The rest of the flight he keeps his arm around my shoulders and pins me to his strong side, and he keeps making sexual foreplay to my ear, the only place where the others can’t really see what he’s doing to me. He tugs my earlobe with his teeth, licks the shell of my ear, and has forgotten all about playing music for me. While I shudder wantonly, wet and squirming as I keep glancing at his jeans, which burst with the fullness of his erection. The volume straining the denim is so staggering that my hands itch, my tongue wants to taste him, lick him, my pussy clenches in desperate desire.

We arrive at the five star hotel, and the heady combo of anticipation and arousal I’ve been struggling with shoots through the roof when I realize Remy has booked me into the two-bedroom presidential suite with him. As the keys are handed out, everyone else seems to notice too.

“I sincerely hope you know what you’re getting into,” Pete says in a concerned whisper, his brow scrunched worriedly at the corners.

Diane’s eyes are almost tear-filled when she tugs me aside at the lobby. “Oh, Brooke, please reconsider rooming with me again?”

Riley comes over and looks at me with all openness, patting my shoulder like I’m going to war. “He’s trying the hardest I’ve ever seen him try for you, B.”

Their attitudes don’t really confound me.

I know they’re worried this will end badly. I’m Remington’s employee and only a temporary one, and he has a bad reputation with tons of evidence behind it. He obviously has a little bit of a temper and can prove to be too hot to handle. But even though he’s so strong, I know instinctively that he’d never hurt me, and he’s never done anything to demonstrate otherwise. The rest doesn’t matter right now. It just doesn’t matter to me at all. I want him. With a force I haven’t felt in over six years. And I’m going to go for it.

Maybe I have a red self-destruct button too?

The nerves about what will happen run me raw as we go up to our rooms to ready for the fight, and suddenly I need Melanie so bad I pull my cell phone out of my purse and immediately text her, since it’s been a couple of days since I have.

Brooke: How’s my BFFFFFFFFFFFF!

Melanie: Miz u! But I forgive u if u tell me you’ve gotten sexy piece of man ass already!

Brooke: Oh, sigh

Melanie: What? You have???

Brooke: Mel

Melanie: What?? What?

Brooke: I think I’m falling in love with him

He took Miami like an avalanche.

We’re back from his first fight, and I’m still breathless with exhilaration. Remy barely got grazed by his opponents. He was super charged, his body precise and so powerful he didn’t even have to deliver many punches to knock down his opponents. He swept through every one of them like he was on vacation, and by the end of the evening, people screamed with delight and even the announcer was out of breath. “May these poor men Rest In Peace, my goodness, this man can hit! You go, RIP!!!! Rip their heads off, you bad bastard! Riiiiptide, ladies and gentlemen! Riptiiiiiide!”

Even Riley was so excited from where he watched at the corner that he climbed on the back of Coach and pumped his fists in the air, yelling his head off. Meanwhile Pete seemed to have left his responsible self back in Atlanta, for before we left the Underground, he declared, “We should fucking celebrate!”

Before Remington even knew what happened, there was already a crowd heading with us to the hotel in about a dozen different cars. So now we’re in the presidential suite with what feels like a thousand strangers, but of course, there can’t possibly be so many for real. And actually, Pete says most of these people have previously partied with Remington, so they’re only strangers to me.

The crowd is so vast, people are even littered out in the hall, making so much noise I can’t help thinking what a blessing it is the other two enormous presidential suites at the top hotel floor are empty, or else we’d probably be looking for somewhere else to sleep tonight.

I’m disappointed I haven’t even been able to see him since he showered and changed. He’s been flocked by admirers and was brought to the hotel by a group of old Miami friends, who let him drive the Ferrari one of them brought.

Now, as I wind through all the people crammed in what supposedly is my and Remy’s suite, I wonder if I should join the merriment and go all out and get drunk, when applause breaks out by the entry, followed by unmistakable cheers only one man I know can cause. He comes into the room carried on the shoulders of four guys. My heart stutters. He’s got this big smile on his face, cocky Remy to the tenth power, high on his wins, and the women scream, high on him. “Remy! Remyyyy!”

“That’s right, who’s the man?” he shouts, and pounds his fists on his chest. I laugh, completely sucked in, mesmerized and enchanted by him. The aura he emanates makes him blaze like a sun tonight. If right now he says he can fly, I think we’d all believe him. Everyone present seems magnetized by him, helplessly gravitating to where he is. He spots me, and his smile softens and his eyes alight with a strange, hungry, and somehow glowing look. “Brooke.”

He hops down to his feet and beckons me forward, and the crowd parts to let me pass. He smiles at me, and his dancing blue eyes hold mine as he slowly walks forward and meets me halfway. He lifts me in his powerful arms and swings me around, and then he kisses me.

The instant he takes my lips, fireworks shoot off in my body.

All the pent-up desire of days and weeks adds up to this one moment when everything that I am, and everything that I want, is narrowed down to this. To me, pulling Remington Tate’s dark head closer to mine as I open my mouth and let him give me anything and everything he wants to.

