He didn’t look fine to me.

“You can leave now,” he muttered, those hands of his gripping his thighs so hard the knuckles turned white.

I didn’t want to be in his house with him, but I knew I couldn’t just skip on out either. The idea of being in a strange man’s house at night alone sent about a thousand alarm bells ringing in my head. This was the kind of stupid shit women in movies did that got them dumped into a deep hole in some psycho’s basement. But bailing wasn’t the right thing to do, and if it made a difference, people didn’t usually have basements in the Texas Hill Country. I looked around and kept my question about whether he had a first aid kit or not to myself. “Do you have anything I can use to clean your cuts?”

The man’s eyes were closed, and from his lap, a couple of his fingers on his left hand wiggled in a dismissive gesture that had me narrowing my eyes.

“Do you know how many germs people carry around on their hands?” I asked him slowly.

I wasn’t a fan of the look he slid my way with only one opened eye.

And he wasn’t a fan of my persistence. “I’m not joking. Do you have any idea?”

He stared at me for all of maybe a second before closing his eyes and making another dismissive gesture that insisted he was going to be an idiot about this. “I already said I’m fucking—”

“What the hell is going on?” an unfamiliar voice spoke up out of nowhere, just about scaring the shit out of me.

Standing in the space where the living room transitioned into what was either a hallway or the kitchen was a half-naked man. A half-naked man rubbing at his eyes and frowning.

“Nothing. Go back to sleep.” The grumpy idiot on the chair couldn’t even talk without groaning.

The sleepy man kept frowning and blinking, still obviously out of it. He reached an arm out toward the wall behind him, flicking the overhead fan light on.

And God help me.

God help me.

The new guy, the not-beat-up dumbass, was only in black boxers. It was obvious even from the ten plus feet between us that he was tall, maybe even taller than Beat-up Dumbass. His hair was cut nearly to the scalp, his face was stubbled but not really bearded, and he was built like those long-limbed male models with brawny chests, six-packs, thighs for days, and a giant brown and black tattoo that seemed to cover everything from his upper arms, across his pectorals to the notch at his throat and continuing to arch up above his trapezius muscles, disappearing somewhere on his back.

He was built like a porn star. The really attractive, muscular porn stars.

Or I guess a male calendar model.

I’d obviously been watching too much guy-on-guy porn lately for that to be the first kind of body I associated him with.

I knew the exact moment his tired eyes noticed I was there because he stood straight up and all of those muscles went tight. “Who are you?” he asked slowly, dryly, his voice rough with sleep.

Dropping my hand from where it was over my heart—I didn’t even remember reaching up—I caught the ragged breath in my chest and held up my palms so that they faced toward him in surrender, taking in his features that weren’t from the neck down. His face was all angles and sharp lines like a gangster in a Russian mafia movie. Not exactly handsome but there was something about it… I coughed. Focus. “I just helped him outside,” I explained, standing there like a deer caught in the headlights.

Wasn’t that obvious? The beat-up guy was bleeding. Why else would I be standing there?

The half-naked stranger stared at me, unblinking, unmoving before his gaze switched back to the man on the recliner. “What happened?”

Beat-up Dumbass shook his head and lay back against the couch, waving his fingers dismissively. “Nothing. Mind your own fucking business and go back to sleep.”

Was I…? Should I…? I should go. I should probably go, I decided. I cleared my throat and luckily neither one of them glanced at me. “All right, well, I’m going to head out now—”

“What happened?” the half-naked man asked again, and it didn’t take a genius to know the question was directed at me… because his gaze was locked on mine, all hooded eyelids and a frown that made me uncomfortable.

“I already fucking told you nothing!” Beat-up Dumbass hissed, raising a hand to his eyes and draping it over them.

The not-beat-up guy didn’t even glance at the other man. I was pretty sure his nostrils had flared at some point, and I could definitely see his loosely hanging hands were opening and closing into fists. His voice was low and almost hoarse. “Can you please tell me why the hell he’s on the chair, looking like he just got his ass beat?”

Because he had? I opened my mouth, closed it, and mentally shrugged. I wanted to get the hell out of there, and it wasn’t like I had some allegiance to the beat-up guy. “He got jumped, and I helped him. I didn’t want to leave him out there.” My eyes bounced back and forth between the chair and the muscles—I mean, the guy in the boxers that only covered about a third of his thighs.

“Jumped?” One of the man’s thick eyebrows seemed to creep up a half inch on his broad forehead.

I’d swear his chin jutted out as he picked at my words to repeat. I’d had enough experiences pissing people off in my life—specifically my mom—to know those three traits were a sign of someone who was angry but trying not to be and failing miserably.

I probably made it worse by adding, “On the lawn outside.”

The width of his shoulders seemed to double, bringing attention to bulky biceps flexing to life with the hands he was fisting in pretty obvious anger. I couldn’t tell how old he was… but it wasn’t like that mattered.

“He got jumped on the lawn outside?” the newest stranger asked stiffly, his shoulders rolling back, his stubble-covered chin inching out a little more.

Why did I feel like I was tattling to Dad? “Uh-huh.”

The man on the recliner groaned in exasperation.

I would have been worried about being a big mouth except Beat-up Dumbass didn’t look like he’d make it five feet on his own.

The half-naked man’s biceps became even more bunched as his hand—a large one—went up to grip the top of his buzz-cut dark hair. “Who?” the man asked in that raspy, deep voice of his that had nothing to do with a head cold, like mine did. I had a feeling it wasn’t a sleep-induced voice either.

“Who what?” I asked slowly, trying to decide the best way to bail on this conversation as quickly as possible.

“Who did it?”

Should I have asked them for their names and addresses? I shrugged, my discomfort growing by the second. Get out, Diana, a little voice inside my head warned me.

“It’s none of your fucking business,” Beat-up Dumbass muttered as angrily as someone who may or may not have internal injuries was capable of.

But at the same time as he gave his response, I blabbered, “Three guys.”

“Outside this house?” Half-naked Man pointed toward the floor with an index finger.

I nodded.

There was a moment of silence before:

“I’m gonna fucking kill you,” the man hissed, not completely under his breath, his head swinging over in the direction of the recliner. The hand dangling at his side tightened into a fist that had me eyeing the door and taking a step in reverse.