Read Online Sweet Affliction [Sweet Awakenings 4] (Siren Publishing Classic) by Nicole Morgan - Free Book Online Page B

minutes before as I worried whether he would be too tired to make the short trip back to the house, suddenly ran toward the man, knocked him down, wrestled with the gun and…”
    She stopped, and he felt her hand tense under his. “It’s okay.”
    “It went off. I was so scared. I ran to them while screaming. He stood up and tried to catch me before I saw. The man’s face was…gone.” She winced as she said it.
    “Somehow my dad had fought with enough strength to make sure the bullet not only didn’t hit you, but it didn’t hit him either. Once it was aimed at the man my father pulled the trigger. He was nearly unrecognizable, as a man I mean. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen. My dad was covered in blood, and I searched him for signs of injury, but he looked into my eyes and calmed me before he tended to you.”
    The story she was telling was unbelievable. Not in the sense that he thought she was lying, but clearly the man must have been riding on pure adrenaline.
    “It was when he saw your tattoo. He started shouting for me to check the man’s pockets as he searched yours. He found your ID and read the name aloud before sliding it in one of the dead man’s pockets.”
    No matter how much he tried to stop himself from interrupting her, it was fruitless. As a moment of “what the fuck” consumed him he asked, “What the hell did he do that for?”
    Her tension turned to fear again. He was starting to be able to read her better and hated that his question scared her. “Please? AJ, I need to know what’s going on.”
    “He wanted them to think the man was you. That you were dead.”
    His eyes closed tightly shut, and he ground his teeth together in an effort to keep from screaming. Some of the loose ends were starting to make sense. That was why he wasn’t taken to a hospital. That was the reason. As far as the United States Navy knew, he was dead.
    “Please let me explain.” Her words were distraught.
    He wondered what the fuck kind of explanation she could come up with that would even come close to justifying faking his death, but none came to mind. He was already classified as dead, so listening to her really couldn’t hurt too much.
    “Okay,” he answered, although anger raged within him.
    “He started ranting. He was going on about a sixth sense and how when he’d stare through the scope of his rifle the little hairs on the back of his neck would stand up when something wasn’t right and how he felt that again. None of it made sense. I was confused. My father was covered in blood and so weak, yet he was barking orders at me, telling me to brush the trail of blood you’d left away with my feet, covering it with the sand. It was almost like something in him snapped. All I wanted to do was get him back here and resting.”
    She looked deep into his eyes then, truly staring at him with everything she had. He could see just how confused she really was.
    “Don’t you see, Commander Slater? My dad is dying. He has no strength and can barely handle a short walk in the evenings, yet when he saw you it was as if someone had injected him with superhero powers. He was strong like he used to be, only stronger than I’d ever known him to be. And for some reason when he told me that I needed to trust him, that no one could know you were alive…” She shrugged. “I trusted him. He’s my dad.”
    Nick thought before he chose to respond. Debating on the right thing to say, he kept his hand on hers. For all intents and purposes, her story was insane. Every normal person in the world would hear that story and roll their eyes in an exaggerated manner, writing the whole thing off to utter and complete bullshit.
    Something she said was nagging at him though. Her father was a marine. Granted, he was a navy man, but marines were not candy asses. Sure they liked to poke jabs at the other branch of military and vice versa, but he’d served with many marines over the years and knew damn well that some of the