Page 163 of Tempting Fate

While Slash arranges an Uber, I keep my gaze locked on the elevators to see if Zeke steps out. He doesn’t.

“Take care of my baby.” Slash tosses the keys for his Range Rover to Isaiah before he opens the door to the Uber for me. I take his hand to steady myself as I climb inside. After he’s seated next to me, he lets his window down to say, “Drop the keys on the counter, then set the alarm and lock the front door behind yourself. Do not wake me up unless the house is on fire or the club needs me.”

Isaiah salutes him, nods at me, then takes off to grab Slash’s vehicle from the stadium parking lot.

“Just one of the perks of being the SAA,” I remark.

“There’s a few.”

Slash holds his arm up in a silent offer for me to snuggle into him. I accept, curling my knees under me and collapsing against him. My body is wrung dry, but my head is wired. Once Slash has made himself comfortable, I screw my eyes shut and will myself to fall asleep.

I think I made a huge mistake tonight.

One I refuse to examine until the morning.

After a few minutes, it works. I drift off, leaning on Slash.

I don’t wake up until he’s shaking me in the back seat.

“We’re home.”

“Go away,” I mumble around my cotton mouth as I slap his hand away when he tries to pinch me awake. “Let me sleep.”

Just like I knew he would, Slash chuckles and pulls me along the seat. He lifts me out of the vehicle and catches the underside of my knees with his arm as his other holds me around my back. I keep my eyes closed, feigning sleep while he carries me upstairs and into the room next to his.

It’s not a short distance, but he isn’t even puffing when we reach our destination.

Of course, the need to take the stairs is his fault. When my things arrived from Zeke, Slash made it clear that I needed to take a bigger room, so he gave me the one next to his oversized master bedroom. Giggling at that thought, I quip, “I bet you’re regretting the whole room change right about now.”

“Gonna start chargin’ you for all the heavy lifting.”

Because he’s shirtless under his cut, it’s easy to find his pierced nipple and twist it. “Take it back! I am not heavy.”

“Fuck.” Slash hisses when I increase the pressure. “You’re gonna pay for that.”

“How? Are you going to put salt in my coffee? It didn’t work last time… I barely noticed it.” Pleasantly tipsy now that I’ve had a nap, I squeal when he tosses me onto my bed. After unzipping my boot, I peel it off my leg and throw it at him. “Take it back, or I’ll shave your pretty mane off in your sleep.”

He catches the first shoe before it can hit him, but when I pull the second one off and my shredded panties fall out, we both freeze.

“’Spose you ripped them on the table too?”

The edge to his voice isn’t one I’ve ever heard from Slash. Unsure what it means, I decide to play it off as a joke. When I lob my second boot at him, it smacks him in the stomach. His mouth drops open, and for a second, I think he’s angry at me until he quips, “Oh, it’s on now.”

With a running leap, Slash pounces on me. When I try to kick him off the bed, he wrestles me underneath him. Straddling my hips, squeezing his knees to hold me in place so he can tickle me, Slash torments me with a smile. His big fingers find the soft spot under my arms, and he pokes me until I’m squirming beneath him.

“Shit,” Slash curses as he suddenly freezes above me. In a rush, he climbs off my bed. “I’ll see you in the mornin’. Sleep tight.”

I roll my eyes at him as he hotfoots it out of my room like he forgot the oven is on. No doubt his Harley will start up in a minute, so he can head into the compound for some last-minute club business like Zeke used to some nights. While I love the Shamrocks, they don’t exactly keep bankers’ hours. Zeke has woken me up too many times to count to kiss me goodbye in the early hours of the day.

“We’re not thinking about him tonight,” I remind myself out loud.

Colour me surprised when Slash’s bedroom door slams shut and stays closed.

Wide awake, I strip out of Slash’s shirt, then pull the rest of my clothes off. When I reach the ruined fishnets, an idea hits. I hurriedly dress in clean panties and a loose singlet. After retrieving the bottle of tequila that Nadia slipped me a few weeks ago because she is a strong proponent of day drinking your problems away, I boot up my laptop and plug my phone into it.

While my cloud opens, I slam down two long pulls of the sweet agave liquid. The alcohol hits fast and my skin breaks out in goosebumps as my hair stands on end. I scroll through the app in search of the video I’m looking for. Once I’ve clicked on five or six videos without luck, I remember that we used Zeke’s phone to film our home video.

On the off chance that he hasn’t changed his password, I log out of my backup and enter his details. The contents of his phone flash up on my screen. Smiling a little devilishly, I click on the first thing he has listed as keep.

---