the man shouted, and Bonnie let out a strangled cry. Her face was twisted, darkening.
“All right, all right!” Paul made a show of pushing the phone off and tossing it into the grass beside the curb.
The man must have softened his hold, because Bonnie relaxed and sucked in a deep breath. Paul was only a dozen feet away now.
“What do you care what I do with her?” the man asked, his voice horribly calm. While Bonnie gasped for breath, he rubbed his cheek against hers. “You've already fucked her. What good is she now?”
The bastard never knew what hit him. Paul's blow to his left kidney lifted his weight off of Bonnie, who quickly rolled to the side and drove a knee upward into his groin. As he cried out in pain, Paul wrapped his arm under the man's neck and jerked him back, freeing Bonnie, who furiously kneed him again in the balls.
“Get the phone!” Paul twisted the jerk's arm behind his back and forced him face down, gasping and moaning, to the ground. “It should be on. Maybe they're still on the line.”
Bonnie lifted it to her ear, managed to give Paul a small smile, and asked the dispatcher for help. At the same time, she gave the whimpering loser another swift kick in the ribs.
“Remind me never to get in a real fight with you,” Paul said, wishing he didn't have his hands full imprisoning a violent sociopath for the police so he could take her away somewhere safe and get started protecting her forever. Or at least kiss her.
She leaned over and kissed his cheek. It felt like a declaration, and his heart imploded.
Then she drew back and drove the toe of her boot into the guy's other kidney.
The police remembered both of them, and made sure the EMT's took Bonnie to the emergency room for a thorough exam and post-assault counseling.
Everyone looked her over and wanted to fuss more. But she just wanted to go home. She wasn't really hurt, just a little sore. It had all happened so fast and she had never felt as though she was at the bastard's mercy. When Paul came along she was preparing a defensive move she was sure would have freed her. But she was glad to know Paul had a few tricks of his own.
Paul refused to leave her side, through every police interview and every EMT, nurse, and doctor exam, continuously gazing at her with burning, possessive eyes that in spite of everything made her warm and distracted. Fighting off the attack had left her pumped full of adrenaline, and when she stepped out of the hospital into the waning evening light, the last thing she wanted was a quiet pat on the back or anyone's pity.
Least of all Paul's.
“You're going to drive me to the top of that hill next to your house, that one with the view, and then you're going to wipe away the memory of that asshole with everything you've got,” she said. “Got it?”
He hesitated as though he was going to argue, then dropped the Florence Nightingale act and slid his hand under the shirt at her waist. “Got it,” he said quietly, stroking her tender flesh.
When they got to the top of the hill she had mentioned, a deserted bend in the road that overlooked the eastern sprawl of the Livermore Valley, Paul drove the Prius onto the gravel shoulder and killed the engine. He turned to her.
“Sure about this?”
The tender concern in his face filled her with a nameless contentment she'd never felt before. She smiled at him. “Very. I was in no real danger, you know. I was just waiting for somebody to come along before I had to kill him.”
“I believe it,” he said gravely. “Not that I'd cry at his funeral, but I'm glad you didn’t have to.”
Smiling, she climbed into the backseat.
The street was deserted, but he wouldn’t have noticed a parade. Paul wiggled next to her on the seat and took her in his arms for a long, deep kiss.
His heart was melting, but his body was rigid with desire. She touched him, rubbed his erection through the fly of his jeans, kissed him, then climbed onto his lap and faced him with her knees straddling him. The sharp slope of the car pressed his head down at an awkward angle, but she was closer to the middle and was able to sit high in his lap. He gazed up at the soft,