Chapter 11

January 16th

2:00 A.M.

When wasthis going to stop?

Was Raul still trying to kidnap her or did he just want her dead now?

And what about Tate?

Was he in danger too?

How did Raul even know that she was staying at his house?

Wasn't like it was planned or anything. Tate had been watching her house, probably because he thought she was guilty, and wound up saving her life. When he could have just handed her over to the authorities he hadn"t. Instead, he'd taken her to his house, tended to her, made love to her, held her while she slept, all because … Scarlett didn"t even know why.

She didn't think he did either.

Tears threatened to spill down her cheeks, but alongside the fear, there was a huge dollop of anger.

Raul Castillo didn"t get to blow up her life like this.

He'd ruined everything, made her doubt her team and the people she worked with, tainted her home, got her accused of betraying her country and branded a traitor. Whether they believed in her innocence or not, Prey would surely fire her, she'd lose her dream job and the people she had built a family with.

Everything was ruined.

But he wasn't going to take her life.

Nope.

In fact, she was going to do whatever it took to see that he was caught. Heck, she'd rather he was dead. He deserved it for what he'd done to her, and countless numbers of people who had been killed with the weapons he had trafficked to people he knew were going to use them for evil.

Finally, they ran through the front yard of a house at the back of Tate's block and six houses down, and out onto the street.

There had been no more gunshots after the ones that had destroyed Tate's living room. Were the men still there? Checking the house to see if they were inside? Or were they already being followed?

Scarlett turned to ask Tate what he thought and what the plan was when he whirled on her.

"Do you know how they found you?" he demanded, grabbing her by the shoulders and leaning down so they were eye to eye.

The softer Tate that had just been emerging back at his place was gone, the cold, hard, angry Tate was back.

Pain tore through her heart, but again along with it came an arrow of anger.

Tate didn"t get to hurl more accusations at her.

He didn"t get to blame her.

He didn"t get to keep treating her like she had done something wrong.

She was sick and tired of all the accusations.

Enough.

Reaching her breaking point, Scarlett acted without thinking. The crack of her hand connecting with Tate's cheek and the sting in her palm caught her by surprise.

Tate, too, if the way his eyes widened in shock before narrowing was any indication.

"Don't you dare accuse me of being a traitor again," she snarled, surprising herself at the venom dripping from her every word. All her life she'd been shut out, left out, told to just get over it, and that wanting her own parents to actually care about her made her weak. All her life she'd just taken it. She hadn"t raged at her parents, she hadn"t raged at her grandparents, she hadn"t raged at her brother when he joined the military and left her behind.

But now she was so consumed with anger there was no way she could keep it inside.

"I've already told you—told everyone—a hundred times already. I didn"t write any email, I didn"t make any deals, I wasn't selling the Reactivator to anyone, I didn"t do anything wrong," she seethed, so angry she was actually vibrating with it.

How dare Tate accuse her all over again after everything they shared last night.

Stupidly, she had believed that him having sex with her proved that he believed she was innocent.

What an idiot.

A man who lied right to her face and pretended he didn"t know her had no scruples. Of course, he would take sex when it was offered even if it was with a woman he considered to be a traitor.

Pain speared through her heart again, but instead of allowing it to control her, she took control of it, used it to fan the flames of her rage.

When his gaze softened and the grip on her shoulders loosened a little, she didn"t allow her guard to drop.

Right now, Tate was as much the enemy as Raul and his men were. Anyone who wasn't going to listen to her or hear the truth, was working against her. They were trying to prove she was guilty without even looking into what she had said and being fair and impartial.

"Look, I believe you weren"t trying to sell the drug. I know you're a good person. A kind and loving person. You wouldn't willingly sell a drug that you and your friends created to save the lives of the people you care about to someone who would use it against them. I do truly believe that. Maybe I had some doubts at first because of the email, but I know you wouldn't do something like that."

There was a but coming.

There was always a but coming.

"But you got involved with Raul somehow. Did he threaten you? One of your friends?"

Her hand was moving before she realized it again, only this time Tate was prepared, snagging her wrist before her palm could make contact with his cheek.

How dare he continue to throw accusations at her.

Hadn"t he heard a single word she'd said?

"Yeah, jerk, I got involved with him when he sent his men to break into my house and kidnap me. I got "involved","—she made air quotes with her fingers—"with him when I had to shoot one of his men to try to survive, not knowing there were more men already in the house. I got involved with him when I woke up in a small, cold, stone cell. When I was cuffed to a chair and beaten. When I was strung up by my hands and whipped. When I was …" Scarlett trailed off, realizing in her anger she'd almost blurted out about the drug. "When I was dragged out to the pool, and had a rock tied to my leg, and told I was going to be shoved into the water and fished out when I passed out. What about any of that makes it sound like I was any sort of willing, or even unwilling participant?"

