We drank and talked about the site we’d worked at today and the crew that had rubbed each of us the wrong way. There was nothing we could do. The site was too big for us to handle in the time frame the owner wanted. There had been friction from the start — the kind that came from two operations with different methods sharing space and equipment access.
The evening was normal. Or as close to normal as six McAllister brothers in the same room ever got.
Then the rival crew came in around nine. No doubt here to blow off steam, same as we were and had ended up in the same bar by the particular bad luck of small towns where there weren’t many options. They were loud and loose and the kind of men who thought the rules were negotiable. I’d seen the type. I’d been the type, in different contexts, in different countries.
My brothers noticed them too. Nobody moved. Nobody said anything. For an hour, everything was fine.
Then one of them went to the bar.
He was big. Not as big as Ridge, but big enough to think it mattered. It didn’t. He ordered a beer and I watched him look at Charlie the way men looked at women like her. Curvy, delicious looking women they wanted in their bed. I watched her handle the first approach and the second and I stayed in my booth because she was handling it and that was what she did.
Then his hand closed around her wrist.
I was out of the booth before I knew I’d moved.
The room narrowed. That old familiar tunnel vision, everything irrelevant falling away, only the distance between me and the problem mattering. I felt my brothers move behind me — all five, simultaneously. The rival crew heard it too.
I came to a stop behind the man. “Let go of her,” I said.
He turned. Took me in and made the wrong decision. “We’re having a private conversation.”
“Not anymore.” I kept my voice level as best I could. “Let go.”
He didn’t.
I pulled him up by the collar.
What followed was fast and loud. He swung, I stepped inside it, and the room went sideways. The regulars headed for the exits knowing what it meant when six McAllisters stood up at once. The other crew came off their stools. They outnumbered us, but we had been fighting together since childhood.
Landry handled two of them with the calm authority of a man who’d made peace with his own strength.
Ridge was simply effective in the way Ridge was effective at everything — quiet, complete, leaving no follow-up required.
Sutton talked while he fought, which was genuinely unnerving.
Grant moved fast and clean, the way youngest brothers did when they’d spent a lifetime fighting older brothers. There was no better training than growing up a McAllister.
Dane was where he needed to be when he needed to be there.
I had the one who’d grabbed Charlie. He was good. Better than expected. We slammed into a table and I winced. Not from the force but from the fact that Charlie was going to be pissed her bar was being destroyed. I got my arm around his throat and held him there until the fight went out of him and he made the sound men made when they understood it was over.
Then I heard it — the solid crack of a bottle connecting — and turned, letting the man go.
Charlie stood behind me, a bottle of whisky in one hand, and a man from the rival crew holding his head.
“Charlie,” I growled, reaching for her and dragging her behind me. She looked at me with an expression that was equal parts satisfaction and defiance
Every protective instinct I had arrived at the same moment as a feeling I didn’t have a clean word for came over me. Impressed didn’t cover it. Furious didn’t cover it. The combination of both, looking at her standing there with a bottle and that expression, was something I was going to be thinking about for a long time.
“Get behind the bar.” I shoved her toward it as another man came at me.
“I just—”
“Now, Charlie.”
She went, but she kept the bottle.
It only took a few more minutes before it was over. The rival crew made their calculations when they saw how it was going and called it a night.
