She didn’t like the way that man was looking at Angel.

The perpetual designated driver, Katelyn nursed her Diet Coke at the bar. She wouldn’t be able to hear what the people next to her were saying unless they yelled in her direction, but Katelyn didn’t need to hear that man to have all she needed to know to be uncomfortable.

He stared into Angel’s eyes when she looked at him—attentive, sensitive, so much so that even Katelyn would have been deceived—but as soon as Angel looked away, his gaze wandered over her like a butcher inspecting meat. He wasn’t leering. His burning attention—impersonal, clinical—seared Angel’s neck along the waterfall of blonde hair that she’d spent an hour curling just right while wishing aloud for a personal stylist, down to her ass moving to the palpable beat jolting through the floors and chairs.

All that wasn’t really enough to justify Katelyn’s suspicions. When Angel broke away from him to talk with Maria and Aly for a few minutes, he didn’t follow or offer to hold her drink. She kept her eyes peeled for powders or pills, but the man did nothing but stare when he wasn’t aware he was being watched.

Katelyn kept telling herself that she was being the paranoid mother hen who always ruined the party. Maria, Aly and Angel told her she needed to loosen up and stop expecting the worst of people, but she couldn’t shake her bad feelings when she had them. And Angel was such a small girl, although Katelyn knew firsthand that short people could be dangerous in their own right, on the level with the most vulnerable part of a man’s anatomy.

This man, however, was a giant. Katelyn couldn’t place him as a University of Texas-Meridian football or basketball player, and she would know. Delta Tau was a big fan of both programs, unofficial cheerleaders and often fawning groupies. He could have been from one of the Dallas schools, or he could have even been a Cowboy or a Maverick, but really, why would a professional athlete travel several hours to Meridian to pay to dance and pay more to drink? Sure, Meridian nightlife had a decent reputation, but Dallas wasn’t exactly a ghost town after ten.

So he probably wasn’t a professional athlete, and he looked a little old to be in college, a little young to be a retired pro.

Maybe a boxer or an MMA fighter. Katelyn sipped her drink again and traced the contours of his muscles with her gaze. His skin was almost shadow, even under the neon lights, but he was so big that she could discern each individual muscle group from a distance in the dark. Some kind of athlete—that much she knew. Perhaps a bodybuilder as well, naturally big but bulked up on top of that. His arms strained the limits of the sleeves that contained them, and his chest pushed against the front of his shirt. His jeans weren’t of the skinny variety, but they clung to him from ass to calves by virtue of his size.

He was the kind of guy a girl didn’t mind ogling, but he wasn’t exactly the kind of guy a girl wanted to be unsure about.

When Angel continued talking with Aly and Maria, the man wandered off. Katelyn finally caught him chatting up another blonde, this one even smaller and more delicate, but they spoke with the same straightforwardness as Aly and Maria with Angel—like friends. The plus-one for entry, perhaps, since girls could usually get into 360° just fine. Even Katelyn could get in when Aly, Maria and Angel trailed her along with them—the perks of association. The only problem was when guys hit on her trying to get to them—or because they’d already struck out with the drunk hotties and thought they’d get a little coyote ugly for their troubles.

Katelyn didn’t think she was that bad, which was why she never hesitated to give trolls a one-finger salute if they didn’t get the first five hints, but she’d faced facts a long time ago. She’d been initiated into Delta Tau because she was smart, because she cleaned up well and because she was a legacy. She evened out the pictures and—like Maria, who dyed her hair blonde but kept her last name—kept the sorority from getting too much attention from the diversity police.

It hadn’t escaped her notice that her friends—and they were friends, no snark—were talking with each other on the dance floor while she played house mother at the bar, making sure her chicks didn’t get hurt while they had their fun. Even so, people-watching was fun, too.

Big Guy was still talking to Tinkerbell, but Tinkerbell had turned her attention to the laughing, talking, dancing trio. Now, both of them were staring.

