Rescued Read online

  RESCUED

  By Scarlett Hope

  Copyright © 2019 by Scarlett Hope

  All rights reserved. In no way is it legal to produce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless written permission from the publisher. For permission requests, email the author at: [email protected]

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This book contains adult language and explicit love scenes. It is no suitable for anyone under 18 years of age.

  Please respect the authors hard work and buy a copy!!!

  Edited by Scarlett Hope

  Cover Design by Scarlett Hope

  Contents

  About The Author

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Epilogue

  Want More of Scarlett Hope?

  About The Author

  Scarlett Hope is a promising and talented creative writer. She’s passionate about the romance genre and it only made sense for her to start turning her ideas into short, super steamy and ultra-sweet love stories.

  Hope’s books surely wouldn’t be the same without a strong alpha male ready to get his possessive hands dirty to conquer the heart of his queen.

  When Scarlett writes, drama is always on the agenda and you can almost certainly expect a happy ever after…you just have to read on to find out.

  Sit back, grab one of her books and enjoy the read.

  Are you looking to connect with Scarlett?

  You can send her an email to [email protected] or join her Facebook page.

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  Chapter One

  Lucy

  My cup of coffee – that steaming bundle of loveliness I had spent all morning craving for – slipped from my hands and met the floor with a sickening crash. The customer to my right jerked a little and somewhere in my periphery I saw Mrs. Ustrov open her mouth in abject horror at the scene. But I didn’t – couldn’t – give her that look of reassurance she expected from me. The hand which had been relieved of the cup remained stuck in the air and slowly began to shake the longer I stared at the notification in my hands. This could not be happening. No, no, this could not be happening.

  I could feel the steam from the spilled coffee snaking around my feet but all I could do was stare at that paper, reading it over and over again, hoping to God that my eyes were playing tricks on me or that I had had a little too much wine last night or anything else at all. Please. Mrs. Ustrov said something but I could barely hear her from the echo of my mind. Both my hands were shaking now as they clutched the paper, squeezing it at both sides and ruining its ridiculously perfect contours.

  It was a notification of evacuation. Those bastards. Hadn’t they taken away enough already? After almost completely sucking away the profits of the family flower shop for the past six months, this was what they thought of next?

  I couldn’t even stomach the writing on the paper. The land my family’s flower shop stood on for generations has been bought by a company last week, it said. We are to ‘kindly take note of this’ and are ‘duly advised to withdraw from the premises within the next two months.’ How… dare they? I suddenly squeezed the paper and threw it at the nearest thing I could find with all my might – and that didn’t even come close to expressing my anger.

  ‘Are you alright, Lucy?’ Mrs. Ustrov’s words finally broke through the haze which had overtaken my mind and I sucked in a breath. The poor woman – she must have asked that question hundreds of times by now. I turned my now-watering eyes to hers which were fearfully squinting at me from behind her glasses. She looked genuinely concerned and I began to feel guilty. All through the past few months, Mrs. Ustrov has been unfailingly by my side, through funerals, tears and loan sharks. I had no right to upset her this way.

  ‘Oh Mrs. Ustrov’, my voice quivered on her name and that was enough for her to clear away the uncertainty from her face, untie her apron and come close enough to envelope me in her arms.

  Of the countless twists fate had chosen to throw at me for the past three months, this had to be the craziest and the most absurd. In fact, as the only customer in the shop finally decided to escape the whole scene and visit another florist, I couldn’t summon the energy to convince him to ‘look around and pick that flower to win her heart!’, as I normally would. Even as Mrs. Ustrov’s hands began to rove up and down my back, I could only feel my head subtly swing left and right in denial on her shoulder.

  ‘It’s going to be just alright dear. Breathe. Just breath, okay? It’ll be alright’

  But it’s not gonna be. Not this time.

  I’d been fresh out of college last year, just done with the final exams and anxious to make my mark on the world when I’d received a call which promptly wiped out the shine in my face. My parents had died. It had been the cliché drunk driver incident, only this time they had not been riding a car, a bus or a motorbike – they had not even been innocently walking on the road as fresh, unprotected targets. No. They had been in a restaurant, celebrating their twenty-fifth year anniversary, recollecting all those years they had spent together when the car had barged in from nowhere and hit them. Two other lives had been lost. A couple of people got injured. The restaurant had to close down. And I never saw my parents again.

  I missed them. I missed her smile, his gruff attitude, her soft way of balancing out his excesses, their love which had seemed so improbable to everyone around them and had lasted longer than even they had thought it would. Even though I’d spent eighteen years with them, it wasn’t nearly enough. I wished I had them by my side for a little longer, at least to see me get married and have kids of my own.

