The Bad Boys of Summer Anthology Read online

  He brings our hands to his mouth, running his lips across the backs of my knuckles. My chest expands, my muscles relax, and I squeeze his fingers.

  “Don’t say sorry, Ky. Just don’t fucking…scare me again.”

  Wyatt McCrae. Scared. Something about him admitting that to me tonight—on the night that we’ve agreed would be our last—sends multiple emotions pummeling through me, beating against my heart like a strong fist.

  I pull out of his grip and scrub the heels of my palms over my eyes. “God, why do you have to say things like that now?” I drag my hands back, slicking tears through my hair as I push it away from my forehead. Asking him this makes my thoughts flash back to a string of days and nights we’d spent together a few years back, and for the briefest moment, I let myself relive the memory.

  Wyatt had come to me after my brother or Sinjin—I can’t remember which one, not that it matters now—had told him I was sick with a particularly nasty strain of the flu. He’d let himself into my apartment where he found me lying on the couch, and I’d shivered violently as soon as his fingertips made contact with my feverish body. When I finally found the strength to ask him to leave, fearing that he might get sick and be out of commission, he’d swooped me up effortlessly in his arms and taken me back to my bedroom.

  “Breaking and entering is illegal,” I had coughed into the front of his tee-shirt shirt. “So get the hell out.”

  “You gave me the key, beautiful,” he’d pointed out, holding me closer. “I’m not going anywhere with you feeling like this.”

  “I’m not kidding,” I’d argued, each word practically wheezed. “Go home, McCrae, before you catch this crap, and I have to hear Lucas’s mouth about getting you sick.”

  “You mean more to me than a goddamn fever,” he’d told me as he dropped me on the bed and then reached for the bottle of Nyquil on the nightstand. “And I don’t give a shit what your brother has to say—never have. I’m not leaving until you’re better, beautiful. And even then I don’t want to go.”

  “Why do you have to say things like that now?” I’d asked, causing him to smile.

  “You want me to tell the truth, don’t you? Well, there it was.”

  But despite what he’d said, combined with a couple days of feverish sex and cough syrup-induced conversations that blew my mind, the moment my fever broke, he’d bolted without as much as a goodbye. It had taken me a few weeks to convince myself to see him again, and even then, neither one of us had brought up the time he spent at my place while I was sick.

  Now, a look of regret, which is quickly replaced by tenderness, flashes in his eyes. “Because it’s true.” He tugs me back to him, cursing. “And don’t do that. I can take tears from anyone but you, Ky.”

  “I swear I’m fine.” I feel a little ridiculous…okay, incredibly ridiculous. I’ve never actually cried in front of him because he’s usually not around by the time the letdown kicks in and the waterworks begin. “I just need to go to bed.”

  I stand to go join Heidi at the front desk, but he closes his hand around mine. “You’re not sleeping anywhere but with me tonight.”

  As much as I want that to happen, as much as I want him, I can’t in good conscience leave my best friend alone. “I should stay with Heidi.”

  Wyatt’s blue eyes scan the lobby until they zero in on Heidi. She’s kicked off her stilettos and is leaning against the front desk with her eyebrows pulled together as she signs a receipt. She was lucky. When Finn ditched her in favor of raiding our room, she had her license and bank cards on her. Instead of going directly back to our room, she’d stopped for a pity party shot at the first bar she found. I hate to think of what would have happened if she came straight to The Veranda.

  Heidi’s right up there with my parents and Lucas and the band for me, and to think of anyone hurting her makes me feel physically sick.

  “I can’t leave her alone, Wyatt,” I say, my voice brimming with so much emotion that he draws his thick eyebrows together.

  “I’m going to text Cal.” He reaches into the pocket of his jeans for his phone.

  I stop him, grabbing his hand, before he can send the other guitarist a message. “They hate each other.”

  The last thing I want is to hear Heidi and Cal bicker, and they’ve been doing it for years, ever since he hurt her feelings by turning her down after a show. A vicious migraine is starting to make my eyes burn, and I doubt listening to them angrily spit out douche bags, hoebots, and fucksticks every few minutes will make it feel any better.

