Sébastien stiffened and looked over his shoulder. I peered around him. A plump, silvery-haired woman with a big navy purse was flushing. “I’m sorry,” she muttered. “I didn’t mean to bump into you.”

The male voice erupted in a string of curse words. I peered the other way around Sébastien to see a huge man, bearded and muscled but going to fat, slamming back into his little blue vinyl fold-down seat, spewing venom.

“Monsieur,” the woman’s small, white-haired husband attempted to intervene.

“Fuck you!” the man yelled at him. “Salop avec ta femme salope.”

The husband stiffened and stood as straight as he could. He was a lot smaller than the burly angry man. Everybody here was, and everybody was looking the other way. I hated the Métro. I hated big cities. I hated the non-movie version of Paris.

“Putain,” Sébastien breathed and turned, keeping his body in place so that I was still behind him. “That’s enough.”

Everybody’s jaw dropped, including mine, including the burly man’s. I had never seen anyone help anyone else out in the Métro before, and I’d been on the receiving end of some of these scenes a time or two.

“What the hell business is it of yours?” the angry man asked. He was a lot bigger than Sébastien, I noticed. Sébastien was pretty tall, just shy of six feet, and he had some gorgeous muscles, but this guy was taller and wider and obviously nastier. At least Sébastien looked tough, not having shaved in a couple of days, and the muscle shirt really did give a salutary view of his biceps. I was the only one here who knew he protected bugs.

“You’re getting on my nerves,” Sébastien said. The tattoo that circled his left biceps flexed. “So why don’t you shut up and leave the lady alone?”

I gasped. This could not end well.

“Nosy asshole,” the burly man muttered, with a complete lack of self-perception. Sébastien held on to one of the metal bars and just looked back at him, saying nothing in response, waiting. The train stopped, and the man got up abruptly and flung himself off, still muttering.

I gasped again in relief.

“Thank you,” the lady’s elderly husband said.

Sébastien shrugged, acutely embarrassed. “I can’t stand bullies.”

He turned back to me. His jaw was still tight, a muscle in it flexing. But after a moment, his face started to clear, and he dropped his hand from the metal bar above his head to put it on the wall by my head, so that his arm brushed my hair.

“So it’s a good thing you didn’t bother to shave,” I teased to lighten the mood. “Makes you look too dangerous to mess with.”

He rubbed his prickly jaw. “I can’t shave every day. I have delicate skin.”

I began to laugh.