John smirked against the glass as he sipped his Captain Morgan. “Says the guy who started them all.”

“No. I only step in to help,” I corrected before returning my focus to the problem on the other side of the bar.

That problem was now mine because I’d read the brunette’s stop on her lips, and the guy wasn’t listening.

“Give me a second.” I set down my drink and followed them off the patio and over to the sand. “Let her go.”

The man-child, doubtfully a day over twenty-one, unhanded her.

She pulled her wrist to her chest, rubbing the red mark on her skin. I could feel her curious gaze on me, but I was too focused on the target in front of me.

The idiota stepped forward, lifting his chin. He was three sheets to the wind.

“Go to your room and sleep it off. Never touch a woman like that again.” It was the evening, but the sun was still hovering over the water like a ball of fire, so I put on my sunglasses. “Do you understand me?”

I cocked my head, daring him to speak, to do anything that might result in cracked ribs and a broken nose.

He rolled his eyes for an answer.

“Apologize,” I ordered, and this guy in a Hawaiian shirt—wrong island—looked over at the girl and said something incoherent. Close enough. “Now, what are you supposed to be doing?” I lifted a brow, waiting for his obedience.

“Going to sleep,” he grunted, then backed away.

He was lucky he was so young. That was the only reason I was being so generous and not connecting my right hook with his chin.

I watched him pull another guy away with him, and they made a hasty retreat from the bar. At least he had some sense despite being drunk.

“Thank you,” the woman said.

I gestured for her to head to the bar so she could enjoy her time without some dude manhandling her.

“Would you like to join me? The least I can do is buy you a drink.” She ran a white-painted nail along her collarbone while eye-fucking me in her pink and black bikini.

“You owe me nothing.”

“You sure I can’t⁠—”

“I’m good, but thank you.” I waited for her to return to the bar, then faced the sea.

After a wild weekend with my friends, I was eager to return to Norfolk and get back to sea. Unlike my best friend, who was a SEAL and currently deployed, I enjoyed being in a submarine. Something was calming about being deep in the ocean, feeling like I was in another world—at least below this one, which was full of assholes.

“You turned her down? Really? Why not play the hero card and get laid?”

John wasn’t a fighter but didn’t mind the other kind of trouble. The kind involving rumpled sheets and sneaking out before dawn.