Katelyn’s mind did its worst-case scenario party trick, with images of cages and auctions. She closed her eyes and shook her head, laughing at herself. Jumping to conclusions had its evolutionary purpose, but God, she felt so ridiculous once she realized what she was doing. Odds were, Big Guy was a creep and Tinkerbell was just a creepette, glaring at the girl Big Guy was creeping on—or maybe she was giving him wing-woman pointers.

Big Guy and Tinkerbell split into the crowd, and Katelyn lost them.

Maria, Aly and Angel stumbled off the dance floor, giggling like mad, and surrounded Katelyn in a mob.

“Hey, girl, come on. Aren’t going to do anything except watch?” After Maria’s fourth drink, she was well over the decibel level needed to be heard.

“We don’t bring you along just as a taxi, you know.” Aly ruffled Katelyn’s hair. Katelyn quickly used the condensation from her Coke glass to smooth it back down. She hadn’t spent an hour on her hair like Angel had, but she didn’t want to have to take her braid down to fix whatever mess Aly would make of it while high—just E, but it meant she didn’t always know when to stop.

“Come on. Join us.” Maria pulled on Katelyn’s wrists. “You can’t just sit up here all night. We have a reputation to maintain.”

“I’m here. I’m partying. I’m good,” Katelyn said.

“We got to get you laid, lady,” Aly said. “We got to find you a hot guy. You have at least two hours before we leave to get it on in the car.”

“I have condoms in my purse. What?” Maria said when other people around them looked at her strangely. “If they only knew how many times a guy whips his dick out and says he forgot to bring protection, but he’ll just pull out when he gets there. Hell no.”

“I don’t want to get laid,” Katelyn protested.

Once her friends decided they wanted her on the dance floor grinding the nearest meat sack they could find, it was hard to dissuade them, but a club was the last place Katelyn wanted to hook up. At this time of night, everyone but her was drunk, and that made for some interesting ideas of what was sexy.

Still, dancing probably wouldn’t hurt, just to get the girls off her back. Besides, she could keep a better eye on them while dancing with them than watching from a distance.

“Good girl,” Angel said, coming up from behind and dancing against her for the delight of the guys around them.

“Do you know that guy?” Katelyn asked.

“Which one?”

“The one you were dancing with before.”

“Gotta narrow it down, Kate.”

“The big Black guy.”

“Oh! Yeah, no, I don’t know him. Hot, though, isn’t he? I bet he can pump it all night long.”

“I don’t know,” Katelyn said. “You know what ’roids do.”

Angel laughed, pulling Katelyn’s braid. “Still, ’d be nice for a test ride. He felt big enough when we were dancing like this.”

“I feel big enough, too,” Katelyn said, grinding back to Angel’s giggles. Angel spanked her before dancing around and rubbing their asses together, riding Katelyn’s skirt up. Katelyn couldn’t help her own giggles. She ground back through the end of the song, when Angel slung her arm around Katelyn’s shoulder and kissed her cheek before moving on.

Katelyn let herself be roped into two more songs. Aly did her usual offering of the pills she kept in her bra, trying to get Katelyn to have a better time, but she never took it personally when Katelyn turned her down, just shrugged and closed her eyes, rubbing her willowy self against whoever came up against her. Katelyn envied her abandon—ecstasy or no ecstasy. And her figure… Aly still took dance, but her professional hopes had been dashed by height the way some dancers’ dreams had been shattered by an ass, like Katelyn’s. Katelyn’s more mature body certainly couldn’t do what it used to do when she’d taken classes with Aly back in middle school, before she’d grown from a size four to a size eight in a year, bloomed from an A cup to a D almost overnight, then continued to grow all through high school.

All that mattered here, though, was the beat. Nothing like a good beat to take the mystery out of movement, and nothing like friends to keep her from being too self-conscious. She was what she was. She’d known what she was going to become based on what her mother looked like, and hell, it hadn’t gotten in her way yet. So why not be okay with it, cellulite and all?

