Liar Liar Hearts on Fire: Bro Code Book 3 Page 3

  Okay, yes, it’s definitely past time to remind myself that this is just a hook-up.

  And that it means relatively nothing other than that I’m about to have one hell of a memory for the books, and he’ll probably forget my name by morning, but memory.

  Who doesn’t want a memory like this?

  And oh my god, now he’s pulling my dress over my head and pinching my nipples through my bra and there’s a bolt of lust ricocheting through my entire body and settling right between my thighs, and just making out with him and licking his neck is already seven hundred times better than my last intimate experience.

  I fumble with his zipper.

  He drops his head to my chest, where he suckles at me through the lace, his fingers dipping back into my panties, fumbling to find my clit. I tilt my pelvis, and when his thumb brushes over that tight nub of pleasure, I grip his hair and drop my head back with a moan. “Oh my god, Levi, yes.”

  He freezes.

  Hard freezes.

  I look down, and a high-pitched screech splits the air.

  I jump.

  He jumps, and then shoves away before I process that the smoke alarms are going off in the club.

  My dress is on the floor. His hair is standing on end where I’ve been gripping it, his jeans are open, and his paisley shirt is hanging in the toilet.

  He rakes his hands through his hair and stares at me with the kind of dawning horror usually reserved for the devastating news that your favorite taco bar is being converted to a polka museum or for that time you accidentally ate the brownies at a party that your hockey friends laced with laxatives meant for their teammates who outweigh you by seventy or two hundred pounds.

  And it’s not the dammit, those fire alarms just screamed their way through the best make-out session I’ve had in a club bathroom in a year horror.

  Nope.

  This is the what the fuck was I thinking letting you maul me with your mouth and body? horror.

  Nine times out of ten, I can fake my way through a situation. It’s why I get free extra cheese at my favorite pizza joint on Fifty-Second and Broadway, how I ended up serving as a bridesmaid for a Thai princess, and it’s how I kept my cool during a bachelor auction once.

  But right now, I’m struggling to find my no big deal, guys are always horrified about making out with me face.

  “Sorry,” he mutters, and that mutter is louder than all of the screaming and wailing sirens. “We need to get out of here.”

  He slips past me—runs, really—glasses crooked, hat knocked off, shirt still dangling in the toilet, and bolts out the door bare-chested, which instantly swings open again as a woman rushes inside in a too-tight dress, hitches it up, and squats to do her business right in front of me.

  On that shirt.

  “I don’t care if this place burns down, I have to pee so bad that I— Oh, wow, tell me Levi Wilson wasn’t a let-down,” she says.

  I blink twice before I realize I need to pull my dress back on and get out of here. This one isn’t a situation I wanted to fake my way out of.

  I definitely should’ve stayed home tonight.

  3

  Tripp

  Guilt isn’t my favorite emotion, but it’s been my constant companion from the minute Lila cried Levi’s name while I had my hand down her panties last night.

  Jesus.

  I almost screwed a woman who thought I was my brother.

  In a club bathroom.

  Just because I wanted to, and she was pretty, and she kissed me, and for that moment, I wasn’t a widowed dad of two.

  I was just a guy enjoying what felt good in the moment.

  And fuck, did she feel good.

  But guilt makes for a very, very long night. Levi not blinking at me showing up without his shirt didn’t help.

  It’s like he knows, and he’s letting me stew.

  The only thing better about morning is that I’m able to get an early private fitting for a suit so I don’t have to wear Levi’s tight-ass pants to the meeting with Sam Pakorski, baseball’s current commissioner.

  But even suiting up can’t erase the guilt of last night.

  That’s not me.

  Period.

  If it was me, I would’ve made sure I had a condom in my back pocket, I would’ve known her name three weeks before even asking her for a drink, and I would’ve made sure she didn’t have so much as a cold, because germs are deadly.

  If I have to pretend to be my brother to have a good time, then I have fucking issues.

  Issues fucking.

  And fucking issues.

