Page 146 of Theta

It comes to a halt, the engine smoking, the glass shattered.

An impulse—a stupid, foolish, idiotic, braindead impulse—sends me across the road to crouch and peer into the driver's window.

Curiosity? Mostly. Concern? A little.

Fuck most people. But then, sometimes, you just know you have to do something.

This is one of those times.

The driver—the reckless dummy who doesn't know how to corner at speed in a van—is a fucking hottie.

Long, shaggy blonde hair, messy and bloody and matted and tangled and filthy. Sharp, symmetrical features. Plump, kissable lips.

And then his eyes snap open—they’re piercing, electric blue, vivid and intense.

"Help." His voice is raspy and hoarse. He blinks at me.

Unbuckles, slumping to the ground, and then crawls out.

He’s wearing truly filthy blue jeans, equally filthy, once-expensive high-top sneakers, and no shirt.

He has roughly forty-seven abs carved by Michaelangelo himself; I’m a sucker for a nice set of abs, lemme tell you.

But his forearms—well, this is foreshadowing, but I’m an absolute whore for sexy forearms, and while I don’t notice it in this moment, later on I’ll find out that he has the sexiest forearms I’ve ever seen.

Shit, he has the sexiest everything I’ve ever seen.

In this moment, though? His abs catch my attention because they’re razor sharp and blocky and powerful.

The other thing that catches my attention are the cuts all over his body—which look suspiciously as if he's been tortured.

Tires squeal, and another black van rounds the corner—this driver knows what he's doing.

"Fuck me." Hottie just sounds tired. "No, no, I got it." This must be to me, because I’m just standing here staring at him, watching him.

He ducks into the overturned van, then drops to his hands and knees and crawls half in the window, rummaging for something.

The man’s ass is a work of art in those jeans. Like, damn.

Mama likey.

No, I don't have kids; it’s just a weird kink I have, okay? I refer to myself as mama when I’m turned on. Yes, I know it's fucked up, lame, and hilariously stupid. I just can't help it.

He finds what he's looking for and crawls backward and finds his feet—standing up is clearly an exhausting thing, as if getting to his feet takes the last of his strength. His platinum blond hair is in his face, and he scrapes it back with one hand in that impossibly erotic way of sexy, long-haired men.

He turns as the other van’s doors fly open, disgorging one, two, three, four…six men in black BDUs, balaclavas hiding their faces, suppressed assault rifles at their shoulders.

"Fuck you."

BAM-BAM-BAM! He drops three in quick succession before they know what's happening, and then—BAMBAMBAM! The other three go down just as fast.

And just like that, there are six dead men in the streets of Zermatt, and Hottie Operator is shuffling and weaving toward me, dizzy, weak, drunk with pain and exhaustion.

"Please help me." The gun drops from his fingers and clatters to the ground at my feet, and then he collapses forward into my arms.

Um, shit.