Antologia De Mate

What Happens in Vegas…After Dark
by Jodi Lynn Copeland, Anya Bast, Lauren Dane and Kit Tunstall

HOT FOR REVENGE Jodi Lynn Copeland To Melissa, who listens to all my rants and raves and understands the value of a good caramel brownie to make everything shiny and new again.

Chapter One
Ryan V egas. A hell of a place to call home. At least, until the bill collectors came a-calling. “Shit.”Growling out a second curse, I pushed through the door that connected the garage to the kitchen and tossed the lease agreement for my inner-city rental house onto the table. Jenison Davis, the old guy I rented the place from, had been nice enough to tape the form to the front door so that I saw it as soon as I pulled in the drive from twenty-four hours on at the firehouse. He’d also been niceenough to highlight in yellow and circle in red the surcharges posed for not paying the rent on time. The rent I was almost two grand behind on. “Yeah. Real fucking nice.” Not that I expected him to let me freeload forever, but, damn, this blew. If I didn’t find a housemate to cover the half of the rent my brother, Jack, quit paying when he moved out to settle down with his fiancée, I was screwed. Ofcourse, there was the option of living at the firehouse full-time. A year ago I would have done so in a heartbeat. Women dug being sneaked into the house and were only too willing to shell out the oral gratitude. But then, a year ago, my guts hadn’t roiled with the thought of being bottled up full-time with a couple dozen adrenaline junkies. And a year ago, I wasn’t a mental case waiting tohappen. The barely contained nasty shit in my head was the reason I hadn’t been more serious about finding a housemate. Now, I didn’t have a choice. Even if it meant some stranger moving in, touching my stuff, moving things where they didn’t belong, ticking me off in general—I had to find someone fast.

Going to the fridge, I pulled a longneck bottle of Bud from the crisper drawer and uncapped it.Cool, crisp ale slid down my throat, calming my irritation while washing away the sensation that smoke clung to my throat and lungs as much as my body. This morning’s apartment fire was the last thing I wanted to think about. The building was located on the opposite side of the city from the blaze that changed my life. Still, it had looked enough like the other building to have guilt chomping a hugehole in my stomach and making me pissy long before I’d gotten home. I lifted the bottle back to my lips and chugged its contents. One beer wouldn’t get me plastered no matter how fast I drank it. But one beer was a hell of a start. Two were even better. Slamming the empty bottle onto the counter, I grabbed another longneck from the crisper and headed for the stairs sandwiched between the kitchenand living room. Before I could ascend the first step, someone knocked on the front door. Or make that some chick who hadn’t waited for an invitation to enter, but let herself inside. At present, she stood in the open doorway, giving me a visual head-to-toe patdown. I’d forgive her the indiscretion of trespassing. But only because she had waistlength red hair, huge, barely covered tits, glisteningcherry-red lips and slanted ice-blue eyes that were screaming “do me all night long.” Shallow? Yeah. But what the hell, I was having a shitty day. Those stunning lips curved in a siren’s smile. In a voice laced with smoke and sex, she asked, “Are you Ryan Dempsey?” Before she’d knocked, I’d been in the process of heading upstairs to shower the acrid smell of smoke from my body. Now, I wantedsmoke all over me. Or rather that sexy, smoky voice coupled with her hotter-than-a-four-alarm-fire body. Goddamn, the woman was built! Feeling like I’d just come face-to-face with my destiny for the next seven or eight hours —or however long it took my dick, which was currently in the process of tenting my jeans, to get its fill of her—I took a step forward. “I am.” I flashed the arrogant grin all...