~~~~~Now Available!~~~~~
The conclusion for the duet, TANGLED, is here,
and the duet is COMPLETE!
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Behind every great fortune lies a great crime, and for Tristan “Twist” King, the time has come to commit his.
And that's when things get TWISTED.
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O, what a tangled web we weave
when first we practise to deceive!
Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field
Sir Walter Scott, 1808
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Twisted
Colleen
This is Book #2 of
the Scholarship Mafia: Tristan Duet.
If you haven’t read TWISTED yet,
GET IT HERE.
The restaurant’s sprinkler system hosed water over everything, spraying sheets through the air and sluicing off the tables.
Panicking people careened through the deluge, screaming, “Fire!” and racing to find an exit.
Colleen Frost’s long silk dress shrink-wrapped her legs as she tried to run. She clung to Tristan King’s side. He flipped his suit jacket around her and held her up as they tried to push through the crowd to get out of the restaurant. Heads bobbled between them and the doors. Running bodies blocked their path and tangled with their feet with every step.
The heat from Tristan’s skin seeped through his clothes and warmed her, but Colleen still shivered from the cold water soaking her dress.
Gunshots banged over the frantic crowd darting between the restaurant tables.
People screamed and reversed the direction they’d been running.
Counterclockwise chaos.
The carpeting squelched under Colleen’s high-heeled sandals, and cold water squished between her bare toes as Tristan hurried her toward the front where they’d entered a lifetime ago.
Tristan asked her, “Are you sure Svetlana got away?”
“Her rideshare should be twenty miles away by now,” Colleen said, trying to kick the wet silk away from her ankles. The thin fabric was plastered to her bare ass, too. “I watched her get in the car after I pushed her out the window. He bought her, Tristan. He’s been raping her and burning her with cigarettes and other terrible things. You should have seen the way she sobbed and the way she thanked me so desperately, over and over, for just doing what a barely halfway decent human being would do. She’s only sixteen! I couldn’t leave her with him.”
“You did the right thing.” He held her up as they hurried around the edge of the crowd, shoving panicking people out of their way.
“But we might have gotten out if I’d have left her,” Colleen worried.
“I’ll get us out. Good girl.”
Colleen almost hopped sideways with the shock of Tristan’s deep voice, at the nearly British intonations in how he said that, at the familiar feel of his body against her side from the previous night and two days before.
Holy shit. No way.
He couldn’t be—
Gunshots blasted in the air. Plaster chipped off the wall beside her.
Colleen ran with the crowd and Tristan, trying to get the hell out of the building.
With his enormous form nearly wrapped around her, Tristan half-hurried, half-carried Colleen through the crowd with his other hand stretched in front of him to stiff-arm people out of the way.
She shoved and kicked fallen chairs out of their path.
A fire exit appeared through the spraying water, and he jammed the safety bar to open it to a short hallway that led to another door.
Within seconds, they emerged into the dimming daylight outside the restaurant.
Tristan was shouting into his phone, “Micah, if you’re going to pull a rabbit out of your hat, do it now!”
Thunder filled the air around them, battering her eardrums.
A helicopter with only a few dim running lights screamed through the darkening air and landed in an empty field just outside the parking lot, skidding as it touched down.
Tristan pulled her along by her hand, crouching as they ran toward the aircraft.
Its side door slid open.
A blond man stood in the helicopter doorway, holding out his hand and yelling over the roar of the engines and blades chopping the air over their heads, “Come on, Twist! Get in the goddamn helicopter!”
Colleen stumbled on the gravel of the parking lot, but Tristan held her up by her waist.
Twist. The new guy had called Tristan Twist.
She hadn’t needed any more proof, not after that throaty growl of good girl and the way his body moved with such power and authority while they’d been escaping.
But there it was.
And all her other rationalizing about how Tristan couldn’t be TwistyTrader collapsed into ash.
Tristan shoved her onto a seat, yelling, “Seatbelt!” as he reached past her to slam the door shut.
