That was the last straw. Adria was off the friends list. I looked up at him under my lashes and hoped against hope that the gunk I had fallen into wasn’t spreading onto him as he pulled me closer to his side. I loved the way I could feel the ripple of all that lean muscle against me as he moved. Knew I would love it even more when there weren’t so many clothes separating our skin.

I jerked to a halt when we rounded the corner. Because my luck was so stellar, and because, of course, that was how my night was going to end, the BMW was sitting on the ground, the tires and rims long gone. The driver’s-side window was busted out, meaning my radio and whatever else wasn’t tied down was probably missing. Luckily, I had locked all my school stuff in the trunk, and it still looked closed.

“Shit.” I breathed out the word and let Race pull me into a tight hug.

“That’s what happens out here.”

“It sucks.”

He didn’t argue, but pulled out his phone and started barking orders into it. It sounded like he was arranging to have someone tow the heap to the garage.

“More minions?”

He gave me a grin that had my insides turning liquid and slippery.

“Sometimes they serve a purpose. Let’s go. The Mustang is behind the warehouse.”

“I need to see if my computer and books are in the trunk still.”

He gave me a hard look and shook his head.

“You shouldn’t come down here with that kind of stuff. People get carjacked for a cell phone, let alone a new computer.”

I made a face and went to collect my stuff. “Like I said, I don’t know what to do with you and I have no idea what to do in this place, and yet I keep finding myself here.”

I breathed a sigh of relief when the Mac glinted up at me. I grabbed it and went back to my sexy escort.

He took my hand again and pressed a kiss to the back of it. It made me want to literally swoon. No one person should be that smooth. It was like he didn’t have any kind of edges, even though I knew for a fact that wasn’t true.

“Whether you want to be here or not, you have to know how to take care of yourself once you get here. The Point eats pretty girls like you alive.”

“What about pretty boys like you? Does it eat you alive too?”

He gave me a look that was dark in a different way from the ones he gave me when he was turned on. There were shadows there, deep places that had marked him, and it made me a little afraid, not just of him, but for him. Getting into bed with Race Hartman came with risks. I knew it, and the look on his handsome face told the truth of it.

“It does until the pretty boy grows a really sharp set of teeth to bite back.”

Yikes. That made him as much of a predator as everything else hiding in the darkness and shadows of this city, and I was about to go willingly with him and let him “take care” of me. It looked like I couldn’t avoid messy situations no matter how good my intentions might be.

Chapter 8

Race

I HAD TO ADMIT that so far, this night was turning out to be all kinds of awesome. Seeing the underdog win against that doped-up bruiser had done something good for my soul. Watching a bunch of greedy, overzealous, bloodthirsty people fall apart when they realized they had bet on brawn and not heart also made something warm ooze inside of my chest. This was a bad place, corrupted by bad people, so when the unexpected happened, when something good and just fought its way to a hard-won victory, it was hard not to revel in the aftermath. Plus the amount of money we had cleared on that dirty-ass fight was obscene and more than enough to keep Nassir off my ass for the foreseeable future.

Brysen was in the passenger seat of my car and she was coming home with me. That alone put the night at the top of my list in awesomeness. She was hesitant about it, looking for a way to justify it not going down, but then I would look at her out of the corner of my eye, she would bite her bottom lip and blush, and I knew that even though she still wanted to fight the attraction—deny the pull—she wanted to give in to it even more, wanted to give in to me.

I reached across the interior of the car and put a hand on her knee. She was jittery, I could feel it coming off of her. She was also the only girl I had ever met who could make dirty jeans and a simple black T-shirt look overtly sexy. There was just something about the way she moved, the innate grace and class that she carried with her, that made her so unique and desirable. It was like she knew that she was so much better than what was going on around her, but instead of looking down on it with disdain and resentment, she just stood in the eye of the storm and let all the ugliness and destruction whirl around her, waiting to see where it was going to land. Then she would just gingerly pick her way through the debris and mess and end up safely on the other side of it all.