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“Let me get my shoes first.”
Her shoes weren’t all. She slipped on a bra. When she came out, he’d found Oinky, and he held it up. “Exactly what school has a pig for a mascot?”
“Community college. Farm country.”
“Ah.” He flicked the pig to her with a short underhand spiral that she doubted he expected her to catch. But she did.
She relished her small victory as he led her down the back stairs. Instead of turning toward the club’s kitchen at the bottom, he opened the door into the alley. “Hold on a minute, will you?” He stepped outside.
She peered out and saw that the wind from last night’s storm had strewn some sodden liquor cartons across the alley’s cracked pavement and in its muddy craters. Graham wasn’t happy. “This was supposed to have been cleaned up already.” He grabbed a soggy box and tossed it in the Dumpster, then snatched up another. She gave him points for being willing to do the dirty work himself and went out to help.
As she gingerly pulled a waterlogged carton from a filthy puddle, she saw Jada coming down the alley. The grocery bag in her arms suggested she had responsibilities a lot of kids her age didn’t. Jada waved and Piper waved back, then turned to pick up more sodden cardboard.
A teenage boy popped out from around the corner, Nerf gun in hand.
Piper stiffened, then spun around, calling out Jada’s name.
Jada reached for the Nerf protruding from her jacket pocket, but the bag she was carrying got in her way. Her teenage assassin braced his gun hand like a TV cop. The girl was going to die. But not on Piper’s watch.
She lunged forward and shoved the first thing she touched directly into the path of the bullet.
Cooper Graham.
6
Graham stumbled. Not from the bullet, which had bounced harmlessly off his arm, but from being thrown off balance without warning.
A second bullet whizzed past from the opposite direction as Jada took control. “You’re dead!” she cried.
“Not fair,” the kid protested.
“Totally fair!” Jada retorted.
Graham, in the meantime, had gone down in the middle of the alley, one hip landing in a pothole brimming with filthy water, a foot landing in another. “What the hell?” he exclaimed.
Defeated, Jada’s murder victim disappeared around the corner. Jada gasped as she finally noticed what had happened to Graham. Piper raced to him. Rivulets of mucky water splattered his skin and clothes. A dab of mud had even lodged in that formidable cleft in his chin. His jeans were filthy, his hands grubby. She went to her knees next to him. “Oh, God . . . Are you okay?”
Jada charged down the alley. “Coop! Please don’t tell Mom! Please!” She whipped toward Piper. “I would’ve been killed if it hadn’t been for you!”
And now Graham was going to kill Piper. Not with a Nerf gun, but—if the look on his face was any indication—with his big, filthy hands.
Muddy water seeped through the knees of Piper’s jeans as she leaned back on her ankles. “You’d . . . better go inside, Jada.”
Jada didn’t need prodding. With one backward, pleading glance at Graham, she, the grocery bag, and her Nerf disappeared into the building.
Piper was alone in the alley with a man who’d built his career on single-mindedly dismantling his opponents. As he shifted his weight from the pothole, a desiccated grapefruit rind slid off his shoe. She reached out. “Let me help you up.”
“Do. Not. Touch. Me. Ever.” He came to his feet with both the grace and the deadly intent of a leopard. Who could blame her for stumbling a little as she stood up? Clenching his teeth, he gro
und out the words “Never touch me again! Do you understand?”
The murderous heat in his eyes was more than a little disconcerting. “Yes . . . sir.”
His icy rage turned hot. “What the hell is it with you?”
“I’m a finely tuned fighting machine?” She’d made it a question instead of a statement, but either way, it was a big mistake because his expression grew even more thunderous.
“What I did was instinctive,” she said quickly. “You were in the way, and I reacted automatically to protect Jada.”
