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“Where you runnin’ off to, baby?”
Damn, she’d almost made a clean getaway. It wasn’t as though Kingston West wasn’t hot as all get-out, or a nice enough guy, it was more that she didn’t have time for him. Not just him, Lyric Simmons didn’t have time for anyone. All she’d done the last few months was clean up her brother’s messes and play sidekick to a never-ending cast of characters from Flying R Rough Stock.
“Not runnin’ off anywhere. What about you?”
While she answered, she didn’t look at him until enough time had passed that she wondered if he’d walked away. So she looked. And he hadn’t. He was leaning up against the wall of the concourse, just outside the arena of the Thomas Mack Center, and if Lyric didn’t know better, she might’ve thought he’d forgotten she was there. Every cowgirl and buckle bunny who passed him by got the full behind inspection from ol’ King.
She turned back around and was headed toward the exit when she felt him behind her. He didn’t have to touch her for her to know he was there. She could sense him; feel him under her skin. His slow, concentrated breathing, put her every nerve ending on high alert.
“I asked you a question,” he breathed, running those fine lips right above the surface of the skin on her neck.
God, that made her knees weak.
“I answere
d you.”
King spun her around to look at him, as though they weren’t in the midst of twenty thousand people trying to exit the arena. “It was a bullshit answer.”
“I’m goin’ to the same place everyone from Flying R is goin’,” she stammered.
King’s gaze was fixed on her, seemingly oblivious to the dirty looks they were getting from the people who had to weave their way around them because they stood right in the middle of the concourse.
“C’mon,” she said, finding her voice.
Lyric pulled King by the hand over to where they’d be out of the way. Fortunately he followed, because there was no way in hell she could’ve moved him if he wasn’t ready to. The man was massive. Not surprising, considering he jumped off the back of a moving horse and wrestled steers to the ground.
Once they were out of the way, King backed her up against the wall, wrapped his tree-trunk-size arms around her, and gripped each cheek of her ass in his herculean hands.
“Don’t lie. You were leavin’.”
He was right; she had intended to leave, but once she got herself into a cab, she wouldn’t have gone through with it. She had to go to the party, if only for her brother.
He wasn’t the only one who won big this week, though. King had too. He wasn’t world champ, like Bullet was in bull riding, but King had landed in second in bulldogging and, with it, got a payout of $263,267.32.
“I told you, I was headed to the party at the Hyperion.”
“Without me?”
“You’re supposed to be there already, aren’t you? Settin’ up?”
A few months ago, Ben Rice, from CB Rice, had arranged for a meeting with her dad, Nate Simmons from Satin, and Mark Cochran from Cochran. While CB Rice was middle-of-the-road rock, Satin and Cochran were full-on heavy metal bands. The three had been playing together and writing songs every chance they got. Sometimes King sat in with them.
“I’m not playin’ guitar tonight.”
Lyric raised an eyebrow.
“I’m gonna play you instead.”
“We could probably…”
King’s gaze was impenetrable while he waited for her to continue. The man had patience like Lyric had never seen. He could wait fifteen minutes for her to finish her sentence, and barely blink. After the second or third time she’d tried to wait him out, she never bothered again.
“You know, stop at the room, or somethin’.”
“Somethin’?”
Gram used to say that the first amendment was written just for Lyric. She never had trouble saying exactly what she thought at the very moment she thought it. But when it came to King West, she found herself tongue-tied more often than not.
