Lincoln studied Derek with cold disdain. “You heard her. Let her go. Leave.” That one word came out with a dangerous edge, a warning.
My pulse spiked. I didn’t want things to get any nastier. Before I could beg Derek to leave again, he pulled something out of his waist. The glint of a blade caught the sun.
“Lincoln,” I gasped just as Derek lunged.
Lincoln moved too fast for me to track. He sidestepped the attack, grabbed Derek’s wrist, and twisted it. The knife clattered to the pavement.
“Are you insane?” Lincoln growled, shoving Derek back with a force that sent him stumbling several feet. “Don’t make me put you down,” he said with deadly calm as he pointed at Derek.
But because Derek was, in fact, insane, as Lincoln had questioned, he charged again.
Lincoln sighed loudly enough for me to hear. I guess he hadn’t wanted to do serious damage to the other man. Just as Derek reached him, Lincoln gave him one punch.
There was a cracking sound before Derek dropped. That was it—one punch, and he was down. I stood frozen. Lincoln approached, his eyes soft when they met mine, as if he hadn’t just put down a guy.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked.
I gawked at him. “No, I’m not okay. I think you killed him, Lincoln. You can’t go to prison because of my mess,” I wailed. I glanced at the unmoving Derek again and started sobbing. Suddenly, I was in a pair of strong arms with my face pressed against a hard chest. I heard his grunt of amusement and stopped crying long enough to glare at him. “How is any of this funny?”
“Because he’s not dead, Ava.”
I sniffed. “Oh…”
To confirm, Derek groaned as he lifted a hand to his face.
“I’m going to call the police, and then I’m taking you home,” Lincoln said.
He was so calm and reassuring that I let him take care of everything, of me, which was so un-Ava-like.
28
LINCOLN
My eyes were fixed on Ava as she opened the first-aid kit. She was focused, lips pressed tightly together, her eyebrows drawn the way they always were when she tried not to show how worried she was. She’d been trying to play it tough all evening, but it was too late. I’d seen her mask crumble in that parking lot. She had sobbed until the police arrived, and she wasn’t a crier. She’d been terrified.
My jaw clenched as I thought about how close that crazy man had come to hurting her. What if she hadn’t dropped her trusty little notepad on the sideline of the football field? What if Jaden hadn’t noticed it? What if I hadn’t gone out to the parking lot, hoping to catch her?
“You’re angry,” she said.
I looked up. “You’re damn straight I am.”
“I’m so sorry you got injured. I know?—”
“You think I’m upset about the damn paper cut?” I growled.
Pink flared in her cheeks as she dabbed at the wound with antiseptic. “It’s not a paper cut. It's a knife wound, and we should have gone to the hospital like I said.”
I glanced at the slash on my forearm and snorted. “I’m hardly going to bleed to death.” I had so many wounds and surgery scars from major injuries that the elongated slash was basically the equivalent of a paper cut. “And I’m pissed because you didn’t tell me you were in danger from your psychotic ex.”
Her eyebrows pinched closer together as she wrapped a bandage around my arm. “It wasn’t your problem.”
“Everything about you is my problem,” I seethed.
“Not before,” she insisted. “We just started dating officially, so it wasn’t your business before now.”
I gawked at her. Was she for real? “If you had said something, he wouldn’t have gotten to you today.”
Her jaw tightened. “I didn’t know he’d follow me here. When I found out, I came to you for help. I asked you to let me stay here.”
