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Sophy groaned and buried her face against Jeeves’s neck.
***
By ten o’clock that night, she was beginning to wonder if someone had been spiking her perfume with pheromones. She had been asked out twice, which might have been more flattering if one guy hadn’t vomited on the dance floor immediately after her refusal and the other hadn’t instantly turned and tried his luck with the next woman who got in his path. Another gentleman, using the term with every nuance of sarcasm, had directed his every drink order to her cleavage for the past two hours and someone had actually pinched her on the bottom. Pinched her bottom, like she was a cocktail waitress in a comedy burlesque show. All of which was pretty miserable, but relatively harmless. It was a newcomer to the bar who was setting off the more serious alarm bells on her creep radar.
He was young, probably younger than she was, about twenty-one or so, and heavily built, packed with muscle through the arms and chest. He had been sitting at the counter for about twenty minutes, all but ignoring the beer he had ordered, and staring straight at her with a horrible, expressionless, dead sort of perusal. Serial killer eyes, if she was going to be melodramatic about it. There was nothing openly lascivious about the observation, but it was so relentless that it was prickling the hairs on the back of her neck. Every flight instinct she possessed was urging her to get away from him, but the bar was packed, they were short-staffed and she felt entrapped and claustrophobic.
Ten minutes later, Ben, the other bartender on duty, leaned close and shouted over the music that one of the waitresses was late back from her break and there was a booth over by the sound system waiting for a tray of cocktails. He was already reaching for it when Sophy seized the opportunity to get out of her watcher’s line of sight for a few minutes.
“I’ll take it!” she called back and arranged the heavy tray carefully on her arms, hoping for the best. It was not one of her marketable skills, negotiating a clear route through throngs of dancers with eight sloshing cocktails.
It turned out be a poor decision all around.
Seven glasses survived with their contents intact, but she was returning to the bar to replace the piña colada she’d spilled mid-journey, coincidentally during a club remix of Rupert Holmes’s Escape, always nice to have a thematic soundtrack for her mistakes, when she bumped into a hard chest.
Starting to utter an apology that would never be heard over the music, she looked up and stiffened as she encountered the intense stare of her erstwhile admirer. The frightening blankness – and it was amazing what a different effect that sort of blank impassivity could have, depending on the individual man emitting it – had gone, replaced by a definite flare of…what? Interest? Determination?
Sophy was actually getting quite frightened. She cast a quick glance around. There were people absolutely everywhere, but not one familiar face. It seemed ridiculous; what could he do to her in a crowded public space, after all, but that didn’t halt her increasing panic.
Then he just grabbed for her. Actually seized her by the waist, a complete stranger, and started to tug her toward the side of the room, toward the exit, his grip steely against her ribcage.
It was so shocking that for a couple of minutes, she stayed frozen, passive, in his grip. Then adrenalin flooded her body in a rush of jittery strength and she yanked back against his hold, possibly made some sort of shrieking noise that was swallowed up by the thumping percussion. It seemed, unbelievably, that he was going to be able to remove her from the room without anyone batting an eyelash, when there was a blur of motion and she was wrenched violently free of his hold.
She skittered back on her heels and her surroundings dipped and swayed for a dizzy moment, exacerbated by a sudden pulse of the detested strobe lighting. The sound of shouts and whooping seemed to get louder all of a sudden and as her stunned brain began to chug into gear, she realised that the music had been turned off and all attention was focused on the two bodies struggling against the counter. Voices were either calling for the police to be summoned or joining in with a stupid “Fight, fight, fight!” chant.
Sophy stared through dazed eyes at Mick, who had both hands bunched in her assailant’s shirt, up by his throat, and was hauling him almost off his feet, pressing him up against the oak bar. Glasses and bottles were shattered all over the surface, liquor spilling to the floor. The other man managed to break free, swung out with a punch that Mick blocked and returned with interest. They were almost evenly matched in size, but to judge by the lethal expression in his eyes, Mick was soundly winning in motivation.