Colleen grabbed the woven strap and latched it around her middle as the helicopter tilted under her legs and butt, lifting off with a roar so loud that it felt like the rotors were bashing her on both sides of her head.
Tristan stumbled, windmilling his arms as the aircraft spun and pitched, but the new guy wrapped an arm around him and hauled him onto the bench seat. They buckled in while holding onto each other and the backs of the pilot’s seat and the other front chair.
The new guy handed out headphones with mics.
When Colleen jammed hers on, the terrible noise from the helicopter blades abated and was replaced by the new guy’s voice yelling, “Strap in and hang on!”
The helicopter rose nose-first higher into the air and then tipped the other way, flying low over the buildings with its rotors biting the air and nose pointing toward the ground.
Colleen grabbed the harness flopping over her shoulders but missed because she was dangling from the seatbelt around her waist.
Water droplets fell from her soaked hair, splattering the seatback in front of her and the wall of the helicopter as it banked into a tight turn. The direction of down changed.
The two guys braced their long legs on the front seats as the sunset outside the front window tilted precariously.
Her seatbelt buckle had been stiff, and it sat at an odd angle like she’d jammed it while trying to make it latch.
It wasn’t going to hold.
Colleen flailed, scrambling to find something to hang onto, because if her lap belt failed, she was going to pitch straight through the front windshield and plummet to the rapidly retreating ground.
Tristan’s arm shot out, and he grabbed a handle on the cabin wall beside her head and caged her body, pressing her back against the seat with his elbow.
Beside her shoulder, Tristan’s shirt sleeve had ridden up over his wrist.
Blue and green tattoo tendrils vined over his skin.
They were exactly like the tattoos she’d seen on Twist’s muscular arms in the video chat and when he’d rolled up his sleeves in the Devilhouse.
The night before, when she’d sneaked into his penthouse suite and bedroom, she hadn’t seen his arms. She’d insisted on turning the lights off because she didn’t want him to see her thigh hickey.
Oh God, she’d sent Twist a picture of her—
The horizon flopped in the other direction. Colleen grabbed the seat and Tristan’s muscular arm.
Outside the window beside her head, the buildings shrank on the ground. People spilled out of the square restaurant from all sides.
The new guy asked, “Are you two all right? Jesus, Twist, the situations you get yourself into. You’re worse than Maxence.”
Tristan’s voice spoke in her ears as he turned toward her. “Are you all right, Colleen? Those gormless cockwombles didn’t shoot you, did they?”
Yep, Tristan King had suddenly acquired a starched British accent.
Super tall, muscular and fit, educated and wealthy, tattooed and well-dressed, Tristan King was hotter than a black car in the summer in Phoenix, but he had also lied his shapely ass off ever since he’d walked into her GameShack store.
She turned her head to look into Tristan’s brilliantly blue eyes. “You’re Twist. I mean, you’re Twist the TwistyTrader from the Sherwood Forest forums. And . . . that other place.” She didn’t want to name the Devilhouse because the new guy was listening through the headphones, too.
Tristan King was looking over his shoulder at her, still holding her in place with his arm. His expression went from a wince to a smirk in an instant. “Yes, and you’re QueenMod, aren’t you, princess?”
She nodded, pissed at how he’d somehow made her feel ashamed of it. “You know I am.”
Colleen Frost was drenched with fire sprinkler water and yet was somehow still slimy with stinky fear-sweat from being kidnapped and then chased by that asshole Sergey of the Russian Butorin bratva.
Which meant mafia. Bratva meant mafia. That was another thing Colleen had learned in the last few days that she desperately wished she hadn’t.
At least they’d escaped.
Probably.
And yet, even with all that, the raging fire in her brain was that she was pissed off as all hell at Tristan King, the tall, gorgeous, ripped, handsome jackass with the brilliant blue eyes who sat beside her in the helicopter.
Tristan was somehow—oh sweet baby Jesus, she did not know how the hell this had all come together, but God knew she hated it—he was also somehow the person known as TwistyTrader on the stock market internet forum that she moderated.
