the club, but her hands down my pants had me carrying her down the alley to the parking garage. I spotted the same car she’d driven to the club two weeks ago and stomped toward it.
Unceremoniously dropping her onto the hood, she landed with a plop. Her nails dragged across my skin as her hands were pulled from my pants. Grabbing her wrists when they crested my shoulders, I followed her down and pinned her to the hood. “You’re pissing me off and making my dick hard.”
“I only like ragey muscles in the bedroom.”
“Never have and never will put my hands on a woman in anger,” I told her honestly.
“Says the man holding me down,” she retorted and tried to move her arms and twist her body to get out of my grip. All she succeeded in doing was flipping herself onto her stomach.
Giving her some of my weight, I wanted to groan when my dick pressed against her firm ass, but she was pissing me off. “Enough!” I roared and released her. “What the fuck is your problem?”
She was on her feet in a flash, and she was livid. “You! You’re my problem! You fucked me, made me think you were going to help me, and then you sent your brother to scare me off!” she yelled and inhaled deeply as if preparing to go again.
“The fuck are you talking about?” I shouted back. “I sent my brother to the hotel, and he said you were gone.”
She scoffed. “He threatened me! Of course, I left.”
“Bullshit!” I started but immediately changed course. “No, you know what? Fuck this shit. I’m out.” I didn’t have the interest or energy to argue with a woman who was clearly batshit crazy.
“You can’t leave!”
“Yeah, I can, and I am,” I said and turned to leave. The Sloane I met months ago and tried to find was not the Sloane standing in front of me. A year ago, I might have played her game a little longer, might have even tried to end the night buried between her legs, but everything changed after Blue was born. Since then, everything I did was for her. And having a screaming match with Lorcan O’Shea’s daughter in a public parking garage—after I’d been warned not to do so again—was not in my daughter’s best interest.
I whirled around when something hit me right smack in the middle of my back. Sloane was standing there barefoot—one shoe in her hand and the other on the ground near me. “Why’d you do it? Why’d you lie to me? You stole the only chance I had of meeting my sister!” With tears steadily streaming down her face, she dropped the other shoe and walked back to her car with her head down, and her shoulders slumped in defeat.
I wasn’t like most men when it came to a crying woman. Nine out of ten times, the first sign of a tear pissed me off. Because based on my experiences, most women used tears as a means of manipulation. But hers were real. No one could fake the defeat and despair emanating from her. And I was a sucker for real tears.
Then, her words finally penetrated, and I was moving toward her before I could think better of it. “Sloane, wait. What’re you talking about?”
“I lied to you!” she cried. “I wasn’t there for an interview. I was looking for the sister I didn’t know I had. And now she’s gone!”
The sound of someone approaching reminded me of where we were. I wasn’t afraid of Luca by any means, but I had a healthy respect for the man he was and saw no reason to piss him off unnecessarily. “This is the last time I’m saying this. You and I need to talk. Nothing you’ve said tonight makes any sense to me. If you wanna go somewhere public and have a conversation, I’ll meet you there. If not, I’m walking away,” I told her and held my hands up in surrender.
She wordlessly turned around and walked to the passenger side of her car. “Fine, we can talk. But you’ll have to drive because I’m exhausted, and I’ve been drinking.”
“Where to?” I asked and slipped behind the wheel of her car.
She answered by holding up her phone and snapping a picture. “I’m sending your name and picture to my best friend so she can pass it along to my father if anything happens to me.”
I reached into my wallet, pulled out my driver’s license, and