Page 15 of Fighting for Scarlett

What the hell was going on here?

CHAPTER FOUR

January 12th

6:06 P.M.

Finally.

Finally, someone had come for her.

Scarlett was so relieved that all she could do was cling to her savior and weep. Huge, wracking sobs that made her chest ache.

Someone was here.

Someone had come.

Someone cared.

Relief was so overwhelming that in this moment nothing else seemed to matter. Not that she’d been kidnapped, not that she’d been tortured, not that there was currently a firefight going on all around them.

Nothing.

Just this.

Someone had come for her because she mattered.

Maybe not to her parents, or grandparents, or possibly even her twin brother, but she mattered to her Prey family, which meant the world to her.

“What’s this?” a voice snarled, and a hand brushed lightly across her back, making her flinch as pain came screaming back.

Then the voice clicked, and Scarlett froze. The voice didn't belong to anyone at Prey, but she recognized it.

Slowly, she lifted her head—which suddenly felt much too heavy—from the shoulder of the man whose arms she had been sobbing in. Her savior was dressed all in black with paint smeared over his face, but she would recognize him anywhere.

For months, those eyes had haunted her dreams. Months.

Despite her assurances to him the night they’d spent together, she wasn’t a one-and-done kind of girl. She wanted the whole fairytale romance. Wanted to fall in love and live happily ever after. Wanted fun dates and roses, holding hands, long walks along the beach, and lying in the sand staring up at the stars. She wanted someone she could talk to about anything in the world, someone who would understand her.

Wanted to be loved.

Stupid maybe, but she’d felt this weird fluttery feeling in the pit of her stomach as soon as their eyes met. Even stupider she’d thought he’d felt it too. His amazing eyes—one brown, the other a beautiful blue-gray—had flared to life like he was experiencing the same weird feelings she was.

That was why it had hurt so much when he’d never called or texted. And the time they’d bumped into one another at the grocery store, and he pretended he didn't know her, that they hadn't spent an amazing night of lovemaking and sleeping in one another’s arms, hadn't just been humiliating, it had hurt her.

Gutted her.

Tate Laurier didn't work for Prey, he was a SEAL.

Why had Prey sent in a SEAL team to get her instead of coming after her themselves?

All at once, that wonderful high she was riding … vanished.

“T-Tate?” she murmured, voice hoarse from all her screaming the day before. “Wh-what are you doing here?”

Something flashed across his face that she didn't understand. It almost looked like he was … angry with her?

What would he have to be angry about?

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