Free Novel Read

Liar Liar Hearts on Fire: Bro Code Book 3




  Liar, Liar, Hearts on Fire

  Bro Code Book 3

  Pippa Grant

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2020

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Editing by Jessica Snyder.

  Cover design by Lori Jackson Designs.

  Cover art copyright © Rafa Catala.

  Contents

  Introduction

  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

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Epilogue

  JOCK BLOCKED Teaser

  Pippa Grant Book List

  About the Author

  Introduction

  Liar, Liar, Hearts on Fire

  A single dad / failed one night stand / enemies to lovers romcom

  Never borrow pants from your brother. Especially if he’s a size smaller than you are, because all that pressure in the junk will short-circuit your brain.

  And you’ll lie to a woman in a club about your real name.

  Leave her unsatisfied after making out in a bathroom.

  Then find out that she’s the one thing standing in the way of your dreams. And she very much doesn’t like being lied to.

  Now I have to convince Lila Valentine—the woman I can’t stop thinking about, my biggest regret, and my new boss—that I’m what’s best for the baseball team she’s inherited.

  If we can’t work together to save the Fireballs, the commissioner’s forcing a sale and moving them across the country.

  I’ll do anything to save my home team.

  But the one thing I can’t do?

  Keep my hands to myself.

  Which would be fine, if she hadn’t been telling me lies this whole time too.

  Liar, Liar, Hearts on Fire is a rocking fun romance between a single dad obsessed with baseball, an heiress with secrets, baseball pants, a rundown team, and rabid ducks. It stands alone and comes with a guaranteed happily-ever-after.

  The Bro Code Series

  Flirting with the Frenemy

  America’s Geekheart

  Liar, Liar, Hearts on Fire

  The Bro Code Spin-Offs

  Master Baker

  Jock Blocked (Copper Valley Fireballs #1) - Coming May 2020

  Keep in touch with Pippa Grant!

  Join the Pipsquad

  Get the Pipster Report

  Friend Pippa

  Like Pippa

  Hang with Pippa on Goodreads

  Follow Pippa on BookBub

  Follow Pippa on Amazon

  Follow Pippa on Instagram

  Join Pippa on Book+Main

  1

  Tripp Wilson, aka a single dad who wishes he could blame an airline on his missing luggage

  The first thing I’m doing when I get home is finding my brain. Pretty sure I left it somewhere between the kitchen and the garage. Or possibly I lost it in a pile of toys six days ago.

  “Dude. Quit picking my pants out of your ass.”

  I glare at my brother, whose white jeans I’m wearing into a club that’s too loud and crowded and will probably give me a seizure with all the flashing strobe lights. A passing server calls his name and does a double-take, glancing between us as she lifts her tray with a single tequila shot. I take it for him, then resist the urge to pick the denim out of my butt crack again as we make our way through the crowded dance floor to a private booth. “What are these, European cut?”

  “They’re skinny fit.” He trades a handshake with a guy whose name I’m supposed to know, then cheek-kisses a supermodel before turning back to me to call over the loud music. “Dad butt giving you troubles, old man?”

  “Muscle is harder to compress than that rock star flab you’ve got.”

  Levi grins and takes a beer from another passing server in a short skirt and low top, who slips a note deep into his front pocket.

  Jesus. She just grabbed his dick in broad club light. Also, how did she even get her hand in there? Did she lube it up first? We’re not that different in size.

  My brother doesn’t bat a lash as he smiles and says, “Thank you, darlin’.”

  She smiles back at him in a way that suggests a beer is just the beginning of what she’d like to offer him before disappearing into the dancing crowd.

  “Darlin’?” I poke him with my elbow while we continue fighting the crowd. Or in his case, working it. “You going country next? Or is that just what you say to the girls who cop a feel?”

  He ignores me while he points me up a half flight of stairs to a private balcony. The stairway is crowded too, and we bump our way past all the people, with more funny glances aimed our way until the stairway opens up. At the top, he shoves me into a black velvet seat and makes me scoot around, which would be hard enough without the tight jeans cutting off circulation to my lower extremities. How the fuck does he get into these every day?

  “Less glower, more glitter, big bro.” Levi claps me on the shoulder. Did I mention that I’m also wearing his tight paisley button-down with the top three buttons undone? Not my first choice, but when I told him I needed to come here tonight—yes, I have brought this on myself—he insisted on dressing me.

