by Lexi Blake
Sawyer grimaced. “I don’t need this. Where’s the gun? I’m just going to shoot myself and get it over with.”
“Hi.” Holly was back, and she slid into the chair beside him. “Look, I’m going to admit something horrifically embarrassing to you. I was going to come over here and try to pick you up, but then I realized that I would only be having sex with you because my ex-husband is an asshole, and that’s no reason to potentially risk a venereal disease.” She flushed. “Not that I think you have one. I kind of picked you because you looked perfectly disease-free.”
The door slammed open and the blonde walked in. She wore jeans and a sweater but no coat. And she had on some seriously high heels. She’d also been crying. Like Holly.
He was surrounded by emotional females. He’d been surrounded by hardened killers many times before, but this was far worse. He had no idea how to handle emotional females.
“No need to give him the whole story, darlin’. You don’t have to hit on tourists. Your escort is here.” Max Harper nodded Holly’s way. “Let me finish my beer, and I’ll get you back into town.”
Holly sighed, a look of deep relief covering her face. “Oh, Max, thanks so much. You know it’s really nice that whenever I do something dumb there’s always someone around to help me out. This is the best town ever. My ex thought it would be a punishment, but I’m happy here.”
The blonde sat down at the bar, a devastated look on her face.
Holly’s eyes widened as she looked toward the newcomer. “Do you need a phone, hon?”
The woman turned, frowning. “I don’t have anyone to call.”
“Hey, I want to talk to you.” One of the muscle-bound idiots who had been stalking Holly had a hand on her arm, turning her to face him.
“What?” Holly asked, her eyes flaring with a proper amount of fear.
Max grinned, looking at the redhead and the asshole. “Thank god. I need a good fight. Stef’s been twelve kinds of mopey lately. He won’t even punch me. Artists. I don’t understand them.”
“Are you kidding me?” Sawyer’s hand slapped on the table as the door opened again. “What the fuck is going on?”
And Bishop felt a bit of righteous indignation course through his veins. Nell walked in, pretty as she pleased, with her two puppy dogs trailing behind her. Seth Stark looked around the bar, taking it in as though it was all just a fun experience and not the site of his potential murder.
Logan, on the other hand, looked scared shitless. He had a Superman T-shirt on, his hands in his pockets.
But Nell walked in like she owned the place. “Sawyer, it’s so nice to see you. This is a lovely establishment you have here.”
Sawyer frowned, his eyes moving around the room as though assessing all the ways his day was about to go to shit. “No, it’s not. It’s a dive bar and a nest of criminal activity, so you should leave and take the underagers with you.”
“Uhm, you should take your hand off my arm,” Holly said politely to the brutish man whose tattoos just might be a roadmap of all his murders. “I’m going home. I don’t have time for a dance.”
“I do,” Max Harper said, putting his hat on the bar. He had a wide grin on his face as he rolled up the sleeves to his Western shirt.
“You were teasing me.” The muscular asshole didn’t look at Max. His eyes were on Holly. “I saw the way you looked at me.”
“Harper, don’t break shit,” Sawyer said before swinging back to Nell.
“I wasn’t looking at you,” Holly argued. “Not any more than I look at anyone. If you come into my field of vision, I will be forced to look at you, but that doesn’t mean anything.”
“You were looking at me like a woman looks at a man she wants to screw hard,” Holly’s assailant said.
“I think she was looking at me that way, too.” A second potential mass murderer stepped up.
“Oh, no. I wasn’t looking at anyone that way,” Holly insisted. “If I was looking at anyone, it was this guy, and I wasn’t thinking about anything like screwing him in a hard fashion. I thought maybe we would start with a foot massage.”
He was going to have to kill someone and then Nell would get all pissy about nonviolence and she would probably give him a long lecture on why it was wrong to shove a barstool up someone’s rectum.
