Escort

Chapter Ten

"What!?" Kate screamed into the phone. "You can't be serious!"

"Yes! Her name is Scarlet and she reminds me of you! She's fifteen though, so a year younger and..."

Kate stopped listening, she was too busy trying to avoid her hyperventilating from sounding through the phone, her tears on the verge of breaking through. This can't be happening. Bianca kept on talking, Kate could just slightly make out the words of 'green eyes' and 'redhead' before she started gasping for air.

"Kate? Kate! Breathe! Come on honey, breathe," she suddenly felt his arms on her shoulders and when her eyes started focusing again she was looking right into his blue eyes.

He was breathing calmly, exaggerating each breath for her to follow. She tried her best, tried breathing with him, but the panic inside of her didn't subside, refused to disappear. Her hands were shaking and she realized he must've taken the phone from her because it was laying on the couch beside her.

"What's going on? Is Kate okay?" she vaguely heard Bianca ask from the speaker of the phone.

"I think she's having a panic attack, what did you say to her?" Rick asked, searching in her eyes for answers behind what was going on, why there were tears streaming down her cheeks. Why she was having trouble breathing.

"I just told her about our new sister..." Kate saw Rick's eyes widen with sudden understanding.

"Okay, I got it, I'm gonna try calm her down, she'll call or text you later," he stated before clicking on the phone to end the call. "Kate, it's gonna be okay, we will help her. We can put a stop to this," he said calmly, never once showing any sign of the stress she was feeling.

He was hugging her shoulders with his hands, keeping her gaze with steady eyes, breathing in a slow, soothing rhythm. Kate leaned down, placing her head in the crook of his neck, and took a deep breath to fill her nostrils with his scent. His arms gently fell around her in a comfortable hug, though it did put him in a weird position so it didn't take long before he excused himself and push her away for a second only to sit down beside her in the couch and pull her into his lap. The exact moment she was safely in his arms she found herself taking slower breaths, her heart started to calm down from the panic and she felt some sort of peace cripple down her veins.

"I got you," he whispered, kissing her head. "We'll solve this."

Swallowing hard she whispered with a broken voice, "How?"

He hummed for a few seconds, probably thinking of a way to handle this, a way to fix it all.

"Well, we could get proof of what they do to her and did to you, we show and tell the police everything," he told her and she only nodded.

He cuddled her closer, kissed her head again, and they sat like that for only god knows how long. He wouldn't relax his body until he felt hers doing so, until she was breathing normally, calmed down in his arms. He was scared of her reaction, how bad had they treated her in the beginning? Had she meant literally when she said they showed her what to do when they introduced her to their kind of escort services. Rick felt disgusted by himself for not knowing what he had contributed to when he first hired her, how could he have added to her pain?! Of course he didn't mean any harm about it but... had he only thought further than his nose then maybe he wouldn't have been so selfish. He never even thought of how she would feel about it, especially not when she had been so willing, now he understood that was a learned behavior due to whatever her foster parents had made her do as a teenager. Then again he did absolutely not regret meeting her. There was nothing more he wanted than to spend the rest of his life with her, even though he had a feeling it was too soon to have those thoughts he couldn't deny them. It was just something about her that pulled him to her, as if they were the ends of two magnets and the pull was too strong for him to refuse. He had never felt that with anyone else, and he somehow knew that he would never feel that with anyone else.