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She folded her arms and turned her head away.
“That made you angry.”
“I don’t need you to check up on me, and if I find you doing it again, I’ll take out a restraining order.” She stood, tossing her napkin on the table. “Thank you for lunch.”
A man with a more agile tongue, a more honeyed way with words, would go after her as she swished out the door. Halsey faced his defeat like a man with a restaurant check to pay and an overwhelming requirement not to end up with a restraining order from the first woman he’d been interested in getting to know intimately for a very long time.
And then he stepped out onto the street, and his restraint was totally blown. He saw it unfold in slow motion. Lenny standing on the sidewalk. The two men positioning themselves on either side of her. Lenny’s purse strap slipping from her shoulder as she typed on her phone, the fall of her hair shielding her vision. She was about to be mugged, and every deeply embedded instinct he had as a Sherwood and a man went on high alert.
Chapter Ten
Lenny almost lost her footing and stumbled when she was shoved sideways into a man who smelled like day-old sauerkraut. As a hand reached for her purse and latched onto the strap, she was lifted off her feet and pulled snug up against a firm body, her phone flying, her purse strap stretched between the bend of her elbow, and the man in front of her holding a short-handled knife.
The thing to do would be to scream, to kick and struggle, but she was held fast and it all happened so quickly she was struck silent, and her body tensed into stillness.
“Back off,” said the man in front with the knife, in a growl that made her gasp.
“I saw her first,” said the man who had hold of her…in Halsey Sherwood’s voice. What?
“I want the purse.”
“Goes with the woman,” Halsey said.
“Nah, man. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“But you’d happily hurt her.” She felt Halsey take a deep breath. “I was trying to do this nicely.”
The knife wielder laughed. “Hand over the fucking purse.”
Lenny was shoved again, this time behind Halsey as he let fly a punch that made the knife wielder stagger, but not let go her purse, jerking her hard into Halsey’s side.
“Drop it and back the fuck off,” Halsey said, one arm holding her against his back.
She’d been in these arms before, but she’d never heard Halsey’s voice go to that savage, threatening place. It was a relief to know it wasn’t directed at her.
“If I hit you again, you won’t be getting up any time soon,” he said.
She let go of her purse strap, let it slide down her arm. There was nothing inside it worth someone getting knifed for. Thrown off balance, the attacker rocked backward.
In a neat move, Halsey snatched her purse out of the air and used it to knock the knife from the attacker’s hand, and it was all over, the knife clattering to the curb, and two men taking off between the stream of traffic.
Halsey kicked the knife into a grate, bent to pick up her phone, and turned to face her. “Are you hurt?”
“No, but you are.”
He looked down at his knuckles, the skin broken and bleeding. “Ouch.”
She took her phone and purse from him, rumbled inside for tissues, pressing a wad onto the back of his hand. Her own were shaking; her legs felt rubbery. Her phone screen was busted, and it wouldn’t turn on. “I don’t know about you, and it’s the middle of the afternoon, but I need a drink and you need a place to wash up.”
He nodded and followed her back inside Excuse My French where she commandeered a towel and ointment from the barman and towed Halsey into the ladies’ room to clean him up.
“You don’t have to do this,” he said, as she ran the tap, making the water warm.
“You didn’t have to take on a mugger.”
He shrugged off his suit coat, laid it over the counter, took off his tie, put his cufflinks into his pockets, and rolled up his sleeves. It was the wrong time to focus on his forearms, on the sexy sleeve-rolling action.
“He was high. He might’ve hurt you, Lenny. Are you sure you’re not hurt?”
