shock and anger—and fear.
A bolt of shock went through Dan, too. He had to clutch at the edge of the table. He had heard that part of the mate bond was knowing when your mate was in distress, but he hadn't expected it to kick in this early or this hard.
"Excuse me," Paula said in a low, distracted voice. Clutching her waitress notepad to her chest like a shield, she marched toward the door, back straight, to confront whoever had just come in.
Dan hastily twisted around in his chair.
The guy in the doorway was trouble. Dan knew that at a glance. He knew the type. The guy was nondescript-looking, almost professionally so, dark-haired and greasy-looking with a bit of a slouch. Sunglasses hid his eyes.
"I told you to leave," Paula snapped in a low, tense voice. "And Mitch told you to leave too. How dare you come here while I have customers!"
"And I told you we'd talk again, Mrs. Raines," the stranger replied. His voice was pitched low, but Dan's shifter hearing easily caught it.
"Leave or I'm calling the police," Paula demanded, still trying to keep her voice down.
"Really? You want to get the police involved, and explain all of this to them and your neighbors?"
With his mate's distress vibrating down his every nerve ending, Dan had only one option.
"Sandy, stay with your sisters," he told Sandy quietly, and got up just as Sunglasses gave Paula a little push. She staggered backward.
Dan saw red. Literally.
It was all he could do to keep his bear from erupting into a wall of protective teeth and claws right there in the diner. As it was, he barely remembered crossing the diner floor, until his one good fist closed on the front of Sunglasses' jacket.
"Hey!" the man barked, jerking backward.
He was strong enough to pull free of Dan's grip, which should have held him like a steel clamp. The jacket tore slightly from the pressure.
This guy's a shifter, Dan thought, startled.
The shifter looked shocked too. Then his gaze went to Dan's right arm and the metal clamps. His eyes narrowed.
"Who's going to make me? You and what army? I'm supposed to be afraid of a one-armed—ack!"
Dan seized him by the collar, in a tighter grip this time, and jerked him closer.
"I used to work as a bouncer. I know how to take out the trash. Do you want this man to leave, ma'am?" Dan asked Paula.
Paula swallowed and nodded.
"I ... uh, yes," she said. "Yes, please."
"Could you watch the kids for me for just a minute?"
Paula gave a jerky little nod. "Yes," she said, her voice growing stronger. "Yes, I can do that."
"Thanks. Come on, friend."
Shifting his grip expertly, Dan frog-marched Sunglasses out onto the sidewalk. The other man writhed furiously, but he was unable to use his full shifter strength to tear out of Dan's grip without shredding his own jacket, and apparently he was unwilling to do that.
Rather than stopping on the sidewalk, Dan marched him down the row of businesses. Passing pedestrians and shoppers behind plate-glass windows stopped to stare at them. Cars slowed down too. This was clearly the most interesting thing anyone in Autumn Grove had seen all day.
"This is humiliating," Sunglasses said between his teeth. "Let me go."
"Not until they get a good look at you."
"What they're going to see is you manhandling me—ow!"
Dan pushed him around the corner and into the relative privacy of the alley behind the block of businesses. The businesses along Main Street backed onto the alley, and a wooden privacy fence shielded the backyards of the adjoining row of houses from the alley's trash cans and loading doors.
Now Sunglasses was starting to look nervous. "Look, it's just business, what I got going on with the merry widow in there. It's not personal. I don't know what your stake is in this, or what you are, but I don't mean her any harm."
"She seemed pretty upset." Dan gave him a hard shake. "Why are you hassling her?"
"Ow! Let up! It's not about her. It's about her ex."
"So why bother her about it?" Dan demanded. "Leave her alone."
Sunglasses pulled away, and this time Dan let him go. The sunglasses had slipped down his nose, revealing a flash of startling gold eyes. Whatever kind of shifter he was, Dan didn't think it was anything he'd seen before.
"How is it any of your business?" Sunglasses asked. He straightened his lapel and pushed the sunglasses up his nose, hiding his hawk-gold eyes.
"Because I don't like seeing a lady