The TwistyTrader she’d gotten sexty with online.
The TwistyTrader she’d met at a place called The Devilhouse for a night she’d never forget, but oh, how she wished she could take it back just then.
The TwistyTrader she hadn’t been able to stop naughty-texting until right before she’d sneaked into Tristan King’s bedroom and boinked him.
Tristan King and TwistyTrader were both the same guy.
And she was going to freakin’ kill him.
“I can’t believe that we called TwistyTrader the ‘King of the Killer Whales,’ and you’re Tristan King.”
“Heh, yeah, that was quite a coincidence, wasn’t it?”
“Why are you faking a British accent?” she demanded.
Tristan was looking at her out of the corners of his eyes, the blueness of his irises barely visible in the low lights of the helicopter cabin and fading sunset as they flew over the California desert hills. “I’m not faking it. This is how I speak. Micah can tell you.” He held out his hand as he made the introductions. “Micah, this is Colleen Frost, my impromptu computer science consultant whom I seem to have put in deadly danger. Colleen, this is Micah Shine, an old friend from boarding school in Switzerland, where we met at the impressionable age of thirteen.”
Micah Shine, the new guy, leaned out and looked in her eyes, and she got a good look at his eyes for the first time. They were light gray and shimmery with aqua and green flecks like nothing she’d ever seen before.
Tristan continued, “Our English rhetoric instructor insisted the Americans learn how to speak ‘properly, without an accent,’ according to his standards. It stuck with some of us more than others. According to actual Brits, I have a light American accent. It now takes effort for me to speak like a Midwestern farm boy.”
“It’s true,” Micah said, leaning to look around Tristan at her, but he spoke with a neutral American nothing-accent. “Master Hamilton would fail you if you spoke with, and I quote, ‘an abominable native accent.’ Some friends of ours can’t move their jaws when they speak English at all.” He elbowed Tristan. “Remember when Hamilton used to tell Arthur Finch-Hatten he didn’t sound British enough? I think it scarred him for life.”
Colleen asked, “If you two went to a Swiss boarding school together, why doesn’t he talk like that?”
“Oh, I certainly can,” Micah said with a cut-glass British drawl. “I just don’t. Keeping it neutral American is enough of a chore for me without adding that on top.”
“Why is he calling you Twist?” she demanded. “Is Micah on the Sherwood Forest forums, too?” She leaned out, her cheek resting on Tristan’s arm. “You, Micah! Are you one of the Killer Whales? You’re the one we call Orca Asshole, aren’t you?”
Micah laughed. “No, but thanks for that.”
Tristan shook his head. “He’s not. We gave each other stupid nicknames in upper school that many of us carry to this day to personify the trauma of that place.”
The blond guy, Micah, cracked a smile and glanced down at his lap. “He’s not wrong. Le Rosey was an excellent opportunity to get away from problems at home, but a boarding school stocked with some of the wealthiest, most entitled teenagers in the world is not a utopia. It’s more of a training ground for future financial fraud defendants and supervillains.”
“What’s your nickname, then?” she demanded.
One side of Micah’s mouth lifted. “Just my last name, Shine. And I am turning my headphones off now. You two have something to talk about, and I am not at all needed.”
Click.
Colleen stared at Tristan over his arm that was still protecting her, trying to murder him with just the anger in her eyes.
Tangled
Colleen
Colleen fussed with the latch on the seat belt, trying to make the dang thing work.
When jamming the parts in didn’t seem to be working, she took a firmer hold on the harness over her shoulders, interlocked the two pieces of the buckle like a baby seat, and shoved the mechanism into the latch. “There, it’s buckled,” she said to Tristan. “Get off me.”
Tristan released the handle on the wall and took his own sweet time retracting his arm from across her.
When he wasn’t moving fast enough, she pushed his elbow out from in front of her face. “Seriously.”
“Pardon me for making sure you didn’t fly through the windscreen of the helicopter.”
“You should’ve told me.”
