by Penny Reid
“Sir, you need to leave.” Her clear voice, full of authority, rang like a warning bell and made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
Alex moved as though to protect her as well. “What are you…?”
Without turning, Fiona lifted a hand to silence him.
The man’s face morphed from sinister to enraged. “I’m not going anywhere! This is between me—” he pointed at Marie, his eyes venomous, “—and her!”
“Sir.” Fiona held up her hands, palms out. “I suggest you leave right now before someone gets hurt.”
The man snorted; it was not a friendly sound. “Get out of my way, you bi….”
I tensed as I read his intent; he planned to go through Fiona, Alex, me—all of us to get to Marie. My arms instinctively pulled her closer as I prepared to flee into the building.
But I didn’t have to. Before I moved an inch, before Alex could intervene, Fiona—short of stature, mother-of-two Fiona—moved like a ninja lightning bolt and felled him. In what seemed like three seconds, the man was on the sidewalk, face first in the snow.
I gasped.
The man lay there motionless.
Fiona stood over him.
We all watched in a sort of suspended animation as we waited to see what would happen next. I was awestruck by Fiona’s completely unexpected mad ninja fighting skills.
Alex, who had initially lunged forward to assist, stopped and hovered a few steps in front of the felled man. He stood before me in profile, his eyes large, his mouth parted in surprise, and he didn’t quite seem to know what to do with his hands.
The bulky stranger shook his head as though overcome, his eyes searching for the cause of his knockout and finding only Fiona.
She shifted her weight from foot to foot like a boxer in the ring. “You need to leave—right now.”
He blinked at her, swallowed, and struggled slightly as he stood. Alex stepped next to Fiona and crossed his arms. They made an unlikely pair. Alex—towering and scowling—had all the appearance of danger, whereas Fiona, I was coming to realize, may have been the more lethal of the two.
The man unfolded himself gingerly; the wind had obviously been knocked out of him.
“Fine.” He said with obvious reluctance, his gaze bouncing between the two of them. “I just want to talk.”
“No.” Fiona shook her head. “But I’ll make you a deal. If you leave now, I might not call the cops.”
He flexed his jaw, features twisted with frustration, and his eyes moved to Marie’s. I felt her tense. After a prolonged moment, the man turned, straightened his shoulders, and walked away.
Marie released an audible breath.
“Are you okay, Marie?” Fiona asked between glances up and down the sidewalk as though she were looking for would-be assassins.
Marie nodded and twisted out of my arms. “What did you do to him?” she asked Fiona.
Fiona’s elven eyes moved among our trio of shocked faces. “Uh, I knocked him down.”
“Where did you learn to do that?” Alex openly studied her. Like me, he appeared to be seeing her in a completely new light.
“I took some self-defense classes.” Fiona shrugged as though our questions were unnecessary, and then she addressed Alex. “Will you call the police, please?”
Alex flinched and rocked backward on his feet as he said, “I can’t. I don’t have a phone.”
Fiona frowned at him. “Doesn’t the restaurant have a phone?”
“Yeah. But I don’t use it.”
Fiona’s eyebrows shot upward.
Alex quickly added, “I’ll ask Mr. Patel to phone it in.”
He turned swiftly then stopped when his eyes met mine; I registered surprise. Obviously, he hadn’t known I was standing behind him.
Alex grabbed my hand and squeezed it, his eyes a bit savage with sudden distress. “Are you alright?” he asked. I was startled by the abruptness and ferocity of his concern.
I nodded. Admittedly, I felt rather dumbstruck by the entire event, especially his readiness to charge outside and defend someone he didn’t know. As well, the way Alex was looking at me now made me feel a little breathless.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” I responded, then asked in return, “Are you okay?”
He nodded as he scanned my features, and then, still holding my hand, he turned to Marie. “How about you? May I offer you anything?”
Marie glanced at the sky. I noted her eyes were shining with barely controlled tears. “Do you have any vodka?”
