The Dimple Strikes Back Read Online Free Page B

for TMZ, but with my ill luck, it would figure.
    In the street, he tugged on my hand and led me to the street corner, then farther into the shadows between two stone buildings. He pushed me against one and whispered, “This is a skimpy dress, Miss Lytton. If I pulled your panties to the side, it would be nothing to fuck you right here.”
    My back protested the sharp stone, but the rest of me was ready to sacrifice my underwear to the alley and get going. I cupped his face and kissed him, sucking on his lower lip as if my lust depended on it. And suddenly he was gone, ripped away from my mouth. “What?” I managed to say before a bag enclosed my head.

Chapter Three
    That Old, Familiar Fleeing
    I sucked in a panicked breath and stale burlap filled my dry mouth. Two sets of hands jerked my arms in opposite directions, but I pulled against all of them and kicked in front of me. I could tell someone stood there, and he cursed when I connected with whichever part of him. One of my arms flew free. By some miracle, my purse still hung from my shoulder, and I swung it to the right and then the left. My other attacker fell away. I jerked the bag off me to see Sam on the ground wrestling with one guy, another going to his accomplice’s rescue and a dude behind the wheel of a black car close by on the street. “Get ‘em!” yelled car guy in an American accent.
    Oh, hell no. I was way too fucking horny to let my piece of ass be kidnapped. Also, I loved him and stuff.
    I unleashed fury on both the dudes pummelling Sam, now bagged on the head, too. I shrieked and kicked and punched, and the guy on top let Sam go to deal with me. Luckily, just then, a stream of burly guys came a-running from the pub next door. Our goons nearly flew into their awaiting car and sped off, a couple of the pub dudes in hot pursuit on foot.
    “Sam!” I knelt on the alley ground and burst into tears, like any proper woman in a melodramatic movie from the 1930s. I removed his burlap sack. He blinked and tried to talk, so I kissed him for being alive. I tasted blood in his mouth, streaming from a rapidly-purpling punch mark.
    “Thanks for kicking me,” my loving lover said.
    Whoops. I attempted to sniff my tears back into my eyeballs. “Sorry, I had a bag on my head.”
    “If I had a nickel for every time you wounded me, I could hire a bodyguard.”
    I chose to ignore that ridiculous remark. I only ever hit him when he deserved it, or when he startled me, or sometimes in the middle of the night—allegedly, since I never remembered this, and everyone knows that thieves are liars.
    “You all right?” asked one of the helpful men who’d saved us.
    Sam’s brow thunderations increased as he counted the number of potential witnesses. “We need to get out of here,” he muttered to me as he steadied himself on my arm on the way to a wobbly standing position. He kept pulling me towards the street, where his other hand was already hailing a cab.
    Our rescuer pursued. “Did they mug you? Let me call the police, yeah?”
    A horrible growl rumbled forth from Sam, and I took that as a sign for me to say my lines. “No, thank you! We’re okay.” Sam shoved me into a back seat and yanked the door closed behind us. “Thank you!” I screamed, hoping the friendly crowd could hear me and wouldn’t consider all Americans to be ungrateful jerkfaces. I grinned and waved like a mad lady. One gent returned my wave, even as he shrugged confusedly.
    I turned to Sam, who was attempting to clean the blood from the corner of his mouth while the cabbie looked askance in the rear-view mirror. “Bar fight,” I lied. “Don’t worry.” I grinned until the driver stopped caring, then gave him the address for my apartment. “Sam, baby, are you—”
    “Not here,” he replied.
    “Well, I’m okay, thanks for asking.” I slumped into my corner of the cab and laced my fingers together. They’d begun shaking at some point. His bigger hand came down over mine, the