  Not the least of which is privately high-fiving myself for my first real foray into not being afraid of germs in almost two years.

  I reach into my pocket for my hand sanitizer, but Levi gives me a look, and I pull my hand back out without cleaning off.

  Did I mention I missed the video call from my mother-in-law while I was trying on the damn suit?

  It’s been twenty hours since I talked to my kids, and I don’t know the last time either of them washed their hands. Yeah, it’s nice that I didn’t have to deal with meltdowns over bedtime, but between the guilt and the unusual bed, and perpetually waiting for James to crawl into bed with me around four AM before Emma woke up serenading us over the baby monitor with her version of “Ice, Ice, Baby,” as she does every morning since Levi taught her the song, I’m still off-kilter.

  “Whoa, hold up, old man,” Levi says as we stroll into the lobby of the Manhattan building housing the commissioner’s office for our eleven AM meeting. “You got a little something here on your face…”

  “Toothpaste? Bagel? Dammit, did I cut myself shaving?”

  “No, it’s this frowny-frown that needs to get flipped upside down.”

  The only thing I’m capable of flipping is the bird. And so I do.

  Levi doesn’t laugh—which is good, because he’d get slugged if he did—but he does clap me on the shoulder. “I don’t know what you got into last night, or how you lost my shirt, but if you don’t want to talk about it, you need to let it go. You’ve worked too hard for this. You know your kids are gonna love growing up at Duggan Field and watching the Fireballs. Can’t get there if you don’t have your head in the game right now.”

  He’s right.

  There’s too much riding on this meeting for me to derail it with regrets over being an idiot last night. And for my kids’ sakes, I need to relax and trust that they’re fine. I’ll see them again in a few days, and they’ll be just fine.

  So I step into the elevator, imagine James’s expression the first time I take him into the dugout at Duggan Field to meet the team we’ve spent hours watching on TV this summer and fall, squirt my hand sanitizer into my palm despite the look it gets me from my brother, and I find my own game face.

  Which turns out to be unnecessary, because at the precise moment when Pakorski is supposed to walk into the conference room so we can pitch our vision for the Fireballs to him, he walks in and drops a bomb on the entire day.

  “Gentlemen, we’re going to have to postpone.”

  Levi and I trade glances. “Why?” I ask.

  Pakorski tips back a bottle of antacids like they’re candy and crunches loudly. “Beversdorf had a stroke last night. Doctors don’t think he’s gonna make it.”

  We both stare at him.

  He jiggles his bottle. “Change is coming for the Fireballs, gentlemen. Don’t know exactly how it’ll play out, but change is coming. Probably in the form of whoever’s listed in his will, which doesn’t mean you’re out, but it does mean I can’t have this meeting without being an asshole. Sorry for the wasted trip. I’ll have my secretary reach out when we know more.”

  And that’s that.

  The dream I’ve been working for—the whole reason I agreed to let my in-laws keep my kids, the reason I’m in New York, the reason I was in that club last night—gets a little further away.

  Again.

  4

  Lila

  My dad used to tell people I have a photographic memory, but that’s not accurate. I actually have a high attention to detail when it matters. Probably got it from my mom. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t.

  But it all means that I can’t make myself forget things that I don’t want to remember.

  The green embroidered tablecloth that I stared at while Uncle Al told me that my parents were missing when I was twelve. Getting my period while wearing my favorite lavender jeans one weekend and having the headmistress from my boarding school have to explain to me how to use a tampon, because none of the girls in my dorm liked me well enough to do it.

  That look on Levi Wilson’s face last night when he realized he didn’t want to give me that orgasm that was seconds away.

  I should be concentrating on what’s going on twenty floors above in the hospital, where Uncle Al is lying unconscious.

  Instead, I’m picking at the tacos that my friends delivered here for lunch, feeling guilty that I was enjoying the hell out of making out with a stranger in a club bathroom while my last living relative probably needed me, despite the fact that he wasn’t really there for me for much of anything, and also despite the fact that his stroke happened while he was chowing on cold fried chicken, watching a rerun of Dancing with the Stars, and getting a blow job in the back of a limo at the same time.