His kiss spins my stomach into a wild swirl. He holds me tightly by the hips and deftly moves his lips as he rubs his tongue to mine. A rumble vibrates deep in his core as he gathers me closer and forces me to feel his erection, all while he angles his head and fucks my mouth like there’s no tomorrow.

People whoot loudly nearby, and when they tell him to “Go fuck that pussy!” Remy tears free. He breathes harshly through his nose as he drags his mouth to my ear, where he whispers, hot and gruff, “You’re mine tonight.”

A fevered moan escapes me. He cups my face in those big hands that make me feel fragile and tiny, and he hungrily recaptures my mouth. He takes it slowly this time, as if I’m precious and valuable. “Tonight you’re mine.”

He looks into my face again, his eyes seething with desire. I think I just nodded in agreement, but I’m too shaky to know for sure. A sweltering fever runs unleashed through me. My legs won’t stop trembling as every one of my cells scream in lust because I want him now. I want him now.

“Remy, I want you, take me!” a woman shouts, but he ignores her, ignores everything. But me.

His eyes dark and intent, he scrapes the sides of my face with the pads of his big, callused thumbs, then spreads his fingers wide over my scalp as he kisses me again, our mouths hot and wet as they blend, thirsty and anxious. I grip the soft gray of the t-shirt he wears in my fists, dying with sensations. I don’t even care who’s watching, am oblivious to the crude things they’re whistling. I hadn’t realized how much I want this, need this, until these shivers ripple through me and I’m in a flux under his insistent sexy mouth, the look in his eyes that makes me feel like I’m the only woman alive to him.

“Take her to your room, Tate!” someone yells. But he seems engrossed only in me, and me in him.

Holding me protectively in his strong arms, he brushes my hair back as his lips buzz along the bare curve between my neck and collar, his fingers sliding up my neck as he once again, like a chant, nuzzles my ear and tells me, “Mine. Tonight.”

“So are you.” I cup his jaw and search his darkened gaze when, suddenly, he’s plucked by four men who swiftly swing him up in the air once more.

“Remy, Remy…” they chant, bouncing him in unison. Laughter fills me, and bubbles of happiness pop inside my chest. I’m happy for me. For him. For this night.

Nearby, Pete and Riley watch the scene with faces so bleak and pinched, it feels like they’re burying a cadaver tonight.

“Have fun, guys!” I say laughingly as I approach. Very possibly both my grandfathers party better than these two. But they just shake their heads and keep looking positively glum.

“He’s getting speedy,” Pete mutters, mostly to Riley.

“I know, man. Shit.”

“Yeah.” Pete scratches his curls. “Did I actually instigate this whole party?”

“Prepare for crash landing,” is all Riley returns, and then he heads down the hall, tossing his head side to side.

Confusion hits me. “What’s wrong?” I ask Pete.

“Nothing. Yet.” He glances at his watch, then at Remy as he’s carried back to the bar. “But anything goes off in a way he doesn’t like, then we’re going to be in trouble. Big. Trouble.”

Glancing around, I see there’s only smiles and laughter while crazy rock music from Remy’s iPod bursts from the suite speakers. I truly don’t know what these two are worrying about. Everyone is having fun, and Remington works as hard as anyone I’ve ever known. He deserves to let loose. Yes, he’s a little hyper, but to me it’s obvious that he’s got a rush from the fight and it’s been added to the same thing that has been having us both, Remington and I, feel coiled like hungry cobras, for weeks.

All day today, when we came up to settle our suitcase in our suite, and went down to lunch with the team, and he prepared before the fight—every instant of these moments, our eyes have been wildly searching each other, and as soon as they lock, the sparks leap between us in arcs so powerful the need to be with him cuts me like whiplashes. Even at the fight, when he turned to look at me before it began, his blue eyes simmered with a fierce appetite to have me. I know that he feels the same hunger I do now, as I wait, fevered in anticipation of this evening. My body hums in arousal, and after such an amazing fight, I know Remington is buzzing like crazy. He’s all jacked up. Stoked and primed.

His energy is so powerful tonight, it actually pulls at every cell and atom in my body, bathing me in pure female awareness of his hot masculinity.

Now I watch as he pours some tequila shots behind the bar, and a striking blond at his side squeezes lemon juice on her cleavage and adds a dab of salt, then she squeezes a shot glass right between her tightly squeezed tits. She tugs on Remy’s wrist and signals for him to come get it. Jealousy clenches all my inner muscles, only loosening when Remy grabs the nearest man around and pushes his face into her boobs, laughing, loud and manly, as he grabs the two shots he’d poured and starts to come back to me.

His eyes lock to mine, and they go dark and wild. As dark and wild as the fluttering in my insides. He seems to want to party with no one but me, and the knowledge hits me square in the knees. Between my thighs, I’ve grown sensitive, wet, and swollen.

He carries a salt shaker and lemons in one of his palms. “Come here,” he says, gruff but soft as he sets the shot glasses on a console by the entry. He sucks the lime wedge between his lips, and bends his head to pass it to me. I open my mouth and the lime juice spills into me, from his mouth, then he draws it away and sticks his tongue in with mine. He groans, we both do, as we linger and kiss, licking each other, until he groans once more and steps back to hand me the shot glass.