CHAPTER 5
“ANOTHER TOAST TO Alex. May he live long and prosper, and have lots of prospering, long-living babies!” Elizabeth raised her glass; all the toasts she’d led so far had been Star Trek related, and this was the second live-long-and-prosper toast, which was how I knew it was time to cut her off.
“Na’zdroveya!” Fiona said.
“Hear, hear!” Kat said.
“Cheerio, old chap!” Ashley said.
“To warm hats!” Janie said.
“À la vôtre!” Marie said.
“I volunteer….” I mumbled under my breath. My brain and lips were loosened by the inhalation of alcohol, but I was nowhere near as inebriated as the rest.
He didn’t hear my comment. No one did.
Or if they did, they made no outward show of it, which means they didn’t hear me because, as intoxicated as they were, at least one of them would have repeated it loudly and made lewd hand gestures.
Alex didn’t laugh; he was filling our water glasses with his usual detached attention. In fact, despite our profusion of toasts in his honor, he hadn’t waved us off or feigned embarrassment, nor had he made a joke of it. Rather, he stood stoically, showing no outward emotion, and accepted our praise—every time.
I made a mental note that, at least at first, Alex behaved as a typical alpha male. His acceptance of the praise demonstrated that he not only welcomed a good ego stroking without putting on a display of false humility to get it; he craved it. But then again, after our prolonged effusion of compliments, he should have revealed some outward sign of weariness or annoyance when the toasts turned into tipsy tributes. He didn’t.
He gifted us with a gentle nod of his head, his eyes snaring mine for a prolonged second, before he turned and sauntered back to the kitchen.
Zing.
I sighed.
As I watched him depart, I wondered if he lacked a sense of humor. I dismissed the thought almost immediately. He had suppressed a laugh last Friday while he sat across from me and said naughty things, and I’d gotten the distinct impression that he had a sense of humor that tended to be wicked, dark, and sardonic.
“Sandra?”
I reluctantly pulled my attention from Alex and met Fiona’s inquiring gaze. “Yes?”
Her elfish eyes narrowed on me and her lips compressed into a threatening smile. “I said, I think we’re going to skip the knitting tonight.”
“Oh.” I glanced around the table. Everyone was looking at me except Marie, who was surreptitiously trying to read her phone. “Yeah, sure. That’s fine.”
“It’s finally happened. I’ve had too much knit to alcohol.” Ashley slurred, her head falling into her hands. The unintended word switch earned her some snickers.
“If you weren’t working on an Ysolda sweater pattern then you could probably still get through some rows,” Kat said then promptly hiccupped, which made her giggle.
“Yeah. Knit a scarf. Stop being such a pattern snob.”
As conversation flared around the table—a debate over the readability of Ysolda Teague’s Vivian sweater pattern while inebriated, and why knitting a ribbed scarf made one a ghetto knitter—Fiona leaned close to me and whispered, “Janie called Quinn.”
I nodded and glanced at her from the corner of my eye as I said; “Yeah. I saw Dan and the guys arrive earlier.”
After the earlier kerfuffle on the sidewalk, the restaurant owner, Mr. Patel, had called the police. Fiona and Marie had done most of the talking.
While the police took Marie’s statement, Janie had called her husband, Quinn, who owned a very capable commercial and private security firm. Three members of Quinn’s private security team arrived not one minute after the police departed.
I noticed that Alex was scarce, and appeared only to refill water glasses until the police left. Of note, Mr. Patel took a break from the kitchen to bring out lovely plates of chicken tandoori and samosas. He was also the one to deliver our bottles of wine, an overabundance of fantastic-smelling dishes, jasmine rice, and garlic naan.
We all eavesdropped on Marie’s story—as we were wont to do—and discovered that the sinister stranger was actually a guy she’d met, a bouncer, while she was working on her most recently published magazine article.
The title of the article was “Looking for Big in All the Wrong Places: The Tiny Truth About Body Builders.”
The police stuck around just long enough to get our quick statements and remind Marie to call if she had any more problems. Before they left, we listened as an APB was put out on her assailant.