She’d caught herself in the mirror before leaving—red dress, low-cut to let her boobs jiggle all a horny freshman would want, swishy skirt, cute flats, serviceable Katniss braid in her natural ginger. There was nothing to be ashamed of just because she couldn’t compare with Maria’s sequins and sass, Angel’s Jessica Rabbit figure and Aly’s modeling side hustle. She’d made it, basic bitches. So she wasn’t the party girl her friends wanted her to be, but she could dance her ass off with the best of them.

The next time Katelyn looked up, Maria, Aly and Angel had gradually shifted away. She found Aly first, because Aly was taller than most of the girls around her. Katelyn did a double-take when she saw that Aly’s dancing partner was Tinkerbell, their ashy-blonde hair almost identical, although that and their waif-like thinness were the only things they had in common.

A little bit of closeness wasn’t surprising on this kind of dance floor, but Tinkerbell stroked over Aly’s arms, and Aly seemed lost, her eyes glazed as their bodies undulated against each other—not in a ‘this is so much fun, be a part of my fun’ way, but in a ‘God, fuck, yes, that’s sexy’ way.

Katelyn felt dirty just noticing. Abrupt bisexuality like that was kind of verboten in Delta Tau, unless there were Alpha Mus around. The sorority could wave a rainbow flag during Pride, but God forbid anyone sleep under a rainbow blanket. Katelyn didn’t have a problem with it, but word got around, even if the person in question wouldn’t remember much more than a fuzzy Polaroid in the morning.

Katelyn looked around for Angel and Maria to help her rescue Aly. It was only midnight, but Katelyn thought it was time to get Aly home to sleep it off.

Maria was a few feet away, one arm around the man in front of her and the other around the guy behind her. She was holding her sixth drink. Katelyn was pretty sure the man in front of her was gay, but that wasn’t any of her business. Even when Maria was stumbling, a quickie in a bathroom was about all Katelyn had to worry about from her.

Katelyn scanned the tops of everyone’s heads, searching, increasingly frantic, for Angel’s particular blonde, which was a bit like trying to look for a drunk person in a bar—every other freaking person was blonde in here.

Her heart jerked in her chest when she finally saw Angel’s lavender top pressed against one of the black-painted columns as she clung to the giant form of the muscled man she’d been talking to earlier. She wasn’t talking now. They were connected at the mouth, tongues passing between their open lips as though neither could get enough of the other. Angel’s hand was pale against his bald head. She was wild, lost, her eyes as glazed as Aly’s. She didn’t usually take any of Aly’s E, but Katelyn couldn’t dismiss it—and that just worried her more.

Her stomach twisted in sickly circles. If any of her girls decided to go home with a strange guy—or girl—was there really anything Katelyn could do about it? Was there anything she was supposed to do about it? She didn’t mind spending the night in the library when one of the girls decided to entertain, although usually everyone was considerate enough to do it at their guys’ dormitories or in the privacy of a car or an abandoned room somewhere on campus. Strangers at the club were another thing, especially when Katelyn was the only ride home.

Big Guy reluctantly parted from Angel, who panted and clutched at him to bring him closer. He stroked the length of her neck, down until his thumb caressed the peak of her breast, which pressed hard and teasing against her thin top. It wasn’t like she could wear a bra underneath.

Katelyn couldn’t help how intensely she blushed. She wasn’t completely inexperienced, but she knew better than to ever use the V-word around her friends and frenemies at DT. She wasn’t waiting for someone special. She just didn’t want to get it over with to get it over with—and that meant she wasn’t willing to settle for some mouth-breather and a Walk of Shame in the morning, hoping no one would notice a bloodstain on the sheets.

