What I Fight For: A Bad Boy Military Romance (Easy Team Book 1) by Gemma Hart Page A

several times from staring at him outright.
                  As the two men talked, I looked out the open door and saw a little girl walking down the side of the street. She was in a ragged dress and her hair was in a messy braid. She had a very round tummy but the sunken cheeks of a malnourished child.
                  I was just reviewing in my head what kind of foods we might have brought with us in the truck that I could give her when I saw her squat down near a gutter and pick something out from a muddy puddle. From where I stood, it looked like some kind of dirty soaking bar of some sort.
                  Before I could shout, the girl immediately put the dirty dripping bar into her mouth.
                  “No!” I cried out as I bolted out the door. “No, no! Don’t put that in your mouth!”
                  From behind me, I heard Cooper shout out in surprise, “Hey! What are you doing!”
                  But I ignored him and ran straight for the little girl who had frozen in shocked surprise at the screaming white lady.
                  Panting, I stopped in front of her. I put a hand on her shoulder lest she tried to run away. Closer now, I could see that it wasn’t some kind of sopping bar or bread; it was literally a piece of iron.
                  It was some kind of rusted piece of iron that had been sitting in a dirty mud puddle for god knows how long.
                  I plucked the iron from the little girl’s hand. She made a small sound of protest but I shook my head.
                  “No,” I said, hoping my gestures and expression would translate. I spoke slowly, shaking my head. “This is not food. This is bad. Don’t eat this.” I shook my head again as I held the piece of rusted iron up. “Not food, okay?”
                  The girl looked up at me in confusion, clearly hungry and not sure why a strange white lady wouldn’t just let her eat whatever she wanted.
                  I sighed and dug into my pockets. I pulled out a slightly crushed granola bar. I handed it to her. I realized with some dry irony that she took the granola a lot more suspiciously than she had taken the dirty piece of iron.
                  She held it like a foreign bomb that might explode in her hands.
                  “That’s okay to eat,” I said. I mimed spooning food into my mouth and then pointed to the granola bar to connect the two. “That’s food.”
                  The girl looked at the bar and then to me skeptically. I added nutritional aid to my list of things to do for the city. We had boxes of calorie dense nutritional bars at base camp. We had been handing them out to the refugees but I realized the people in the city needed them just as much.
                  I was about to see if I could ask the girl her name when a large hand touched the small of my back, making me whirl around.
                  Cooper stood behind me. He smiled at the little girl and said something in Qunari to her.
                  The little girl looked up at Cooper with a quiet regard before looking suspiciously around the street. Finally she nodded.
                  “What did you—?” I started.
                  “Why don't you take her inside? The official says that he has some tea and biscuits for her,” Cooper said, gently pressing my back towards the official’s office.
                  I gave him an odd look. Where had he suddenly come from? There seemed to be an urgency in his body but his voice and facial expression were calm and collected.
                  “Alright,” I said slowly. I was about to usher the little girl along when suddenly I felt a small hand grab my own.
                  I looked down and saw the little girl pulling me along