She lifted her own eyebrows back at me with a grin. “Are you sure you want to do that? That’s like a pack of jackals circling a fallen gazelle. It might get ugly if you go and ruin all the fun.”
The band that was the live entertainment for the night switched to a cover of Tom Petty’s “You Got Lucky,” and the girl in the center of the storm suddenly turned and locked her eyes on mine. Somewhere in the middle of all her bumping and grinding, she had lost her shirt, so all she had on was a skintight tank top that wasn’t doing much to cover her up. Her rich auburn hair had fallen out of its ponytail and was sticking to the sweat on her chest and neck, while her eye makeup was smeared under her dark eyes. Her chest was rising and falling from exertion as all her flawless, exposed skin gleamed with a sheen of perspiration. She looked like something out every wet dream any guy had ever had or a real-life Victoria’s Secret model using this no-name bar to strut her stuff instead of a catwalk. She was going to cause a riot, and I think somewhere under all the kamikazes fueling her blood at the moment she knew it. I could see it as she stared defiantly at me across the space that separated us.
“I’m okay with ugly; I’m not okay with her being in the middle of the carnage.” I shouldn’t care. Shouldn’t be concerned. The redhead was more than capable of taking care of herself, and like Dixie had mentioned, she was probably packing, but I couldn’t stop the surge of protectiveness that floated to the surface when a clumsy frat guy put his hands on her tiny waist and drew her back to his chest.
She didn’t struggle at first, her senses and reflexes obviously dampened by the steady stream of alcohol she had been swimming in all night.
Dixie left to deliver the drink and came back around the bar with a sigh. “I can’t wait until Rome hires his friend to hang around and do security stuff on the weekends. I love this place, I love my job, but watching you guys have to tangle with drunken hotheads all the time is getting old.”
I shrugged and moved past her so that I could go put a stop to the impending disaster. The redhead had finally gotten her sluggish wits in gear and was now actively struggling in the frat boy’s hold.
“It’s just part of the job.”
Though I had to admit that when the boss, Rome Archer, mentioned he had an old platoon buddy that was getting ready to come back home and was gonna need something to do until he got his feet under him, I was relieved that my time banging heads together when the crowd got rowdy on the weekends was going to come to an end. I had a criminal record. A long, colorful criminal record, and anytime I put my hands on another human being in any kind of violent way, I automatically saw pages and pages getting tacked onto it. Like so much from my life before I had died on that hospital table, it was something from my past that would always define me and hold me down.
Dixie called to me over the bar as I started to weave my way through the crowd: “You’re too pretty to put that face in front of a flying fist, Asa. Be careful.”
Frat Boy was holding his face while blood rushed out between his fingers as he covered his nose. The redhead was being held by two other guys, one with each wrist locked down as she glared at the group of men surrounding her. She was tall and in ridiculously good shape, but none of these inebriated guys would have any clue as to why. All they saw was a feisty girl that was wasted and had been enticing them all night long, whether it had been intentional or not. And of course, now that she had made one of them bleed, had unmanned him in front of an entire barful of spectators, it was clearly about to get nasty. It was one thing to get your ass handed to you by a girl. It was an entirely different thing to get your ass handed to you by a girl that looked like she should be walking a runway wearing fuck-me stilettos. It also didn’t help save face for the guy that she had on bright yellow pants that hugged her curves just right and breasts that it should be illegal to ever cover up.
In half of a heartbeat she was in the middle of a tug-of-war between the two guys holding her arms and I could see the anger building in the watery eyes of the guy whose nose she had probably broken.
I gave him a warning look. Dixie was right: I was pretty, too pretty to be as ugly as I was on the inside, but to counteract the deceptive beauty of my face, I was also big and had been in trouble since the day I took my first breath. So I generally had a way of letting an opponent know they were going to be on the losing end of a confrontation with me. The bleeder took a step back as I manhandled the guy closest to me off of the redhead’s arm. He grunted and swore at me, mostly because as soon as she was free and had enough leverage, she rammed her knee right into the guy’s unprotected balls, doubling him over.
I shook my head at her as she turned and sloppily swung at the remaining guy clutching her wrist.
“Royal. Knock it off.”
She ignored me as the band picked up a quick tempo cover of Shooter Jennings’s “A Hard Lesson to Learn,” and went into full-on attack mode.