Chapter One
Fist.Face.Floor.
Dylan assumed that was the sequence of events. Fuck if he could swear to it, though. He’d gone from trying to peel a Santa hat off a drunk groom-to-be’s head so he could check for injuries to flat on the floor.
It didn’t hurt too much.
He was pretty sure that was about to change, though.
On a count of three…
Dylan rolled onto his side and scrambled up onto his knees. He’d been right. That was the hurt he had been waiting for. His skull felt like someone had stepped on it, and the contents of his stomach tried to crawl up into his throat as the pain in his face hit him.
His nose was broken. It kind of hurt now, but he could tell it was going to hurt a lot more once he started to poke at it. It had that queasily loose feeling.
Great. Something to look forward to.
Blood dripped out of Dylan’s nose and splattered over the floor. He wiped it with the back of his hand as he scrambled to his feet and took in the revived bar brawl.
How long had he been out?
The groom, identifiable by his Last Night in the Wolf Pack T-shirt, had gone from petty sulking on a barstool to swinging the stool like a mace to keep the bar’s bouncers at bay. Blood was painted down one half of his face and he had a tinsel bikini top gripped in his free hand.
And where the fuck had that come from?
A woman in a sexy Mrs. Claus costume—might be a stripper, might be a party-girl willing to bare her belly button to the Minnesota winter—was being restrained by a bouncer. Her boobs, pinned in place by two sticky silicone pads, were exposed since she’d have to put the broken bottle down to cover them.
Oh. There. That made sense.
Alice grabbed Dylan’s arm and hauled him back to his feet.
“Should we do something?” she asked dubiously. “Help?”
Dylan sniffed—that hurt, like two needles right behind his eyes—and shook his head. It was Alice’s first month on the job. Dylan had been a medic for six years, two of them in Belling.
“Stay out of it,” he said. “Our job is to patch them up. It’s easier to do that when you don’t need patching up yourself.”
The topless woman jammed an elbow back into the bouncer’s face as she tried to squirm free. He jerked his head back in time to avoid catching the jab to the mouth. Her heels scraped down his shins as she kicked at him.
“Bastard!” she swore through peppermint red lips. When she couldn’t get loose, she cocked her arm back and threw the bottle at the man with her top wrapped around his fist. “Dirty bastard!”
The rest of the bar staff and bouncers scuffled on the floor with the groom’s ‘Wolf Pack’—already battered from the fight that brought Dylan here—to keep them out of altercation. The bottle sailed between them on a steady, confident softball player pitch. It missed the groom and bounced off a bouncer’s buzz-cut skull.
It gashed his ear open and distracted him enough that the groom managed to shove the barstool through his guard. The rung that braced the legs rammed into the bouncer’s throat, and he gagged as he was driven backward. As the other bouncers broke ranks to catch him, the ‘Wolf Pack’ rallied and pushed forward.
Before it could get any worse, a big, blond man stalked out of the back room and waded into the fight. Somerset North, owner of the Just-as-High… which Dylan knew because he’d been on a call here more than once and not because he’d started to drink here on his nights off—just for the company, not the ambiance—grabbed the groom by the back of his T-shirt. The man’s face flushed red, his eyes bulging as the cotton twisted into a garrote across his throat. He gagged and choked as he dangled there before Somerset tossed him unceremoniously toward his friends.
They scattered rather than try to catch him. He crashed into a table and took it out—broken chairs, broken bottles, and a half-throttled man hitting the floor at the same time. One of the pack yelled something and lunged at Somerset. He had a broken pool cue gripped in one scarred-up hand, and he swung it in a vicious arc at Somerset’s knees.
Somerset grabbed his wrist before the stick could make contact. His fist tightened until Dylan could have sworn he heard a crack. The man went a sickly color and dropped the stick. It clattered onto the floor, and Somerset kicked it out of the way. Then he twisted the man’s arm until the grayish-faced man folded at the knees.
Most of Dylan’s working hours were spent trying to triage the aftereffects of violence. It wasn’t hot.
Somerset was, though. He was six foot five of lean muscle in old jeans and a T-shirt, all short temper and gruffness. It was not Dylan’s type at all… but apparently some people were too sexy for that to matter. Even if they were about to break someone’s arm.
Alice elbowed Dylan in the ribs. He dragged his attention off Somerset to look at her.
“You’re drooling,” she muttered.
