He slammed the door.

I lost my mind.

“Zano, hello?” I snapped. “I didn’t invite you in. And something to know about me, I’m not the kind of girl who gets off on some guy doing whatever the hell he wants to do, especially around me, and especially especially when it happens to be something I don’t want him to do.”

“You invited me in, Ally,” he replied. “Around the time you came when my mouth was between your legs on my stairs. Then again when you came when my c**k was driving into you in my bed. Then again when you wrapped your mouth around my cock, also in my bed. And a-fuckin’-gain when you found it while riding my cock, also in my bed. And last, when you wrapped your sweet, hot, na**d body around me and passed out in my bed.”

Okay, I’d had a variety of Rock Chick chinwags where the girls let it all hang out about their guys and how they communicated in Asshole, but I’d never experienced it personally. And Ren had just demonstrated he was fluent in Asshole.

It must be said, I didn’t like it much.

Therefore, I invited acidly, “Rewind and try that again.”

He didn’t accept my invitation.

Instead, he turned. I saw him locate the light switch and flinched when the overhead light came on.

When I quit flinching, I noted his angry attention was back to me and he asked, “Were you drunker than I thought last night?”

“No,” I answered.

“So you remember what went down last night.”

“Yes,” I snapped, then tried to get him onto a subject I wanted to talk about, namely him leaving, but I didn’t get the chance.

He kept talking.

“All that went down last night?”

“Yes!”

My voice was rising because I did remember all that went down last night. And how I felt when I woke up that morning. But mostly I remembered the name he called me when I was lying there, thinking he was my one, and he was lying there holding on to a substitute body that, since he had no shot with the real one, was just going to have to do.

“So tell me, honey, if you weren’t hammered and you remember all that went down last night, why did I wake up to an empty bed this morning?” he asked.

“I had shit to do,” I answered, and it wasn’t totally a lie. I always had shit to do. I was a busy girl.

“You had shit to do,” he said low, and his eyes were a tad bit scary.

But I didn’t scare easily.

“Yep,” I replied.

“And it was so pressing you couldn’t wake me and tell me you had to go?”

“Yep, it was that pressing.” Now, that was totally a lie.

“And it was so pressing you couldn’t find a minute to jot down a note?”

Okay, suffice it to say, I was done with this bullshit. If he needed someone to give it to him regular while he waited for Ava, and to continue to give it to him regular when he realized that he’d never get Ava, he’d have to find someone else.

In order to communicate that to him, I stated, “Dude, we hooked up. That’s it. Or that’s all I remember. But maybe I was drunker than I thought. Did I miss the part where you slid a ring on my finger?”

This was the wrong thing to say, and I knew it when the room filled with something so oppressive, it was stifling. No joke. I literally couldn’t breathe.

As I mentioned, I didn’t scare easily.

But the truth of it was, I didn’t get scared. There wasn’t a situation that I remember ever being in where I didn’t feel in control or think I could find a way to regain control. I also had the gene passed down through my family where I could sense when things were going bad in a way that I would lose control and not get it back, and I was smart enough to get the f**k out of Dodge when I found myself in those kinds of situations.

But right then, feeling suffocated by the sheer force of Lorenzo Zano’s anger, I felt a hint of genuine fear.

Then his anger dissipated.

Vanished.

It did this instantly when he said, “I get it. You’re a Nightingale.”

My back snapped straight at his tone, which said it all about his implication. I just didn’t know for certain what he was implying, just that it was no good.

So I asked, “What does that mean?”

“That means both your brothers laid waste to most of the talented pu**y in Denver. Took what they wanted, walked away and never looked back. Not surprising, you a Nightingale, that’s your thing. Except you collect cock.”

And on that very effective parting shot, he turned, jerked open the door and slammed it behind him.

Standing in my apartment in the dead of night staring at the door, I didn’t feel my heart squeeze.

I felt it shrivel up and die.

* * * * *

Not surprisingly, in the coming days as Ava’s drama (that partly had to do with her courtship with Luke, but mostly had to do with the fact that the Rock Chicks were magnets for trouble) played out, I saw Ren again.

Both times he was up in Ava’s business, giving her soft looks and taking her back.

However, he did look at me. Once. When Ava’s drama reached its grand finale.

But the look he gave me was far from soft.

Unsurprisingly.

I acted like I didn’t give a shit.

Deep down, though, I knew it didn’t make any sense.

I also knew it killed.

Chapter Two

We Got a Deal

Rock Chick Rewind

Three weeks later…

I was sitting at the bar in Club, a happening hotspot in Cherry Creek that posed as a posh eatery but was mostly a pickup spot. I had on a little black dress that did the best it could (and its best was far from bad; the dress was scorching) with what little cle**age I had. I had on killer strappy black sandals that I’d borrowed from Indy, who had borrowed them from our friend Tod, the premier drag queen in Denver, and she’d not returned them.

Tod wouldn’t mind. He was generous with his shoes. I had three pairs of them in my closet already. He also had two pairs of mine.

I was there because I had my eye on Zach Gilligan, the guy a friend of mine, Helen, was dating. They’d been together for a while and she liked him a lot. But she suspected from some of the behavior he was exhibiting that he had a nasty habit that was the reason she had cash going missing from her wallet more than once. And last week, she’d “lost” the diamond pendant her grandmother gave her when she graduated from the University of Colorado ten years ago.

She feared her cash and the diamond she treasured was going up his nose.

I had no idea how I was going to prove this fact, outside of watching him with his buds, eating steak, drinking martinis, laughing, and him being the loudest and liveliest of the lot because he was so obviously coked to the gills. But I couldn’t just tell Helen he looked high. She was into him and really didn’t want to believe he was stealing from her.