“Told you what? That I have a stupid username on an obscure stock market discussion board? That the night before I accidentally got you fired and then convinced you to work for me, I had a one-night-stand in a sex club with another woman, one who told me she never wanted to see me again? Why didn’t you tell me that you were QueenMod?”
Not the point. “You should’ve told me that you were the guy who met me at you-know-where and we did you-know-what! How long have you known that was me?”
“About two minutes before you put it together, I suspect. It did not occur to me that you might have been the Sailor Moon of my darkest desires from two nights ago. Sailor Moon seemed taller than you by quite a bit. Not that there’s anything wrong with petite girls. I just didn’t think you were her.”
“And that’s also weird because TwistyTrader seemed shorter than you are. I mean, he wasn’t short. He was super tall. But you’re enormous!”
“I’m six-four. I wasn’t a different height at the Devilhouse.” He squeezed his eyes shut and snapped his fingers, which Colleen couldn’t hear over the grinding of the helicopter rotors. “But you were. You came up to my shoulder while we were there, and now you don’t.”
She rage-whispered, “Those red boots you liked so much had five-inch stiletto heels and an inch of platform under the toe box. I was at least five-seven in them, maybe five-eight.”
Tristan chuckled, “Yes, those boots,” and then he practically growled through the headphones, “That must be why you thought I’m taller now. I was only eight or nine inches taller than you when you wore those boots, but we have more like fourteen inches difference between us now.”
“And you had a British accent, which you hid when you walked into my GameShack.”
He shook his head and rolled his eyes. “I wasn’t hiding it. I just didn’t let myself speak that way because it’s distinctive. I’d been in three other GameShacks that morning, asking about business and what sorts of inventory they had. The last thing I needed was for employees to start talking to each other about some British guy coming into their stores and grilling them about things that would affect the stock price. So I went back to my roots and put on my Midwestern Iowan accent for the day. Once we started talking, I couldn’t switch back.”
The adrenaline from being shot at by Russian mobsters was slowly leaking out of Colleen’s bloodstream. “I did think it was weird that you said chunder and gormless when you were yelling at my manager at GameShack. Those are British swears. You just said gormless again to Micah.”
He shrugged. “I got carried away, but that cockwomble was mistreating you and was racist to boot. If he’d have come after me again, I was prepared to take him out behind the barn as his uncle should’ve.”
Colleen chuckled and shook her head. “That sounds more like an Iowa farm boy. But you had a beard under your mask in the Devilhouse.”
He nodded. “I shaved it off the next morning before I did reconnaissance at the GameShack stores. Again, it would have been an identifying characteristic if employees talked to each other.”
“Huh. I guess so. I can’t believe neither one of us figured it out. God, I’m an idiot.”
His voice lowered to a Twist-like growl. “You’re not an idiot, and don’t talk about yourself like that. That’s a punishment later.”
Now that sounded like Twist.
Tristan relaxed farther into his seat. “I never lied to you. That night at the Devilhouse, Sherwood Forest forum decorum dictated that I couldn’t tell you anything else about who I was. And ever since, I’ve had no reason to mention a username that I use on exactly one minor internet forum. So it never occurred to me that you were my debauched Sailor Moon.”
Colleen was glad he hadn’t added, and I’ve had my tongue in your twat. She said, “I was wearing some pretty advanced cosplay makeup that night. And you had on that mask.”
He chuckled. “It got in the way.”
“I still have your tie,” she admitted.
He braced his arm on his knee and turned toward her, a hint of a smile on his lips. “No, you don’t.”
“In my luggage.”
One side of his mouth turned up behind the microphone. “Like serial killers display trophies of their kills on their shelves?”
It was Colleen’s turn to chuckle. “Maybe kind of like a souvenir, I guess. Just something to remember that night by.”
He twisted more toward her. “So it was memorable, then.”
She stifled a laugh. “Yeah. I mean, I obviously liked it.”
“I couldn’t stop thinking about you.”
“Even after you met me?” Colleen asked him, pointing to her soggy dress over her sternum to indicate her Colleen-self.
