Rescued by Her Rival by Amalie Berlin

Author:Amalie Berlin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2019-02-12T19:09:05+00:00

* * *

Beck made it back to camp with daylight still lighting the skies, but came into an empty cabin.

Lauren wasn’t back yet.

She’d had to hike out by herself because of him, and he still didn’t know if she’d been retrieved or if she was still in the woods.

He slammed into the cabin, then straight on to the shower. He’d ridden a spike of terror all day, and stank of it.

There was nothing to do but keep busy. Keep busy and do the things that needed doing. Clean up. Get dinner. Get two dinners, so if she got back after they closed up evening chow she could still eat something. Something besides an MRE, because, God knew, those were awful.

The thought of food ration packs conjured the chemical taste he always had to fight to ignore when choking them down. But standing in the shower, he let himself consider every aspect of that fake, preservative-laden bite. It was better than the thoughts that had been consuming him since he’d seen her parachute drifting toward the flames.

Lauren burning. Fire eating through the suit she’d jumped in, turning her golden, beautiful skin to char. Her long caramel hair gone. Skin cracking.

He’d never actually seen someone burn, and he’d avoided movies with those kinds of special effects, but he knew what fire did. He knew the sound of bacon popping on the griddle. He knew what a forest looked like after a wildfire had consumed it. Even wood blistered and cracked in that kind of heat. Skin was nothing by comparison. He could picture it. Had been picturing it in ever increasing detail since he was a child, when his mind had been without the knowledge required to summon nightmarish levels of detail. Like it could now.

MREs and their cocktail of chemical flavors were heaven to think of by comparison.

Fake butter flavor.

The metallic taste of tomato sauces when the chemical heat was applied.

He made it through the shower, dried, dressed, and went on to the next task. Always the next task. He checked in with the office for word, learned she’d been picked up, sore and slightly injured. Went to get dinners.

Picked pine needles and tied them up in a cloth, getting salts ready for the soaking bath she’d probably need if she’d landed hard enough to kill her comm.

Then he sat on the front stoop of the small cabin and waited. Waited and tried to listen to the frogs singing in the woods behind.

Stopping Lauren from going up this morning when he could see how it unnerved her would’ve really pissed her off, but it would’ve been for her own good. Making her take time off now that she was injured would also be for her own good. Was she hurt badly enough to bow out until next year? God help the man who suggested such a thing to her.

He didn’t see her small frame slogging across the dark field until she was almost on him, and it took every ounce of willpower not to rush over and scoop her up, frisk her for injuries, shout at her, shake her.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.