Bumping, grinding and twerking on the dance floor was nothing. Seeing Big Guy’s large hands so deft over Angel made Katelyn too uncomfortably aware of her own body. She couldn’t wear flimsy tops like her friends, because not wearing a bra was akin to inviting an assault and battery charge from her boobs punching someone in the face, and her ass could never fit in compact parking. But she suddenly wanted hands like those—not necessarily his, but something like his—on her like that. Preferably somewhere more private, but at that moment, Katelyn’s yearning was so strong, she couldn’t blame Angel for biting her lip and arching into Big Guy’s touch.

Then Big Guy slipped his giant hand under her shirt, groping her firmly and sensuously with no regard for the people around them, and Angel didn’t slap him the way she or Maria always did if a guy got too fresh too fast. Instead, she looked like he had a direct line to her G-spot with the power of his stare.

Katelyn glanced at Aly. The similarities between Aly’s and Angel’s expressions hit her immediately. Angel had had only one drink, Aly two plus enhancements, and Angel was with a man with godlike arms while Aly was with a fairy-like woman—complete strangers—but they’d both been hit hard with the same something.

Still playing with Angel’s breast, Big Guy glanced across the crowded dance floor, directly at Tinkerbell. They both nodded.

Just a dip of the head, but Katelyn abruptly stopped dancing, leaving the people around her without someone soft to press against, and wove through the throng to Maria.

“Hey!” Katelyn shouted over the music. “We need to get Aly and Angel home. Something’s wrong.”

“Relax, killjoy. You’re just jealous because they’re getting some tonight and you’re not.”

“I’m not being paranoid. I think they’re being tag-teamed by people who put something in both of their drinks. Something is very wrong. We need to get them home.”

“Oh, whatever.” But Maria extricated herself from the man-wich she’d been enjoying.

Katelyn tended to think of all the ways that things could go wrong, sometimes to an outrageous degree, but she also had an uncanny ability to figure out the ways that things were already going wrong. DT could talk about how Katelyn was the buzzkill, the good girl, the surrogate mother, all they wanted, but when Katelyn insisted, the girls knew to listen. She’d saved at least three girls from roofies and five from being taken advantage of during house parties.

“You get Aly,” Katelyn said. “I’ll get Angel.”

Maria rolled her eyes in annoyance, but Tinkerbell had her mouth at Aly’s ear, lips brushing the shell, and Aly was nodding. Katelyn gave Maria a little shove as Tinkerbell led Aly toward the back exit. If Maria grumbled about not being anyone’s babysitter, she didn’t do it where Katelyn could hear, and she worked her way through the crowd fast enough. As soon as Maria started bickering with a belligerent and visibly confused Aly, Katelyn turned to rescue Angel.

A determined glare and refusal to stop got people out of her way in a hurry. As long as she didn’t spill anyone’s drink, people filled up the space she left behind like water flowing around a stone and went back to the business of having a good time.

Up close, Big Guy seemed even bigger, and his groping seemed that much obscener, yet arousing. He whispered in Angel’s ear much as Tinkerbell had with Aly, but it seemed so much more sinister when it came from a man who towered over the object of his attention instead of vice versa.

“Hey, girl.” Katelyn nudged Angel’s shoulder with as little awkwardness as possible. “Maria and I aren’t feeling so hot. It’s time to go.”

“No.” Angel flopped back against the column and pouted up at the man. “I’ll find my own way home.”

“You’ll find your way to a hangover and regret. How many drinks have you had?”

“Just two.” Angel stared at her empty hands. “Maybe three.”

“Yeah, we’re taking you home.” Katelyn tried to extricate Angel from Big Guy with all the diplomacy she could when hands were touching intimate places. “Sorry, man. Find someone else.”

“We weren’t finished.” He even rumbled like a giant. Next thing, he was going to threaten to grind her bones to make his bread.

“There’re plenty of options out there, but we need to go,” Katelyn said, hoping he didn’t decide he’d prefer her as a Hulk-smashed blob of jelly on the floor. Those arms were bigger around than her head. Being right next to them like this was more than a little intimidating.