  “And?” Wyatt’s smile is cocky and infuriatingly handsome. He shrugs out of my grip, his fingertips skimming mine in the process. He doesn’t seem to care that I’m glaring flame-tipped darts into his forehead as he sends Cal a message. “At least she won’t be alone.”

  “Your tenacity is unnerving.”

  “I want to do so many fucking things to you when you talk like that.”

  “Let me talk to her, okay?” Sighing, I start toward Heidi, turning around to glance back at him a couple times. His eyes follow me, doing a double take when they drag over my ass. He’s probably just now realizing that I’ve not showered or changed since he left me, and knowing Wyatt, it’s probably giving him more ideas. “You shouldn’t look at me like that,” I hiss over my shoulder.

  “Why the hell not?” he drawls. Running the tip of his tongue over his bottom lip, he gives me a confident smirk. “Trust me, she’ll say yes.”

  I turn to face Heidi, whispering under my breath, “We’ll see.”

  But, in the end, Wyatt is right. Heidi feels like she’s screwed up my night enough, so she doesn’t want to ruin what I had planned. Without so much as an eye roll, she quickly agrees to sleep on the extra queen bed in Cal’s room.

  Wyatt and I go with her to grab her bags…well, bag because that’s all that’s left of her designer suitcases in our room. Most of my luggage is still there, and I pack my remaining belongings quickly. When Wyatt excuses himself to return to his suite, taking my stuff with him, I walk with Heidi to Cal’s room on the sixth floor.

  On the third knock, Cal flings open the door, wearing nothing but a towel. A toothbrush is in his mouth, and his black hair is clinging to his damp shoulders. Leaning against the door frame, he gives Heidi a head to toe once-over. While under his scrutiny, I feel her fidget beside me.

  Through a mouthful of toothpaste, he says, “Your mascara looks like shit.”

  And here we go.

  Heidi sneers. “I’m only staying with you because I love Kylie, limp dick.” She shoves past him, snapping the towel away from his waist in the process.

  I’ve been on the road with the guys so much that there’s nothing I haven’t seen, but I still cover my eyes, feeling heat creep up my neck.

  He chokes on the toothpaste and garbles something.

  I’m laughing as I back away from the door. After the night I’ve had, it feels good to laugh. “Good night, y’all.”

  Cal is still coughing when I begin to head down the hallway, but before I hear his door close, he says in a clear enough voice, “Bet you’re not going to try your small-dick-phone-sex humiliation shit on me now.”

  For the next forty-five minutes, I sit in the hotel’s business center, canceling all my credit and debit cards. It’s a pain in the ass because it’s so late, but I finally get it done and order replacements to be delivered to my apartment in L.A.

  By the time I’m ready to go upstairs to Wyatt’s room, I’m so exhausted that I practically drag myself across the lobby, and I lean against the wall of the elevator as I ride up to the fifth floor.

  The door to Wyatt’s room is propped open with the hotel’s binder that’s filled with information about local restaurants and the cable channel lineup. I pick it up as I go inside, and then I lock the dead bolt and throw the binder on the chair by the door. I follow the hum of the pipes into the bathroom, walking into a haze of fog from the steam.

  Wyatt pokes his head out from behind the shower curtain w
hile he’s scrubbing shampoo into his scalp. “You. Naked. In the shower. Now.”

  “You. Caveman. Go screw yourself.” I shed my clothes anyway and kick them under the sink. I take his hand and carefully step into the shower. I recoil at how hot the water is, but he pulls me to him, shielding my body from the stream, as he adjusts the temperature.

  “It took you fucking forever.” He lathers soap over my breasts, testing the weight of each, as his thumbs trace around my nipples. His hands move to my belly button, and when he glides a soapy finger around it, I shiver. “Thought you forgot about me.”

  He’s echoing my sentiments from earlier tonight, and I smile slightly. “No, that’s impossible. I had to cancel my cards linked to Lucas’s accounts before someone steals all his money, and he decides to strangle me.”

  “He’s too busy with Red to notice anything, except for her pus—”

  I flare my palms down his slick abs and his toned V to grab his cock. This must catch him off-guard because his lips part. “I don’t want to hear things like that about my brother.”

