The woman snorted. “Nobody forced you to play pool, Tommy Carson. And nobody forced you to bet on it, and keep betting on it after it became clear that you were seriously outmatched. Go home and sleep it off, and take your brother with you. Get, now.” She shooed them out the door, and everyone else scuttled off to sit at tables and try and look as though they hadn’t been about to pile four-deep onto a perfect stranger.
She turned to Alexei, tilting her head up so she could look into his eyes. “You,” she said. “Bar. Sit. Now.” She pointed at an unoccupied stool towards the end, away from anyone else. When Alexei didn’t move right away, a little bemused by the small dynamo who had just ordered around a room full of men twice her size, she narrowed her eyes, crossed her arms over her chest, and added, “Unless you’d rather go after the Carson brothers than have another beer.”
“Make it a vodka,” Alexei said, trying to hide the laughter in his voice. “Since you’ve insisted on spoiling all my fun.”
“Fine,” she said, stalking off toward the bar. “You can pay for it out of your winnings.”
She went to the other side and waited for him to sit before and pouring him a drink.
“I’ve been watching you,” she said. “I’m Bethany McKenna. This is my place, or near enough.”
“Alexei Knight,” he said, holding out a massive hand. Alexei couldn’t figure out how he missed noticing her. He must be worse off than he thought. There was something special about her. And considering the women he normally hung out with, that was really saying something. “You’ve been watching me?”
“I don’t much appreciate you hustling my customers. I realize those two boys are none too sharp, but still, I figure you took about eighty-five dollars off them, and that’s enough.” She pushed a stray stand of red hair back into the clip that held the rest off her slender neck.
Alexei shrugged. “How am I supposed to get the money to pay for my beer, then?” he asked in a reasonable tone.
She pointed at an well-dressed man currently being rude to the lone waitress. “Feel free to entertain yourself with the tourists,” she says. “Just don’t hustle them. I don’t need this bar getting any worse a reputation than it already has. Play an honest game. Anyone still dumb enough to bet you after the first one, well, I’ll consider it a cheap education.”
Alexei thought he might like this woman. He’d tell her so, but he had a feeling she’d just smash a bottle over his head. “Okay,” he said instead. “Fair enough. You get a lot of tourists in here?”
The woman grinned. “At the end of March? Nope. Hardly any.” She gave him an assessing glance. “You’re not from around here, but you don’t seem like the tourist type. What brings you to the Cape?”
He shrugged again. “I started out on the West Coast, and I’ve been drinking my way across the country. Near as I can tell, I’ve about run out of road.”
Bethany took this in without any notable reaction. “Yup, I’d say that’s probably true, although technically you’ve still got about half the Cape to go before you hit Provincetown.” She shifted a couple of inches to the left so she could wash dirty glasses and still continue their conversation, her eyes constantly roaming over the bar to see if anyone needed her attention. “So what are you going to do now?”
“Not sure,” Alexei said. “Turn around and do it all over again, maybe. Or get on a boat and go drink my way across Europe. Haven’t done that in a while.”
She put a clean glass upside down on a drying rack. “A boat? Not a plane?”
Alexei shuddered. “Not a chance. Flying is for birds and dragons. Not for people.”
Bethany laughed. “I wouldn’t have pegged you for a man who was afraid of flying.”
“Not afraid,” he said. “Just smart enough to know when something is a bad idea. I don’t have many rules. Do not trust a machine to carry you through the sky is one of them.”
Another glass joined the first. “So, what are the other rules?” she asked, sounding half curious, half dubious. He understood that. He knew he didn’t exactly give the impression of a man who followed many rules. And he didn’t, although the few he thought were worth following, he’d stuck to without exception for more years than most could count.
“An empty beer bottle is an abomination,” he said, looking pointedly at the one he’d carried over from the pool table, until she took the hint and replaced it with a full one. He took a swig and thought for a moment. “Never hurt an animal that isn’t trying to hurt you. Picking on those weaker than you is wrong.”
Bethany bit her lip, trying not to smile. It made the cleft in her strong chin stand out even more. “I’m guessing that doesn’t leave many folks for you to pick on. That’s a pretty short list. Anything else?”
Alexei took another drink and stared blankly into the mirror behind the bar, not really seeing his own reflection. “Never pick a fight you can’t win, unless you’re backed into a corner and don’t have any choice.”
She raised an eyebrow. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d have ever lost a fight,” she said, waving a wet hand to indicate his size, in case he’d somehow forgotten the way he dwarfed most other people.
“It only takes once,” he said with a growl, and tossed down the shot of vodka, slamming the shot glass back down on the bar. “It only takes once.”
*
Bethany had the guy pegged as trouble from the moment he walked through the door. It wasn’t just his size - although admittedly that was part of it. She’d seen men who weighed more, but that was usually mostly fat, and this guy was incredibly tall and broad, with muscles on his muscles. There wasn’t an extra ounce on him that she could see, which was kind of amazing when you considered the way he was currently putting away the beer.
Some of it was how he was dressed; the black leather jacket dangling with chains, black jeans, and the black tee shirt that stretched tightly across his chest and abs as if it had been molded to him. Add in the long brown hair pulled back with a leather thong and the braided beard that made him look like something out of Lord of the Rings, and he stood out even in a bar full of tough sailors. But mostly there was something about the way he moved, the way he carried himself, that just shouted dangerous to every instinct she had. Dangerous in an attractive way, if that kind of man was your type (hers was more of a button-down shirt intellectual sort), but dangerous all the same.
When he gleefully prepared to wade into a fight with the Carson brothers, she figured he’d proven her right. She’d been tempted to toss him out of the place right then and there, and would have if he’d given her any sass at all. Instead, he’d let her take away the pool cue without an argument and sat quietly at the bar, even had something like a civilized conversation until she’d said something that had caused him to slide back into glowering silence.