“Are we going to do this here or outside in the alley?” one of them asked.
Another hand dove between Dree’s thighs, and she clamped her legs together and punched at the arm and face connected to it.
The shaking in her arms wracked her whole body.
There were too many of them.
Too many hands, and all were too big and too strong.
“Leave me alone,” she begged them. More hands, more leering faces, more hands and bodies coming at her and trapping her. “Stop! Jesus Christ, just leave me alone!”
Movement from behind the guys.
Rumbling.
A few of the guys’ heads swiveled left as something drew their attention, and their eyes widened.
Large, strong hands appeared over the wall of her attackers and grasped their shoulders. Their attached bodies flailed and flopped aside.
The cluster of men fragmented like a rotting sea wall broken apart by a rogue wave.
Men’s voices yelled as the barrier they’d made themselves into was ripped apart.
A tower of white cotton and muscled flesh breached the ring of guys and rose in front of her. Scents of mild soap and a fresh, masculine aftershave emanated from the white tee shirt and the mountain of a man standing there and facing away from her. One of his arms reached back to shield her, and the other shoved outward, pushing the guys’ shoulders and forcing them to stumble backward.
The man’s deep voice said in British-accented English, “Back away. The lady said she wanted to be left alone.”
The other men crowded around them shrank backward like they were melting wax in the hot sun.
Dree’s heart thrashed in her chest. She was struggling to suck air because the room seemed to have fallen on her. The only thing holding back the wreckage was the huge man looming in front of her, protecting her from those men intent on—
—rape.
Intent on rape.
Dree knew what would have happened to her, and people would have said that she deserved it because she’d yelled such a thing and the whole bar had heard it.
But the man was holding them back.
Her heart fluttered as it settled.
She was still shaking from her skeleton to her skin.
The man twisted, looked down at her, and asked, “Are you all right?”
Up close and looking down at her like that, his chiseled cheekbones and jaw seemed more pronounced, and his large, dark eyes had grown more intense and filled with points of light. He had a straight, masculine nose, and his dark curls swept forward and framed his face as he bent. He looked like a statue of a Roman god or a sculpture by Michelangelo that had come to life and twisted to stare down at her. Shock at his pure male beauty flooded her, and it felt like something between a tremor of magic and abject worship of a divinity that had materialized in front of her.
“Are you all right?” he asked again.
By all the saints, the man had a refined British accent, too.
That was just not fair. It was like he’d scooped up all the masculine perfection in the world and left none at all for the other guys. Dree was pretty sure that every man she met for the rest of her life would seem watery, weak, and spineless, and they would talk funny, too.
The man turned a little more toward her, peering at her face. “You’re not all right. Let’s get you out of here.”
He grabbed her hand and tugged, and she stumbled off the bar chair. The flesh of his hand was hard around her fingers, like he had thick calluses on his palm and fingers. Her legs wouldn’t hold her, and she felt like a newborn lamb trying to not fall on its face in the straw and failing.
His firm grip on her arm hauled her up, and she knew her stupid face was slack with numb confusion at the squawking of the people crowding around her and the whirling disco lights and beeping techno music. When she breathed, the tequila from her mouth mixed with the exhaled breath of too many people packed into the room, and she was suffocating.
The man held her up by her upper arm and half-dragged her a few steps. She was trying to follow him, but her legs would not cooperate. Her limbs tripped and splayed at bizarre angles as the music and screaming beat on her ears.
The man wrapped one arm around her, holding her up around her back. She frog-flopped one foot in front of the other, staring at her white ballet-flat shoes, and he hustled her out of the Buddha Bar’s front doors.
She stumbled out of the bar and into a wall of ice.
Freezing air slapped her face and sweaty skin. Clammy cold crawled under the red fabric of her skin-tight dress and sucked the heat out of her. “Oh!”
“What is it?” the man asked.
The cold stung her cheeks and arms, rousing her from her drunkenness. “It’s so cold,” she said. “I left my coat in there.”
“We’re not going back in,” he said, his deep voice spreading out in the night air.
“But my coat—”
“You can get it tomorrow.”
“Someone will take it,” she said.
“You’ll be fine.”
The icy air sucked the heat out of her flesh and chilled her to the core. “It’s December, and I need a coat.”
The man whirled something black through the air that had been hanging over his arm. He said, “It’s not even that cold out here.”
The air stung the inside of her nose, and it hurt to breathe. “It totally is! It’s freezing! How do you Europeans stand it?”
He looked down at her as he settled his black leather jacket around her shoulders. “Where are you from?”
“Arizona!”
One corner of his mouth turned up in a half-smile as he adjusted the jacket’s collar.
One of his fingertips brushed her neck, and a shiver flew through her.
“That explains it,” he said. “This is a chilly fall evening for Paris. It’s a little fresh.”
Dree shoved her arms into his jacket, pushing her small purse down the sleeve. Of course, his coat must be roomy to accommodate his thick, muscular arms and broad chest. The inside of his jacket was still warm, and the lining was smooth on her bare arms like it might be silk.
She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered as a hint of the warm spice and dark scent of his cologne rose out of the collar and brushed her face. “Thanks. I do need to get my coat, though.”
“That bar isn’t a safe place for you right now. You can see if it’s still there tomorrow.”
She blurted, “I can’t afford to buy another one. I have to go back and get it.”
One of his shoulders twitched, a gesture of dismissal, and he blinked and glanced off to the side from under his thick eyelashes. “If you promise not to go back in there tonight, I will buy you any coat you want.”
“Oh, you don’t have to do that.” Her instinctive pushback to anyone helping her popped out of her mouth before she could even think. She didn’t want to be a bother.
“I promise,” he said, his smile becoming easier. “Any other problems I can solve for you?”
She wasn’t going to tell him. She was a grown woman of twenty-five years old and didn’t need anyone to solve her problems for her. “No.”
“Then smile for me.”
“Smile?”
“Before you made that ridiculous pronouncement that you were going to screw every man in the bar—”
“Fuck. I said I was going to fuck every man in the bar.” She was supposed to fuck somebody tonight. There was a reason she was supposed to do that, if only she could remember why.