walking and minding my own business while I caught up on my latest read, and the next thing that I know, I ran into a large box of wrapping paper.
And when I say ‘large,’ I mean large.
There wasn’t just one box, either.
There were multiple boxes.
Fifteen, in fact.
But, I’d walked past four such boxes before I’d tripped on thin air—like always—and took a header to the left.
I managed to cradle my phone to my chest and tuck and roll, but that also made me into a human bowling ball.
I took down not one, not two, not nine, but eleven boxes jam-packed with wrapping paper.
And every last roll of wrapping paper fell out of the boxes and started rolling in every which direction.
Meaning that not only did it get me, but it got four other people in the process.
Jennifer Marie, the beauty consultant at Ulta that was here getting a coffee. Brian McAdams, the young sales clerk that I’d taught three years ago and was now an assistant manager in this fine establishment. Larry Conway, the electrician. And finally, Ezra freakin’ McDuff.
Though, Ezra didn’t exactly go down like the rest of the
people did.
He only tripped on one and dropped what looked like an armful of undershirts and underwear.
Boxer briefs.
Boxer briefs that landed directly next to my face.
But apparently, clothing hadn’t been the only thing Ezra had been holding.
He was holding a box of condoms, too.
Why do I know that particular detail?
Because the box smacked me in the face, and, like the loser my nose was, it started to bleed.
He made me bleed by dropping a box of condoms. On. My. Nose.
Dear sweet baby Jesus on a cracker.
I grumbled and held onto my nose as I felt the blood start to pour out.
The only good thing I could say about it was that it was one of those value sized packs, not just the small ones that had like twelve condoms in it…not that I would know. I’d never bought condoms before, so who knew? Maybe the value size was really the smaller package.
The closest I’d ever gotten to the condoms was when I was buying tampons, and even then, they were still half an aisle away from the offending pieces of latex.
I wailed and rolled onto my hands and knees.
Instead of waiting around for cleanup, and knowing what a bleeder I was, I started to make a mad dash toward the bathroom where I could find something to hold over my nose.
The first thing I came to once I was inside were the paper towels.
I moaned as I covered my nose with a handful of towels, cursing the stupid machine when it only spit out a small square of paper at a time.
God.
Anybody. Anybody in the freakin’ world could’ve hit me in the nose with those condoms, and I would’ve been okay. Anybody but Ezra McDuff.
Shit.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
I panted into the paper and rested my head against the cool, white-tiled wall beside the dispenser.
Then I counted to one hundred, hoping that would help.
It didn’t.
But what it did do was give my nose enough time to stop bleeding.
I reached for my phone, thinking now would be a perfect time to call my best friend, Camryn, and tell her about my humiliation.
But…it wasn’t there.
I closed my eyes and realized what had happened.
When those condoms had hit me in the face, I’d dropped my phone to immediately raise my hands to my nose. And in doing so, had left my phone wherever it happened to be when my hand had discarded it.
Garnering the courage, I walked to the door and pushed.
When I opened the door, bloody paper towel still in my hand in case it started to bleed again, it was to find the best backside in Gun Barrel, Texas blocking the door.
“Uhhh,” I hesitated. “’Scuse me.”
Ezra turned around, saw my face, and blanched.
“Are you okay?”
He was looking at me like he’d never seen me before.
To be perfectly honest, he probably hadn’t.
I wasn’t exactly in Ezra McDuff’s social circle.
I was more like that quiet girl in the corner at a party, while Ezra was the town hero and star quarterback all rolled into one.
The sad thing was, we worked at the same damn place. We probably passed each other in the halls half a dozen times every school day, if not more.
He was also staring right at me, and I was finding it hard to breathe.
I’d dreamed of this day so many times.
So. Many. Times.
In high school I used to sit behind him, studying his every move.
When I’d been a junior, and he’d been a senior, we had our first class together.
My last name started with a C, and his with an M. But, since he couldn’t sit in the back thanks to some rule that the coach of the football team at the time had made, he’d had to move to the front, and I’d been pushed back a chair.
And, by doing so, I’d gotten to see his every single feature for an entire year.
Which had been how my infatuation with the man had begun.
At first, it’d only been my appreciation of his body.
He was six-foot-four, muscled, and strapping.
He was also funny, intelligent, and sweet.
He was a caregiver. He was a nurturer. And he also had no clue that I was alive, even then.
Now, he’d grown up quite a bit from that boy that I used to obsess over, but he was still no less captivating.
Today, he was in a simple pair of jeans—covered in dirt and grime from whatever he was doing—probably working on his old truck that he got in high school, and still drove on Sundays to this day.
