Page 31 of Forced By the Bratva

She turned to me and pursed her lips. I pulled her back and made her lie on my chest.

“Let me go and tend to the fire,” she said and tried to pull away, but I pulled her back and tightened my grip around her body.

I wouldn’t choose to be stuck on an island with anyone else. Jenna was the perfect option.

It wasn’t too long before Jenna slept again.

Luckily, when morning came, a helicopter landed nearby. I stood up quickly when I heard the sound, waking Jenna. She sat up and began to rub her eyes.

I watched her as she tried to wake up fully. I looked down at the fire. It was now filled with just smoke and little to no flame.

I stood up and helped Jenna to her feet.

“I think they’re here to rescue us,” I told her, pointing to the helicopter nearby.

Her eyes lit up, and there was a smile on her face as she sighed. She placed her hands around her chest.

Immediately after we stood, the smoke from the fire shifted in our direction, and our eyes began to water again.

“Thank goodness! At least we were safe until we found help.”

My men walked out of the helicopter. They rushed toward us and led us back to the craft. Tom was there when we arrived. He sighed deeply when he saw us and walked down from the helicopter.

“Thank goodness you’re both safe,” he said.

“Thank you for coming to our rescue,” I replied.

“When I couldn’t contact you, I decided to come over and see for myself,” Tom began when we sat in the helicopter. “I saw your car there and not you both, so I panicked.”

He paused and turned to Jenna, then back to me. It seemed like he wanted to tease her, but he changed his mind. Her head was on my shoulder, and our hands were locked together.

“Luckily, I saw the smoke from the bush and called my rescue team to come with their helicopter to rescue you both.”

Chapter 17 - Jenna

Even a few minutes after Feliks’ car drove away, the smile plastered on my face was enough to melt even the coldest ice and break the hardest rocks. I wondered if Feliks ever noticed.

I noticed, not for the first time, that I’d been smiling after him a lot these days—when I re-read his texts, which usually had little or no emotions attached to them, or better still, he usually tried to hold back his feelings and not express them in his texts.

Whatever it was, what I knew for sure was that something about him always made me smiley, even when he wasn’t there.

It was one of the very few mornings he somehow had the time to have breakfast with me before he left for work. Usually, he was always in a hurry, as if he was rushing out to catch up with someone or something.

I gently slapped the side of my face when my jaw began to hurt from smiling too much and walked back into the house to meet the table where we had just had breakfast being cleared by the housekeeper. I stood there for a while watching. I was getting used to other people doing my chores for me.

In the beginning, it had been hard for me to adjust. It still felt weird that I could leave the table after eating and have someone else clear it for me.

I walked straight to my room after standing there and watching the housekeeper for a while. Because it was still early morning, there was so much time and nothing much to do, and I felt bored.

My usual routine, whenever Feliks left the house since I didn’t have anywhere else to go, was to stand by the window of my room, which overlooked the small garden at the back of the house. The cool morning breeze and its counterpart in the evening usually soothed my nerves.

The garden was beautiful, but for some reason, I’d never actually visited the garden and spent time there—maybe because I’d always been voluntarily confined to my room.

I decided to stand by my window that morning to admire the garden as usual, especially since the sun was already starting to peek from the sky, making the view even more beautiful. The fact that I had to glimpse the sun from the branches of some of the trees in the garden made the whole picture look more surreal.

It was so beautiful that I didn’t want to stop looking.

The ding from my phone, lying under the pillow since last night, pulled me rudely from my thoughts and cut short my admiration of the natural goodness that I had the luxury of viewing from my window from the comfort of my room.

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