The Hotel 2 (The Billionaire Seduction) by Lola Darling Page A

hard she
got me, and it’s all I can do to save myself for when Miss
Mysterious shows up.
    “Shit,” I mutter to myself, as I take out a bottle of
nice wine and some glasses, “what if she doesn’t even
show up?”
    I stamp the thought all the way into the back of my mind – like
I do most things these days – and jog on up to the second floor
to change.
    I get dressed, comb my hair, and go back downstairs. I put a little
music on in the den, something slow, but edgy – none of that
sugary shit. I like a little dirt in my music. Then I proceed to walk
around the room, checking my watch as I pace like I’m scared of
getting stood up in my own home.
    I stop as soon as I hear a sound, not sure if it’s real, and
too involved in my own imagination to hear it properly. Was that a
car door slamming? I hear footsteps on my porch.
    And there goes the fucking doorbell.
     
    Dylan and Gemma’s sexy adventure continues in BOOTYCALL: PART ONE
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Discover the Sexy Bastard series: five
friends, one bar, and a whole lot of trouble. From Eve Jagger –
out now!
     

HARD
     
    RYDER
     
    CH. 1
     
    There
are two smells in the world I love more than any others: a woman
right before sex and this warehouse right before a fight. They’re
different, of course. There’s nothing like a naked, wet,
waiting woman, the scent of her skin salty with sweat but sweet at
the same time, like swimming through an ocean of roses. The
warehouse’s odor is far less pleasurable, phantoms of last
round’s knocked-out teeth, bruised faces, and aching bones
making the air heavy, grimy, stifling, like the smell of fresh dirt.
But both are thrilling and unpredictable and make me want to explode.
    Even when it was me
in the ring a few years ago, my ribs about to get punched, my
knuckles about to crash into someone’s cheekbone, the smell of
this place would intoxicate me. Facing off with a guy whose sole
intention for the next several minutes is to pummel you into
submission is as terrifying as it sounds. And as exhilarating. The
policy of bare-knuckles brawls is no shirt, no shoes, big problem
standing right across from you. But all I had to do to calm myself
was take a big inhale of this warehouse air, let the molecules seep
into my lungs, into my bloodstream, and I won every match.
    I always win.
    So tonight, after
Crutcher beats Miller in an upset, a big win for me for sure, when
Tyler tells me that some kid is in for $10,000 and has disappeared, I
tell him he’s got to have it wrong. “I would never have
let Jamie McEntire run up that kind of tab,” I say. “I’ve
seen him around. I wouldn’t give him ten dollars, let alone ten
thousand.” When I took over running fight night two years ago,
I did a little cleanup from the mess my predecessor left. No five- or
six- figure debts to people we don’t know, no credit to anyone
who’s welched more than once. We may be an underground
operation, but there are standards. There’s also a dress code:
women in heels, men in collared shirts, and our crowd is the type who
likes to drop a lot of money on both. We have security guards. The
bartender will call you a cab if you get too drunk. I run a tight
ship. Even the police think so. That’s why they don’t
hassle me. Sometimes they even take a try in the ring.
    Tyler
shrugs. “It’s been gradual. Losses on a couple fights,
loans to cover him,” he says. “I hate to be the bearer of
bad news. But I double checked the ledger, and it adds up.”
    “Fuck
me,” I say, and a blond woman in high heels and a dress so
tight she must not have exhaled all night turns toward us. She raises
an eyebrow at me, smiles like she might take me up on the offer.
    And
with the way she wraps her mouth around the neck of that beer bottle,
keeping her eyes locked on mine as she takes a drink, I might just
let her.
    Tyler’s
voice yanks me back to the problem at hand. “So what do you
want to do?” he says. “He’s offered his house as
collateral.”
    I