He chuckled. “I couldn’t get you out of my mind, even though I was thoroughly infatuated with you,” Tristan said. “But that night in the Devilhouse was one for the ages.”
She risked a glance up at him, and he was watching her face. “I liked last night more.”
One side of his lips rose, and water slid from his wet hair down the side of his face. “Did you?”
“Yeah. Because it was really us, you know? Not makeup and masks.”
Tristan drew a breath to say something more, smiling as his eyes searched hers, but Micah threw out his arm and whacked Tristan across his chest.
A click sounded in Colleen’s earphones. Micah said, “The pilot wants to know whether to head for LAX or San Francisco.”
“LAX.” Tristan retrieved his phone from the pocket of his suit jacket, shaking off the water. “I’ll have Jian meet us at the airport with the luggage. He’s been driving around for an hour, awaiting instructions on where to meet us.”
Micah raised an eyebrow at him. “Do you think the airport will be safe? Maybe you should come back to my apartment in San Francisco for the night. At least no one will know you’re there.”
Tristan glanced at Colleen. “I think we have other plans.”
She shrugged. “I just want to get into some dry clothes.”
Tristan reached over and took Colleen’s hand in his huge, warm one. “Definitely LAX, then. I’ll text Jian to meet us at the plane.”
And he was holding her hand.
That was awfully . . . intimate.
Rivulets of panic trickled upward from Colleen’s weak knees, infested her belly, and crawled over her scalp.
She jumped, trying to crawl out of her harness and her skin to yank open the sliding door of the helicopter and jump the hell out.
Tristan didn’t need to be holding her hand. Rolling around on a bed and enjoying friction on nerve endings was one thing, but this—whatever this was—this grabbing onto her hand like he might dangle her off the side of the cliff was something she had not signed up for.
Before they’d left the hotel, she’d been too wound up by him toying with her body to think about what he’d been saying, but his words had snapped into crystal clear focus on the limo ride over to the restaurant.
She hadn’t been freaking out about them being kidnapped by the Russian mafia, though that was far from inconsequential. Sweet Baby Jesus, these were Vladimir Putin’s henchmen, the kind who forced commercial flights to land in old Russian Federation countries so they could kidnap journalists off the plane and murdered people fighting for democracy and freedom in Russia. They pushed lawyers out of windows and poisoned people who escaped with chemical weapons.
The Russian mafia wasn’t morally gray. They were just plain evil.
But she hadn’t taken her opportunity to escape. That bathroom window caper had been Colleen’s escape plan until Svetlana had needed it more. Since that hadn’t worked, she’d have to figure something else out.
Colleen was a farm girl who’d worked in a feed store her whole life. She’d been delivering receipts from her mom at the cash register to her father in the storeroom when she could barely toddle.
“Self-reliant” didn’t begin to describe her.
She was a polar bear, just fine being cold and frosty and only interested in other polar bears to screw and then throw the hell out. Don’t let the cave door hit you on your fluffy butt, Mr. Boy Polar Bear. Just get the hell out of my den.
But the things Tristan had said.
How’d he put it? What were those terrifying and claustrophobic and exhilarating things he’d said?
I want you to sit at my feet and hold onto my leg like I’m your everything, because you already are mine.
That part at the end had tumbled Colleen like an avalanche.
And now his hand was wrapped around hers like a steel trap, and the polar bear in Colleen wanted to yank herself the hell out and lumber across the frozen wasteland into the blowing snow and midnight sun.
Panic.
Torn
Colleen
The helicopter banked, turning in the California evening above Los Angeles. The sky darkened as the sunset over the sea caught fire outside the helicopter’s window.
Colleen leaned, tugging at her hand a little where Tristan held her fingers.
He didn’t release her. Indeed, Tristan seemed to grip her fingers a little more firmly as he and Micah jabbered on about airports and boarding school friends.
Airports! The helicopter would eventually land at an airport.
Yep. Airport.