  I let him, but only because I forgot to separate my own clothes out of my kids’ luggage when I dropped them with my in-laws this afternoon, and therefore don’t actually have any of my own clothes with me. I didn’t realize until we were on the way out the door to New York’s nightlife that I had a fruit roll-up stuck to my crotch, and don’t ask about the fermenting apple juice in my sweater.

  “I haven’t been to a club in five years,” I remind him.

  “Know what you need?”

  I eyeball the tequila shot that I haven’t taken—or let him take—because I know better than to take open drinks in public. Even in clubs that are supposedly safe for celebrities. Learned that lesson the hard way back in our boy band days. “A fresh bottle of whiskey and three nights of sleep that I won’t be getting so long as James and Emma are with their grandparents?” Fuck, I miss my kids already.

  “You need to be more like me.”

  “A playboy pop star who goes through women faster than he goes through a bag of peanut butter cups?”

  “No, chill. Relaxed. Own the place. Don’t glare at it like you want to burn it down. Make love to it with your eyes.”

  Usually, that would snap me out of this grouchy funk I’ve been sinking deeper and deeper into the past few weeks. Also known as the time I’ve been dreading dropping off my
progeny.

  Tonight, though, nothing’s touching my funk, because even knowing the project I’ve been working on for well over a year is hitting a critical moment tonight now that the legal paperwork is done and the money’s ready, I’d still rather be home reading The Paperbag Princess to Emma and helping James line his trucks up just so on the shelves next to his firetruck toddler bed.

  Plus, I couldn’t fit my hand sanitizer in these jeans, and this place is crawling with germs. Which I’m actively not thinking about.

  “Tripp. Dude. You gotten laid recently?”

  I punch my little brother in the arm.

  Doesn’t feel as good as I want it to.

  Levi pops the top on his beer while he gives me a look that means he’s gearing up for a lecture. “She’d want you to move on.”

  “You bring all your friends here to talk about bad memories?”

  “You don’t have bad memories with Jessie. But you might as well not be living at all if you’re not willing to make new memories.”

  “I’m making new memories,” I grit out.

  “Memories for just you, old man. Not memories of who you’re taking care of this decade. Not that it’s not noble, and you know I love those two little rugrats, but they can’t be all you live for. Evenin’, Victoria.” He winks at one more server who’s bouncing her smile between us like she knows one of us invented toothpaste, and if that’s the best analogy I have, I shouldn’t be out here chasing business any more than I should be out here pretending I still know what to do in a club.

  She sticks her hip out and looks my brother up and down now that she’s apparently figured out which one of us is him.

  Jesus. We don’t look that much alike.

  Do we?

  “Levi Wilson, where’ve you been?” she demands.

  “Germany, Spain, and Italy. World tour wrap-up.”

  “Hm. I suppose that’s a good excuse.”

  “You got a bottle of Pappy van Winkle to welcome me back to my second favorite city on the planet?”

  “Anything for you, hot pants.”

  He blows her a kiss, and she shoots him an and I do mean anything look over her shoulder while she heads to the bar.

  I rub my eyes. I shouldn’t be here. “You’re shameless.”

  “I’m friendly.”

  “You’re giving them ideas.”

  “Yes. Yes, I am. You should too.”

  “I—”

  He drops his ridiculous fedora on my head, then hands over his aviators. “C’mon, old man. Put ’em on. Look at the world through my lenses for a minute.”

  “I don’t think I want that many diseases.”

  “You’re already in my pants.”

  He has an unfortunate point, so I slide on his ridiculous sunglasses. The amber lenses do cut down on the glare from the spinning club lights.

  “No guilt, Tripp. You work your ass off taking care of your kids. You work your ass off for the team. Go have some fun. Dance. Kiss a girl just because. Get laid. Nobody here’s looking for a ring. Half of ’em think you’re me. Can’t get that at home.”

  “I’m here to connect with Beversdorf.”

  “You mean you forgot how to relax and enjoy life.”

  I’m the oldest of the five of us who spent years touring as the boy band Bro Code. My version of fun was never quite the same as my little brother’s. Or the other guys’, for that matter.

  Levi grins over his beer. “You’re making that pompous older brother face.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “That face. It means you’re thinking everyone else had fun while you kept us in line. Have we forgotten Berlin? And Denver? And Rio?”

  “My nuts still hurt from Rio.”

  “Got the girl, though, didn’t you?”

  “I mentioned my nuts hurt, didn’t I?”

  He chuckles as he tips the beer back, but fine.

  I’m smiling. A little.

  There may have been too much cachaça consumed the night I decided I needed to be the mechanical bull riding champion in that club in Rio. And to this day, I don’t know how bull riders manage to perform in the sack with squished nuts and broken dicks, but maybe they have tricks I don’t know about.

