The Protector (Lone Wolf, Book 1) (10 page)

After another twenty minutes or so
of booze and laughter, Tracy glanced down at her watch, bringing it up closer
to her face with narrowed eyes when she couldn’t make out the time at first
glance.
 
“Gosh, kids, I hate to drink
and run,” she said, yawning hugely and covering it up with her hand, “but I
have
not only
a concert tomorrow, but a stupid dentist’s appointment
like…first thing.”
 
She winced and shook
her head.
 
“I should reschedule,
but…”
 
She trailed off as she blinked
owlishly at us and shook her head again.
 
“I think I’m going to call a cab—I don’t think I can walk all the way to
my apartment,” she said slowly, slurring every word as she stood
unsteadily.
 

“Do you want me to call one for
you?” I asked, reaching quickly for my crutches.
 
I was a little tipsy, yeah, but Tracy was pretty darn drunk and I
was worried about her and her fiddle getting home in one piece.

“I got this,” she said with a wide
smile, patting my shoulder.
 
“You two
have fun!” she practically sang, then she pecked a kiss on my cheek, waved to
Layne, and faded into the crowd as she headed toward McBride’s door.

And then it was me and Layne
sitting there in the oldest lesbian bar in Boston.

I cleared my throat, taking another
sip of my martini.
 

I realized just then that this…kind
of felt like a date.

But it wasn’t.
 
It absolutely wasn’t,
obviously
.
 
Because Layne was technically my employee
(wasn’t she?
 
Or was she my father’s
employee?
 
Did it matter
?).
 
Either way, we had a working relationship
that sleeping with—or dating, or anything related to either of these
things—would vastly overcomplicate.
 

And did I really
need
overcomplicated
in my life right now, when someone had—allegedly—just tried to kill me?
 
Wasn’t that overcomplicated
enough
?

I stared at Layne across the
table.
 
I couldn’t help but stare.
 
It was the way she bonelessly lounged back
in the chair, the way she gazed at me with her bright, flashing eyes that could
never decide what color they wanted to be, their hazel depths seeming to turn
green one moment, blue the next, and then a deep, shimmering brown a heartbeat
later.

Their color transformed again as
Layne leaned forward, just then, her body language shifting as she curved
toward me, her entire body a question mark punctuating an unspoken query.

She was going to ask that
question.
 
Her beautiful mouth parted,
and those full, perfect lips were going to ask me…something.
 
But then her face shut up like a boarded-up
house, and she leaned back again, clearing her throat, averting her gaze from
me.
 
The moment had somehow come and
gone, and I didn’t know what had just changed, but something obviously
had.
 
“I’m about ready to get going,”
she said then, quietly.
 
“If you are.”

What had just happened?
 
What had she been about to ask me?
 
Maybe I’d imagined it…but no.
 
It’d seemed precious, that last moment, how
she’d curved toward me like I, for a single heartbeat of time, had a gravity to
me
, too…and I called to her as strongly as she called to me.

“Yeah, that’d be fine,” I told her,
realizing as I spoke the words that I was slurring them, too.
 
Okay, so maybe I was a little past
tipsy.
 
And maybe, just maybe, I’d
imagined that moment with Layne.
 

I stood and tried to grab for the
crutches, but I had to grip onto the edge of the table as the world started to
reorient itself around me, twirling and spinning like it was a carnival ride
that would never let me off.

“I can bring the car to the front
of the bar,” said Layne, standing in an instant and putting one strong hand
under my right elbow.
 
The way her
fingers curled around my arm made me lean toward her, but then I was shaking my
head, grabbing at my crutches again.
 
I
managed to get them under my arms as Layne lifted up my violin case from under
the table with a questioning tilt to her head.

“No, no, that’s too much trouble to
go to.
 
That’d just be silly,” I said,
as practically as I could in the circumstances.
 
“We can both walk together to the parking garage.
 
And anyway, the night air in the city always
makes me happy.”
 
God, did I really just
say that?
 
I couldn’t put thoughts
together long enough to voice them articulately.

“But it’s quite a
walk
to
the parking garage,” said Layne softly into my ear, her warm breath brushing
against my skin and making me sigh, my heart beating a little faster.
 
God, I hoped she hadn’t heard that happy sigh.
 
“And aren’t you feeling it after everything
today?
 
Aren’t you sore?”

I mean, I was, but the booze was
taking care of most of the worst of the pain.
 
Somewhere in my muzzy head, I remembered a warning label on the pill
bottle saying you shouldn’t mix the pain pills with alcohol, but I was pretty
sure that it was all right if I wasn’t driving.
 
Maybe.
 
I blinked
again.
 
Layne had asked me another
question, but I hadn’t remotely heard it.

“I’m sorry, I’m pretty gone,” I
finally admitted to her, leaning heavily on the crutches, and a little on Layne
herself.
 
God, she felt so good against
me, her body so hard in all of the right places, sculpted muscles beneath the
jeans and leather jacket and t-shirt, and soft in all the
right
places…
 
I wanted to touch her.

I wanted to kiss her.

I tried to hang onto the last
shreds of inhibition as we eased out of the loud, bass-thumping confines of the
bar onto the chill sidewalk outside.
 
The cool June night air brushed over me, waking me up a little from my
stupor as I glanced around at the heavily populated road, covered in brightly
lit taxis, cars and buses, and the equally packed sidewalk, swarming with
people.

Much to my sadness, a lot of the
closer parking garages had already begun to fill for the night (and it was a
Thursday
night!
 
But Boston loves to party
any night of the week), so we hadn’t bothered to move the car from where we’d
parked by the concert hall.
 