Bishop took a sip of his horrifying vodka. He didn’t need a lecture from her. And he didn’t need to shove a piece of furniture up some criminal’s asshole. Now, hers, yeah he could do that, although it wouldn’t be a piece of furniture and he wouldn’t shove. No way. He would be smooth and slow. He would take his time getting that perky, tight asshole ready to take his dick. She would fight him at first, the muscles clenching to keep him out, but he would have his way. Sooner or later, his cock would slide in and then she would fight to keep him inside. That was what he needed.
“Are you going to help me with this, professor?” Max’s bark brought him out of his lovely daydream. No one seemed content to leave him be in this place. First, the kids broke up what should have been a nice long fuck, and now the violence was pulling him from thinking about a nice long fuck. The whole town of Bliss seemed intent on cockblocking him.
Holly was now surrounded by five large men who had started to use the term gangbang.
The blonde had jumped off her barstool and she got to Holly before Max could. She swung her backpack like it was a weapon. “You get your hands off of her, you filthy piece of crap. All of you better back away from her.”
Chaos. Wow. It was taking over. One minute everything was fairly peaceful, and now it looked like they were on the verge of Armageddon. One of the assholes screamed as the blonde’s backpack hit him in the head. She moved well. She was trained, and not in a cardio-at-the-gym way. He would bet she was some form of law enforcement. Or she had been before she’d decided to backpack across America.
“I’m not underage,” Seth said with a confident grin. He stood at the bar talking to Sawyer. “I have the ID to prove it.”
“It’s a fake,” Sawyer shot back.
“Prove it.” Seth held out his ID.
Sawyer rolled his eyes. “I don’t have to. That’s Logan Green. He’s barely nineteen. He graduated from high school last year.”
Seth held up a second ID. “You’re wrong. His name is Orion Buchwald. He’s twenty-two. We don’t know this Logan Green you speak of.”
Logan sighed. “Please don’t call my moms.”
Nell’s eyes met Bishop’s and then quickly slid away, refocusing on the bartender. “Do you have any organic liquor?”
A rough shout pulled him back to the Holly issue. “Look, bitch, I can take you, too.”
He was going to have to deal with the muscular assholes. The whole bar was watching the scene play out.
“You better find some cover.” Max got off his barstool. “These things can get nasty.”
“Don’t you try anything.” The blonde reached into her bag as Max stepped up. It was obvious she didn’t know he was trying to play savior. “I have pepper spray.”
“Why would you pepper spray me? I’m trying to help. Damn. I get sprayed too much as it is.” Max took a step back.
“I don’t think violence is the answer.” Nell had inserted herself into the situation, her hands out in a placating gesture. “We should sit down and have a sharing circle.”
Why did he want her? Oh, yeah. Her boobs were really nice. And she had those freaking lips. “Don’t get closer.”
She was about to get into the middle of this, and that meant he would be forced to take over.
“I’d like a beer.” Seth bellied up to the bar like he didn’t have a care in the world. Little bastard.
Bishop slid off his barstool. Fuck all. He should pick Nell up and leave, but she would likely protest that action, too. “Nell. Get back here, now.”
She frowned his way. “Why should I listen to you? You left me.”
She’d come after him. No doubt about it. So the sweet thing was really interested.
Now the only problem was the way the world was falling apart around him. “I was thirsty. Get behind me.”
“You didn’t say good-bye.” Nell crossed her arms over her breasts. He could remember the way her nipples had pressed into his chest before the Stark kid had interrupted him.
“I’m not giving you a beer.” Sawyer rolled his eyes at Seth.
“Hey, you should get your hands off her.” Logan seemed to have stopped worrying about his moms once he finally caught sight of what was happening with Holly.
“Hey!” Seth followed his friend’s eyes and stopped bitching about his lack of a beer. He came off his stool and started making his way toward men who outweighed his skinny ass by a hundred pounds of muscle. “I don’t think she wants you touching her.”
“You two kids better step the fuck back, and blondie there can come with us, too.” He numbered the combatants one through five since he preferred a neat order when it came to killing. The biggest of the mean assholes managed to get a hand in the blonde’s hair. He tugged her head back.