  Wyatt laughs but then asks in a serious voice, “Did you get everything handled?”

  “That idiot stole my ID, too.”

  He bends his head, so he can run his tongue around my lips. “You know what has to happen, Kylie,” he says. I start to move my fingers away from him, but he closes them back around his length. “It’s not like Lucas is expecting you back anytime soon—who knows how long he’ll be in Nashville. So … you know that you’re coming with me tomorrow, don’t you?”

  Yes, I know. I’ve known that’s how things would go down the second Officer Townsend mentioned my credit cards, and I realized there was no way I could board my flight tomorrow. I study Wyatt’s shit-eating grin. “You planned this, didn’t you?”

  “For some motherfucker to screw you over? No. But for you to come with me? Yes. That was my plan all along.”

  “And the fact that someone broke into my hotel room makes it easier for you.”

  He pins me against the shower wall, hitching my leg around his waist, and I let go of his erection, so I can grip his tattooed shoulders for support. Water is beating down on my face, but I don’t blink as I wait for him to answer.

  “Did you really think I’d give you up so easily, beautiful? Did you think I’d let you go without reminding you why you fucking fell in the first place?”

  I swallow hard and nod.

  Before he lowers his mouth to mine, he shakes his head in disappointment as he murmurs, “Then, you must not know a goddamn thing about me.”

  Chapter Six

  Generally speaking, I hate the way the insides of rental cars smell. I don’t know anyone who gets excited about the stale musk scent of dusty vacuum cleaner and Windex. But when I open the Suburban’s passenger door early the next afternoon, I pause. And I inhale. This particular vehicle smells like Wyatt’s cologne, Jean Paul Gaultier’s Le Male. I bend and put my nose closer to the seat. This time, I breathe in the scent as deeply as my lungs will allow. He must have spritzed some all over the leather when he was loading our bags.

  A shiver courses down my spine.

  “Are you…” Heidi’s voice coming up behind me startles me, and I jolt up to see her and Cal walking up to the Suburban together. As I shuffle away from the car, he gets inside, moving all the way to the back row, but Heidi doesn’t budge. She raises her thinly arched eyebrows and slips her hands into the front pockets of her floral-print skinny jeans. “Holy shit, Kylie, you’re sniffing the seat.”

  “No, I—”

  But she pokes her head into the car and breathes in. “Ooh, that does smell good. Wonder what you’re thinking about right now?” She climbs into the Suburban through the back door and plops down in the middle seat, folding her skinny arms across her chest. Cal snorts from the row behind her, and even though her eyes narrow dangerously, she ignores him. “This will be fun,” she says to me, a little too cheerfully.

  Instead of holding back the nervous laugh building in my chest, I let it out as I slide my sunglasses over my face. There’s nowhere near enough sunshine today to need the oversized aviators, but they’ll help me sleep on the ride. At least, that’s the plan.

  “I sure as hell hope this’ll be good,” I say.

  “There’ll be music. What’s not fun about music?” Heidi asks.

  Cal says something to her from the backseat, and though I’m not a hundred percent positive, I’m pretty sure he said, “And the dicks attached to the guys who play it.”

  Whatever it is was, it earns a hissed, “Fuck you,” and the bird from Heidi.

  Biting the inside of my cheek, I rub the back of my neck. I’m already dreading the fact that I’ll be forced to listen to Heidi and Cal’s back-and-forth until the end of the week, which is three days from now.

  When I spoke to Heidi about my plans to travel along with Wyatt and Cal this morning, she promptly volunteered herself for the trip. I was quick to point out how unnecessary it is for her to spend her free time with me on the road, and of course, she was quick to argue, claiming that not tagging along isn’t even an option.

  “You don’t have to do that, babe. I don’t have a choice, but you do,” I tell her. “Catch your flight and get back to sexing up drunk guys.”

  She responds by ripping her itinerary into tiny pieces and dropping them into my hand. “You’re stuck with me now.”

  “You do know that you can just print another one, right?”

