LITMIR.BIZ

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She slipped in to place the plate beside Holly, her words clear enough to Lannie’s wolf. “Here you go, honey. You want a beer to go with that?”

      Holly nodded, and Lannie jerked his attention to the casual approach of the slender man who took a seat in Holly’s empty chair.

      This time when Lannie drew on his alpha, he did it deliberately. He eyed the man without welcome and without apology.

      The man met his gaze without rising to that challenge. Faint concern lived in the lines gathering at his brow. “I know I’m intruding,” he said. “Hear me out. We have a common interest.”

      Lannie gave the man a sharper look. He’d dressed out of Cabela’s outfitter catalog for the evening—high country fisherman casual, all fresh from the package—and while he hadn’t quite shaved down his balding head, he’d come close enough for dignity. His watch was high quality without being ostentatious; his single ring was black onyx in a masculine setting and his ears went unadorned.

      No particular threat there. But on this night when Lannie had taken responsibility for Kai Faulkes’s vulnerable, wayward sister, he didn’t much like coincidences. “How many of your conversations start out this way and still end well?”

      “I’m interrupting,” the man said, a touch of car salesman in his demeanor. “I understand that. But I need to talk to you about what happened earlier this evening.”

      Lannie kept his stare flat. “Earlier this evening I closed down my store, met a friend for dinner and came here. You’re sitting in her seat.”

       Earlier this evening, he’d taken a knife between the ribs and still put five men down...and then walked away from it.

      But this man couldn’t know that unless he’d been part of it somehow.

      “I’m not doing this well,” the man said. “I’m more than aware that under other circumstances, we not only wouldn’t be companionable, we wouldn’t even speak—”

      And then a cluster of casually raucous men moved to the bar, and Lannie saw their faces.

      Familiar faces. Battered faces. Only four of them, because the fifth apparently hadn’t recovered from the consequences of sticking a knife into Lannie.

      And there was Holly, sitting alone and upset, and completely unaware.

      Lannie didn’t much like coincidences.

      “You should have talked faster.” He rose from his chair with the wolf coming out strong, already silent in movement. “Your friends tipped your hand.” He hesitated, briefly, to loom over the smaller man. “Whatever you want...this was a mistake.”

      “You misunderstand,” the man said, drawing back—but at Lannie’s expression, his protests died back into annoyance. After a final hesitation, he rose from his seat and strode for the exit. Lannie might have grabbed his arm—might have demanded an explanation—but Holly came first. He headed for the bar.

      Barbara crossed his path with empty serving tray in hand and caught sight of his expression, freezing there a moment. “Lannie?” But then she saw the men, and muttered a curse. “I see them. But this is a family place, Lannie.” He passed her by, snagging the tray from her unsuspecting grip along the way. She let him have it but still followed him. “Lannie!”

      Lannie moved in beside Holly. She made a startled sound and sent a glare his way.

      “Right,” he said. “You’re pissed at me. I get it. Let’s go.”

      “I’m eating.” She turned away from him and forked up some sauce-smeared sweet potato.

      “Lannie,” Barbara said from behind, “what—”

      “These guys are not our friends.” Lannie caught Holly’s gaze, nodding at the little gang. They hadn’t spotted him yet, but they’d be looking. They were just having fun along the way.

      “I see them.” She took a swig of her own bottled beer, and her Upper Peninsula accent came out strong. “They’re rude. Big wha. I run my own crews, Mr. Stewart—you think I haven’t handled rude before?”

      “Holly.” Lannie took the beer from her, set it on the bar, and ignored her fully justified glare of astonishment. “These guys are not our friends.” It didn’t matter that Lannie got no sense of Core from them; he wasn’t sensitive to that particular stench in the first place. They’d already attacked his pack, and they’d attacked him. They were the enemy, and he needed to get Holly out of here, and he told her so with his expression and with his eyes and with every bit of the alpha within.

      Holly’s eyes widened; she closed her mouth on whatever she’d been about to say and cast a more thoughtful glance at the men, three of whom were giving the bartender grief while the fourth caught sight of Lannie and stiffened, his expression darkening.

      “Uh-oh,” said Barbara from behind him, and hastened away.

      “I’m hungry,” Lannie told Holly. “Grab your meal and your beer and we’ll eat somewhere else.”

      By then the gang was headed their way. Lannie took the step in front of Holly and felt more than saw as she slid off the stool to stand at his shoulder.

      “Look who we found.” The lead guy came to a stop, his expression just a little too bright, his bruises from earlier in the day blooming puffy and dramatic. “The idiot who showed up in the middle of nowhere to mess with our business.”

      Lannie kept his voice even and his hands low. “Out in the middle of nowhere happens to have been my property. And the old man you beat up happens to be my friend.”

      The man offered him a nasty smile. “You should have thought of this moment before you butted in.”

      “There were five of you and one of me, and I’m still standing. This time there are only four of you. Is this really something you want everyone to see?” He didn’t, at the moment, feel the aches. He didn’t feel the wound on his side. And he didn’t hold the alpha inside.

      “Let’s just go.” Holly’s low voice held disgust rather than fear. “You were right. We can eat somewhere else.”

      A camera flashed from behind Lannie, highlighting the man—tall, muscle-bound and graced with a graying blond beard that crawled unmanaged down his throat to his chest. His friends started as the flash went off again, and Barbara made a satisfied noise in her throat. “Got ’em. Now you scoot, Lannie. If they wanted to take a poke at you in my place, they should’ve been faster about it.”

      “Yes’m,” Lannie said, easing a step aside without taking his eyes off the men. This would be the moment, if they—

      The big guy in front went for it, dropping his shoulder for driving punch that would have caught Lannie pretty much where the knife had.

      Lannie whipped the serving tray up between them, bracing it against the sharp impact; hot pain tore at his side. As the man cried out and grabbed his injured hand, Lannie yanked the tray up and cracked it in half over his head.

      The man dropped like a rock. Lannie held the other three with his eye, waiting that extra beat. When they exchanged an uncertain glance, he dropped the tray halves on top of their fallen friend.

      Barbara had more than a camera; she had a short bat, and she tapped it meaningfully against her palm. “We done here, boys?”

      That could have been it. That should have been it. But the fallen man surged upward with offended fury and Lannie snarled it back at him, grabbing the bat from Barbara—

      Heavy glass thudded dully against a hard head. The man collapsed in a moaning heap.

      Holly looked ruefully at her beer bottle—upended and now empty. She placed the bottle carefully upright on the bar. “Maybe we can get those dinners to go?”

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