1
Twisted
Colleen
This is Book #2 of
the Scholarship Mafia: Tristan Duet.
If you haven’t read TWISTED yet,
Get TWISTED 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.