His white t-shirt was stained, too.
And he had grease on his cheekbone.
His dirty blond hair was longer than normal, and some of it fell into his eyes. Those eyes that were a mix between a golden honey and a seafoam green.
At times, I wasn’t able to tell which color was more prevalent, but I’d decided long ago that it was dependent on the color of shirt he was wearing at the time.
I swallowed when I got a load of the newest tattoo that peeked out from under his shirt sleeve.
It looked like a sugar skull, but honestly, I wasn’t really sure without actually pulling his shirt sleeve up and looking. And that was creepy. I tried not to be creepy.
“Ma’am?”
I gritted my teeth.
He didn’t even know who I was, but I could tell that I was familiar to him, at least somewhat.
He was studying me like he was trying to place how he knew me.
How about school from kindergarten up to my junior year. He had been two years older than me, and since the town of Gun Barrel was so small, the bus route had kids that ranged from kindergarten all the way up to seniors in high school. How about college? I knew Oklahoma State is a big campus, but he never saw me there even once? How about work? He never noticed me at all?
Dammit!
“I’m fine,” I lied.
In all honesty, I was thoroughly embarrassed.
I was also sick at heart.
I had this idea in my mind that maybe I wasn’t quite as invisible as I always felt like I was at times.
Apparently, if the football coach, who knew everybody didn’t even know me, then I was a lost cause.
I smiled.
He winced.
That’s because the movement forced the clot that had stopped the bleeding in my nose to break loose.
Blood trickled down my face.
And I decided now was the time to go.
That was when I looked down.
At my phone. In his hand.
He was holding it out to me.
I took it with shaking fingers as I placed the towel back to my face.
Then, to add insult to injury, I looked down to find my phone not only open but the book I’d been immersed in reading still up.
My cheeks flamed.
There was no way, with him holding it like he had been, that he hadn’t scanned what it was that was on the screen.
None.
And what it was, was my latest book club read, a BDSM romance that had immediately grabbed my attention. Then kept it.
Oh. Shit.
“Thank you,” I murmured, my face likely matching the blood that was probably staining my skin.
Then, I took my bloody towel, my phone, and hightailed it straight out of Target before I could do anything else stupid.
I also pretended that he didn’t see me hit the door on the way out.
Because then I might’ve just crawled into a hole and died.
***
“This isn’t the first time I’ve ever heard of someone getting a black eye from something pertaining to Ezra McDuff’s dick,” Camryn supplied.
I flipped her off.
“Go fuck yourself,” I grumbled. “Is it really that bad?”
She winced. “It’s not…good.”
With my pale complexion, paired with my inky black hair…I didn’t doubt that it was more than obvious that I not only had one shiner, but two.
From a box of condoms.
How does that even happen?
But I shouldn’t be surprised. Bad things happened to Raleigh Jolie Crusie. Always had. Always would.
Chapter 2
I’m a ray of fucking sunshine.
-Coffee Cup
Ezra
Four hours earlier
“I’m going to be late,” I said into my phone. “I have to run by the store and get somebody something.”
That somebody was my sister’s teenage son, Johnson. Johnson was a sixteen-year-old boy, who was on the verge of doing things that his mother would rather not think about. That being in the form of sex with his girlfriend.
How did I know this?
Because I saw them in the park last night, making out in his truck when he should’ve been at home asleep.
Now, I felt obligated to run by the store and buy him a box of condoms just to make sure he had them in case he needed them.
I wasn’t sure if he did or not, but I’d rather be safe than sorry.
Or a great uncle.
That would suck.
“Okay,” Cady, my sister, said. “But would you mind picking me up some wrapping paper? It’s seventy-five percent off, and I haven’t had a chance to go up there yet. There’s no doubt that it’ll be sold out by the time I get off at five.”
I rolled my eyes.
That was the last damn thing I wanted to do, get fucking wrapping paper, but I’d do it for her.
I loved my sister, after all.
And she did make sure that I had food every single night.
We lived together—kind of.
She lived in the main house, and I was in what was now known as the ‘brother suite’ and not the mother-in-law suite.
I had my own kitchen and my own entrance, but I could also enter their living space, as they could access mine. Not that either one of us did that unless it was dinner time—or it was an emergency.
But there hadn’t been one of those since my niece, Moira, had decided to make her entrance into this world a whole four weeks early while Cady’s husband had been out of town working on the pipeline.
Now Grady was home more, well, if you called two weeks on, two weeks off home more, and they didn’t have much need for me.
Me? I needed them, though. At least if I didn’t want to eat out every single night of the week.
Hissy Fit (The Southern Gentleman Series Book 1) Page 1
