“No!” I watched her fight like she was a deer caught with its leg in a trap.
What the hell was wrong with her?She was acting like a woman possessed, behaving just like she did yesterday at the gas station.
Just as crazed. Just as fiery. Just as fucking infuriating.
“Scarlett, stop.”
She ignored me, still squirming against me. “How did you even find me?”
“Doesn’t matter how I found you. What were you doing in that bar with those men?”
“None of your goddamn business,” she snarled.
“It is when I’m in charge of you and you serve yourself up on a goddamn platter to what were probably gang members or drug dealers.”
“Well that’s my decision to make!”
“And it’s my job to save you from your dumbass decisions for the next seventy-two hours.”
“Lucky me,” she growled, twisting her shoulders against my grip.
“Scarlett, just… stop fighting for one fucking second!” I damn near shook her as I begged her to find her fucking chill. “You don’t have to fight me. I know you don’t want to be here and I’m not thrilled about it either, but the faster we get to Quantico, the faster this trip can be over for both of us.”
The fight in her stalled out to let a humorless chuckle roll free. The sound of it curled up my spine. “You don’t get it.”
“Well then kindly explain what it is I’m not getting.”
Pink flashed across her lips as she ran her tongue across them. Scarlett shook her head, letting it drop to rest on the wall behind her. “I don’t have the time to waste to explain it to you.”
Green eyes drew back to mine and steadied there. A breeze rustled between us, blowing her lavender scent beneath my nose, and I changed to breathing from my mouth so I didn’t have to smell its addictive high.
Her father’s tip was stale, and she clearly wasn’t meeting any of the Vitalis today. Relief untangled the knot in my stomach that had been there all morning.
If she wasn’t meeting any of them, then there was no reason we had to stay in this godforsaken town until tomorrow. There was no reason I had to be around this woman who, in just a day and a half, had run my patience into the ground and tripped every single one of my triggers.
I had to get her out of my life sooner rather than later. The connections she had to the Vitalis made her trouble, and everything else about her made her lethal.
We could leave tonight and be in Quantico by the morning. I could end this nightmare for both of us.
I’d just have to hope that her father wouldn’t fire me over the plan I hatched to make it happen.
“Maybe you’ll find the time.” It was her turn to part those fire-spewing lips of hers, and have whatever it was she was going to say snipped at the legs by her new favorite bracelet of the weekend.
Scarlett gaped down at the handcuffs, one around her wrist and one around mine. With a rising smirk I watched as her head fell back to the sky, and her bottom lip pulled back between her teeth.
“Fuck!”