  Flipping her chestnut waves over her shoulder, she presses her lips together. “It’s…what? Only four days, counting today? And it’s not like the phones are going anywhere. It’s my fault that you have to be with them, so I want to go.”

  Though I should have, I didn’t tell her the sad, twisted reality of it all.

  A part of me is thrilled that I’m going along for the ride and ecstatic that I’ll have these few extra days with Wyatt just so I can get everything off my chest. Even if he will be busy driving and performing the majority of that time, we’ll have the opportunity that was taken away from us last night.

  But then, a part of me aches inside because I know that prolonging my time with him will just slice open my heart a little more. He didn’t tell me the exact plan for this trip until this morning, and when he did, I was speechless for a long time.

  The first leg of our trip is the same route that we took eight years ago when I realized that I loved him. It’s the same route where I went from the girl who coped with her insecurities by physically hurting herself to the woman who’s spent the last several years carving deeper emotional wounds into her body.

  Wyatt’s breath on my neck separates me from my thoughts. I face him with a forced smile on my face.

  “Ready?” he asks.

  I tip my head back before I answer him, glaring up at the overcast sky through my sunglasses. “Yeah, I am.” Taking a small step toward the car, I say, “But fair warning—if you end up asking me to chauffeur you around, I might break that pretty blue Kramer of yours over your head.”

  He inclines his head toward the back compartment of the SUV where his Kramer guitar is safely stored. “I’m not Lucas, beautiful.” He grabs my waist firmly between his hands, and lifts me off the ground, placing me into the Suburban.

  “I’m capable of lifting my leg high enough to use the step rail.”

  “Trust me, I know exactly how high those legs will go.” Before he closes my door, he winks and says, “By the way, Ky, you couldn’t hurt that pretty blue Kramer even if you tried.”

  Using the rearview mirror, I catch Cal and Heidi stifling laughter from their respective rows. “Stop encouraging his bull,” I say a little too sharply. But at least they’ve found common ground. It just blows that it’s in the form of the tension crackling between Wyatt and me.

  Wyatt slams down into the driver’s seat, pops open the biggest Monster Energy drink I’ve ever seen, and starts the ignition. He glances over at me, wearing a grin that’s far too sexy. “Let’s do
this shit.”

  “Let’s,” I agree sarcastically.

  I’m silent as he pulls out of the hotel parking lot. Because he hates GPS, he has to turn around at a gas station a quarter of a mile up the road.

  “Babe, you do know that Garmin isn’t actually watching every move you make, don’t you? It doesn’t have a camera recording every messed-up thing you say. So, trust me, if you use the damn GPS, I swear everything will be alright.”

  He rubs his tongue up and down the labret in his lower lip as if deep in thought before gesturing to the folded piece of paper lodged into one of the cup holders. “If you insist, Ky.”

  My nose wrinkles up when he gives in so easily, but I say nothing as I unfold the paper, which turns out to be the location of the Houston hotel. I alternate between punching the address into the GPS and glancing at him. “Done.”

  “If a close-up of my dick ends up on YouTube, your ass is mine, Kylie.”

  “Didn’t you already claim it as yours anyway?” I challenge in a voice quiet enough for only him to hear, and he nods slowly. “Ugh, just drive.”

  I sit back in my seat and press my forehead against the cold window, watching New Orleans fade away, as Wyatt speeds the Suburban onto I-10 toward Houston. I don’t know if he planned the road trip like this on purpose, but if he wanted me to remember everything, he’s succeeded.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpse at him. His blue eyes are glued on the road, and one of his hands is gripping the steering wheel so tight that I swear I’ll hear the leather split apart at any moment. His expression is suddenly unreadable, and I wish like hell I knew why.

  Silently, he reaches past the center console and creeps his hand across my lap, not stopping until his fingertips brush the inside of my left wrist. Gasping, I jerk away as if he’s scorched my skin with fire. I close my eyes, and I can practically feel the way his hand closed around my wrist when we left New Orleans all those years ago. It was before Your Toxic Sequel— at the time, Falling Anarchy—made it big, and I was huddled up against him in the backseat of Sinjin’s Ford Expedition. I can hear the words he whispered to me, just as clear and startling as ever.