Vin's dark-haired woman stepped out from the locker room. “Trez, the two in the skull shirts are the problem.”
Vin blinked like a dummy at the beautiful sound of her voice, but then he refocused and muscled his kid face- first into the wall. “Feel free to finish what I started here,” he said to the club's owner.
Jim pulled his loose bundle of frat boy off the floor. “This one had the knife.”
The Trez guy looked the kids over. “Where's the weapon?” Jim kicked the thing over and the owner bent down and picked it up. “Police been called?”
Everyone glanced at the woman, and as she shook her head, Vin found himself unable to look away. From across the club she'd made his heart pound; up close she made the thing stop dead: Her eyes were so blue they reminded him of a summer sky.
“I think these boys are done,” Trez said with approval. “Nice work.”
“Where do you want them?” Jim asked.
“Let's take 'em out back.”
After a moment, Vin followed the example, pushing his guy along. When they came to the door, Trez opened the way like a perfect gentleman and stepped to the side. “Anywhere you like,” the owner said.
Jim 'liked' the brick wall to the left, whereas Vin preferred the opposite side— Just as he dropped the kid on his ass, he froze.
The security lights around the door shone down over the heads of the boys, casting a solid blanket of illumination all the way to their feet. So their shadows should have been on the asphalt. They weren't. Both of them had dark halos on the brick behind their heads, a twin pair of smoky gray crowns that weaved ever so slightly.
“Oh…Christ,” Vin whispered.
The one he'd been beating on glanced up with eyes that were more tired than hostile. “Why are you looking at us like that.”
Jim's voice registered from a distance: “Vin? What's up?”
Vin shook himself, and prayed those damn shadows disappeared. No luck. He tried to rub his eyes in hopes of wiping them away—and found that his face hurt too much from the punches it took to handle that kind of attention.
And the shadows prevailed.
Trez nodded over his shoulder to the club. “If you two can head in, I'm going to have a word with this pair of shit-heads. Just so that they're perfectly clear on where things stand.”
“Yeah. Cool.” Vin forced himself to get moving, but as he came up to the door, he glanced over at the kids. “Be careful…watch yourselves.”
“Fuck you,” was what came back at him. Which meant they were taking it not as advice, but a threat.
“No, I mean—”
“Come on,” Jim said, muscling him back into the building. “Let's go.”
God, maybe he was wrong. Maybe he just needed to get his eyes checked. Maybe he was going to get a migraine in another twenty minutes. But whatever the explanation, he couldn't go back to where he'd been with this shit. He just couldn't handle that.
In the hallway, Jim took his arm. “You get knocked in the head bad?”
“Nope.” Although, given how much his face was flaring up, that wasn't entirely true. “I'm fine.”
“Whatever. Let's give the owner a minute out back and when he comes in again, I'll take you to my truck.”
“I'm not leaving until I see that—” Woman. There by the locker room door.
Vin headed for her, shutting all of his paranoid, wingnut head spins down and concentrating on her. “Are you okay?”
She'd put a fleece on over her revealing getup, and the thing fell to her thighs, making her seem like the kind of woman you wanted to take into your arms and hold through the whole night. “Are you all right?” he repeated when she didn't answer.
Her eyes, those stunning blue eyes of hers, finally swung over to his face…and he felt it again, that high-bore charge barreling through him, enlivening him.
Her lips lifted in a small smile. “The question is more…are you?” As Vin frowned, she made a motion around his face. “You're bleeding.”
“It doesn't hurt.”
“I think it's going to—”
Two other women bubbled out of the locker room like a pair of yappy dogs, talking a mile a minute, hands waving like tails, the gold chains around their waists bouncing and chiming like tags on a collar. Fortunately, they were all over Jim, but then again, they could have popped skirt and mooned Vin and he wouldn't have noticed.
“I'm sorry about those guys,” he said to the dark-haired woman.
“It's okay.”
God, her voice was lovely. “What's your name?”
The rear door to the club opened and the Trez guy strode over. “Thanks again for taking care of things.”
Conversation sprang up, but Vin wasn't interested in anyone but the female in front of him. He was waiting for her to answer him. Hoping she would. “Please,” he said softly, “tell me your name.”
After a moment, the dark-haired woman turned to the owner. “Mind if I clean him up in the locker room?”
“Go right ahead.”
Vin glanced back at his comrade in harm. “You okay to hang out, Jim?”
The guy nodded. “Especially if it means you won't bleed all over my truck.”
“I won't take long with him,” the woman said.
Not a problem, Vin thought. As far as he was concerned, she could take forever—he stopped himself. Devina might have stormed off, but she was in his house, in his bed at this very moment. He owed her more than the way he was going on about this other female.
“Come on,” the woman said to him as she opened the locker room door.
Vin looked back at Jim for some reason—and the expression he met was all about the watch-yourself-my- man.
Vin opened his mouth, prepared to be reasonable and get a grip.
“I'll be right back, Jim,” was all that came out.
Slut. Whore. Prostitute.
He couldn't believe it. She was whoring herself out. Selling her body to men who used her for sex. The reality was incomprehensible.
At first, he hadn't been able to fathom what appeared to be going on. Bad enough if she'd been a bartender or a waitress or, God forbid, a caged dancer in a club like this—but then he'd seen her walking around with her breasts on display and her thighs bared to the eyes of other men.
And she got what she deserved for doing what she did: Those two young guys had tracked her like prey, treating her exactly as men treated women like her.
He'd followed along as the pair had trailed her into the hallway, and watched as that fight had erupted. He'd been unable to move, so great was his shock. Of all the things he had pictured her doing, of all the assumptions he had made about what her life here in Caldwell was like, this was not it.
This was not happening.
As the harassers got pounded in the corridor, he backtracked through the crowd and tore out of the front of the club in an urgent haze, having no idea what he was doing or where he was going. The chilly night air didn't clear his head or his confusion, and he went around to the parking lot with no plan whatsoever. When he got into his nondescript car, he shut himself in and breathed hard.
That was when the anger hit. Great waves of fury poured through his body, making him sweat and