  If those smoke detectors hadn’t gone off, would Levi have been there with me when I got the call? And would we have gone all the way? Or would we have been laughing over drinks? Would I have asked him to go somewhere quieter with me?

  Considering he froze the second before the fire alarms went off—triggered by a malfunctioning smoke machine, I heard later—I doubt it.

  Maybe my vagina wasn’t up to snuff, but he had to inspect it closely be
fore he knew.

  I throw down my chili lime taco.

  Could I be a little more inappropriate?

  Or a little more distracted when I’m supposed to be not only running a publishing company, but also the de facto person who needs to run Uncle Al’s affairs while he’s unconscious?

  Challenges are usually a good thing. I love a challenge. I’ve built a fortune on challenges.

  But today, I can’t concentrate on anything. I couldn’t even finish reading a book last night.

  “I was thinking we should do a line of crocodile shifter heroines falling in love with mer-dinosaur beta heroes,” Knox Moretti, head acquisitions editor for Wellington Holdings’ publishing house’s romance imprint—aka, my latest challenge at work—is saying. “It’ll be a paranormal fantasy time travel imprint with unorthodox gender roles.”

  I nod absently. “Sounds good.”

  That kiss…just wow.

  But then, that look of horror when the alarms went off…

  Maybe he was stoned. He definitely wasn’t drunk, but I’m still having a ridiculous fantasy about making a new picture-perfect life for myself with a guy who knows how to kiss a woman.

  What the hell is wrong with me?

  “Great, because my grandmother already has a draft, but I’m going to need you to run interference when she tries to work in the meteor angle for the black moment. It’s good, but her meteors are always made of bacon-covered mothballs that turn into flossing armadillos when they touch lava. Flossing like the dance, not flossing like teeth. Plus, she’s done it before.”

  I nod again, and it’s not until Parker, Knox’s wife and my friend who knows more about every boy band member in the history of time than I’d be comfortable with if I were Knox, snorts iced tea out her nose that I tune back in to the full conversation.

  Mer-what? “Wait. No. We’re not publishing your grandmother. Sorry. Hard no.”

  Knox grins. He’s one of those tall, dark, handsome types that I won in a bachelor auction just so I could ask him to come work for Bubble Bath Romance, Wellington’s romance publishing company.

  Interview him, actually, without him realizing what I was doing. His internet presence was too clean, and I needed to make sure the man behind it wasn’t going to get weird and embarrass me, and that he actually had the taste his romance-loving blog said he had.

  Call me paranoid—the shoe fits for so many reasons—but I don’t tend to blindly trust anything I read on the internet, especially when it comes to men loving romance novels.

  “You don’t like my nana?” he asks while Parker tries to keep a straight face and chides him about being inappropriate.

  “I adore your nana,” I say, “but that doesn’t mean I’m willing to make her an internationally bestselling dinosaur shifter beta mer-crocodile author.”

  “And I thought you had vision. Also, it’s mer-dinosaurs. And alpha shifter crocodile heroines.”

  “Knock it off. Lila clearly has a few other more important things to deal with today.” Parker rubs his hair, then winces and grabs a napkin and wipes his hair harder. “Gah. Sorry. Got some of my taco in there.”

  Of all the women I’ve ever met in my life, Parker is my absolute favorite, bar none. She’s majestically awkward, and she owns it in everything from her autocorrected text conversations to—well, to rubbing tacos in Knox’s hair in a hospital cafeteria.

  “I like your taco,” he says with a brow wiggle.

  Her fair skin goes pink. “Shush.”

  “You want to head home so you can lick it out?”

  “Yes, but we’re being polite and having a meeting with your boss. And then we both have to get back to work. Unless Lila needs one of us to stay with her. The taco will, erm, still be there tonight. It’ll probably take a shower to get the clumped cheese out.”