  The funeral came and went by in a haze. I wasn’t quite aware of anything that happened and thank God for Mrs. Ustrov else it wouldn’t have taken place at all – or at least not as seamlessly as it did. The tears which wouldn’t stop escaping my eyes rendered me useless. Living in this shop with so many memories of them was bittersweet. Yet every day, whenever I woke up, walked downstairs to see the roses, lilies, daffodils, marigolds and everything my parents had spent which my parents had spent years grooming, I could feel them. Right here. Watching over me.

  So that, and the fact that I had worked so hard to keep it running for the past six months, is why I will not give up the shop.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ Mrs. Ustrov asked as she looked down at me. I had managed to find a stool to sit on and she had managed to find and straighten out that notification paper. Now, she looked at me with her eyebrows curved and lips turned downwards and slightly open.

  ‘Not give up, that’s what we are going to do.’

  She looked at me and sighed, shaking her head. I knew what she was thinking. How could we fight against a multinational company? How would we stand up to FAMECO, the biggest investment corporation on earth, especially since it has decided to knock its giant hand on our door to use our land for other purposes a.k.a. its shiny new company branch? Oh, and I haven’t forgotten the fact that the fee
ble claim we originally had on this land went into the air the moment my father used it as collateral for a loan he was afterwards unable to repay. So we could say goodbye to the luxury of pursuing the case in court.

  ‘We haven’t even paid…’

  ‘I know Mrs. Ustrov.’

  It’s not as if I could ever forget. For all his love and cleverness, dad had one problem he couldn’t quite get rid of – the need to always look tough. He would permit no show of weakness, even if it meant spending money he didn’t have just to keep us assured that ‘all is well’. He had taken out so many loans and left the shop sinking in debt. And I should have known better than to believe his assurances.

  ‘We’ll… we’ll find a way’, I took off my apron and went to take a glass of water. ‘We’ll put up a resistance of some sort, find means to expand the business or… or… knock on the door of the bloody FAMECO corporation until they decide to leave us alone’

  I gulped down my water. Then paused. Now, wasn’t that an idea?

  Mrs. Ustrov saw the expression which suddenly overtook my face and began to shake her head slowly.

  ‘Oh, no. No Lucy. Don’t go there.’ I stepped backwards as she stepped towards me, shaking her finger. ‘No don’t even think about it.’

  Too late.

  ‘It is a good idea. I mean… what other choice do we have?’ I slowly backed away from her and slipped under the counter to the other side of the shop, ‘All we have to do is talk to them, you know?’

  This time, I took a vase and held it in front of me as a sort of protection. But she didn’t budge.

  ‘Talk to them? Talk? No, no Lucy. This is one of your crazy ideas. If talking could get things done, we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place. Calm down and think about this’

  ‘But we have no time!’ By now I was breathing hard from all the exercise we’d done around the shop. For her age, Mrs. Ustrov sure was intimidatingly agile. She hadn’t even lost her serious, no-you-don’t-missy look and her pudgy finger was still firmly aimed at me.

  I know I had taken some pretty bad decisions these past few months in my desperation to save the shop. But I knew deep down that this wasn’t another mistake. Besides, what other option do we have?

  ‘This is something we have to do, Mrs. Ustrov. We have to at least try and do something. They’re going to take all these. Everything! And then what?’ I stretched out my arms as if to stress my words. After a little pause spent trying to calm my heaving chest, I put down the vase and walked towards her, saying softly, ‘What do we do then Mrs. Ustrov?’

  She only looked at me. We both knew there was no other way to go. Sure, I was only a twenty-year-old with nothing close to my father’s experience or my mother’s patience. But I had the heart of one who would do anything to preserve the memory of her family. And the spunk of one who had taken on a business that would otherwise be dead. These meant that I would have my voice no matter what, even if it meant going to the C.E.O. of that devilish company himself.

  Chapter Two

  Dale

  The alarm blared and my eyes opened. A nerve twitched in my forehead. Damn. What exactly had happened last night? Why does my head feel like the fucking roman cavalries are having a party there and why on God’s earth would that alarm not stop blaring?

  ‘Dale’, the girl beside me purred, inching her legs closer and snaking her hands around my chest.

  What was her name again? Emerald? Ruby? Or was it Diamond? Fuck. I really couldn’t deal with this right now. Removing her hands from my body, I swung my legs to the side of the bed, sat upright, blinked hard and held my head in my hands. I remember I had been in some sort of charity ball last night. Collins, my right-hand man, who also happened to be the biggest thorn in my life, had convinced me to ‘go out there, check out the options, see a woman or two or even three, the more the merrier.’ The damn idiot had had me all dressed in a tuxedo ‘to better attract the ladies’. As if the fact that I had more money than any other man in America wasn’t enough of an attraction.

