Peter let go of Leslie and yanked Seth up by his collar, so full of white-hot fury he could barely see, and slammed his fist into his solar plexus. Seth doubled over, gasping for air, and just as Peter was going to punch him again, Leslie made a sound like a choked back sob.
He whipped his head around toward the sound to find her wiping at a cut on her hand, and the sight of her blood pushed him over the edge. He snapped. “How dare you touch my woman!
Seth was gone.
His footsteps were fading quickly down the hallway. Then the back door creaked open and slammed shut. Fuck.
Peter was about to go after him when Leslie stopped him with a hand on his arm. Shaking, adrenaline and rage a thundering, furious concoction inside him, he looked up from her slender, bleeding hand. “I’m going to kill that son of a bitch.”
“Let him go,” she replied. “I’ll call the cops and file a report. I’ve got all his information, Peter. They’ll find him.”
“Not if I find him first.” He couldn’t think. Couldn’t reason. His blood was pumping and a primitive, primal need to protect her overrode all else.
Panting, Peter raked a hand through his hair, swore, and gave her a very thorough once-over. Other than the wound on her hand and messy hair she looked all right. Definitely less shaken up than him.
But her office was a mess. How much had happened before he’d arrived? “I hope you hit that bastard in the head with your broken lamp,” he muttered, grabbing desperately for a measure of control.
Leslie smiled at him in a way that had the anger subsiding a little and said matter-of-factly, “He kept trying to grope me, so I threw it at him.”
“Then I slipped on some potting soil and fell on my ass. That’s when you came in.”
“Are you okay?” he asked, realizing the question was more than a smidge belated as his brain started functioning again. Not much, but enough to remember to ask.
“I’m okay.” But she was looking around at the state of her office, frowning. He raised a hand and grabbed hers, held it still while he assessed the extent of her injury. It wasn’t much of one, thank God. Just a small cut at the base of her left thumb. No doubt it’d been from the porcelain lamp shattering.
“I’m going to go double-check the lock on the back door and make that call,” Leslie informed him, already striding out the door. And the sight of her ass all smeared with dirt had anger sizzling in his gut like acid.
Stomping after her, Peter was at a slow boil the whole time she made her report. When she refused to have an officer come to the club for her statement he scowled at her. She just held up a finger, giving him the signal to wait, and finished the phone call, providing her statement by phone.
When Leslie hung up, she put the cordless phone back in its cradle behind the bar and said, “An officer will get back to me tomorrow for a follow-up, but they have all they need now to find Seth.”
“Good.” A tick started in his jaw.
She leaned her elbows on the bar and cocked her head to the side, looking at him with her gorgeous hazel eyes. All he saw was messy hair and her dabbing at the cut on her hand with a bar towel. “Are you all right, Peter? You went after Seth hard and I’m worried about your shoulder.”
He didn’t feel any pain. “I’m fine.”
But he wasn’t fine and she knew it. “You’re not moving your arm.”
Peter glanced at his shoulder, shrugged. “It’ll hurt like a bitch tomorrow, but it’s fine. Felt good shattering the fucker’s nose.”
“Thank you for doing that.”
For some reason her gratitude pissed him off and he rounded on her. “What the hell was he doing in your office after hours in the first place?” The answer had better be nothing.
Watching him with what looked like caution in her eyes, Leslie answered softly, “Not what you think, Peter. He’d already been sent home for the night, along with the rest of the crew because of the snow. I was shutting down my computer when he came in reeking of whiskey and stumbled into my bamboo plant, knocking it to the floor. Then he tried to get handsy with me.”
So the little bastard had needed liquor to bolster his courage to try and grope her? Shit, Peter had to find him now for another sound beating, Philly-style. This was beyond not okay.
Emotions churned in his gut, hot and greasy. The events of the past few days piled up, one on top of the other, and Peter swallowed around the ball of anger that lodged in his throat. Everything was falling apart. His whole goddamn life was upside-down and he didn’t know what to do about it. He didn’t know what to do with
All he knew was that if something didn’t change soon he was going to explode.
Leslie rounded the bar and came to stand in front of him, her back to the glossy mahogany counter. “I should have been more careful, I suppose. But I swear to you I didn’t see it coming. Not from him. He seemed innocent and sweet. Dumb, but completely harmless.”
The fact that she could even say that with sincerity after the asshole had tried to touch her breasts only succeeded in riling him up all over again and he whipped out a hand, grabbing a strand of her disheveled hair. “Right,” he scoffed, “he was completely harmless.”
She stilled and narrowed her eyes on him. “What’s going on with you? Are you okay?”
For whatever reason that question pushed him over the edge. Didn’t she understand the gravity of the situation at all?
Dropping the strand of hair like it was scalding hot, Peter took a step away and rounded on her, the dark emotional vortex sucking him in, and he yelled, “No I’m not okay! Christ, Leslie. How could I possibly be okay?”
She crossed her arms over her chest and leaned against the bar. For a woman who’d just been almost assaulted she seemed too damn calm for his liking. “What is it, Peter? Tell me.”
He was swallowed by the tide of emotions and couldn’t think. It was too much. Everything. Just too fucking much. “I can’t tell you!”
Her head tipped to the side and she looked at him with sympathy. “You don’t know what’s wrong?”
Of course he knew what was wrong, he just wasn’t going to tell her. His life as he knew it was over, he was going blind in one eye, and the woman of his dreams was standing before him with a cut hand because somebody had almost hurt her. It brought out every frigging primal instinct in him. All he wanted to do was punch something. Again and again until this claustrophobic, choking feeling left him. “No,” was all he said, hoping frantically that she’d drop it.
But she didn’t. Of course she didn’t. It was Leslie.
She stood her ground, looked at him searchingly, and said quietly, “You called me your woman.”
Denial cut through him like a hacksaw. “No I didn’t.” She wasn’t his woman. She didn’t want to be.
Peter tried desperately to reel his emotions back in, but when she touched his chin, he teetered on the edge of coming completely unglued. That hadn’t happened to him since he’d come to blows with his old man after he’d told him he was going to play ball. Viktor Kowalskin had slapped him in the face for trying to be something special.
Soft, slender fingers of steel gripped his chin and Leslie forced him to look at her. “You did too, Peter, and I think we should talk about it.”
“Why?” It wasn’t worth the air it’d take. “I was angry. It didn’t mean anything.”
“Oh really?” she challenged and took another step closer to him. Now her body was brushing against his and he felt the crackle of electricity. “Prove it.”
He tried to shove her hand away, but she was strong and held steady. “How?” His gut was still swirling and he didn’t trust himself to do whatever she wanted gently. No matter how far he’d come from his days in South Philly, at his core he was still a fighter—a tough-as-nails, rough-around-the-edges, raw, unfiltered son of immigrants who didn’t know a fucking thing about tenderness.
“Kiss me.”
“No,” he said a harshly, about to come unhinged. Christ, he didn’t want to hurt her.
Leslie stared him down with challenge in her eyes. “Do it, Peter. Or I will.”
