Page 236 of Sweet Temptation

“Oh, fucking yes, I can.”

“You have no right,” he said, and his voice lowered to a growl, like a wounded dog with no way out. “She used to talk to me. You said something to her. You made her stop talking to me.”

“Think you arranged that yourself,” Maddox said. “With your fuckin’ charm.”

“No. No, you don’t know. Her music speaks to me,” he grit out, with so much force that he spit through his teeth.

And now I was starting to get the picture. Of just how crazy this asshole was.

There was something so deeply wrong in his eyes, it made my neck itch.

“Jesus,” Maddox said. “How much meth you need to smoke to believe the shit comin’ outta your mouth right now?”

“I just wanted to talk to her,” Sanchuk repeated, in a feral growl that rattled right through his clenched teeth.

I got down in front of him, and poked the tip of my remote control shiv into the hole I’d made with the drill, until I’d forced his head back against the wall and he had nowhere left to go—and the weapon in my hand had nowhere left to go but into his jugular.

“Oh, no. No. You’re never talking to her. You’re never getting near her, ever again.”

He swallowed, and blood oozed out of the hole.

“See, that drill? I brought it in here. I use it against you, it shows forethought, premeditation, all that shit. Bad idea, right? But who knows. Maybe I just came in here to talk, and you pulled that gun on me. I had no choice but to use the only thing I could… this TV remote… in self-defense.”

“I…” he tried to say something, his voice garbled, but I pressed the jagged plastic deeper and he shut up.

“Who do you think the cops are gonna believe? Me? The bodyguard of the woman you terrorized? Or you, the asshole who violated his restraining order tonight and as a consequence, ended up bleeding out with a broken remote control in his throat in some shit hole motel?”

My words were calm, even cold. But I was trembling with anger, with adrenaline, as I held myself back. Struggling to keep thinking straight… as every lizard brain impulse in me told me to go ahead and make him hurt for what he’d done to Summer.

For how he’d scared her and made her feel unsafe in her own home, in her own fucking life, when all she’d ever wanted to do was make people happy with her music.

And for whatever he’d been trying to do to her when he climbed the wall of her house and tried to break into her bedroom.

But something was holding me back.

A sense of humanity? Sanity?

Fear of going to prison for the rest of my life for murdering a man with a TV remote in some nasty motel room?

Then I froze. I barely even heard the knock on the door through the pounding in my skull. But my eyes met Maddox’s.

He slipped over to the door and looked out the peephole, and my mind raced…

Motel manager.

Police.

Bloody Bastards?

Then Maddox opened the fucking door faster than I could get to my feet.

Piper was standing outside, and he wasn’t smiling. He walked in, with two of the guys he’d been with at the club tonight. And Blazer.

“You called your fucking club brothers?” I spit out, as Maddox shut the door. I couldn’t fucking believe it, and yet, of course I could. These assholes always stuck together.

When he went to park the van, or maybe before that, Maddox had been on the phone, spilling everything to his fucking VP.

“Hey, now,” Blazer said. “What kinda welcome is that?”

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