“My name is Laura, bastard. I’m the blondie who’s going to kick your ass.” She struggled, trying to get those killer heels to sink into his foot.
Max took a punch to his gut, but it oddly seemed to make him happy. He threw himself at his opponent, his fists flying.
Everyone got in on the action. Almost faster than his eyes could track, the entire bar erupted in pure chaos. Bishop sighed and eyed the door, hoping for a clear path out. The truth was none of this was his problem. Holly had come to the wrong place looking to get laid. The blonde chick was obviously in some sort of trouble, likely on the run from something she’d done. The two kids were obnoxious, and a near-death experience would toughen them up. Max Harper seemed to have found his nirvana, and the dude behind the bar was a baby criminal with the patch to prove it.
Not his problem.
Nell, on the other hand, was. He took her hand and started to lead her out.
“Henry, what are you doing?” Nell asked, her cruelty-free shoes scooting across the floor.
Bishop kept walking. “Getting you out of here. They don’t want to join in a sharing circle, Nell. You’re going to get hurt.”
“My friends are already getting hurt.” She tried to pull away from him. “What’s wrong with you? We can’t leave them.”
He heard a crash and someone screaming. He totally could leave them. If he stayed much longer, he would get a headache. “They’ll be fine.”
She pulled at his arm, finally dropping to the floor, her dead weight causing him to turn. He was surprised to see tears streaming down her face. He was amazed at how much the sight kicked him firmly in the gut. “You go on. I have to help my friends.”
She weighed maybe a hundred and fifteen pounds. She’d almost surely never been in a fight in her life. She claimed she abhorred violence, and he believed her.
“They’re fighting, Nell. What are you going to do?” Bishop asked.
“I don’t know, but I can’t leave them.” She got to her feet.
“You’re going to get hurt.”
“Then I get hurt. I’ll hurt worse if I know I didn’t try. Let me go.”
She would do it, he suddenly understood. She would walk into that chaos and try to talk reason to people who would kill her before they would listen to a word she said. She was stupid, and Bishop sort of admired her. He finally got what Sawyer had been trying to tell him. Nell believed, but even more than that, Nell was willing to put herself on the line for her beliefs. They weren’t empty words to her. They were who she was.
He pulled her back. “I will take care of it on one condition.”
“Take care of it?” She was shouting over the chaos. “How?”
He wasn’t about to tell her the how of it. “I’ll take care of it but you have to go out with me tonight and you can’t blame me for what I’m about to do.”
She nodded. “Don’t kill anyone, Henry. That kind of karma is hard to shake.”
He had so much of that karma he was up to his ears in it, but he gave her a nod. “And don’t watch. Just trust me. Can you trust me?”
She put a hand on his chest and closed her eyes. “Don’t get hurt, Henry.”
It was five against one, like that could hurt him. The main problem he had was saving the civilians, though Max Harper was doing a fine job on his own. He was gleefully taking apart his guy, and Sawyer had another in a headlock. Asshole Number One was trying to pull both Holly and Laura around the bar, likely to get them to the parking lot. Assholes Three and Five were dealing with the kids. Three had Seth Stark’s lanky body dangling from his hand, the kid’s sneakers kicking for the second time that day. Logan was faring better, surprisingly. He was taking a chair to his asshole’s back.
Bishop started with the girls. He walked straight up to Asshole One, no hesitation.
“Get back or I’ll have to kill…” Asshole One started in a gruff voice, but Bishop was already close enough. He let his booted foot come back and kicked the fucker’s balls so hard he was pretty sure they now resided somewhere next to his large intestine.
The big guy dropped his hold on the women and went down with a low groan. This was the moment when he would normally give his opponent a nice adjustment to vertebrae C1 and C2, and then no one ever had to worry about him again, but he’d made a promise so he merely picked up the nearest bottle. Vodka. No great loss. One little tap and the glass was broken and the asshole was out for a while.
