A slow smile spread over his face.
“You are a sneaky thing,” he commented.
I tried to make myself blush as I looked away. I wasn’t sure if I pulled it off or not, but it was enough for him to grab my head and kiss me again.
“You are hot and adorable,” he informed me. “Give me about an hour to convince Alex and Phillip you aren’t coming back and that I’m going to bed. We’ll have the whole night.”
I nodded and smiled.
Too damn easy.
Shortly after eleven that night, Brad and I opened the adjoining suite doors, clomped down the back stairs of the International Tower, and out the side door. He wore a baseball cap pulled down over his face and some dark glasses, which looked ridiculous in the dark. You would likely notice that he was hiding something, but what he was hiding would have been anyone’s guess.
We quickly booked a room at the Westin just down the street under Marshall’s name again and hurried up the elevator. He was all over me as soon as the door to the room closed, and I had to just go with it for a few minutes to keep him off his guard.
His hand dropped down my chest, over my abs, and cupped my crotch. I closed my eyes and thought of all the porn I could remember to get myself to react a little.
“You’re still nervous,” Brad commented.
“Yeah, I bit, I guess.” Either that or my dick really only worked for chicks.
“Don’t be,” he said quietly. “We can go as slow as you want to.”
“Okay,” I replied. I cleared my throat. “Maybe some wine or something?”
“Good idea.”
There was a small bottle in the tiny hotel room bar, which I opened and poured into two glasses. Checking over my shoulder, I quickly added Rohyphenol tablets to one of the glasses, stirred the drug until it dissolved into the liquid, and then handed it to Brad.
It didn’t take long for the drug to take effect. Not that I needed any of that to rape him, as had become the drug’s more common usage, but it did make him nicely stupid and easy to manipulate. Actually, he took to the stuff like I imagined a schoolgirl would.
In other words, he just dropped to the bed and started to giggle.
“I think maybe that wine hit you a little too hard,” I informed him.
“Hard,” he slurred. “I want to see you hard.”
More giggling.
“Let’s get a little fresh air first.”
He agreed. He would have agreed to anything at that point, up to and including taking a leap off the balcony. If I had thought about it beforehand, and if his death should have looked like an accident, I might have gone that route. He was a message, though – like most of my work: Don’t fuck with Rinaldo Moretti. It didn’t matter who you were or how many people there were around you – you were going to get killed.
Ashton half fell against me, and I felt his mouth on my neck.
“So fuckin’ sexy...”
“Yeah, I’m a dream,” I replied. I sat him down on the bed as my phone began to buzz.
I glanced at the number, but other than being a Chicago area code, I wasn’t sure who it was. Under most circumstances, I didn’t answer when I didn’t know the number – it was more often someone wanting me to buy something than anything else – but this time I did.
“So where you hanging out tonight?”
“Terry Kramer?” My eyes narrowed as I looked at the phone again. I had a number in there for Terry, but this one wasn’t it. “What do you want?”
“Just wonderin’ what you were up ta,” he said. “I heard you might have left town.”
“Who told you that?”