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Boone
Since I was about to get real damn busy with calving, I figured I’d make the most of having a night off to come down and enjoy some live music at The Barn while I could. I stood to the side of the pool tables with Jack, the owner of the honky tonk. We’d met in college and hit it off. Since my folks had to sell the family ranch and move into the city about a year before I’d completed my degree, when I did finish, I needed to pick somewhere to set up my own place. With nowhere else to go, I followed Jack out to southeastern Texas where he’d been born and raised, and settled in.
That had been twelve years ago and since then, we’d both grown our businesses to be successful. I’d bought a run-down ranch that had taken a lot of hard work to get back to being profitable, but I’d done it. Jack had taken over this honky tonk and classed it up a bit. Not so much that it had lost its roots, but enough he didn’t have to have chicken wire surrounding the stage for the band’s safety anymore, like it had been set-up when he’d first bought the place. These days it was doing good enough, he didn’t need to be working his ass off behind the bar every night, which meant he could relax and have a few games of pool with me and some of our other friends on occasion.
Setting down my beer, I stepped up to the table for my shot when Jason, one of Jack’s bartenders, came rushing up to him. The glint in his eyes had me turning my full attention to him.
“Jack, man, we got problems,” Jason said. “You need to get down to the hallway near the ladies’ bathroom, like, yesterday. Two redneck assholes have a woman jammed up down there.”
Jack’s expression turned dark enough to have the air feeling cooler. “Who reported it?”
“Had a young lady come to me just now to say she went back there to use the restroom but stopped short when she saw there were two men getting aggressive with a woman.”
Jason was a great bartender, but he was a lover, not a fighter. It was not a shock he’d come to get his boss rather than trying to deal with the situation himself. Setting my stick on the table, I stepped up next to Jack.
“I’ll come with you.”
Liam, my full-time ranch hand who’d joined me tonight, stepped up too. “I’m in.”
Jack looked me dead in the eye. “You sure? You ain’t gonna lose your cool with this?”
Jack knew what had happened to my sister, and why men attacking a woman would be a huge trigger on my temper.
“No more than any other man. Let’s get down there before they manage to get her outside.”
With a nod, he turned to Jason. “Call the cops. Tell them to roll up to the rear entrance. No need to have the whole place up in this woman’s business once we deal with her attackers.”
He spun on his heal and strode off toward the bathrooms. Liam and I followed in his wake as Jason headed back to the bar to make the call. There were a few people hanging around the hallway entrance watching, and I wanted to knock each one of them into next week. None of these men or women were willing to step in to help the harassed woman, but were happy to watch her being attacked for entertainment? Some days society made me sick.
Jack pushed through the small crowd, telling them to get the hell out of there as he did. The bouncers who normally wandered hung around the door and stage area to keep things respectable came over and got the people moving. They were good guys and Jack could have tossed this to them and not worried about it, but he liked to be more hands-on than that.
We stepped into the dim hallway. One man was clutching his face and blood was dripping down from his nose. Looked like the woman was a fighter. Good for her.
“Why don’t you both just go walk this one off? You misjudged me as an easy target but I’m not. Keep this shit up and you’ll be going home knowing a little bit of a girl kicked your asses.”
Her sweet voice drawled with a native Texan accent that did all sorts of inappropriate things to my body, considering the circumstances. I wanted to laugh at her words but taunting this bull of a man wasn’t a wise move. Jack seemed to agree as he called out to distract the asshole before he could attack.
“What the fuck is going on down here?”
We kept moving toward them. The woman had shifted her stance and raised her fists like she was ready to take down her attacker. Considering the state of the other guy, I didn’t doubt she’d give it a red-hot go. But this redneck cowboy wannabe was big. He could do some damage to the little lady if he had a mind to. Her beauty caught my attention, holding it for a moment when I should have been focusing on the attackers.
Thankfully, Jack and Liam stepped in to end the stand-off. Jack grabbed the bigger man and threw him against the wall. One of Jack’s hands was wrapped around the back of the asshole’s neck, keeping him plastered to the sheetrock, while the other held his arm pinned up high behind his back, rendering the bastard fully immobile.
Liam had wrapped his hand around the injured man’s bicep, letting him know he was being restrained but clearly not worried the man was any sort of real threat in his present state. If I wasn’t mistaken, the man was actually blubbering over his busted-up face.
I moved closer to the silver-haired beauty, whose gaze flipped between each of us as though she was trying to decide if she was being saved or in more trouble than before. Even scared and roughed up, she was gorgeous.
“Ma’am? Are you okay?” I asked.
Gabs
Oh, wow. Now this man was a genuine cowboy. A black Stetson sat on his head, covering his hair, but the scruff along his jaw revealed he was a honey blond. His irises were the sweetest baby blue, and I could happily drown looking into them.
When a small sigh escaped me, it shocked me back into the moment. What the hell was I thinking?
“Let me go! She wanted what she was gettin’. Practically begged me for it!”
Billy’s words had me seeing red and with a snarl, I spun to glare at him, trying to think of what I could do to hurt him while he was being restrained like he was. Turned out I didn’t need to do a damn thing, as the man holding him shifted his grip from his neck to his hair and smacked his head against the wall to shut the idiot up.