Marie, though I was concerned about her emotional and mental well-being, was determined to salvage the evening and insisted on ordering four more bottles of wine. She wanted to stay and celebrate, and no one was inclined to argue her out of it.
At one point she said, “I will not be bullied out of celebrating my success.” And I think I loved her a little more in that moment, though I didn’t know how it was possible.
Of course, there were about seventeen remaining elephants in the room, the three largest of which were Marie’s future safety, Fiona’s mysterious badassery, and the way Alex had knight-in-shining-armored his way to the top of our favorite person list.
Instead of addressing the former two, we focused on the latter and made copious red wine toasts to Alex once he replaced Mr. Patel as our server—and every time he came to the table. Our appreciation—especially my appreciation, of course—quadrupled when he remembered to bring out Marie’s gift after dinner and before dessert.
“Do you think I should ask Marie if she wants to talk about what happened?” My attention was distracted as I watched the only other customers in the restaurant push back their chairs and depart for the night. Although it wasn’t yet 9:30 p.m. and the place had been packed at 7:00 p.m., it was a Tuesday night, and it was bitterly cold. People wanted to be at home and warm.
More customers at this point were highly unlikely.
“No.” Fiona paused, her eyes moved over Marie. “She’ll clam up if you try to use your powers of psychoanalysis on her. I think that’s why she insisted that we stay and have dinner here. It’ll be hard enough to get her to agree to the security detail.”
I silently conceded the point and said, “I need to visit the ladies’ room. If I see adorable Alex, I’ll ask him to bring the check.”
Fiona’s gaze sharpened, and the suddenness of it halted my movements. “Adorable Alex, huh?”
“Yes. Don’t you think he’s adorable?”
“No. I think he looks like a tall, scary version of James Dean.”
“The dead actor or the porn star?”
“The dead actor.”
“Shoot.” I twisted my lips to the side and sighed mournfully. “That porn actor has a gigantic….”
“Sandra,” Fiona interrupted me, her voice a careful whisper. “Be careful with Alex. There is something not right about him.”
“What do you mean?”
“Come on. You two have been eye sexing each other all night. It’s hard not to notice.”
“Well, I can’t help it. He gives me the zings in my things.”
“What does that mean?”
“I feel like I have wings.”
“Maybe you’re drinking too much Red Bull.”
“No. It’s lady quiverings.”
“Listen, Doctor Seuss, I don’t care if looking at him makes you want to sing. Look all you want. Just don’t…don’t do anything else.”
I didn’t even try to look sheepish, but because I also sensed that something about Alex was a bit off, I was curious about Fiona’s assessment. “You’ve been making toasts to him all night.”
“Yes, because he helped—or intended to help—Marie. Which is another thing, how he ran out of here. How many people do you know—how many guys do you know—who are willing to run into a fight like that?”
“You did.”
She looked abruptly uncomfortable. “Yeah, well I’m not a guy. I had the element of surprise, I know Marie, and we’re not talking about me.” Her voice was firm and left no room for questions. I recognized her deflection for what it was. “He doesn’t know her. And that bouncer guy, even though they were evenly matched in height, that guy was almost twice Alex’s width. It’s almost like Alex has a death wish. You’re good at reading people; I’m sure your thoughts were similar.”
I nodded noncommittally. Usually I was good at reading people. Admittedly, now, and at the time it happened, it didn’t occur to me to think that what Alex did—running out to save some unknown damsel in distress from a beefy behemoth twice his size—was reckless.
I thought it was sexy and swoony and hot. Maybe our Friday kiss and the constant zings had clouded my judgment.
After a short moment, she added, “And the way he looks at people.” Her eyes lost some of their focus.
“What do you mean?”
“He stares openly at people. It’s as if he has no fear—that or very little understanding of normal social behavior, or a complete disregard for it. Maybe it’s a bit of all three.”
