I’ve never gotten drunk with someone, and suddenly I’m just glad it’s with him. Reckless joy courses through my veins. I feel wicked and impulsive, doing everything I’ve never done. Taking the glass between my fingers, I toss back the liquid and feel it burn a path down my throat, and when he hands me the lime again, I’m absolutely crazy with excitement.

Repeating the same thing he did, I stick the lime wedge into my mouth, and he ducks and sucks the lime juice from me. A moan escapes me when he tugs the lime away and replaces it with his tongue. Need rips through me, and my arms go around his neck.

The empty shot glasses crash to the ground as he grabs my ass, boosts me up to the console, slides between my legs, and thrusts his tongue into my mouth.

He shoves his hips and hardness against me, the desperation in the move shooting lightning bolts through my body. “You smell so good…” he rasps into my ear. His hands clench on my thighs as he rubs his hardness against me. His mouth grazes a path down my temple, to my chin, and his lips my buzz, fast and fevered, over mine. “I want you now. I can’t wait to get rid of these people. How do you like it, Brooke? Hard? Fast?”

“Anyway you want it,” I murmur, intoxicated with the feel of his arms, his mouth, the scrape through our clothes of his sex against my sex. I think my words make him remember the song I played, for he groans and ducks his head to lightly nibble on my lower lip.

“Wait here, little firecracker,” he says, and he makes his way back to the bar.

We have a second set of shots, and then he goes off for rounds three and four, and I’m definitely woozy by the fourth. I’ve never really drunk before, and I don’t think my system is equipped to handle it. My head spins as I watch him go for round five with a dopey smile. Some of the men once again grab him and shoot him up in the air, shouting, “Who’s the man? Who’s the man?”

“You bet your asses it’s me, motherfuckers!”

They set him back on his feet at the bar and then start yelling as they push an enormous glass of beer to him, and they yell at him, with triple cadence as their fists bump the granite, “Re-ming-ton! Re-ming-ton! Re-ming-ton!”

“Cool down, guys,” Pete says as he approaches, trying to calm things down.

“Who the fuck is this nerd?” one bearded guy says, and Remy grabs him and shoves him up against the wall as easily as if he weighed no more than a premature baby.

“He’s my bro, you toad. Show some fucking respect.”

“Calm down, dude, I was only asking!”

Remy drops him to the ground and goes back to fix our tequilas.

I know he’s going to come back to me with more shots, but people keep detaining him, and my stomach is making noises. I can’t feel my tongue, and I’m pretty sure I need to puke.

Covering my mouth, I rush to the bathroom of the smallest but closest bedroom, and ignore the couple making out on the bed as I charge into the bathroom, slam and lock the door, then drop at the side of the toilet, grab my hair and barely manage to lift the lid as I puke my guts out.

Five minutes later I’m still at it, gasping as I begin to have a private pity party with myself. Right here in the bathroom.

God. My stomach. My poor liver. Poor me. I’m so frickin’ glad I did track in my teenage years instead of te-kill-ya! I can’t even believe Melanie likes to do this. I groan in misery as the nausea comes back up my throat again. I hang my head into the toilet once more and convulse as everything rips out of me.

When I think I’m done, everything is a blur and I’m still dizzy. I wash my mouth and search for my vitamins in the stuff I’d left in this room’s bath in case I’d rather not share a bathroom with Remington, which seems like a great plan now that I might be spending all night puking. I grab a red-colored B complex and vitamin C mix and pop one in, and I figure I should start hydrating myself, but I feel lazy to go get some water, so instead I flush the toilet a third time, close the top, and lean my forehead on it in case I get nauseous again. I grab my phone and text Mel;

Fel like shiz!@ Drunk as a firkin don%ky! but Im gunna furck Remy if i survve th8 teqila!

Then I think I even doze off.

When I come to, my temples throb, and the noise outside in the presidential suite is deafening. I have the good sense to wash my mouth and calm down the tangles in my hair and wash my hands, then I peer out into the room and the lovers are gone, so I pad out into the living room toward the noise. No. Not noise. The pandemonium.

Blinking, I absorb the scene before me with disbelieving eyes. I don’t know what’s happened, but something. Definitely. Has. Happened. Feathers from torn pillows are littered everywhere. Glass crunches under my feet as I walk. People are shoving against each other, somehow drunk and panicked as they try to save themselves from something. Then I see him.

Remington “Riptide” Tate, the sexiest man alive, is tossing anything in his path and yelling at the top of his lungs, “What the fuck did you tell her about me? Where the fuck is she?” while Pete is jacketless, and tieless, and desperate to calm him down. Remy flings a crystal decanter into the wall with a fantastic crash, and people scream both in fear and laughter, while Riley is busy ushering them out the open suite doors.

My drunkenness instantly fades, or at least it drops down about fifty percent, and I am almost fully sober from the shock. I jump into action and start shoving all the bodies I come into contact with toward the door, “Out, out, out!” I scream like a banshee.

