A Low Down Dirty Shane by Sierra Dean

and…
    “More?” he asked, cocking his head to the side.
    “What?”
    “You said more .”
    “I did not.” Oh Goddess, she had, hadn’t she?
    He glanced inside his jacket. “I brought more clips. I’m pretty sure this is all the heat I can manage without bringing backup.” The jacket flapped closed before he could draw any unwanted attention to himself. “Should I have brought backup?”
    “You are the backup,” she reminded him.
    “So, then…what’s the plan, Red?”
    Siobhan wobbled but steadied herself and pretended she’d wedged her boot heel into the boards. Of course it would have been more believable had they actually been walking at the time.
    “Before I came up with my…alternate option last night—”
    “The sex.”
    She hissed a shushing sound at him and started to walk back towards Manhattan. Shane was hot on her heels, catching up with a few long-legged strides. “Focus, Hewitt,” she scolded.
    “Okay, but you brought it up.”
    Siobhan threw her hands in the air because she had to do something with them or she’d hit him. Or grab him. She wasn’t entirely sure.
    “Someone’s life is at stake here.”
    “I can’t fuck all the virgins in New York. I mean…if that’s the plan here, I hate to disappoint you or make you question my virility, but it’s a tall order. And in some cases is probably really illegal.”
    Siobhan spun on her heel, sidestepping a tourist couple who almost collided with her. “Are you handicapped in some way? I mean, were you dropped on your head several times as a child?”
    Shane seemed ready to say something in return, but instead flushed and bit back the reply. She remembered, then, him mentioning a foster mother, and her own mouth snapped shut. People with foster parents didn’t usually come from the most stable upbringings.
    “I’m sorry, I didn’t—”
    “You don’t know anything about me,” he told her, shaking his head. “So don’t pretend you can hurt me, okay, sweetheart? You can’t.”
    “I’m sorry,” she said again.
    “Yeah, well, we’ve got a virgin to save. Let’s go be heroes or some shit like that.”
     
    Shane had been sucker-punched. He’d had his nose broken five times since becoming a bounty hunter. Once, he’d been stabbed with a fucking trident . And only a month earlier he’d taken a bullet meant for someone else. He knew all about pain, and he thought of himself as a tough guy.
    One sentence from a pint-sized bundle of sass who was perched mighty tall on her high horse and it felt like he’d been kicked in the stomach.
    He’d actually been kicked in the stomach several times, making him pretty damned familiar with the feeling.
    No, he’d never been dropped on his head as a child like she’d politely suggested. He had, however, received his first lessons in taking a punch like a man before the age of nine. And the Cassiopeia-shaped constellation of scar tissue between his shoulder blades? Well, to say he related to Bender’s cigarette-burn speech in The Breakfast Club was putting it mildly.
    Shane had been twelve when he was taken away by the Office of Children and Family Services, and even then it hadn’t been the abuse that had drawn the county’s attention to him. Nope. He’d skipped school one too many times, and they wanted to know why his father thought fixing car radiators was a better way for a twelve-year-old to spend his days than learning state capitals.
    “Who the hell needs to know what the capital of Alaska is?” his father had sneered. “Boy this useless ain’t never going to go there. He needs a skill . If he can do something, maybe he won’t be such a disappointment.”
    The black eye Shane had sported from being a disappointment the previous evening when he delivered a beer too slowly was what iced the OCFS cake. He was removed from his parents’ home and never saw them again. They didn’t fight to get him back.
    A middle-aged manicurist named Wanda Malloy had raised Shane. She was