  Tricks I don’t want to know about, because I’m never doing mechanical bulls again.

  Performing though—okay, yes.

  I miss sex.

  “You’ve earned some fun, bro.”

  “I forgot how to have fun.”

  “It’s easy. Just pretend you’re me.”

  Victoria slides to our table in her stilettos and squats beside Levi with the pricey bourbon and two rocks glasses on her tray. “You gentlemen need anything else?”

  If he says I need four minutes with her in a broom closet, I don’t care how much that bourbon cost, it’ll become a murder weapon.

  He grins like he once more knows what I’m thinking. “You’re the best, Vickie. We’ll let you know.”

  She’s barely left before a string of musicians and actors rotate through our table, most of them acknowledging me but actually here to schmooze with Levi. When the band broke up, Levi set out on a solo career while I hung up the keyboard and moved to Hollywood.

  Not to act, but to settle down with an actress. And when she passed away, I moved our kids back home and started investing in local businesses. I’m out of the inner circles here in New York now. Nothing to offer most of these people, and they don’t have much to offer me either.

  Except Al Beversdorf.

  The current Fireballs owner is supposedly here somewhere tonight, celebrating the end of baseball season with a tour of New York’s best clubs while his team licks their wounds from setting a new league record for the worst season in professional sports ever, but he’s not circling over to our table, so I’m going to have to go find him.

  I rise as elegantly as I can in these tight-ass jeans, nod to Levi’s musician friends, who make jokes about getting me back in the studio, and I give my brother the I’ll be back, don’t be an asshole and abandon me look.

  He replies with a wink and a silent Go have fun. Pretend you’re me.

  I’m reminded all too well by the way my dick’s suffocating in these pants that I’m not Levi.

  Still, I make an effort to smile as I head down from our private balcony and around the edge of the dance floor, looking for the guy who pretends to be the Hugh Hefner of baseball team owners, but is actually a disaster.

  My former boy bandmates and I intend to take one of his messes off his hands. Tonight, if we can.

  We might not play and tour together anymore, but the five of us—along with all of our best buddies from the neighborhood we grew up in—are still tight. Still believe Copper Valley—our home city overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains in southern Virginia—can support a pro baseball team. And we’re willing to put our money where my mouth is.

  Levi and I have a formal meeting with the baseball commissioner tomorrow to discuss a hostile takeover—I’ll get into the Fireballs any way I can—but I heard a rumor the commissioner’s also talking to an oil tycoon who wants to move the team to Vegas.

  With as bad as the Fireballs have done the past five years, the commissioner is within his right to entertain a hostile takeover bid. There’s always a worst team of the season. But the Fireballs’ repeated performance sinking lower and lower in the history books means they barely qualify to be called a pro sports team anymore.

  Has to sting for Beversdorf.

  The team’s belonged to his family for three generations.

  And he’s the one driving it into the ground.

  It’s time to make the man an offer he can’t refuse. At least, if he still loves the team as much as I hope he does.

  And there he is.

  Third-floor balcony, surrounded by women and bodyguards. He’s seventy-three, with a thick white pompadour, a cigar clenched in his teeth, a rocks glass in one hand, and a supermodel in the other.

  I grit my t
eeth and head toward the staircase. The bouncer guarding this section of the club nods to me. “Evening, Mr. Wilson. Welcome home.”

  I’m three stairs up when I realize he thinks I’m Levi too.

  Hell. Maybe I should just be Levi.

  Best way to have fun, his voice whispers in my head.

  He’s not wrong.

  Tripp Wilson doesn’t know how to have fun by club standards. Levi Wilson?

  Yep. That dude’s all about the fun.

  I smile and wink at a woman walking down the stairs.

  She smiles back demurely like I’m not good enough for her, and I wonder what Levi would think of that.

  Probably not much.

  He has no shortage of offers, and even if I give him shit about being a manwhore, I know he’s picky about who he takes home. Or to a hotel. Or backstage.

  I’d actually be surprised if Levi took anyone to his private sanctuary. He plays the playboy well, but he’s exactly as jaded as a guy with over fifteen years in the industry should be.

  Which means he knows how to give the appearance of having fun.

  But is he actually having fun?

  I decide to worry about Levi’s not-actual-problems another day, because I’m approaching the third floor landing as the music thumps below and the sea of bodies bop along to the beat, spotlights spinning over all the beautiful people with all the right moves in all the right clothes and all the right words.