Chapter 22
“Are you sure you want to do this?”
Hadley tightened her ponytail and frowned at him. “Of course, I do. If anything goes wonky at any point during this dinner tomorrow, or at any other point in this mission, I want to know how to protect myself on some basic level.”
Cole’s hands went to his hips. “I’ll protect you.”
Annoyance flowed through her veins like a river of freakin’ lava.
They’d been arguing about this for twenty minutes.
She was glad she’d had him disable the cameras in the living room for this little encounter, because she might just kill him and wouldn’t want to incriminate herself.
“I know you’ll protect me. But I want to know how to defend myself.
Maybe if I’d known how to do that, we wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with. ”
His expression softened. “There were two of them. There wasn’t anything you could’ve done differently.”
She straightened the padded exercise mat she’d borrowed from the Pilates MLM lady down the block and thrown down in the living room, did her level best not to remember how it felt to wake up to bad guys standing over her, and focused her attention on the stubborn jackass in front of her.
“I’ll rest easier if I know what to do if I’m ever attacked again. ”
“I’m a terrible teacher,” he argued. “You’ll hate me.”
“I will not. I asked you to do this. Please, just help me so I can relax a little.”
His answering sigh let her know she’d won.
Cole was nothing if not consistent. Her fear and discomfort were a trigger for him.
He’d do pretty much anything to help her rest easier.
She would’ve felt bad for using that trigger against him if she wasn’t so sexually frustrated.
But she was, so she did. And as a result, she felt zero guilt.
Especially since he’d gone out of his damn way to change the subject every time she tried to bring up the fact that she’d basically used him the night before as her own personal masturbation tool…and that he’d been a totally willing participant.
Plus, he was wearing those damn sweatpants and that threadbare white T-shirt again. It just pissed her off that he looked positively edible in that outfit, meanwhile, she was practically wearing the same thing and looked like Adam Sandler.
“Fine,” he said through gritted teeth, approaching her on the mat. “Have you ever taken any self-defense courses?”
“Does kickboxing count?”
“Who taught it?”
“Some guy at the Y.”
“Then no,” he said dryly.
She pursed her lips. “Then no.”
“That’s OK. We’ll start with the basics. First of all, self-defense isn’t about winning a fight. It’s about buying enough time to escape.”
He spent a couple minutes circling her, telling her how he wanted her to stand (feet apart, weight balanced, centered so that she was hard to knock over) and how he wanted her to hold her hands (loose, but up and ready to strike), looking annoyingly calm, not laying a hand on her.
When he quit correcting her, she asked, “Are you going to show me how to punch now?”
“No. I don’t want you to punch. Your hands are small and soft.” He seemed to lose focus for a second, then gave his head a shake as if to clear it and added, “Palm strikes and hammer fists will be much more effective for you.”
He showed her the proper technique for both moves.
Made her run through each until her arm muscles started to burn.
“Good,” he said after what felt like an eternity.
“You’re going to attack anything that can’t be protected easily—eyes, throat, groin, knees—with those strikes.
The second a strike buys you an inch of freedom, you run like your life depends on it, because it might.
” He gave her a come-at-me gesture. “Give it a shot, yeah? Try to hit me. And don’t hold back. ”
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
He didn’t smirk at her, but he wanted to. She could tell. “You won’t.”
And, boy, he wasn’t kidding. Because she tried to hit him like a million times, and he deflected every blow like he was Neo in The Matrix. She did her level best, but all she got for her efforts was winded, sweaty, and supremely frustrated.
“That was really good,” he said, having the audacity to not be winded or sweaty at all. “You’re a quick learner.”
She snorted. “Apparently not since I couldn’t hit you even once.”
“I knew what was coming. Anyone trying to attack you won’t.
Any one of those strikes you threw could’ve disabled a guy long enough to let you escape.
So, stop feeling sorry for yourself. You’ve got more to learn.
” He punctuated his sentence by giving her a quick slap on the ass that turned her on and pissed her off in equal measure.
Was shitty bedside manner a thing for self-defense teachers? Because Cole had it if it was.
But rude as he was, he wasn’t lying about her having more to learn. He taught her elbow strikes, arm bars, how to escape a bear hug from behind…she was starting to feel like a supreme badass. It wasn’t until he was teaching her about knee strikes that everything went a little sideways.
“Good,” Cole said after she’d broken out of a bear hug a few times. “Now, if someone is here—” He grabbed her waist, thumbs spreading down along the curve of her hip, pulling her in a fraction closer. “I want you to drive your knee up, hard, toward anything on my body you can hit.”
The move seemed simple enough. Probably would’ve been, too. If not for her sweaty feet on the mat.
As soon as she pulled her knee up, her toes betrayed her and she lost her balance. She braced herself for the hit she knew was coming when her shoulder met the mat.
Except it didn’t.
Cole banded his arms around her way faster than she ever could’ve reacted, one hand at the small of her back, the other behind her shoulders, and twisted.
The room spun as he rolled with her, taking the impact against the mat with his shoulder and back, before rolling her neatly under him.
The air rushed out of his lungs from the impact he’d just absorbed in a rough exhale right by her ear.
Hadley went still. She could feel every inch of his body against hers. Every. Inch. All those muscles, all that heat, the way his heart pounded against her own…the unbelievably hard cock that was now pressed against her thigh.
She lifted her hips. Sweet merciful crap. “Cole…”
“Fuck,” he muttered, lips against her temple. “Ignore it. It’ll go away. Eventually.”
“What if…I don’t want it to?”
He lifted his head enough to look down into her eyes. “What do you mean?”
Shit. Was she going to do this?
Yep. She was definitely going to do this. “I mean…look…we’re both here, there’s clearly some attraction between us—” oh, Lord, help me, he looks horrified, “—so, why wouldn’t we just…roll with it?”
His gaze dropped to her mouth. “Roll with it?”
She didn’t know if he was being intentionally obtuse, or if he genuinely had no clue what she was trying to say. Was he deaf to innuendo? So, totally flustered, totally turned on, and totally ready to ride this man like Seabiscuit, she blurted, “I’m saying I think we should fuck. Like, now.”