Page 128 of Kiss Me Tonight

Arm cocked back and rearing to go, I look from my balled fist to Clarke’s stunned expression to Levi standing just behind her ex-husband, her glass bottle shattered and spewing beer like a fountain of alcoholic debauchery all over his head.

I love her.

It’s certainly not the most appropriate time to realize it, considering she just bashed her ex-husband over the head with a bottle of Bud Light, but I’ve never done anything in my life by the books. Why start with the way I fall in love? Her blond hair is in disarray around her face and her skin glistens with beer. She takes my goddamn breath away.

Like the goddess of justice, she tosses the broken bottle to the ground. “That’s for thinking for one friggin’ second that you couldevermanipulate our son into playing your stupid games.”

Clutching his head, Clarke stumbles out of the booth. “You crazy fucking bitch.”

“You’re right,” Levi hisses, her normally delicate features severe in her fury. “Iama crazy fucking bitch—I put up with you for far longer than I ever should have, no matter what you held over my head. You plucked me out of this town like I was your treat of the month and then you spent the next fourteen yearsruining me.”

If she’s expecting Clarke to show any remorse, she doesn’t get it.

He only laughs harshly, like a lunatic, and tears a hand away from his skull to point a bloodied finger at her face. “Did you walk in too late to hear this part? Imadeyou, Levi.” He wavers to the right, looking green in the face. “I dressed you up and stripped you down and you should be thanking me for all I’ve done for you.”

“You’re wrong.”

I glance over at the bar, expecting to see Shawn prepared to throw down the hatchet but he’s not behind the bar. Figures the longtime bartender would take his break the minute shit’s about to hit the fan.

Sauntering toward Levi on visibly weak legs, he taunts, “I made you, sweetheart. You were nothing before me.”

Fuck this.

Before he can advance any farther, I grab the neck of Clarke’s damp button-down shirt and pull—hard. With his balance already shot from the hit to his head, Levi’s ex-husband careens backward, arms pinwheeling almost comically. I step to the side when he topples to the floor.

How the mighty fall.

“I wassomeone, Rick,” Levi bursts, her face contorting with frustration. “I had dreams long before you showed up, and you know what? Let me say thank you.” She sweeps forward, her eyes flinty, the toes of her shoes practically stomping on her ex. “Thank youfor being such an asshole. You opened the unlikeliest doors for me: I discovered that I love coaching. I learned what I want out of a relationship and what I don’t. And you gave me my most important mission in life: to make sure that your son turns out to be nothing like you. So, thank you—because you took a twenty-one-year-old woman and made her strong and invincible, and I. Love. Me.”

“Poor, little Aspen Levi,” Clarke mocks as he crawls onto his feet to stand, “trying to be brave. Do you remember what happened when you first told me no—”

I don’t have the time to stop it. One second I’m twisting at the waist with the intention of grabbing Clarke to shut him the hell up, and then Levi is doing it for me.

Thud!

Oh.Shit.

Clarke falls to his ass as Levi sucker punches her ex-husband in the gut. She’s fuming, blue eyes large and murderous in her face.Time for this to end.I’m reaching into the fray, intent on yanking Levi away before she does any lasting damage and we have a lawsuit on our hands, when I hear it:

“Oh shit, is that Rick ‘the Prick’ Clarke?”

I twist to stare at the newcomers, only to find Oliver standing not ten feet away with two buddies. He stares at me, holding onto a flailing Levi, and I stare at him. He turns to his friend, and says, “Hold my beer, Stuart.”

Stuart, the friend, narrows his eyes. “Are you hurt, Levi?”

Her biceps tense under my grip. “And you carewhy? You told me your wife was dead just to mess with me.”

Do they know each other? And what the hell—he pretended his wife was dead? I don’t have the chance to ask the question before the third dude exclaims, “Wait, she’sbleeding!”

“Fuck that dude,” Oliver growls at the same time Stuart snaps, “Hold our beers, Sam, no one fucks with a Levi but us,” before promptly thrusting his and Oliver’s beer bottles to the third guy.

And then . . . and then straight mayhem ensues.

Londoners storm the Golden Fleece, and if this was the eighteenth century and not the twenty-first, today’s festivities would result in someone being drawn and quartered out on the town square.

No one fucks with a Levi.

I manage to snag her T-shirt before she can launch herself forward all over again. With little finesse, I drag her back and into my chest.

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