Total pages in book: 60
Estimated words: 58987 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 295(@200wpm)___ 236(@250wpm)___ 197(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 58987 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 295(@200wpm)___ 236(@250wpm)___ 197(@300wpm)
He smiles, then laughs. "Are you dangerous, Scarletta?"
"What?" I giggle.
"That look. Wow. You just checked me the fuck out."
"So? Did you hate it?"
"Not at all, button. I'm diggin' it hard."
"Button?" I snort.
"Yeah." He pauses, smiling all the way up to his gleaming eyes. "You're like… cute as a fuckin' button."
"Oh, my god."
"I'm lame, right?"
"Well… yeah. But…" I let out a breath. We're flirting. And I love it. "Totally lame. Please don't stop."
His smile lingers a few moments too long. Like he's really thinking about this interaction. "So… let's go," he says, and there's something different in his voice now—lower, rougher around the edges.
He steps a little closer, not crowding me but close enough that I can smell whatever clean, woodsy scent he's wearing.
"I'll show you exactly how to turn your already amazing body into something so goddamn fuckable that every single man within a two-hundred-mile radius will be lining up, practically begging for the chance to take you out."
My brain short-circuits.
Fuckable.
He just said fuckable.
To my face.
Like it's a completely normal thing to say to someone you're training.
My pulse is hammering so hard I'm pretty sure he can see it in my throat. My face is burning. Every nerve ending in my body just woke up at once, screaming.
I open my mouth. Close it. Open it again.
Nothing comes out.
Ryan's watching me with that same easy confidence, like he didn't just detonate a bomb in the middle of my carefully maintained composure. Like he knows exactly what that word did to me—and he's enjoying it.
Then he turns and heads toward the machines—casual, confident, like he didn't just rearrange every single thought in my brain.
While I stay rooted in place.
Mouth open.
Heart pounding.
The word fuckable looping on repeat in my head like some kind of filthy mantra I can't shut off.
He wants me.
The realization crashes through me. Hot, and disorienting, and impossibly real.
He actually wants me.
Not hypothetically. Not in some vague, distant, maybe-someday sense.
He wants me. Right now. Enough to say it out loud. Enough to use a word like that and watch what it does to me.
My legs feel shaky. My skin feels too tight. Everything inside me is vibrating at a frequency I don't recognize.
I force myself to move. One foot in front of the other.
Hurrying to catch up.
Ready to see exactly where this goes.
Chapter 8
Caleb
I'm starting to wonder if I might be obsessed. Not in the casual way I normally am, but… clinical definition.
Because here I am, sitting in a black Tahoe across the street from Iron River Fitness, with enough surveillance equipment to make me look like a Mission Impossible cliche.
The drink-holders are littered with empty coffee cups—three of them, all from different days because apparently I've made this parking spot my second office. In addition to my custom security setup on the dash, there's a laptop balanced on the passenger seat, feeds cycling through every angle I've managed to hack into.
Legal? Absolutely not.
Necessary? Apparently fucking so, because I can't seem to stop myself.
Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to determine if your good little slut is actually… not yours at all.
The leather steering wheel creaks under my grip. I force myself to loosen my fingers, to breathe. This is what passes for restraint these days—not breaking inanimate objects while I watch her gym from across the street like some kind of deranged stalker.
Which, let's be honest, is exactly what I am. I've crossed so many lines I can't even see them in the rearview mirror anymore.
It's been nine days since I gave her my card with explicit instructions to find me when she's ready. To contact me. To give me some indication that what happened between us wasn't just a fever dream I manufactured in my own twisted mind.
Three of those days count as travel days since she went to Vegas for her little glow-up.
But actually, the third day doesn't really count as a travel day anymore because Ryan fucking Adamson bumped in to her at the baggage claim.
What if that was planned?
No I can't even consider that.
Why Caleb? It's an honest question. You have no idea what's been happening inside Iron River Fitness. You have no cameras in there. Not a single fucking one.
The point is, two days out of nine.
Two full days she was, for certain, not thinking about Ryan Adamson because she was in Vegas getting new hair, and new nails, and new clothes, and new makeup. A complete transformation. A reinvention.
Trying to forget me.
Trying to scrub away every trace of what happened in the maze. Trying to wash the blood off her hands with platinum blonde dye and Charlotte Tilbury foundation. Trying to bury the memory of my cock spewing long ropes of come all over a corpse.
Trying to put her past behind her—to put me behind her.
That's what women do when they break up with a man, isn't it? They reinvent themselves. They emerge from the cocoon as someone new, someone better, someone who never would have done those things in the first place.