Layne was right—we had a long way
to walk, though it was a beautiful night to do it in.
 
Layne carried my violin case easily with one hand, and placed her
other strong, sure arm around my waist, bringing me close against her.

She smelled so good, I
realized.
 
Not of cigarette smoke, like
the crowd of smokers we’d just passed, or of alcohol, though there’d been a lot
of booze sloshing out of various glasses and bottles at the bar.
 
She smelled…well, it’s absurd to describe it
like this, but it’s the truth, so here goes:
 
she smelled fresh, like she’d just been out for a hike, and there’d been
a really brisk, clear wind, and all the scents of the forest, of a bright,
glorious day, had gotten stuck in her hair and against the warmth of her
skin.
 
She smelled fresh, but she also
smelled hot, like cinnamon and a dark, cool musk that was an added magnet to
her.
 
I could have stood there all day
and inhaled the old, sweet leather of her jacket, the musk of her skin, the
fresh greenery of a wild hike, but we were moving through the city—my city—at
night, and all around us people laughed and cried and talked and moved through
the night on their way to many different places and experiences.

And Layne and I seemed to move
through them all like we weren’t really a part of them.
 
Like everyone else moved in one direction,
and Layne, with her warm arm wrapped tightly around me like she’d never let me
go, moved in another.

It was like we were kept safe in
our own little bubble, just the two of us, Layne and me.

That is, until we reached the block
with the parking garage.

The crowds had started to thin out
more and more.
 
If I’d been paying
attention to the time, I would have noticed that it was really quite far past
my bedtime, and if I’d been paying attention to the sparseness of the
crowds—and, surprisingly, the almost complete lack of people on the only
recently teeming streets—I would have realized we should probably be
progressing to my car a little quicker than we were.

We had to pass a slim alleyway
before the parking garage came into view.
 
I’d parked in this garage dozens of times when I drove to the concert
hall instead of taking the bus to rehearsals, but I was never around here this
late into the evening.
 
The parking
garage was a few blocks away from the concert hall itself, which put it into an
entirely unfamiliar neighborhood at night.

Which would explain why I never
could have predicted what happened next.

If you’d ask me, I would have told
you, yes—this was a safe part of town.
 
But it was very late at night, and I guess any part of the city can be
unsafe at any time if the wrong people are there.
 
And the very wrong people were there just then.

Like it was a very bad dream or a
scene from a dark, gritty movie, two men folded out of the shadows of the
building of the parking garage and stood beneath the streetlight, their feet
hip-width apart, their heads back, their hoods up.
 
They looked utterly menacing, and as the first one—a big, burly
guy with a brown beard—stepped forward, I realized what was happening before
the gun came out of his hoodie pocket.

“All right,” he said with a quick
sneer.
 
“Empty out your purses.
 
Any rings, cell phones, anything of value,
give ‘em to me.
 
Right now
.”

My heart was in my throat.
 
I couldn’t quite breathe, and all I could
really think about was the fact that I didn’t really have
anything
of
value on my person—nothing but my violin, and really, not that many people in
this world would know what that instrument was worth.
 
I wondered if they would shoot us if they knew that we didn’t
have anything they could take.
 
I
wondered what would happen if they became angry that we didn’t have anything…

All of these thoughts came to me in
the flash of an eye, because the gunman took a step back, just then.
 
His eyes grew wide, and he lowered his gun.

He was staring at Layne.

I looked up at her.
 
I remember how fast my blood was pounding,
like we were still back at the bar, and they’d just turned up the bass of an
already pretty bass-impressive song, the music thrumming through the soles of
my feet and into every inch of my body and bones.
 
Everything in the world faded to that deep thumping, and then I
understood that the quick, fast bass was my heartbeat roaring through me.

Layne was snarling.
 
Actually
snarling
, her lips up over
her very white teeth, her eyes impressively narrowed, and her body posture
curling forward.
 
She was a very tall
woman, but she seemed to suddenly be looming over the two men, which wasn’t
exactly possible:
 
they were tall, too.

The gunman took another step back,
but then his companion shook his head, nudged the gunman’s arm.
 
“C’mon, Larry,” he said in a strained
whisper.
 
“Ask ‘em for their stuff
again.”

It was strange, in that moment, the
things that stood out to me.
 
Like how
cold I’d suddenly gotten.
 
Like how this
second guy didn’t have the typical Boston accent, but something a little softer
and more rounded, almost southern.
 

And then the hair on the back of my
neck stood up to attention as the first guy’s eyes widened, as Layne took one
step forward.

As the gunman raised the gun and
held it at shoulder-height, pointed at Layne.

“Back up, bitch,” he muttered, his
eyes so wide that they were almost rolling in his head.
 

The gun fired.

There was a scream, but that was
me, I realized after a second—
I’d
screamed.
 
Layne wasn’t falling backward, like someone who’d just been
shot.
 
She was lunging
forward
,
and then the two guys were turning and running down the alleyway as if the
hounds of hell were on their heels.
 
They were headed back toward the rear of the building, and they were
pretty fast, but even with their head start, Layne was hot on their heels.
 

Layne was so
fast
—impossibly
fast, like the fastest track runner I’d ever seen, but somehow even faster than
that.
 
She caught up with the gunman in
a heartbeat, and then she was shoving down on his shoulder with her hand.
 
It was just a small gesture—it really
shouldn’t have even broken his stride—but he crumpled to the ground as if his
legs had completely given out underneath him, rolling three times over until he
rested, possibly unconscious, against the side of a dumpster, the gun
skittering across the ground and thudding up against the side of the building
with a metallic clunk.