Because, shit, this was Anne. His boss’s daughter. Sitting in a bar with a bunch of wasted douche bros instead of dancing the night away or whatever with her friends at the hotel. She’d done something to her eyes, he thought, to make them look bigger, and her lips were red to match her dress. It should have been cute, like Hailey getting into their mother’s makeup.
Except in that dress, Anne didn’t look like anybody’s kid sister.
Something stirred in him, low and warm, like lust. Not lust. Anger, he told himself. Concern.
He made his way through the tables to the back. Stood there, silently, until his presence registered with the group at the table.
Anne’s eyes widened. “Joe!” If he didn’t know any better he would have thought she sounded glad to see him.
He ignored her, staring down the asshole trying to sneak her a drink. “Dude, she’s seventeen.”
The kid’s hand curled around his mug as if he wanted to pull it back across the table. “So?”
“She’s underage.”
“What are you, a cop?”
“Maybe he’s her dad,” another joker said, and the rest of them laughed.
Joe heard the edge to it. Five of them, drunk enough and entitled enough to make things difficult. But he was bigger. Older, by at least a couple of years. And he had the home field advantage.
“I’m a friend of her dad,” he said evenly. “I’m also friends with that whole table of first responders sitting over there. Who would be really upset to learn that our mutual friend’s kid was being taken advantage of by a bunch of shit-faced frat boys from out of town.”
The laughter died.
Joe looked at Anne, his jaw pulsing. “Let’s go.”
She raised her pointed little chin. “You can’t tell me what to do. I’ll be eighteen in a couple of months. I’m going away to college.”
“Where you’ll be somebody else’s problem.”
She glared.
“You want this place to lose its liquor license?” he asked quietly.
A flush spread from her face to her pale, freckled chest. “Of course not! I didn’t mean…I didn’t think…”
“You never do.” He watched her cheeks go from red to white and felt almost bad. He backed up a step, enough to let her push away from the table. “I’ll walk you home.”
Nobody protested as she slid out of her chair. Joe left a twenty and his almost-untouched beer on the bar, aware of Cindy watching them on their way to the door.
“Take care, Joe.”
“Thanks. You, too.”
Outside, the night was clear. The stars were out. It was cold. Early May. Anne shivered, clacking along beside him in her little red dress and impractical shoes. Joe suppressed a surge of sympathy. Maybe a little suffering would teach her a lesson. What had she been thinking, crammed at a table with guys four, five years too old for her, all dressed up like…Helooked at her, her upswept hair, her slicked-up mouth, the sparkly earrings swinging against her neck.
Like she was trying on adulthood like a dress.
Like she was going places.
Joe shortened his stride, already regretting that crack about her being thoughtless. He’d always secretly liked the way her brain worked, the way she had something to say about everything and nothing, darting from one topic to another, barely stopping for breath. She probably could have talked herself out of trouble back there. Rob always bragged about how smart his daughter was. She’d been accepted to Northwestern, for God’s sake, the first of her family, as far as Joe knew, to go to college. But she was still a kid. Young. Naïve.
“Do you know what was in that glass that guy was trying to slip you?”
She rolled her eyes. “Beer. Duh.”
“Okay, smart girl. What else?”