And Angel was still doing nothing to help separate herself from the man. “He invited me to a party. Exclusive. Hard-fucking-core. Wanna come with?”

“Yes,” the man said. When Katelyn would extricate him from one place, he’d find another. At least now he was over Angel’s clothing instead of under. Still awfully handsy. “You and your friends are all invited.”

“So you’re not a perv. You’re recruiting.” Katelyn abandoned all attempts to contain the situation and instead yanked Angel behind her.

Now the guy was starting to look pissed off, but also…intrigued—and not in a good way.

At this point, Katelyn’s stomach decided it really wanted to be empty—yeah, empty. She swallowed back bile. They needed to leave. Now.

Katelyn backed them both away. “Maria’s going to blow chunks all over someone else’s dress if we don’t go.” She glanced at the bar and the entrance. The bartender was checking on her, making sure nothing escalated. Good.

Now that Big Guy had completely turned his attention from Angel to her, she experienced the full force of his gaze.

What are his eyes made of, magnets? Is he so big he literally has greater gravitational force?

“I don’t think it’s your friend who feels sick,” he said. “Our party can fix that.”

“A party isn’t the cure for what ails me.”

He stepped forward every time she stepped back, and his stride was greater. Soon they’d be walking into people on the dance floor. It didn’t help that Angel kept trying to get back around Katelyn.

He held out his hands for both girls, glancing again in the direction of Tinkerbell. “You’d be surprised.”

Katelyn slapped Angel’s hand before she could take one, then hooked her arm through Angel’s to whirl her away. The longer she stayed and argued, the more likely she’d agree to that party of his—and not because of any grand argument. Those eyes. Those eyes that made her pulse race in her ears off-rhythm to the music.

His hand weighed heavy on her shoulder. “Stay,” he whispered in her ear, sending shivers through her. If it hadn’t been for Angel stumbling from the turnabout, Katelyn might have just let the man have his way.

“No,” she said firmly. “We’re going. Good night.”

He could part a crowd faster than she did, but Katelyn could maneuver better. She yanked Angel along, despite her slurring protests.

Three drinks, my ass. The guy must have given her another one, plus extras.

She met up with Maria, who was keeping a similarly sloshed Aly away from Tinkerbell. After a brief look at Big Guy, Tinkerbell fixed her attention on Katelyn as well.

Definitely some kind of conspiracy, and Katelyn didn’t want to know.

She clamped her hand around Maria’s wrist and dragged all three girls to the front. She didn’t even try pretending everything was okay as she paused at the bar.

“Hey, Ben, those two—the blonde in the metallic dress and the big guy over there—something’s up. I think they’re drugging girls and inviting them to some private party.”

“Your friends okay?” the bartender asked.

“More or less.”

“Those two are regulars around here, but I’ll have them looked into,” Ben said. “Sorry if they were really bothering you girls.”

“All good.”

“Night. Get home safe.”

“He’d totally hit that, chica. Man, she is wasted,” Maria said, supporting Aly as well as she could when she wasn’t exactly ‘walk a straight line’ material herself.

“Just need to get to the car.” Katelyn checked behind them. Tinkerbell and Big Guy had disappeared once more into the crowd, and that actually scared her even more, because a giant and a fairy shouldn’t have been inconspicuous.

“Hey, can you keep an eye on us till we get in our car?” Katelyn asked one of the bouncers. “I think someone’s following us.”

The bouncer—big, but only his neck was thicker than Big Guy’s—nodded.

That made her feel a little better as she led the three girls to her car and helped Angel into the front passenger seat.

“Wanted to go to the party,” Angel murmured. She tucked her heels up and leaned against the window. That would do until they got home.

Katelyn climbed into the driver’s seat and made sure at least Maria was fastened in. Aly’s head was in Maria’s lap. Maria finally looked troubled.

“Geez, what’d these crazy kids take?”

“No idea,” Katelyn said, “and I’m not staying to find out.”