She was still fuming about the fact that Ted hadn’t listened her to tell him no. Alethia Parker would tell any man no she wanted to, and if he took issue with that, she had pepper spray in her purse and she wasn’t afraid to use it.

So that was the mindset she was in when some guy in a scraggly beard and a stained T-shirt noticed her and leered. “Hey, honey, you lose your boyfriend?”

“I don’t know,” she snapped. “He’s probably with your mom.”

In retrospect, that had been a dumb thing to say.

Scraggly got mad and grabbed her arm.

“I think you should learn some respect.” His breath was hot in her face. It did not smell minty-fresh.

“Let go of me.” She made sure to enunciate each word very carefully.

“No.” His grip tightened.

Ali looked down, hoping to God he wasn’t wearing steel-toed boots. Nope, she was in luck: dirty white sneakers.

She drove her four-inch stiletto heel down into his foot. He howled and let her go, and she darted off into the crowd as fast as she could go.

That was it, she was finding Denise and they were leaving right now!

She ran smack into someone, rebounding off his chest like he was made of stone.

She looked up—and up—to meet the cool, grey eyes of a man who had to be at least 6’3’’. He was lean and muscular and looked like he could take anybody at this bar without breaking a sweat.

Great, Ali thought. Now this guy would want a piece of her, and she was going to have to try and pepper spray him, except his face might be too high for her to reach.

But he wasn’t making a move. He was just looking at her, intently, and when she looked back, she saw that his eyes weren’t cool after all. They were warm, a warm silvery color that held her attention like nothing else ever had.

“Gotcha!” Scraggly had come up behind her without her noticing and grabbed her arm again.

Gotcha?

She tried to find it funny—it was funny, after all, like she was a mouse in a cartoon—but all of a sudden, the whole night seemed to crash down on her. Molly, Denise, Ted, Matt, Scraggly. She wanted to burst into tears.

She couldn’t cry in a bar in front of everyone. But somehow, a single hot streak escaped her eye makeup and made it down her cheek.

Then a big hand closed around Scraggly’s wrist and twisted.

“Hey!” Scraggly yelled, instantly letting her go. “What’s wrong with you? I saw her first.”

“I’m thinking she doesn’t want to see you,” said the grey-eyed man in a rumbling voice. “Seeing as how she was running away from you.”

“She needs to pay for what she said to me,” Scraggly whined.

The grey-eyed man stepped forward. “Excuse me,” he said to Ali.

Suddenly, with a graceful twist, he was between her and Scraggly. He stared down at Scraggly’s trucker hat. Scraggly tilted his head back and looked a little less sure of himself.

“Seems to me that you need to pay for what you did to her.” His voice was almost a growl. “We can do that here or outside.”

“No! Uh, no, no thanks.” Scraggly backed away abruptly. He had to shoulder a few guys aside to do it. Then his whiny voice rose again as he started making new friends a few yards away.

Ali let out a breath that she felt like she’d been holding for an hour.

“Thank you,” she said to the man.

Now that she had a chance to take in more than his height and his eyes, he was even more striking. His skin was weather-beaten and tanned a pale, pale gold, and his hair was white-blond, getting a little too long and falling into his eyes. He had broad shoulders and muscular arms, but still managed to give the impression of leanness, a rangy grace that she had just witnessed in motion.

“No need to thank me.” No longer a rumbling growl, his voice was husky, deep but quiet enough that it seemed like she shouldn’t be able to hear it over the noise of the bar.

“It was just what any man should’ve done.” His eyes flickered over the crowd of men around them, none of whom had done anything, but most of whom would’ve followed in Scraggly’s footsteps if they’d noticed her. “Any decent man,” he corrected himself.

“Well, you’re the one who did it, so my thanks are going to you.” She couldn’t help looking him up and down again. Wow, he was a tall, cool glass of water. “Do you have a name?”

“Grey,” he said. “Grey Landin. You?”

She opened her mouth to say Ali, like she’d introduced herself a thousand times before, but for some reason what slipped out instead was, “Alethia. Alethia Parker.”

“Alethia,” he repeated.

In his husky voice, it didn’t sound weird or stupid or old-fashioned, like she usually thought. It sounded exotic and beautiful.

“Are you okay, Alethia?” he was asking. She made herself pay attention. It wasn’t hard. His voice seemed to curl up next to her ears, somehow drowning out the crowd without being loud at all. “Did he do anything to you?”

She shook her head. It was tempting to mention Ted feeling her up earlier, just to see what Grey Landin would do to a man like that.

But just the sight and sound of Grey pushed Ted—and Molly, and Paul, and Scraggly, and even Matt—out of her mind. She didn’t want to bring any of that up with him. “I’m okay. I got his foot with my heel before he did anything.”

Grey’s eyes flickered downward, and he smiled faintly. “Always wondered why women wore those things. Now I understand.”

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