Colleen relaxed her hand until it became limp and tried to drag it away from him. Between being drenched and the cold sweat oozing from her palm, her hand probably felt like an eel.
Eels were notoriously hard to catch. Tristan King shouldn’t be able to hold onto her hand that easily. Her fingers should be flopping on her own leg by now.
But still, her hand was bundled up in his.
His fingers flexed and then wove through hers, making a giant, mutant fist.
Between all that stuff that he had said back in the hotel room in Malibu about how he really liked her and now this weird thing of trapping her hand in his, Colleen became a hooked fish on the end of the line, flopping to get away.
She bounced against her harness as she tried to stand and leap. “I’m really nervous about flying, especially in a helicopter, and I need to hold onto my harness.”
Tristan looked concerned and leaned outward. “Is your seatbelt not latched right? I can make sure that buckle is secure.” He reached toward her chest with his claw-like fingers extended like he was going to tear her heart out.
Colleen crossed her arms over her chest like she was in a straitjacket. “I’m fine! My buckle is fine! Jeez, it’s hot in here. When are we landing?”
Tristan withdrew his hand, but he kept it raised by his shoulder and in plain sight. “We should be at LAX within a few minutes. I’ve already had a call from Jian that he’s readying the plane.”
“Well, good! I mean, I suppose that’s safer.”
“Right,” Tristan said, and then he looked down, frowning.
Colleen wove her fingers around her shoulder straps and shivered. “There’s no safe place we can go. You said that they were Russian mafia, and Svetlana said it, too.”
He settled back in his seat, still solemn. “Yes. Yes, I did say that.”
Yes, a private plane. A private plane that she would get on with Tristan, who was also the King of the Killer Whales, TwistyTrader, who was also God-only-knew what else.
She didn’t really know this guy, Twist or Tristan King or whatever he was calling himself today.
She didn’t know anything about him.
All that stuff he’d told her about boarding school might be fake. That Micah Shine guy might be faking it, too. He might be just going along with whatever Twist said. What kind of a name was Micah Shine, anyway? It sounded fake. Shine. Didn’t that mean lying? Shining someone meant that you were conning them, right?
Everything Twist had ever said might be fake. Surely, that baloney he’d rambled on about at the hotel about liking her and all this crap while he’d been holding her hand had to be nothing but a con.
She didn’t even know what he was after anymore.
She didn’t have any money.
He’d already gotten her into bed.
She didn’t own anything of value. Her laptop was a jury-rigged piece of trash that she’d reconfigured to run Linux so it would work.
Whatever Tristan wanted from her must be something else, something valuable that she knew or could do that he was willing to swindle her for.
But what on Earth could a man like Twist want from her? She owned nothing, was nothing, controlled nothing. When she’d met him, she was a nada-nobody working a dead-end job with an unhealthy internet-forum habit. He was a much better coder than she was.
And with that thought, she figured it out.
The Sherwood Forest stock market forums wouldn’t seem important to an outsider because it was supposedly just an entertainment and education bulletin board, but its influence went further than that.
Thousands of small- and medium-size traders blindly followed the advice on the boards.
Journalists were known to haunt the posts, looking for scoops.
They were a mob on the stock market.
That was why she took her moderating job so seriously. Any one of the small traders could be wiped out with a single piece of bad advice. A rumor could start a run on a stock, either buying it at any price or dumping it as fast as they could.
But put together, there were enough traders and lurkers and influencers and market makers and journalists on Sherwood Forest to create more than a ripple in the trading frequency and stock price of even moderately priced stocks.
Between the Killer Whales and the rest of Sherwood Forest’s Merry People, someone with control of a moderator’s account could influence the people who believed everything the forum told them, and they could banhammer anyone who tried to call them out.
And thus, a person with a Sherwood Forest moderator account could control markets, at least for a while.
TwistyTrader didn’t like Colleen for herself.
He wasn’t attracted to her or interested in her.
He was trying to steal her Sherwood Forest moderator credentials.