  I never got drunk. Ever. Not since what happened three years ago. Yet Collins had done some perusing of his own just to make that happen. He’d fully unleashed his boyish charm, smooth tongue and thousand-kilowatt smile on the ladies, occasionally dropping hints which went like;

  ‘You see that tall, handsome chunk of six-foot-three manliness over there with the dark, beguiling stare? Yes, yes, that guy. It kills me to say but…’ and then he’d lean on some table and flip his hair, ‘Do you know he is Dale McNorla, C.E.O of FAMECO, otherwise known as the freshest fish in the goddamn American pond of eligible bachelors?’

  Needless to say, by the evening’s end, I had a whole swarm of models and non-models buzzing sultrily, batting eyelashes and pushing tits of every size and color at my face. And as if that was not enough, they’d all collectively tried to get me drunk as hell. And I’d let them. Why Emerald/Ruby/Diamond got to come home with me though, I couldn’t understand.

  I stood on my feet, toes sinking into the black carpet, and stretched out my arms the best I could. The morning air whiffed around my naked body as I stared out the walls of the glass penthouse down at hundreds of thousands of buildings stretching out as far as I could see. It was supposed to be impressive. This was the sort of thing mortals were meant to look at and contemplate the insignificance of our existence or some shit. But as the sun slowly peeked around the city, casting its golden light through the glass at my body and at the city which never slept and so had no need to wake up, even through the pounding in my head or perhaps because of it, all I could think of was how pointless it all was.

  In the world of cutthroat business, I had seen each and every kind of human. We are so fucking needy. And so damn untrustworthy. Collins was the only one who had remained by my side for this long and that was only because we had grown up together and done all those corny boyish things. He was annoying as hell, had always been the exact opposite of my character and I sometimes wished I could have his grinning face on a pike. Still, he was the one person I could give a gun and know I wouldn’t get a fucking hole in my head the next second.

  Collins, the typical golden-haired ladies charmer, loved to throw out casual hints that I had been much more fun when I was younger and that I had changed. Well I don’t know what the heck he meant by that.

  As I walked towards the view, I couldn’t remember a single time when, like Collins, I’d been all too happy to throw caution to the wind and charm the skirts, or pants, off anything with tits in sight. Besides, even if I had been that guy, how could I have remained all happy-jolly after all these shitty years? In fact, who on this earth wouldn’t become a ‘closed-off and unfeeling sardonic bastard’ after being through what I had been through? Building up my empire had been no child’s play; I’d had to sacrifice my soul. So, who wouldn’t look at all these – the money, girls and damn penthouse view – and see the futility in it all?

  The girl behind me purred again, stirring awake.

  Although my back was turned to her, I felt her eyes open up and stare at me. They paused, then travelled from my black, tussled hair down my muscled back, butt and finally to my feet. My lips twisted into a smirk. I could practically see the gears in her brain turning faster and faster, nearing overdrive. I saw the calculation in her eyes. I saw her, with my mind’s eye, thinking that she had hit the jackpot and smiling to herself. Finally, the bed sheets rustled and she got up and walked over.

  ‘Hey ba…’

  ‘Leave.’

  The word was simple. It had always been. Yet she, just like so many other before her, stood frozen to my side like I had just read out some kind of mind-numbing legal document. I walked over to the counter and poured myself some water, still staring outside the penthouse but now thinking of the day ahead. I hadn’t been to the headquarters since that business trip to Japan for a convention that lasted one week. Collins had had everything in tight control, I was sure. My secretary, Natalie, was under strict instructions to contact me i
mmediately an emergency cropped up. Still, I’d had too much time to myself. As the cool water rushed down my throat, lessening to some degree the drum-fest in my head, I gave a nod in agreement. Yes. I had to give myself some sort of thing to do, re-immerse myself in the running of the business; else I would go fucking crazy.

  Besides, I reasoned as I tilted my head slightly, wasn’t MEMAR, one of our partner companies, supposed to…

  ‘Daaaarrling.’

  My thoughts stopped short as my hand froze midway to my mouth. I turned to my left. She was still here?

  Damn. She actually was. Not just that, she had decided to take matters into her own hands and had taken the liberty of spreading herself on my work table, trying to do one of those coquettish body-wriggling displays I had been unfortunate enough to be a recipient of one time too many.

  Maybe once, long, long ago, her hooded stare would have caused a shiver to run down my spine. Those perky tits which she now held and plucked while running her tongue over her lips would have sent me to cloud nine. Her slender finger now being sucked into her mouth and traced down her body, through those tits, her bellybutton and into the pink folds of her pussy while she gyrated to some imaginary music would have gotten me bloodshot with lust.

  But now, I was way too smart to fall into that trap again. I turned my eyes away.

  This was why I stayed away from women. This – This annoying behavior of assuming that her body was enough to make me go against my will. Why did women always assume they could exercise power they never even had from the start? I scoffed. Power? I had seen it happen way to many times for liking, in way too many ways. One forgotten night with her and now she felt emboldened enough to try to seduce me.