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A thousand kisses on a thousand perfect nights wouldn’t be enough.
I tipped my head back, looking at him with the lights f
lashing all around us.
But it might be a nice place to start.
He lowered his head.
Just as my eyes closed and my lips parted in expectation, the other shoe dropped. Someone screamed, and a half-second later I smelled smoke.
Chapter Thirty-One
Sawyer was standing on the table in our VIP booth, and Ana was nowhere to be seen.
I forced my way through the dense crowd with Cade, Leo, and Sunny in tow, my pulse still throbbing in my ears and my heart hammering a mile a minute.
Sawyer spotted me, and her expression changed from panic to guilt in an instant. “I didn’t mean to.”
I didn’t need her to explain what she meant.
The entire side of the booth was smoldering, flames licking along the leather cushions, smoke furling into the air. Our bottle-service waitress materialized out of the shrieking crowd with a fire extinguisher, and as quickly as the blaze had started, it was out.
Ana reappeared then with a drink in hand and a what the fuck expression on her face.
“Where did you go?” I snarled, breaking from the group and grabbing the cleric by the arm. “You were supposed to watch her.” This was my punishment for letting my guard down for even a second. How could I have been such a dumbass?
I was out dancing, and Sawyer almost got burned alive.
I was literally the worst guardian since Bruce Wayne.
Leo helped Sawyer down from the table as if she weighed nothing, and she immediately latched on to him in a fierce hug, as if she were a barnacle and he was the side of a boat.
“I just went to get her a drink.” Ana held up the glass, showing me the orange and cherry inside. Shirley Temple. “I wasn’t even gone two minutes.” She looked over at the ruined booth. “What happened?”
That was the million-dollar question. There weren’t any candles on the table and nothing to easily start a fire of that size anywhere within reach. If Ana had honestly been gone such a short time, how had the blaze gotten started so fast?
Which was going to have to wait, because a beefy security guard with no neck and arms bigger than my waist was elbowing his way through the crowd towards us. I’d already gone out on a limb to get Sawyer into the club. I didn’t feel like spending the rest of my night explaining to management how she’d almost burned it down.
I pushed my group towards the patio exit, where most of the patrons had gone when they realized the place was on fire. We’d blend in easily.
“We’re going,” I announced.
Sunny, still a bit drunk, took the longest to realize what was going on, so I ended up dragging her by the arm through the crowd until we were well out of sight of the guard.
Out on the Strip we walked a few blocks before I stopped abruptly and grabbed Sawyer, pulling her free of Leo’s protective grip and forcing her to look at me.
I wasn’t angry so much as I was full of adrenaline that I had no idea what to do with.
“What happened in there?”
She blinked at me, bewildered. “I don’t know.”
“You do know. Don’t bullshit me, kid, I invented that game. What happened?”
Sawyer glanced around, but when no one immediately jumped to her rescue, she said, “When Ana went to get my drink, this guy started talking to me. I don’t know where he came from, he was just at the booth suddenly, asking me all these questions.”
“What questions?”
