They stopped talking and looked down at me.
“I’m trying to get through,” I explained, pointing beyond them as though that would help make them understand.
The taller guy in the group pointed to his chest. “Through us?”
I nodded. “Yes. Excuse me,” I said again.
“What will you give me?”
I blinked.
He pushed back his cap, revealing sweaty dark hair at the crown of his head. “Yeah. You gotta pay a toll.”
I laughed nervously.
I was about to start my third year of college. I’d been to plenty of bars. Been hit on by drunk guys. However, I was usually in the company of Emerson or Pepper or Suzanne. And usually it was Emerson’s mouth that did the talking—telling guys like this off.
“Come on, guys,” I coaxed. “I’m not cutting in line. I just need to get to the kitchen.”
He looked at his buddies and cocked his head as if considering my request. “Maybe just a kiss?”
His friends laughed.
Anger flashed through me. Who was he to make demands of me? I get that some other girl with a few beers in her might not have minded the attention. She would probably be happy to play his game, but I wasn’t one of them.
He leaned down until our faces were on level. “Come on. Give me some sugar.”
I clenched my jaw, tempted to take a swing at that face with those puckering fish lips. My fingers curled into a fist, ready to take a swing at his ruddy, perspiring features. “Get out of my way.”
Then suddenly he was out of my face. Logan was there, stepping around me. He shoved Fish Lips hard against the shoulder and knocked him off balance. The guy staggered. Clearly the alcohol didn’t help his equilibrium.
Regaining his footing, he came back at Logan with a double-handed shove.
Logan stood his ground, hardly budging from the force. He stared Fish Lips down, indifferent to the two guys on either side of him who suddenly looked ready for a fight. I licked my lips and glanced around to see if help was coming from any of the other bouncers. Three to one weren’t the best odds.
And then Fish Lips’s gaze flicked to the Mulvaney’s logo on Logan’s shirt, clearly recognizing him as staff. Some of the tension ebbed from him as he demanded, “What the fuck, man?”
Some of the fight went out of his buddies, too. They no longer looked ready to jump Logan.
Fish Lips went into instant restrained-pissed-guy mode, puffing out his chest and practically standing on his tiptoes to match Logan’s six-feet-plus frame. “What’s your problem?”
Logan jerked his thumb in the direction of the back door. “You can take your boys and go for the night.”
“You’re kicking us out, man?”
“Harassing girls is something we frown on, man.”
Fish Lips looked ready to argue, his hands flexing open and shut at his sides.
One of Fish Lips’s friends clapped him on the back. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Come back in here and harass any girl again and you’ll be blacklisted from Mulvaney’s,” Logan added.
Fish Lips snarled as he started walking away with his boys, his body twisting beneath their hands. “Like I’d ever step foot in this shit hole again.”
I turned an uncertain gaze on Logan.
He was staring at me unwaveringly. That stare alone made me feel like I needed to apologize. For what, I didn’t know. I hadn’t done anything wrong.
I moistened my lips. “You didn’t need to do that.”
Both his eyebrows winged. “Oh, no?”
I shook my head and then yelped as he grabbed my hand. “What are you doing?” I demanded over the buzz of voices as he pulled me through bodies.
“Escorting you to your room.” He flipped up the counter, and instantly we were free of the hot press of humanity. It was like suddenly breaking through the water and taking your first deep breath of air.
“That’s not necessary,” I said as we walked past Karla working the counter and back into the kitchen. Cook didn’t even look up from where he was shaking salt over fries. “I can make it on my own now,” I said, digging my key out.
Logan ignored me, plucking my key from my hand and unlocking the door to the loft. Still holding on to my hand, he pulled me up the stairs after him, his feet heavy thuds on the wooden steps. “You really think it’s a good idea to live above this bar, Pearls?”
I bristled at his use of that nickname. “It’s just for the summer.”
“What? Mommy and Daddy won’t spring for a pimp apartment. You gotta stay here?”
I bit back a “no.” He didn’t need to know the particulars of my life—that my parents only paid my way as long as I did exactly as they instructed.
“I’m home now.” My sandals hit the steps hard in my mounting anger. “You can go. I don’t want to keep you from your job.”
“Saving damsels from drunks is part of the job requirement.”
We reached the top floor and I tugged my hand free of the warm clasp of his fingers. “Yeah?” I tossed my handbag on the futon and turned to face him.
“Yeah,” he tossed back. “I’m pretty sure it’s even more important to my brother when the damsel happens to be a good friend of his.”
I narrowed my eyes on him. “Did Reece tell you to look after me?”
He snorted and crossed his arms over his chest, advancing on me. Those well-carved lips curved as he spoke. “That goes without saying.”
“Oh.” I inched back, stopping when the back of my knees hit the edge of the futon. “You think he would approve, then, of you hitting on me?”
Chuckling, he stopped directly in front of me, leaving only a thin line of space between us. “I don’t answer to my brother. I’ve been my own man for a long time.”
I had a flash of memory then. Pepper telling me that Reece was only eight when their mother died. Logan would have been just three then. And their father was a mean drunk. Cruel and bitter even before the accident that put him in a wheelchair. Yes. By all accounts, Logan had been his own man for a long time. He had missed his childhood entirely.
The breadth of his chest was so close, vibrating with an energy and vitality that made something inside me quiver . . . stretch soundlessly toward him in response. But it was an invisible thing, buried deep inside me. I refused to let it loose.