"For three months straight? Always knowing exactly where you'll be?"
Put like that, it sounds impossible. It sounds like something more than coincidence or good guessing.
Cole crouches down next to the rear driver's side wheel.
"He put a tracker on your car," he says.
"What?"
"That's how he knows where you are. That's how he knew you were at the fights tonight." Cole reaches underneath the car, his hand disappearing into the wheel well. "Found it."
He pulls out something small and black—a device about the size of a matchbox with a blinking green light on one side. A GPS tracker. Daniel put a GPS tracker on my car.
For three months.
For three goddamn months, I've been driving around thinking I was safe, thinking I had some privacy, and he's been tracking my every movement.
Cole stands up, the tracker in his palm, and looks at it for a moment. Then his fist closes around it.
I watch as he crushes it.
The plastic casing cracks, then shatters completely. The green light flickers and dies. His hand is so large the device disappears entirely within his grip, and when he opens his palm again, all that's left are broken pieces and circuit board fragments.
I bite my lower lip.
I can't help it. Watching him destroy that thing, watching the casual display of strength, the complete lack of effort it took, sends heat straight between my legs. My control is slipping. Hasbeen slipping since the moment he put his hands on me during that first lesson, but now it's actively falling apart.
He brushes the pieces off his palm, letting them fall to the ground.
"He won't be able to track you anymore," he says. "But you should check your phone too. Make sure he didn't install anything there."
"I will. Thank you."
"And if he shows up again, anywhere, any time, you call me immediately."
"Okay."
He's looking at me in that way he does, like he's reading something I'm not saying out loud, like he can see straight through to whatever I'm trying to hide.
"You want to come upstairs?" he asks.
"Upstairs?"
"My apartment. Above the gym. It's warmer than standing out here. Private."
Private.
I know what he's offering. Or what he might be offering. Or what could happen if I say yes. This isn't just an invitation for coffee and conversation. This is Cole Steele, Rampage, asking if I want to go somewhere alone with him, somewhere private, after he just pinned my ex to a wall and threatened to break his legs.
I should say no.
I should absolutely say no.
Cole is dangerous. Violent. The kind of man who beats people unconscious for money and doesn't apologize for it. The kind ofman who has scars on his knuckles and nightmares he won't talk about and a darkness in him that I can see even when he's trying to hide it.
He is nothing like the kind of man I ever thought I'd be attracted to. Nothing like the safe, stable, predictable men I dated before. Nothing like the life I planned for myself when I moved to Blackwater Falls looking for quiet and safety.
But he's also the man who spent an hour teaching me how to protect myself with more patience than I knew he possessed. The man who invited me to his fight and made sure I'd be safe. The man who just grabbed my ex-boyfriend by the throat and promised to break him if he came near me again.
