Page 285 of The Black Trilogy

No way. I refused to spend the evening wedged between their massive thighs, nice though they were. The British version of football was bad enough, but the American version sent me to sleep. How did they manage to turn a sixty-minute game into five hours? And when I started to nod off, Nick would poke me, constantly.

“You must be kidding.”

“Or you could sit on my lap,” Jed offered.

My eyes rolled so hard they got halfway to Alabama. “Nick, give me your keys. I’ll sleep at your house.” Next, I turned to Bradley. “And, party princess, if the house doesn’t look pristine when I get back tomorrow, I’m holding you responsible.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll all be good.”

I returned the next morning to find a very hungover Bradley balanced precariously on a stepladder, trying to scrape a slice of pizza off the lounge ceiling. Boy, was I glad I’d escaped the night before.

“How on earth did that get up there?”

Bradley shrugged and wobbled, so I grabbed the ladder to steady it.

“I literally have no idea. I passed out around four.”

I ventured further into the house, marvelling at the skill it must have taken to hook a shoe on a branch of the ridiculously expensive chandelier that hung in my two-storey high atrium, and almost tripped over Logan, who was asleep in the entrance to the dining room. As I wandered through the place, I counted another six men unconscious downstairs, before finding Nate in the kitchen concocting what had to be the most vile-smelling alleged hangover cure I’d ever come across.

“What’s in that?”

“Lemon, raw egg, fresh oranges, vitamins, kale, pickle juice.”

“Pickle juice?”

“It restores electrolytes.”

“I’d rather just go teetotal.”

I heard a gasp from the doorway and swivelled to see Mack, looking fresh as a daisy and followed by Luke and a very excited Tia.

Uh oh.

What on earth were they doing here?

CHAPTER 49

I HUGGED TIA then covered her eyes as Jed hobbled into the kitchen in his boxer shorts and cast, scratching his unmentionables.

“For Pete’s sake, put some proper clothes on!” I snapped at him. “Tia doesn’t want to see you half-naked.”

“Actually, the bit I saw looked quite good,” Tia mumbled, her face still squashed against my hand.

“Jed—clothes!”

He ambled out of the kitchen and Mack stared after him. “Ah, Jared Harker, the CIA’s finest.”

I turned to Luke with a groan. “My house isn’t normally like this, I swear.”

“What happened?” Mack asked. “Did your harem escape from the basement again?”

Not helping.

“Mack, be serious. This isn’t setting a good example for Tia. Honestly, I wasn’t even here last night. I left them to it and stayed at Nick’s. Although to be fair, his place looks worse than this, and he didn’t even have a party.”

Luke didn’t look as though he believed me, but when he laughed at Nate’s attempts to work the blender, I breathed a sigh of relief he wasn’t cross.

“Perhaps we should go to the office instead?” Mack suggested.

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