Page 52 of Sweet Temptation

“What are you looking for?”

“Anything that stands out,” he said. As if that told me anything.

When we got to the backyard, he headed over to the house and walked across the patio, then made his way around the windowed walls of the sunroom. He ran his fingertips lightly over the edges of the windows as he went, and I followed, watching.

When he reached the end of the sunroom, where it met the house, he stopped dead. I almost bumped into him.

He crouched down, looking at something on the ground.

“What?” I tried to peek over his enormous, hunched shoulder. “What did you find?”

He stood up and shifted aside, toeing something in the grass with his boot. “You see that?”

I looked where he indicated, and sure enough, there was something there. Bits of broken glass, kinda hidden in the grass. “What is that?”

“It’s a crack pipe,” he said. “A broken crack pipe.”

“What?” I craned to get a better look at it.

What the hell was that doing in my yard?

Ronan poked around in the grass with his boot a bit. I wasn’t sure what he was thinking. Yes, I had a lot of house parties. Great house parties. But I knew my guests. I had wild friends. Not stupid friends.

I really, really couldn’t picture anyone I knew sneaking back here to smoke crack, then coming back inside to mingle and drink martinis.

I wasn’t even sure what to say. Ronan was feeling up the wall again; he seemed to be searching for finger holds.

“You’re telling me one of my friends is a secret crackhead?”

He looked at me. “Where, exactly, did the police dog catch Sanchuk?”

I looked at the wall, right where we were standing. Beneath my bedroom balcony. “Right… here,” I said, touching the window. “Wait. You think it’s his?”

“He probably dropped it. On purpose. He knew the cops had him, so he ditched it so they wouldn’t find it on him.”

“Shiiit.” I thought about that, and I really wasn’t liking the conclusion I was drawing in my head… “A few of my girlfriends told me he offered them meth at my shows.”

We both looked at the shattered pipe.

“Could be for smoking meth,” he said.

Fuck me.

I looked up into his eyes again, feeling fucking stupid for some reason. The fact that Blair had offered meth to my friends at my shows was one of the reasons I’d tried to distance myself from him; but I hadn’t told Ronan about that. “I guess I should’ve mentioned that to you.”

“I heard,” he said. “You had Flynn bounce him out of an event a couple of weeks ago?”

“Yeah…” I said, realizing that I probably didn’t need to tell him anything. Brody or Flynn or whoever had beaten me to it.

That irritated me. That they’d been talking about me.

But of course they’d been talking about me.

Summer makes pour choices.

Summer has crazy stalker methhead friends.

I looked around in the grass. “There’s nothing else here, though.” Then I looked up into Ronan’s eyes again, and I could see the gears turning behind his eyes. “He didn’t ditch any drugs to go along with the pipe…”

---