All blonde. All wavy, curled hair. Barbie triplets. All grinning at Alix as he made his approach.

The fucker was never turned down.

Could be the Swiss-French accent he had. Probably the tousled blond hair and cut jaw with a scar. More than one random he met brushed their finger against it. How in the hell women found facial scars attractive was something I never figured out, but hell if they did. I’d had the same questions asked.

“How’d you get that scar by your eye?” “And your nose? It looks like it’s been broken?”

Puck Bunnies-R-Us were a dime a dozen once you hit the pros, and their lines were as manufactured as their tits.

But they were tits up for the offering tonight. A vile taste rose in my throat and I fought it back.

I wasn’t this guy. Not anymore. Hell, I didn’t want to be this guy ever again.

My phone buzzed in my pocket again.

Shit. I’d never called Heather back. I declined the call. No way I could talk to her now, but as I did, I noticed missed calls from my neighborhood’s security office.

What in the hell?

“Hey, there,” one of the blondes practically screamed in my ear.

Her hand slid up my arm, and an icy, sick feeling spread all over me.

Yeah.

I was out.

“Sorry,” I shouted back and turned.

Left the dance floor.

Left the bar.

The younger guys could entertain Bromann. As soon as fresh air assaulted me, I stumbled back on the sidewalk. Throngs of people lined the area, screaming and shouting as a few people followed me out.

Damn it. It was midnight my time.

If Heather was still calling…

I grabbed my phone and called her back, barely got out a “Hey,” before my sister blurted out her own response.

“Thank God you finally called me back.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Oh. Nothing. Well, not with me, anyway.”

“So help me God, Heather. If you called me in the middle of the damn night to talk about some vegetable or herb plant of yours that is dying—”

She laughed. Had to be, what? Three, four o’clock in the morning, her time? She needed to be working in a couple of hours, for fuck’s sake.

“No. It’s not that. Remember my friend Emmersyn?”

Heather had dozens of friends. Was always bringing them out to catch a game or taking me out to meet someone when I was in the New England area. Girl was the reigning social butterfly and had been ever since elementary school when she proudly came home carrying a “Talks too much” warning note from her teacher.

“What about her?” It was late, and I didn’t have the mental bandwidth to start a guessing game of who was who. A taxi pulled up, and I flagged it down.

I slid into the back seat as she said, “Well, the thing is, she’s in trouble. So I sent her to your place. She should be there…”