Page 41 of His Best Friend's Baby

Instead of sending young Samantha on her way, telling her to get out of this town before it used her up, he decided to let her stay.

Samantha with her sweet smile and old eyes didn’t have what he needed. But those three men, drinking hard and talking too loudly, held the salvation he was looking for.

Those three men he could fight.

It wasn’t good or decent of him. But nothing in him felt that way.

“Hi, Sam.” He smiled at her and shook her hand. “I’m Jesse.”

He ordered beers for the two of them and waited.

IT TOOK A LITTLE LONGER than Jesse expected. Sam had four beers while he nursed his one, but eventually the confrontation he’d been praying for did happen.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Sam?” an angry voice asked from Jesse’s left.

“Whatever I want, Mike,” Sam answered, hot and fast. Her eyes were heavy-lidded with alcohol but were still shooting out sparks. She’d clearly been waiting for this as long as he’d been. Jesse felt a sudden kinship with her.

“We broke up, remember?” she sneered.

Jesse turned to see the biggest of the three men, Mike, flanked by the smaller ones, not two feet from him.

Perfect.

“Why don’t you just leave me and Sammy alone,” Jesse asked, throwing gasoline on what was smoldering in the air. Mike went red then purple under his collar.

“Why don’t you mind your own business?” one of the sidekicks asked around his toothpick. Jesse wanted to warn him about that toothpick, how dangerous it could be to get in a fight with a weapon sticking out of his mouth.

But that would have been at cross-purposes. He intended to cause some damage with that sharp wood.

“Well.” Jesse pushed himself up and away from the stool. He smiled at the men, needling their pride, wanting to get this show on the road. “I figure tonight, for the next few hours anyway, Sammy is my business.”

“Holy shit, I know that guy,” the other sidekick said, his blue eyes rimmed red. “He’s that soldier who survived the helicopter crash that killed Mitch Adams.”

And there it was. What Jesse never could outrun or outfight.

“Don’t forget Artie and Dave,” he muttered.

He stumbled, his knee stiff from the hours of sitting, and Sammy stood up next to him, a restraining hand on his elbow. “Jesse, let’s just go. You can come back to my place….”

Ah, she thought he was a cripple. Pitiful. Unable to stand up to a bunch of fat bullies. Even Mike took a step back and the air cooled a few degrees.

“He’s not going home with you, Sam,” Mike said, weary rather than angry.

“Well, you’re not coming home with me, that’s for sure,” she retorted.

“Sam, stop playing games.”

Well. Damn. Things were getting way out of control. He’d sat with her all damn night waiting for this moment and the big guy was getting distracted. That wouldn’t do. To remind Mike why he’d walked all the way across the bar with his buddies beside him, Jesse gave him a solid right hook across the jaw and felt the crunch of bone and teeth.

That seemed to jog Mikey’s memory.

Mike roared and grabbed Jesse by his collar.

“Outside, Mike!” Billy yelled, from behind the bar. “You take this shit outside!”

“Gladly,” Mike said, spitting blood and saliva onto the floor. His eyes were hot and electric with rage. “You’re a dead man, asshole,” he growled and pushed Jesse toward the door.

That’s the idea, my friend. That’s the right idea.

CHAPTER NINE

THREE AGAINST ONE were not his kind of odds, so to make things fair, he didn’t fight back for the first few punches. The shot to his face, badly timed and way off target, merely skittered across his cheek.

“Come on, boys. You’ve got to focus,” he told them. “Here, I’ll stand real still.” He locked his knees and stuck out his chin, taunting them.

The sidekick spit out his toothpick and landed a solid punch to Jesse’s gut that radiated down his legs and shook his bowels.

Good one. Better.

The men were mad and Jesse wasn’t stopping them so fists landed where they’d been aimed.

Any minute now he was going to fight back. He was going to lay them all out with busted wrists and sprained ankles and noses so broken they’d need surgery. That was what he was going to do. It had been his intention all along. He was going to punish these men for all the things he couldn’t have.

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