“I’ll stay,” he said, and her posture softened in relief. With the way the shithead was acting, Eli had planned to keep an eye on her anyway—which was probably a whole other degree of creepy, but here he was. Making this random girl whose name he didn’t even know his business. He leaned back against the counter, arms crossed on his chest. A large group approached the bar and took a seat next to them, forcing him to shift a little closer to her.

R.

Rebecca.

Rowan.

“I know we’re supposed to . . .” She gestured vaguely upward, and a million things flashed in his brain at the flick of her index finger.

The pragmatic tone of her first message to him: Are you still in the Austin area? Interested in meeting up?

The only casual—no relationships or repeat meetings in her bio.

Her answer to the Kinks? question on the open survey.

The list of what she was not willing to do. Of what she was.

At this point he doubted anything would happen between them tonight, but he was still going to mull over the latter. A lot.

“I don’t want to anymore,” she continued, voice steady. He liked that she didn’t say can’t, but don’t want. The lack of apology in her tone. Her serious, quiet expression.

“You mean, you don’t want to go upstairs and fuck a man you don’t know minutes after a man you do know assaulted you?” He gave her a look of mock surprise, and she nodded thoughtfully.

“That’s a good recap. I bet it’s too late to get a refund on the hotel room, so if you need to make plans with someone else for tonight, feel free.”

He felt the corner of his mouth quirk up. “I’ll survive,” he said dryly.

“As you prefer,” she told him, indifferent. She clearly couldn’t care less whether he took his phone out and booty-called half the city or swore his undying loyalty to her, and Eli bit back a smile. Her head cocked. “Do you do this a lot?” she asked.

“Do what? Fuck?”

“Save damsels in distress.”

“No.”

“Because you don’t encounter many, or because you leave them in distress?” Her voice was soft, and on anyone else’s lips the words would have sounded like flirting. Not hers, though. “Either way, I’m flattered,” she added.

“You should be.” He glanced at the man, who was still outside, glaring. “Do you live alone?”

Her eyebrows rose, and he noticed a faint scar bisecting the right. His index finger tapped once against the counter, itching to trace it. “Are you trying to find out if I’m single?”

“I’m trying to figure out what the chances are that the dipshit will be waiting for you where you live, who could help you if he is, or whether your pet could protect you.”

“Ah.” She didn’t look flustered to have misunderstood him. Fascinating. “I do live alone. And he shouldn’t know where.”

“Shouldn’t?”

“I’m not sure how he tracked me here. I can only imagine that he found out where I lived, wasn’t allowed inside by my doorman, and followed my Uber when it picked me up.” She’d been shaken until a minute earlier, but now she sounded disarmingly utilitarian. Just like in her texts, Eli thought. She’d messaged him with no emojis. No LOL or LMAO. Correctly placed punctuation and proper capitalization. He’d guessed it was a localized quirk, but her demeanor seemed like the embodiment of her writing.

Serious. A little impenetrable. Complicated.

And Eli had never been a fan of easy.

“How are you getting home?” he asked.

“Uber. Or Lyft. Whatever’s quicker.” She picked up her phone, but when she tapped on it, it refused to light up. Eli remembered the spilled water. “Well, this is a new development.” She sighed. “I’ll hail a cab.”

No fucking way, he almost said, but stopped with his mouth half-open. This woman was not his friend, sister, colleague. She was someone with whom he’d been planning to have a sexual relationship that would last part of the night, then never see again. He had no right to tell her what to do.

Though he could try to convince her.

“He’s still out there,” Eli said evenly, pointing at the man with his chin. He paced outside the revolving door, skin glistening with sweat. “Waiting for you to step out of the bar.”

“Right.” She scratched her long neck. Eli stared far longer than he should have. “Could you walk outside with me?”

“I will. But what if he does know where you live, and waits for you there? What if he follows you?” He watched her ponder the situation. “Do you have a neighbor you trust? A friend? A brother?”

She laughed once, silently, in a wistful way that Eli didn’t understand. “Not quite.”

“Okay.” He nodded, experiencing the opposite of annoyance at the thought of what would have to happen. “I’ll drive you home, then.”

Her look was long and even. Eli wondered why her wide, limpid eyes felt like a punch to the stomach. “You’re suggesting I get in the car of a man I do not know to avoid being harassed by a man I do know?”

He shrugged. “Pretty much.”

She bit her lower lip. Suddenly, Eli was more physically aware of another human being than he remembered being in a long, long while. “Thank you, but I’ll have to pass. The potential for situational irony is a bit too high, even for me.”

“I don’t think this qualifies as situational irony.”

“It would if you turned out to be a serial killer.”

Smiling wasn’t going to win him any points, but he couldn’t help himself. “You were going to go upstairs to a hotel room booked under my name and spend hours alone with me.”

“Hours?”

The way he was feeling at the moment, more than that. “Hours,” he repeated. She held his gaze for every letter. “Seems late in the game to worry about whether I’ll murder you.”

“A friend knew where I’d be and how to check on me,” she countered. “A second location is a whole different beast.”

“Is it?” He had no business being this pleased by her self-preservation.

“Vincent’s a dick. But for all I know, you’re the Unabomber.”

Vincent. She knew the dickhead’s name—and Eli still didn’t know hers. Fucking irritating. “Unabomber’s dead.”

“That’s what the Unabomber would say to throw me off,” she deadpanned, unknowable. He couldn’t tell whether she was flirting, making fun of him, or dead serious.

It was exhilarating.

“He made bombs and solved math theorems. He didn’t kidnap young women.”

“You know a lot about the Unabomber for someone who supposedly isn’t him.”

Eli looked up at the ceiling to hide his amusement, exhaling slowly. Then he straightened. Took his wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans and the driver’s license out of his wallet. Dropped it on the counter, right by her hand.

“What’s this?”

He leaned back against the counter without replying, and she nimbly picked it up. Her eyes shifted between him and the picture on the card, as though solving a Find the Difference puzzle. “Eli Killgore,” she read. “This is not a reassuring name, Eli.”

He frowned. “It’s Scottish.”

“It sounds like the name of someone who trims girls’ pubes and sews them into dolls. You look younger than thirty-four. And are you really that tall?” He sighed heavily, and she returned his license, straight faced. “So we’ve established that your last name is closely related to the term ‘blood splatter.’ But I still don’t know that this isn’t a fake ID you made to lure women into your mothdecorated lair.”

“I bet you think you’re so funny.”

“Actually, I know I’m not. I was born without a sense of humor.”

He huffed out his amusement. She was fucking with him, had to be. And Eli was apparently very willing to let her continue, because he pushed his entire wallet toward her. “Knock yourself out.” He watched eagerly as her slim fingers opened it, wondering why her elegant movements seemed to be unlocking some kind of long-hidden fetish part of his brain. She brought it to her nose to smell the leather (an odd, inexplicably appealing move), pulled out a random credit card, then another.