“Hmm….” was all I said because I agreed with her on this point, but I didn’t want to confirm her suspicions. Sounding a bit loftier than I intended, I added, “Your concerns have been noted, and I still need to go pee.”
“Ah—okay. Sorry.” She smiled up at me as I stood. “Go pee!”
I returned her smile mostly to put her at ease. As I walked to the bathroom and completed my business transaction with the toilet and sink, her words of warning filled my ears and divided my thoughts.
I was smart. I knew this with as much certainty as I knew the underwear I was wearing was yellow. I wasn’t looking at Alex as a potential long-term relationship or partner of my future life. If something progressed between us, it would have to be purely physical.
And this was a big if.
In fact, it was an IF.
Because he had me curious about him, interested in him, and fascinated to find out who he was.
The zings were disconcerting as well, and could not be ignored.
I’d never had a purely physical relationship before; in fact, I didn’t even know if I was wired that way.
Part of me didn’t think so. For all my bravado, when I fell, I fell hard. I fell fast. I fell stupid. I invested too much too soon. My capacity for giving was matched only by their capacity for taking. My emotional intelligence took a backseat to my emotionality, and the end of these relationships always took me completely by surprise.
They needed me and I helped them, but when I was no longer needed, I was left with a massive heartache and fifteen pounds of kummerspeck.
Kummerspeck, of course, being the German word for emotional weight gain; literally translated, it means grief bacon.
Afterward, with the passing of time and emotional distance, I worked off the grief (bacon) and the heartache and found my romantic optimism again. I dissected the relationship and tried to turn it into a positive learning experience.
All this explains why this time I had no interest in dating a man with rampant and unresolved parental issues (failed relationships numbers 1 and 2) or with other unresolved emotional baggage related to past relationships (again, failed relationship number 3).
I didn’t want to be a bitter person, but it was a fine line to walk without inviting more heartbreak. After the last fiasco I made a promise to myself that, though I refused to succumb to woman-scorned syndrome, I was going to be smart about the next guy.
&nb
sp; I wanted to fall into stupid love. I wanted to give myself without fear. This meant the next guy was going to be scrutinized, vetted, and evaluated before I jumped, heart first, into another disaster—which was likely how Thomas had ended up with such a thriving practice.
All of this meditation led me back to Alex.
Was it possible to do this, do him, without risking my feelings? Was I even on his to-do list? Did he like me or despise me, or what? He was the king of mixed signals.
I was swimming in my conflicting contemplations, attempting to exit the bathroom, when my progress was wholly impinged and impugned.
By Alex.
He stopped me. Meaning, he put his arm out and barred my way forward as though he’d been lying in wait. His eyes bounced between mine before settling on my mouth with completely unapologetic brashness.
“Hello, Sandra.”
“Hello, Alex.”
He smiled, slow and a little wicked. He leaned a fraction of an inch closer—which, as a percentage of the close distance separating us, was quite a lot. “Did you enjoy your butter chicken?”
“Yes. Did you enjoy serving me?”
His gaze flickered to mine, held. He had the most unusual eyes: dark, dark blue—like cobalt—with black and gold specs radiating from the pupil at the center. “Serving you is always a pleasure.”
Of course, his voice and words sent an enchanting shivering awareness down my spine all the way to my nerve endings. Unaccountably, all my previous concerns evaporated, and I was left with a single thought.
Alex naked.
Zing.
I returned his smile and hoped mine rivaled his for wickedness. “Glad to hear it.”
“So, Sandra….” He hovered, dipped his chin so that I had to lift mine to maintain eye contact. If I took a deep breath, our chests would probably touch. “You owe me one, right?”
I nodded with casual indifference, but my outward appearance of nonchalance was the complete opposite of the building apprehension and excitement twisting in my middle. “That’s right. At this point, after what you did for Marie, I might even owe you two ones.”
He shook his head, momentarily thoughtful. “No, I don’t think so. Your friend Fiona seemed to be perfectly capable of handling the situation. What’s her story anyway? What does she do?”