By the time she finished her rant, Scarlett was breathing hard, her pulse throbbing loudly, all the aches and pains that had seemed to dim when she was in Tate's home were now screaming at her so she couldn't ignore them.

Tate was staring at her in shock, but by now she was done caring what he thought about her.

Arrogant jerk.

Like he was so perfect and everyone around him was beneath him.

What had she ever seen in him anyway?

Was she so desperate for love that she was inventing connections now with the first man who looked at her with a hint of interest in his eyes?

No more.

No more going out on dates every chance she got hoping that this time she was going to find the one and fall in love. No more dreaming of big weddings filled with love and laughter. No more pretending happy endings existed.

She was done.

Done with men, done with looking for love, done with caring so much about what others thought because she always felt like such a failure.

From here on out, she was focusing on learning to love one person and one person alone.

Herself.

How could she ever expect to actually find something that would last when she doubted everything about herself? When she felt like she wasn't good enough, that she was a failure, that she was too weak to ever be taken seriously.

She'd survived being tortured, she hadn"t told Raul what he wanted, and she wasn't weak. If she could make it through that then she could make it through anything.

You"re not weak.

You"re not pathetic.

You are strong.

A survivor.

You know how to love and care for others.

You know how to make them smile and laugh.

You learned love even if it wasn't at the hands of the people who were supposed to raise you and teach you everything you needed to know about life.

You have nothing to be ashamed of.

The internal pep talk worked. Sure she'd probably have to repeat it a few hundred times, but Scarlett already felt stronger and more sure of herself.

Determined to bring Raul Castillo down, Scarlett shoved away from Tate, surprised when he let her go. They couldn't stay out here, cops would be coming, alerted by calls of gunshots, and by now, Raul's men had to know they weren"t in the house. If she was going to bring down the weapons trafficker, then she had to get to Prey. Her team said they believed in her and told her that everyone else did, too. At the time she wasn't sure she believed them, but that was her insecurity talking.

Her people had her back.

Tate Laurier just wasn't one of her people.

"I want to go into Prey, then I want you to get the heck out of my life," she told him, deadly serious. Any connection she'd thought she felt toward this man had fizzled and died when he accused her all over again of being a traitor just hours after he was buried inside her.

January 16th

2:10 A.M.

He'd messed up.

Possibly beyond repair.

The sense of desolation Tate felt knowing that Scarlett had just slipped outside of his reach came as a shock.

If he'd wanted her, he could have had her, but he'd made his choices, decided that risking falling in love was too great a chance to take, and taken the easy way out, pushed her away before he could develop feelings. He'd been ruthless in how he'd gone about it because he'd panicked at the strength of his feelings after just one night.

Coward.

There was no other way to describe his behavior.

Now, even if he changed his mind, he'd lost his chance with her.

Lost it as soon as he'd accused her of bringing Raul's men to his front door.

The sting on his cheek from where her palm had connected ran deeper than surface level. Not in a physical sense, she hadn"t inflicted any injury, no broken bone, not even any bruising, if there was even a red mark at all it would quickly fade. But the sting of knowing that he'd hurt her, pushed her too far away from him to ever get her back, that would leave a lasting mark.

What could have been now never would.

Taking a step away from him, Scarlett pulled her cell phone from a small pocket in the side of her leggings. He hadn"t even realized she had it on her. When he thought about it, he recalled her having her cell in her hand when she crept out of her house, but so much had happened in the last twenty-four hours that it had slipped his mind. He'd been preoccupied with the idea of Scarlett taking a bullet for him to think of anything else.

Rookie mistake.

Scarlett hadn"t been alone while in his house other than one short trip to the bathroom, she hadn"t made a phone call, and while she could have sent a text with the phone on silent so he didn"t hear the tapping of keys, there was another much more likely scenario.

The cell phone was bugged.

It would explain why Raul's men knew when she was back home and then knew she was at his place. She was being tracked.

Since her cell phone had been left behind when she was kidnapped, he didn"t think Raul's men had a chance to put the tracker in her phone.

Which meant …

Maybe somebody at Prey was setting Scarlett up.

They might have access to her phone, and they'd know about the drug. Was it possible she really had been kidnapped and someone else had set up the email trail in case she was found so nobody would be looking at them?

Was it possible that someone was one of her teammates?

Who else would know enough about both Scarlett and the drug and have access to her cell phone?