“Thanks.” The blonde, Laura, put a hand on her lower abdomen. She’d gone pale, the blood draining from her face. “I think I might have popped a few stitches.”
“Go sit with Nell and we’ll make sure you get to a hospital.” Bishop turned and assessed his next victim. Though he thought the Stark kid was obnoxious, he was also turning a nice shade of blue. If Bishop had his way, he’d get this guy with one punch to the solar plexus. He would break the man’s xiphoid process, neatly shoving it into his diaphragm and causing an almost instant death. Instead, he took the boring route and wrapped his arm around the man’s neck, cutting off the blood flow to his brain and causing a very quick trip to nighty-nightville.
Seth Stark hit the ground, his chest heaving. “Thanks.”
“Go protect the girls.” He didn’t truly intend for Seth to protect anyone, but he needed to give the kid something to do.
“Logan,” he started, looking back to his best friend.
“Is doing just fine.” Logan was a mean shit in a fight. His form sucked ass, but he made up for it with pure bile and rage. It was a beautiful thing. And he had to stop it because Nell would be upset by the blood.
He decided to take this shithead out long range. He grabbed Max Harper’s empty beer bottle and aimed for the dude’s meaty head. One nice thunk and Logan was left with a completely defeated opponent.
Logan looked down at the man, scratching his head. “Did I do that?”
“Sawyer, Max, finish them off or I’ll do it for you.” Those two were perfectly capable of handling it.
Max punched out one last time, blood coming off his fist as he broke his opponent’s nose. He got to his feet with a frown on his face. “Spoilsport. I was having fun.”
Sawyer finally seemed to find the right angle to cut off his guy’s circulation. His opponent went limp, and he slid to the floor.
“That took you long enough. You need to practice more,” Bishop said. It had been a sloppy takedown.
“Who the hell are you? Where did you learn that shit?” Sawyer asked, new respect in his eyes.
He learned that shit in Delta Force and later refined it in the CIA. Yeah, he wasn’t telling anyone that.
“Krav Maga classes.” He stretched his hands out, popping every knuckle, and gave them his best professorial smile. “I take it with the other history professors at my college. You have to keep the body limber, too, you know.”
“Henry, can I open my eyes now?” Nell’s voice carried across the room.
“Yes, sw
eetheart. It’s over and everyone is alive.” He hoped. The beer bottle to the head had been a little stronger than he would have liked. Nope. The asshole was still breathing. Excellent. The asshole would only be brain damaged, but he hadn’t seemed that smart before.
“Idiot youngsters, come on. The first and only beer is on me. You did good, boys.” Sawyer popped the tops on two cold ones.
Nell flew across the room. One minute Bishop was standing alone and the next his arms were full of Nell.
He wrapped her up and hugged her close. Something settled inside him when she was in his arms. He didn’t even try to pretend like he wasn’t smelling her hair.
“You did it. Thank you, Henry. Thank you.” Nell squeezed him tight.
“Guys, can y’all take it from here?” Holly asked. “I’m going to take Laura into Del Norte and get her looked at. She had surgery a week ago. I’m really sorry. I’m going to stop going to bars looking for my soul mate. It gets me in trouble. If my luck holds, my soul mate is in Russia or Africa or someplace. He’s definitely not here.”
“I’ll drive you,” Max said. “Rye would have my head if I didn’t.”
Sawyer looked up from the bar. “How about you, professor? Want a drink? It’s on the house.”
“No,” he said, unable to stop staring at Nell, who was looking at him like he was a goddamn hero. “I can’t. I have a date.”
Chapter Four
Henry glanced around the small diner he found himself in and wondered if he’d managed to fall into a time machine. Stella’s Café proclaimed itself to have been established in 1970, but if he’d been forced to guess, he would place it all back in the fifties from the vibe coming off of it. Oh, the occupants of the place looked modern enough. They had cell phones and such, but every time the café doors opened, each patron looked up and waved at whoever happened to be walking through the doors.
