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“Um, I saw you sitting here alone and thought that you would let me buy you a drink,” he said.
The woman held up her beer and shook her head. “I already have one,” she said. “I’m good.” She was blowing him off and sure, that was like a kick in the nuts—especially when he looked over to find his older brother laughing at him. There was no way that he was going to give Maverick his chance with her. Not without a fight.
Owen sat down on the barstool next to her and she sighed, picked up her beer and purse from the bar top, and slid down one stool. Ouch—that hurt, but he wasn’t about to let it deter him. Even with Mav’s laughter playing like a record skipping on a record player behind him, he felt some crazy determination to get to know this woman.
“My name’s Owen,” he said.
“Well, Owen, I’d say that it’s nice to meet you, but that would be a lie. I thought that you’d take the hint to get lost when I turned your drink offer down,” she said.
“I was just trying to be friendly,” he breathed. “Won’t happen again.” The woman nodded and chugged down the last half of her beer. She pulled a ten from her purse and tossed it onto the bar, thanking the bartender, Spade, for the beer and even smiling at the guy. What the fuck?
Owen watched as the pretty woman walked back to the bathroom and disappeared through the door. “You fucking struck out, didn’t you?” Maverick taunted. He sat down on the stool that the pretty little red head had just vacated and smiled over at him. “You can buy me a beer if it will make you feel better,” Maverick teased.
“You can go fuck yourself,” Owen said under his breath, just loud enough that he knew his brother heard him. His laughter rang out through the bar, garnering them more attention than Owen was hoping for.
“Can you shut the fuck up?” Owen grumbled. “I don’t need every guy in here knowing that I struck out with her.”
“Agreed,” Maverick said, sobering, “I don’t need the competition when I ask her out. Not that any of these assholes are my competition or anything.” Maverick mean mugged a few of the guys who were hanging back by the ladies’ room door, waiting for the pretty red head to come out.
“Looks like you’re going to have some competition whether you think they are or not,” Owen taunted.
“Yeah, I’m going to have to knock some skulls together,” he said. Maverick stood just as a woman’s scream rang out from the ladies’ room. “What the fuck?” he asked. Owen was about to ask the same thing, but his brother beat him to it. He had a sick feeling that the sexy red head was in trouble because he hadn’t seen any women go back there in a while. Hell, there weren’t a lot of women at the bar tonight. That’s why the guys were salivating over the hot red head.
He followed close behind Maverick as they made their way through the crowd of guys who were trying to get a glimpse of what was going on. Mav pushed his way through the ladies’ room door, not bothering to knock, to find the sexy red head on the floor, blood trickling down from her forehead.
“Don’t move her,” Owen ordered. His Army medic training was kicking in and it helped that he rode for the local ambulance services on weekends to earn some extra cash. “Call 911,” he shouted back to Spade.
“On it,” Spade shouted.
“Give me your jacket,” Owen ordered. Maverick immediately removed his leather jacket and handed it over to him. “Thanks,” he murmured as he balled it up and put it under the woman’s head.
“Who would have done this?” Maverick asked. Owen looked around the room to find the guys watching them and shook his head.
“I’m not sure,” Owen said. “I didn’t see anyone follow her in.” He had been watching too. He didn’t take his eyes off the door after the sexy red head disappeared into the bathroom. He looked around the small room and noticed that the bathroom window was open and was big enough to possibly fit a person through it—a smaller person, not one of the hulking guys standing around them.
“Her purse is missing,” Owen said, looking around. “She picked it up, paid her bar tab, and then walked back here to the bathroom. Did someone knock her out just to rob her?”
“Don’t know, but I think that we should look around outside, just in case someone used that window to escape,” Mav said, as if reading Owen’s earlier thoughts.
“Agreed. I’ll stay here with her, and you take a couple of guys you can trust to look around outside,” Owen ordered. When it came to things like this, Maverick usually let him take lead. It was his military training that had gotten them both out of a good deal of scrapes. Owen was used to calling the shots when the odds were against him and from the way things looked for the pretty red head, she’d need someone to call the shots until she could get back on her feet. He might be crazy for thinking about doing it, but he was going to stick by her until she told him to get lost again. It was the least he could do for the pretty woman who blew him off at the bar and if it won him brownie points, he’d take them.
Tilly
Matilda Newton wasn’t sure how she had ended up at a biker bar, surrounded by big, bearded, tattooed men who didn’t want to seem to take no for an answer. She was determined to try to put her bad day behind her and find a way out of the mess she had gotten herself into. She just never imagined that the little dive bar she picked to hide away, and think, would be a biker bar.
She sat in the corner hoping that everyone would leave her alone, but being one of the only single women in the place garnered her some unwanted attention that she couldn’t seem to shake. When she had to spell it out for the hot biker that she wasn’t interested in him buying her a beer, he seemed a bit hurt. That wasn’t Tilly’s intention, but she had already politely turned him down once. She just wanted to be left alone until she could figure out what to do with the hard drive that she had swiped off her boss’s desk. Apparently, it was important enough to Nate that he called her about twenty-five times since she had left the office, threatening to come after her if she didn’t give it back to him. His threats grew darker and more menacing and the messages longer as time passed, and she worried that he’d make good on every one of them if she didn’t give the drive back to him.
She knew that Nate was doing something illegal, and now, she was sure of it. Tilly was also sure that the information that she’d need to bring him down was on the hard drive that he kept under lock and key in his desk. He was foolish enough to leave the key on the desk when he ran to lunch and Tilly snooped, against her better judgment. Now, she had her boss and who knew who else was chasing after her and the one thing she was sure of was she couldn’t go home. She was sure that if she did, she’d find Nate waiting for her there and he’d be ready to make good on his threats.
Her only hope at getting out of there was going to be to pay her tab, tell they biker sitting next to her to fuck off, and regroup in the bathroom. Then, she’d be able to figure out where to go next and who she could trust. Honestly, she had no one to turn to, and that made her feel desperate and alone. She almost wanted to take the biker up on his offer of a drink and then, ask him to take her someplace safe, but that would give him the wrong idea. She needed a safe place to land that didn’t involve his bed for the night because she was sure that would be what he wanted in return for helping her out.
She spent about five minutes in the mirror, trying to talk herself into going home with the sexy biker when a shadow in the corner caught her eye. It was a man—at least she thought it was. He had a slight build, and she was sure that he had gotten in through the window somehow.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he breathed as he stepped out of the shadows. “I just want the drive,” he said.
“Nate,” she breathed. “How did you get in here? How did you know that I was here?”
“I knew that sooner or later, you’d get up to no good and do some snooping, so I put a tracker on your car. I saw you sitting at the bar drinking and assumed that at some point, you’d need to use the ladies’ room, so I climbed in through the window.”
