Sweet Temptation: A Players Rockstar Romance (Players, Book 3)

I remembered: Ash would be with Danica. He hadn’t crashed here since they’d hooked up. I wondered if they’d both stayed over.
Obviously, someone had.
I walked into my living room, expecting to find someone sprawled on the couch. I stopped in the middle of the room.
It wasn’t as bright down here, but I didn’t need to turn on any lights. The trees surrounding the house blocked some of that intense moonlight, but I could see that there was no one in the room.
“Ashley?” I said. I was so fucking sure someone was here. “Danica?” I called out, as I headed down the hall beyond the living room, where the guest bedrooms were. I peeked into each room. The doors were open and no one was there. I checked the guest bathroom.
Then I went back up the other hall toward my bedroom, where the music room was, and peeked in there, too.
No one.
As I walked slowly back into the living room, where the evidence of tonight’s party was strewn about, a shiver went up my back. And I remembered what I’d said to Elle.
I swear, someone is sticking pins in a tiny little Summer doll today.
It had been a small, chill party, and no one had stayed very long. I’d walked Xander and Courteney out myself, before I went up to bed, around two o’clock. Or maybe it was one-thirty. I hadn’t really paid attention. There were only a few people left, including Ash and Danica.
Now, there was obviously no one in the house but me. Yet I couldn’t shake the lingering feeling that I wasn’t alone.
I went into the adjoining kitchen, looking around, for what, I had no idea. I kept telling myself I was just freaked out because of my stuff getting stolen after last night’s show, and then getting woken up by my neighbor’s alarm last night…
No one was here. And nothing was out of place.
There were some bottles and glasses still sitting on the tables in the living room and on the bar. Someone had cleaned up a bit, organizing empties into boxes by the fridge. Danica, probably.
I got a glass out of the cupboard and poured myself a water. I took a sip, just trying to breathe and shake off the creeped-out feeling.
Since when did I get creeped out in my own house?
It was a bad dream or something. I didn’t normally have those, but maybe those three green apple martinis I’d drank with the girls weren’t sitting so well. I took another sip of water, turning to go back to bed.
And I heard a noise.
I stopped.
I definitely did not imagine that. It was coming from the sunroom at the back of the living room.
It was the sound of something scratching on glass.
Goosebumps rippled across my skin.
I stepped slowly around the bar that separated the kitchen from the living room, and peered through to the glass-walled sunroom. Moonlight partly illuminated the room, but it was half-dark, too, the trees outside throwing eerie shadows.
And there it was again. A brief scratching sound on glass—and a dark figure moving outside.
There was a man in my backyard.
My body froze as ice-cold fear tore through me. It was instinctual, primal. Even as my mind started racing for an explanation, my body knew there was something deeply wrong here.
All I could see was the dark form, definitely a man. But that wasn’t one of my friends out there. I knew it, even though I couldn’t see him clearly in the shadows.
People showed up in my yard all the time, for parties. But this was not that.
This was unwelcome.
Everything in me told me this was wrong.
What the hell was he doing out there? Was he looking for the key? The one in the coffee can in the bushes?
Did he know about the key?
I considered marching into the sunroom and throwing open a window, yelling at him. Maybe that would scare him away?
But the hairs all over my body were standing on end, and something made me stay right where I was. Walking into the sunroom would leave me exposed to him, even in the near-dark, with nothing but a wall of windows between us.
What if he had a weapon?
I stood frozen, afraid to move, barely able to breathe… as I watched him reach up the glass wall of the sunroom… and feel along the edges of the windows.
I set my water glass down on the bar, my heart pounding so hard that my hands shook. Then I backed slowly away. I didn’t even think about what I was doing. I just backed out of the room, turned, and ran down the hall and up the stairs to my bedroom.
I ran into my room and grabbed my phone, which was charging on the nightstand… wondering all the while if the doors were locked. Did my friends lock the house when they left?
I dialed 911 as fast as I could with trembling fingers.
The whole time, I could hear the faint scuffling noise outside—the sounds of a man trying to break into my home.
And God damn, it took them a long time to answer.
“911. What is your emergency?”
“Someone’s trying to break into my house!” That’s about all I could get out of my mouth. There was a lump in my throat. I could hear the sounds, down below my bedroom balcony.
The curtains were closed over the sliding glass doors to the balcony, moonlight streaming through.
Were they locked?
I backed toward the door of the bedroom, listening to the sounds from outside, even as the operator asked me questions. I gave her my address. She seemed to be trying to calm me down, though I thought I sounded calm.
Inside, I felt hysterical. I could hardly make my legs work to get back down the stairs.
The operator double-checked my address. She assured me that the police were on their way. She felt very, very far away.
“Stay on the line,” she kept telling me, as if she thought I might hang up. “Where are you now, in relation to the