  His eyes go dark, and he doesn’t look at me while he talks. Nope, his attention is squarely on the woman he’s head over heels in love with. “I hate it when you say shower when it’s hours before we can take one.”

  They’re a romance novel come to life. Him, a romance-loving librarian. Her, the geeky organic grocery store vice president who used to babysit him. The two of them together, utterly adorable.

  “Go back to the real story idea, please. I’ll dismiss you both within five minutes so you can get to naked shower time. Promise.”

  “We’re not abandoning you in your time of need,” Parker replies.

  “Uncle Al and I weren’t close. Boarding school, remember? Besides, I have seventy-five other phone calls to catch up on for the day job, and more meetings to reschedule.”

  “I thought Wellington’s retirement was basically done?”

  It is.

  My boss’s retirement was announced several months ago, which means pulling back from both the holdings part of Wellington Holdings, and also suspending work on the development side of things.

  It’s not a normal holdings company.

  But then, my boss isn’t normal either.

  And I’ve really enjoyed the challenge of dismantling a company. So much so, I might’ve dragged out the process longer than necessary. In truth, those seventy-five phone calls are actually three, and they’re final approval phone calls that will leave me with only one project on my plate beyond the publishing house, which I’m terrified I’ll get bored with entirely too soon.

  I have issues.

  But I won’t use my issues to hold my friends up when they clearly need to be somewhere.

  Parker squeezes my arm. “If Dalton doesn’t give you a two-week vacation soon, I’m going to go hunt him down myself and tell him to finish his own damn work.”

  “That really won’t end well.”

  “Stupid reclusive billionaires and their stupid security,” she grumbles. “You deserve time off. At least he’s giving you a good severance package.”

  I gesture around the hospital cafeteria and swallow the guilt at telling my friends that I still have months of work to do to finish the retirement project. “Pretty sure the universe just gave me time off. But. In the meantime—finish with the story idea, please. I really do have to make some phone calls before I check in with the doctors. And I refuse to be a cock-blocker.”

  They both grin—Knox naughty, Parker embarrassed, and I’d like to tell her that she has nothing to be embarrassed about since she knows he’ll actually close the deal tonight, unlike my last encounter with a man, but one, I can’t bring myself to ruin the fantasy of one of her favorite boy band members for her, and two, it’s not freaking appropriate.

  Also, I really need to pay attention. Knox is talking about a self-published book he found about a woman keeping a diary about pretending to be Cinderella to snag a prince who’s at her college for a year of studying abroad, but how she’s actually falling for the guy playing her fairy godmother. It sounds fun, and I love Cinderella stories almost as much as I love secret baby stories, so I greenlight him to reach out about acquiring the book to repackage, re-edit, and market the hell out of it to take it from obscurity to superstardom.

  He knows how to get in touch with the rest of the production and marketing team, so there’s not much left for me to do.

  I gather my planner and notebook off the table and toss them into my messenger bag, because I know I can’t actually make phone calls without checking in with the doctors first.

  And odds are good that instead of making my phone calls, I’ll be sitting in the waiting room on the twentieth floor, reading a book.

  An erotic rock star romance.

  About a lead singer who can’t get it up after a horrific break-up, and the groupie who’s accidentally turning into his physical therapist. Yes, that kind of physical therapist.

  It’s super sexy, and I had to replace the batteries in my vibrator once already while reading it, and I should probably put that one on hold and grab a time travel romance instead. With shape-shifters. In space.

  Dammit.

  “You said your nana already has that book written?” I ask with a wince.

  Knox grins, and I pretend I don’t notice that he’s palming Parker’s ass while he helps her out of her chair. “I’ll shoot it to you on email.”

  “No judgment here,” Parker assures me. “Distractions are a good thing during times of high stress. Plus, we read it in bed the other night. You should really find someone to read in bed with. I highly recommend it. Just don’t think about the author while you’re reading, and you’ll be fine.”