so fast that a few of their chairs tipped over backward.
“Stop it, Treat,” one of them said.
And then, as people shifted and pressed in on the scene, Hutch recognized the woman who didn’t want to dance. It was Brylee.
He plunked down his mug on another table and instinctively headed in that direction, ready to take McQuillan apart at the joints like a Sunday-supper chicken just out of the stewpot. But right when he would have reached the couple, an arm shot out in front of his chest and stopped him as surely as if a steel barricade had slammed down from the ceiling.
“My sister,” Walker Parrish said evenly, “my fight.”
Hutch hadn’t spotted either Walker or Brylee when he came in, so he hadn’t had a chance to square away their presence in his mind. He felt a little off-balance.
In the next instant, Parrish shoved McQuillan away from Brylee, hard, hauled back one fist and clocked the deputy square in the beak.
That was it. The whole fight. Though in the days to come it would grow with every retelling, eventually becoming almost unrecognizable.
McQuillan’s eyes rolled back, his knees buckled and he went down.
Walker, meanwhile, gripped Brylee firmly by one arm, barely giving her a chance to retrieve her purse from the floor next to her chair, and propelled her toward the exit.
“We’re going home now,” he was heard to say in a tone that left no room for negotiation.
“Damn it, Walker,” Brylee yelled in response, struggling in vain to yank free from her brother’s grasp. “Let me go! I can take care of myself!”
In spite of everything, Hutch had to smile a little, because what Brylee said was true—she could take care of herself and in the long run she’d be just fine.
Oh, the woman had spirit, all right. Life would have been so much simpler all around, Hutch thought, if only he could have loved her.
Moments later, the Parrishes were gone and somebody was helping McQuillan back to his feet. He was rubbing his jaw and had one hell of a nosebleed going, but he looked all right, otherwise—no obvious need for any wires, stitches or casts, anyhow.
“I’m pressing charges!” McQuillan raged. “You’re all witnesses! You all saw what Walker Parrish did to me!”
“Ah, Treat,” one man drawled, “let it go. You put your hands on the man’s sister, and after she told you straight out she didn’t care to dance—”
McQuillan’s small, beady eyes flashed fire. He was trying to staunch the nosebleed with the sleeve of his shirt, but not having much luck. Some of the sawdust on the floor would definitely have to be shoveled out and replaced.
“I mean it,” he insisted furiously. “Parrish assaulted an officer of the law and he’s going to face the consequences!”
Hutch, standing nearby, flexed his fist slowly and waited for the urge to drop McQuillan right back to the floor again to pass.
Presently, it did.
The show was over and Hutch turned, meaning to go back for the beer he’d set aside minutes earlier. He nearly collided with Brylee’s best friend, Amy Jo DuPree in the process.
“You have your nerve coming in here, Hutch Carmody!” Amy Jo seethed, standing practically toe-
to-toe with him and craning her neck back so she could look up at him. Five-foot-nothing and weighing a hundred pounds soaking wet, Frank and Marge DuPree’s baby girl was a pretty thing, but feisty, afraid of nothing and no one.
Montana seemed to breed women like that.
Hutch arched an eyebrow. “Excuse me?” he countered, raising his voice a little as the jukebox cranked up and Carrie Underwood took to extolling the virtues of baseball bats and kerosene-fueled revenge.
Maybe that was what was making the whole female sex seem more impossible to deal with by the day, Hutch speculated fleetingly. Maybe it was the inflammatory nature of the music they listened to on their iPods and other such devices.
“You heard me,” Amy Jo all but snarled through her little white teeth, and gave him a light but solid punch to the solar plexus.
Intrigued and, okay, a little pissed off at the injustice of it all, Hutch took Amy Jo by the arm and squired her outside.
The parking lot was hardly quieter than the interior of the bar, what with Walker and Brylee yelling at each other and then peeling away in Walker’s truck, and then Boone arriving with his lights flashing and his siren giving a single mournful whoop in case the blinding strobe left any doubt he was there.
“Hell,” Hutch breathed, watching as