Page 3 of Rescuing Josiah
Only he’d been outvoted.
Chelsea had insisted that nobody would believe that a retired SEAL, who had served his country and lost his entire team in combat, would seek out a black-market trafficking ring. Not for himself anyway. But she’d believed that if the ring thought he was doing it to save someone he loved, it might be more believable.
So here they were. A day later, at the courthouse, getting married. To make this work, they needed everything to be as legitimate as possible, since quite obviously, Chelsea was not in fact dying and in need of a black-market organ to survive.
The justice of the peace who would sign off on the marriage certificate was watching him with suspicious eyes, like he wasn't sure if he should pick up the phone and call the cops.
While Josiah hated the idea of Chelsea being in danger, he didn't hate her specifically. Despite his reputation for hating everyone and everything, the only people he truly hated were themen who had stolen the lives of his teammates and the man who had set them up.
What he did hate was letting anyone get even vaguely close to him.
Including touching him.
It took more effort than he would have expected to slowly uncurl his fingers, one by one, from around Chelsea’s slender wrist. The look of understanding in her gray eyes almost made rage explode out of him.
How dare she understand him.
Why couldn’t she keep her distance like everybody else?
The rest of his team were polite, but they respected his boundaries and didn't try to force friendship that he didn't want onto him.
Not Chelsea, though.
Never her.
She was always trying to engage him in conversation, trying to be nice to him, and get closer to him. She baked him sweet treats, she gave him a Christmas gift every year, she brought cake and candles, and insisted everybody sing him “Happy Birthday”. She was everything good and sweet in the world, and everything he wanted to avoid at all costs.
Only now as he stood and faced what was without a doubt the scariest mission of his career, and that had nothing to do with bringing down an organ trafficker, she was everything he couldn’t avoid. Everything he had to pretend he wanted, because to the outside world, this marriage had to appear real, even if it was going to be annulled the second Desiree Tilly was in custody.
Doing this with anybody else would have been easy to pretend, to fake it, do what had to be done for the greater good.
But Chelsea Pierce was his Achilles heel.
Something he couldn’t allow anyone—especially her—to realize if he wanted to go back to his solitary life once this wasover. That life, devoid of as much human contact as he could, was the only thing that kept him sane, kept him breathing.
Keeping people out wasn't just self-preservation, it was the only thing keeping him alive.
May 11th
6:50 P.M.
This was never going to work.
Chelsea Pierce glanced sideways at Josiah as they walked back outside after what had to be the absolute shortest wedding in the entire history of humanity.
Why had she thought this was a good idea again?
At the time, it had seemed so simple. No one would believe that Josiah Fleet, an honorable man who had just about every military medal it was possible to receive, was suddenly going to go seeking out traffickers to save his own life. That she was absolutely certain of. It wouldn't convince anyone, and if they were going to make contact with the traffickers, they would have to seem legitimate.
After all, Desiree Tilly and her ring knew that Prey was onto them, knew that Prey was hunting them, and knew that Prey would do whatever they had to in order to destroy them. Including sending someone in undercover.
So this had to seem real.
Enter her.
She was confident that if they could convince the trafficking ring that she and Josiah were in love, then they could convince them that they weren't there to betray them but to save her life.
But getting Josiah to look as though he tolerated her, let alone liked her, let alone loved her, seemed to be getting more impossible by the second.