Her heart lunged and almost stopped when the bloody creep swung out his arm and seized a broken beer bottle, but the sight of the lethal, jagged weapon seemed to jolt some common sense and bravery back into the wired crowd. A handful of other men shoved forward and waded into the fight, helping Mick to disarm and restrain the brawny, struggling figure.
Sophy stood, shivering, her arms wrapped around her torso, watching the scene with almost a sense of detachment. She belatedly recognised the owner of the bar, John, in the little group of better-late-than-never Good Samaritans. She hadn’t even realised that he was in-house tonight. Ridiculously, she felt a rush of guilt and embarrassment, as if she’d committed an employee misdemeanour in attracting the attention of a criminal sleazebag. People were starting to chatter excitedly as the immediate danger passed and faces were turning to look at her. Fingers pointed in her direction and her fidgeting increased.
All she wanted was to go home.
She couldn’t even look at the man on the floor. Mick had secured his hands with a length of cord and was speaking in quick, rough sentences to John. He was casting frequent glances over at her, scanning her body for damage, searching her face for panic. He looked more furious than she’d ever seen him.
Sophy pulled her gaze from his, stared determinedly at the floor, tried to block out the sights and sounds of the staring crowds around her. Her thoughts were as agitated as her twitching muscles, leaping from one fragment of feeling to another. She was shocked; she was horrified. She was completely confused. Who was the guy? Was he the anonymous gifter? Brad Pitt seemed more likely to have purchased her a pâte de verre vase than that blank-faced bastard. Overriding it all, she felt intensely stressed and stupidly mortified. She had never been involved in such a situation in her life. She was the centre of very negative attention, it was a nightmare and it seemed like the last straw in a whirling chaos of recent experiences.
She fully recognised that her reaction was unfair, almost unbelievably so, and born of lingering shock. But for a few seconds she felt almost bitterly angry with Mick. Every forced mental change, every embarrassing scene of late seemed to revolve around him and she let her resentment show in her eyes, just for an instant.
Long enough. He glanced over at her again and she saw his face change. He looked…struck, as if she’d landed a knockout punch where the assailant had failed.
It was all just…too much. Sophy felt her face crumple, put up her hands to hide it. She wasn’t crying; she just couldn’t hold it together anymore.
She jumped slightly when arms came around her, then almost fell into his hold. Mick’s palm came up to cup the back of her head, his fingers deep in her hair. Even after she’d hurt him, he was still there for her. Something about that seemed overwhelming, too much to think about tonight. Words were rumbling through his chest, against her ear.
“…you all right? Sophy?” she heard at last, and she pulled back long enough to nod.
The sound of sirens was loud outside now, uniformed police officers swept in and most of the bar’s patrons swept out. Most of them were unlikely to have anything worse than a parking ticket on their conscience, but a police raid obviously destroyed the buzz of a good night out. Sociopaths brandishing broken bottles they could apparently take in their stride.
For the second time in her life and within the space of a month, Sophy found herself giving evidence to a policeman. Mick, at her side, his hand clenched around her hip, his mouth white and pinched, fired back questions of his own. She listened in continued bewilderment as they learned that there had already been a watch out for the man as he’d tried something similar earlier in the evening, at another bar across town. He was also a suspect in an attempted assault that had taken place before Christmas. Haltingly, she mentioned the anonymous gifts and the cop made a note and asked her to come in and make yet another report the following day, but none of them thought the incidents were related. She had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time tonight and unlucky enough to match the physical type that the assailant seemed to target.
Just an unfortunate coincidence. One of those things that happens every so often in every town and city.
It didn’t happen to her.
John came over and patted her arm, told her to go home right away and to leave the rest of her shifts that week. Sophy thanked him politely and wondered if she was ever going to be able to enter the bar again.
She couldn’t remember getting out to Mick’s car or the drive home, but her awareness returned when they pulled up outside her house. At the sight of the warmly lit windows and her polka dot gumboots lying on the step, she burst into tears.