She wasn't supposed to be found. She was supposed to have died in Raul's remote jungle home, never to be seen or heard from again. That would leave the true traitor in the clear and make sure suspicion never landed on them.

"No," he said, knocking the phone from Scarlett's hand when she tried to make a call. If the phone was compromised, he had to destroy it. Then he was going to have to keep Scarlett someplace safe, away from Prey, while he figured this out. He needed input from someone who wasn't messed up when it came to this woman. Someone who could think clearly and logically when she was around because those were things he absolutely couldn't do. If that didn"t tell him everything he needed to know about his feelings for her then nothing else ever would.

"What are you doing?" Scarlett growled, giving him the most adorable little death glare he'd ever seen.

Fighting a smile—he didn"t think Scarlett would appreciate him thinking she was cute when she was clearly furious with him—he lifted a foot and slammed it down onto the phone which had landed at their feet.

"Are you crazy? Do you think I was going to call Raul right in front of you? Newsflash, Tate, I don't have his number because we're not buddies," Scarlett snapped.

"I think your phone is bugged," he explained.

That took a little of the wind out of her sails. "Oh. I mean, I never thought of that, but it makes sense. Why did you think of it?" she asked, suspicion raging in her huge doe eyes. "After all, you already have a convenient target standing right in front of you. I"m the epicenter of all that is evil, aren"t I?" she taunted.

Was he ready to set aside all hints that she was guilty, even if it was because she had been coerced, and fully embrace the notion that she had been innocent all along?

Was he ready to set aside the evidence against Scarlett and look at it from a different perspective?

Was he ready to allow his gut to lead him rather than constantly trying to override it with what he thought was sensible logic but was really just his guilt over getting his father thrown in jail?

Was he ready to trust the woman whom he suspected if he let her have the power to wriggle beneath his defenses and lodge herself in his heart, a place he wanted to protect from love at all costs?

Before he got a chance to make up his mind one way or the other—and once he did, there would be no going back, no matter which side he picked—he saw shadows moving down the end of the street.

Not willing to hang around and find out if they were Raul's men, not when he had Scarlett with him, he grabbed her hand and pulled her along with him as he darted into the front yard of a house with a huge hedge fence. It should give them a place to hide unless the men were searching each and every yard.

"What are you doing?" Scarlett snapped, trying to fight her way out of his grip.

Not happening.

Yanking her up against his body, he pinned her arms to her sides with one of his across her chest and covered her mouth with his other hand. If she really tried, she could still make enough of a sound to alert the men of their hiding place, so he leaned down to whisper in her ear.

"Shh, Scarlett, I think it's Raul's men."

Tate knew his words penetrated because she stopped fighting him and instead went completely still.

They both seemed to hold their breaths as the footsteps grew louder, whispered voices accompanying them.

"They should be here," a voice with a Mexican accent muttered.

"You sure this is the right spot?" another asked.

"Yeah, tracker says the phone should be here," the first replied.

"Oh, it's here," a third said, and Tate didn"t have to be able to see them to know they'd found the wrecked phone.

"They know," the second man said.

"Boss won"t be happy," the third added.

"They can"t have gone far, they're on foot," the first reminded them. "We can still find them before the boss even knows we lost them."

The footsteps faded as the men hurried off further down the road, searching for him and Scarlett. There was no doubt what would happen if they were found. He'd be killed, they wouldn't allow Scarlett to take another bullet for him—not that he wanted her to—and she would be taken back to Raul.

Where she would be tortured until she gave up the formula.

Everybody had a breaking point.

Didn"t matter how much training you had, exert enough pressure, and everybody broke.

No way could he allow that to happen to Scarlett.

Releasing her slowly, he turned her around to face him. She was pale in the moonlight and shivering, not dressed properly to be out on the cold winter night, not even wearing any shoes. Her eyes were wide, and although fear shone brightly in them there was something else as well.

Determination.

She'd taken her anger at being accused of being a traitor and was using it as fuel. Proud as he was of her for standing up for herself, he was equal parts scared.

Because that determination meant she was prepared to take risks. Risks that might well get her killed, because she already felt like she didn"t have anything to lose.

Somehow, he had to convince her that wasn't true.

She was smart and beautiful, strong and kind, sweet and funny, any man would be lucky to have her.

That man just couldn't be him.

If things were different, if he was different, he'd snap up what she was offering in a heartbeat.

But some things just weren"t meant to be.

That didn't mean he wasn't going to do everything he could to keep her alive, and hope that one day she found the happiness and place to belong she deserved, even if it couldn't be with him. He wasn't that selfish, even if his entire body reacted violently to the thought of her with another man.