he pushed past both men and stormed down the path, never once looking back.
Bram and Gavin shared a silent exchange. Bram nodded and turned to follow Nolan. Gavin focused his attention on her. Leigh only hoped the quaking turning her muscles to jelly wasn’t visible on the outside.
“Did he touch you?” Gavin demanded.
“N-no.”
Gavin’s unwavering scrutiny was chilling. This was a side of him she’d heard about but had never seen. Dark and intense, his anger was slow to fade. Where Nolan had blustered, Gavin projected a hard determination.
Leigh crossed her arms protectively over her stomach. Her knees felt absurdly weak and her stomach was queasy.
“Sit down,” he ordered.
The hands that guided her onto the unyielding bench were surprisingly tender. She’d forgotten he had such large hands. They were warm, with the long tapered fingers of a musician. Those hands had once roused her body to incredible heights, but now they soothed, lightly stroking her shoulder. Amazingly, his touch helped to dissipate the chills lifting the hairs on her bare arms.
“I’m all right,” she told him.
“I know you are.”
The warmth in his tone sent her pulse leaping. She shook her head, telling herself she was imagining things. Gavin wasn’t interested in her.
“Do you make a habit of rescuing women in distress?”
His gaze became shuttered. “Not generally, no.”
“What did you mean when you said you warned him once before?”
His eyes went flat and hard. “Nothing you need to worry about.”
Leigh shook her head. Her mind whirled, slotting the pieces together. The picture that formed shocked her.
“You went after him seven years ago, didn’t you? Of course you did. That’s why you had cuts and scrapes on your knuckles when they arrested you. That’s why the police were so sure you were the one who hit poor Mr. Wickert.”
He squeezed her shoulder. “Let it go, Leigh.”
“But—”
“You didn’t want to press charges against Nolan, remember? You wouldn’t even let us report that you’d been drugged.”
As if she could ever forget. Memories of that night and what might have happened without Gavin had haunted her for years.
“There was no point. His family has all sorts of influence in this county. You know the police wouldn’t have believed us. They would have said you put the drug in my drink.”
“I know,” he said thoughtfully, releasing her to rub a hand across his chin. “I didn’t realize you did.”
“Of course I did! We couldn’t prove anything. Nolan would have said he handed me the wrong glass, or that someone else had slipped the drug into my soft drink.”
But she knew Nolan had deliberately handed her the drugged glass. There’d been something in his smirk, she’d seen it even then. She just hadn’t understood.
Leigh knew she’d been lucky. If he’d been able to slip the drug into the beer she’d drunk first, things would have ended very differently that night.
Looking back, she’d take bets that he had asked her and not Hayley to go out with him because Hayley would have taken one look at that party scene and created such a fuss Nolan would have had to take her home. Leigh’s stomach still churned at the memory of that awful party and Nolan’s group of leering friends.
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