Free One Hell of a Guy: The Cambion Trilogy, Book 1 by Tammi Labrecque Page A

around was actually the least of her worries. She tried again to get a limb loose, but after almost a full minute of struggling her hardest she got nowhere; they had her arms well-pinned and Red Jacket was pressed against her legs in a manner that was both repulsive and impossible to escape.
    She cast her gaze over to the other woman, and swallowed convulsively when she saw her shirt was in shreds and her skirt was rucked up completely over her hips — and the furious kicking with which the woman was keeping her attackers at bay was becoming less effective as they used the sheer weight of themselves to press her against the wall behind her. The guy in the black sweatshirt already had his pants around his knees.
    At least I’m not wearing a skirt , she thought — as though that was going to make any difference at all, in the end.
    Just as she had this despairing thought — just as she felt that same emotion she’d seen in the other woman’s eyes take up residence in her — someone came in from the mouth of the alley. Fast.
    Faster than she’d ever seen anyone move in her life.
    And it was Sebastian.
    He was coming straight at her — in the second she had to realize it was him, their eyes met and she saw murder in his. She’d never understood what that saying meant until now, but she saw death in his eyes as surely as if he’d been the Grim Reaper himself.
    He moved past her, and for one confused second she thought he was a hallucination or something — this was the part of the movie where the hero pulled the attackers off the heroine and smacked their heads together like coconuts, wasn’t it? So what the hell was he doing?
    What he was doing, apparently, was being smarter than her … and better at prioritizing. Wrapping a hand around Black Sweatshirt’s throat, he pulled him off the other woman with not a moment to spare; given her attire, her location, and the lateness of the hour, her virtue was likely to be nonexistent, but Lily thought — and apparently Sebastian agreed — that whether she chose to compromise it further really ought to be up to her.
    Baggy Shorts gave a shriek but Lily couldn’t really see what had happened — and then the shriek spiraled up an octave … and up … and up. Then Sebastian shifted slightly to the right and Lily saw he had quite literally lifted the guy up by the crotch of his pants and was holding him about four feet off the ground, his body bowed back in agony, long greasy hair just barely brushing the asphalt. Judging from the screaming, that wasn’t just fabric Sebastian had bunched in his fist. Somewhere in the back of her mind Lily wondered how well everything was still attached in there.
    Sebastian let go and the guy fell in a heap on the ground, crying and puking. Black Sweatshirt, meanwhile, was still immobilized by Sebastian’s grip around his throat.
    How is he doing that? she thought frantically, and then, incredibly, Sebastian picked the guy up and threw him — literally threw him, a good ten feet — against the brick wall on the other side of the alley, so hard Lily heard bones crunch. Black sweatshirt hit the ground as his friend had done, but there was no crying or puking; he was soundly unconscious, and the way the side of his head was dented, it didn’t look like he’d be waking up any time soon — if at all.
    The two guys holding her had let go — only about forty-five seconds had passed since Sebastian entered the alley but you didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to see whose side he was on, or how badly everything was going for anyone not on that side — and they were both turning tail to run when he caught Red Jacket on the back of the skull with a roundhouse kick right out of a karate movie.
    Red Jacket crumpled and Sebastian reached out and grabbed Wifebeater by the back of his neck, plucked him right out of his flip-flops, turned him to face Lily.
    “Tell the lady you’re sorry,” he said, and Lily couldn’t even recognize his voice.