Remy hears my voice, and whips around and sees me. His eyes flash with something feral as he tosses the lamp he has in his hands and sends it crashing with a big explosion of glass behind him, then he starts for me. But Pete grabs him back, pulling desperately at his arm. “See, dude? She signed a contract, remember? You don’t need to destroy the hotel, man.” As Remington stares into my eyes with an expression of pure raw pain, Pete rams something into his neck and his eyelids flutter.

His head slumps forward, and I freeze in complete and total horror. Clouds of confusion impede any rational thought as I try to process the fact that Pete, gentle Pete, just shot something up Remy’s jugular.

Riley continues shoving people out the room as Remy slumps down and Pete struggles to prop him up against the nearest wall. When we manage to get the last person out, Riley drapes one of Remy’s arms around his neck, while the other goes around Pete. His feet are dragging beneath his body as they start hauling him to the master bedroom, and when I hear his beautifully male voice speak, he sounds not only drunk now, but super drugged, his timbre low and barely intelligible.

“Don't let her see.”

“We won’t, Rem.”

His head hangs forward as if he has no strength to support it. “Just don’t let her see.”

“Yeah, man, got it.”

Icy dread spreads along my insides as I move dazedly, like a sleepwalker, and follow them to the door. I stay at the threshold, torn between going after him and my utter confusion of what’s going on and my OCD which just begs me to start cleaning all this damned mess, and also the tequila shots which still make me feel like a donkey. “What’s wrong with him?” I ask Pete as they both come out. Riley heads out to the living room phone.

“He’s fine, just a little low.” Pete grabs the doorknob to close the door.

And suddenly I’m concerned out of my ever-loving mind and hold onto Pete’s arm like a lifeline. “Don’t pull this shit on me. What doesn’t he want me to see?”

My voice trembles, but I’m so scared and drunk and sexually frustrated, if he doesn’t give me an answer I think I’m going to go and smash the rest of what Remington left intact.

Pete hesitates, then pries my arm free from the death grip I seem to have on him. “He doesn’t want you to see him.”

I’m stunned speechless, but my need to make sure Remington is all right is so overpowering that I still try to go in. Pete quickly yanks me firmly aside.

“Look, he’s been speedy since you got here, and this kind of thing happens after the speedy. All he needs is some physical contact to make him feel good, get him out of that funk, and he’ll be fine soon. We knew it was coming, it was just a matter of days. It always begins when he can’t be worn off in the ring. And the fact that he’s been panting after you like a dog doesn’t help, Brooke.”

“And who the hell gives you the right to shoot chemicals up his veins, Pete?” I demand, reeling in fury on Remington’s behalf.

“He does. A thousand trashed hotel rooms, Brooke. I’ve been with him a decade, and so has Riley. He’s the most high maintenance man you’re ever gonna meet!”

Riley walks back to us with a bleak expression. “They’re on their way.”

“You got two?” Pete asks.

“Three. New ones. See if that will whet his damned stubborn appetite.”

When I realize what they’re talking about, I immediately want to hit them. “Three new what? Prostitutes?”

With a fresh glimmer of concern, Pete pats my shoulder in an appeasing there-there mode. “This is standard protocol, all right? These are clean women and very expensive ones. He won’t care who it is. We shouldn’t have let him go so long without working that off especially with you around. Sorry about being graphic but this is our problem to fix now, and he can’t fight like this tomorrow. Hell, it’s going to be a miracle if we get him out of bed.”

Something bleak and green twists inside me, knotting viciously in my chest. “I don’t want those women here,” I tell them in deceptive calm.

Maybe I don’t have a say in the matter, but I remember Remy’s kiss tonight, the gentle cup of his hands. His words. You’re mine tonight…

The sudden, vivid image of his body entwined with someone else’s makes me want to rush to the toilet again and throw up. I’m a little drunk, or maybe already hung over. I don’t know. But my heart hurts and my stomach roils at the mere thought of anyone else touching him. And suddenly I do need to cover my mouth and rush to the toilet again for real.

I spend the next ten minutes there, then wash my mouth again, clean everything up, and wind my way back to the living room just in time for the stinking prostitutes to arrive. Riley seems to have gone down to the lobby to bring them up—as no respectable hotel would allow these women access on their own—and when Pete opens the door to let them inside, with their stinking perfumes and glittery ensembles, I gape and feel green and twisted all over again.

They’re so beautiful, I realize with horror I may be the kind of drunk who starts yelling at people and then crying, because I feel like doing both. I’m so furious I charge forward and halt the women only two steps into the living room, all three of them stopping when they see my messed-up hair and my angry glare.

“We don’t need your services anymore, ladies. I’m sorry for your time, here’s for your expenses coming over.”

Grabbing a hundred dollars from Riley’s wallet, who was the closest and also the jerk who had the gall to call them, I shove the women out into the hall and slam the door in their faces. Then I spin around, a scowl biting into my face.