Page 1 of Tangled

1

Twisted

Colleen

This is Book #2 of

the Scholarship Mafia: Tristan Duet.

If you haven’t readTWISTEDyet,

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. Heboughther, 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 onlysixteen!Icouldn’tleave 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 nightandtwo 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 itnow!”