Yeah, Tristan had known her name and address because she’d had to give the Devilhouse her ID. He’d conned her into meeting him there so he could track her down. And then he’d shaved his beard, changed the way he talked, and worn a long-sleeved shirt in June in Phoenix, Arizona, to cover up the tattoos on his arms and make sure she didn’t recognize him at GameShack.
And he’d worn a suit when they’d been at the airport. Even Anjali had said they must be boiling in those suits in the hot summer morning.
Obviously, Twist had been hiding something. No one in their right mind would wear a long-sleeved shirt or a suit in the desert summer unless they had a good reason.
And then he’d gotten her fired and convinced her to go with him to LA.
Damn, it all fit together, and Colleen was an idiot.
She’d been stupid to think anyone ever would just like her. Even her own family had thrown her the hell out of their lives as soon as they could and sabotaged her on her way out.
Tristan King had wanted something from her.
She rested her forehead against the side window of the helicopter and watched a white bull’s-eye painted on the asphalt slowly come nearer as they landed. A drop of water from her still-soaked hair dripped down the plastic window.
As soon as the helicopter skids touched the tarmac, she was bounding up and away from TwistyTrader and his accomplice. She grabbed the handle of the door and yanked it, sliding the heavy door backward.
Behind her, Tristan called out with that stupid fake British accent, “Colleen? What are you doing?”
She didn’t want to jump the last few feet out of the helicopter. Her stupid, strappy, high-heeled sandals would break her ankle when she tried to land on asphalt. So, she yanked the sodden silk of her skirt away from her legs and held onto the edge of the door as she meticulously climbed out like a sloth trying to swing around a branch.
In her headphones, she heard Micah say, “What’s she doing? She’s going to—”
Colleen was climbing out and leaning toward the asphalt to get the hell out of that helicopter when her headphones hit the end of their cord and yanked her head backward like a leash.
“Dammit!” She yanked them off and threw them at the seat as she continued to feel for the ground with her toes.
Tristan tossed his headset on the seat behind him as he came after her. His mouth was moving, but the screech of the engines winding down and the battering rotors drowned out his words.
Colleen’s toes finally scraped the ground, sending a solid jolt up her leg. She ducked even though the rotor blades were far above her head, and crouching, she began to run toward the small building just past the helipad’s landing zones.
A vice gripped her arm, and her whole body flopped backward. “Hey!”
Tristan was holding onto her arm, saying, “Where are you going?”
She danced around, her wet skirt wrapping around her legs on the heliport’s warm tarmac, and yanked her arm out of his grip. “Out.”
“I would’ve helped you out of the helicopter. You could’ve hurt yourself.”
“I don’t need your help.” The ocean breeze picked up, and the wet silk clinging to Colleen’s back and legs chilled her. “I don’t need anything from you. I want that plane ticket back to Phoenix, and I want it now.”
A flicker of shock rippled through Tristan, and he blinked. “I’m sorry about everything that happened.” He looked away, beyond the tail of the helicopter, and sighed so hard that his shoulders slumped. “Everything went wrong.”
Her heart slammed so hard that her breath shook. “I just need to get out of here. I need to go back to Phoenix where I’m a hell of a lot safer than hanging around you.”
Especially for her heart. She was so stupid for believing him.
She kept talking. “I don’t care about your plans or whatever it is you want from me. I need to leave, and I need to leave right the hell now. Either you buy me that plane ticket to Phoenix like you promised, or else I will march right over to the Southwest Air desk and bankrupt myself by buying the first available plane ticket on my credit card. But however this is going down, I’m done. I’m out. And I’m leaving right now.”
“Don’t.” Tristan scowled at the cityscape of Los Angeles in the distance, and then he gestured at the looming aircraft hangar behind him. “You take the plane. It’ll take you back to Phoenix, and I can transfer your pay for the week in just a minute from my phone.”
That wasn’t what she’d meant. “So where are you going to go?”
Tristan was scowling and staring at the ground. “I’ll stay here.”
“No way!” she yelled at him.
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