Page 160 of Damaged Protector

I grasped her chin and let my eyes blaze into hers. “Yes, you can, and you will. Besides, Nut misses you.”

Her forehead scrunched until wrinkles appeared. “Her name is Coconut, and you took her to the shelter after I left.”

Lifting an eyebrow, I asked, “Did I?”

Mallori’s eyes rounded to the size of dinner plates, and her voice went breathless. “You kept her?”

Puffing out a sigh, I nodded. “I had her in the front seat of my truck, ready to take her to the shelter, and she just kept looking up at me like I was about to feed her to an alligator or something.” My lips flattened into a thin line. “I couldn’t do it, Bee.”

She threw her arms around me and cried against my shoulder for a long while before pulling back. “Can I see her?”

“Let me go get her. She’s probably in your room.”

After standing, I bent down and caged Mallori to the back of the couch with my arms, putting my face about an inch from hers. “Listen closely, Bee. There’s no fucking way I’m letting you stay in that dorm with those psychos for one more night.” Then a thought struck me, and I smirked. “Actually one more night sounds great. I think I’ll stay with you.”

Her face was a mixture of apprehension and curiosity. “What do you have planned, Hawk?”

I stood and winked. “You’ll see.”

Chapter 47

Hawk packed a bag and loaded the storage containers into the back seat of his truck. Each time I tried to protest that I couldn’t possibly move back in with him, he simply smirked and continued with what he was doing.

I watched as he jogged into Tank’s house while I sat in the truck. He seemed to have some kind of plan, and he looked awfully smug about it.

I chewed on the tip of my thumb while I waited. My brain was a mess. Everything inside me told me this would be an excellent solution. His house was quiet so I could study—and sleep—and it was only about fifteen minutes from campus.

The only part of me that thought this was a bad idea was my heart. Because it belonged to Hawk Gentry. I needed to set some ground rules to keep it from being broken.

The man I was in love with climbed back into the truck and handed me a small black device with a USB on one end. “Plug this into your laptop. The program will load automatically.”

“What is it?” I asked, inspecting the tiny thing. It was completely unremarkable looking.

“It’s a watchdog program, similar to what schools use to monitor what students are doing on the school computers. This one is completely untraceable though. Tank developed it himself.”

“I’ve heard of that. It’s to make sure the kids aren’t watching porn,” I said with a laugh, and he nodded as he pulled out onto the road.

“Exactly. I have another one that we’re going to install on that bitch’s computer, and then we’re going to have a little bit of fun.” He reached over and took my hand. “I’m going to teach her a lesson about fucking with my girl.”

My girl. God, I loved hearing that though I knew he didn’t mean it literally.

Did he?

“Okay, babe. It’s go time,” Hawk announced as we sat at a café on campus, tucked into a booth in the back.

“What do we do?” I whispered.

While Starla and Donner were at dinner, he’d installed the watchdog program on her laptop and then placed a stapler with a tiny camera embedded in it on the bookshelf, facing toward Starla’s bed so we could watch her reactions.

She’d just settled cross-legged on her bed with her computer in her lap, and her stupid boyfriend was laid out beside her and appeared to be sleeping. The fucker.

“Whatever you type will pop up in a little box on her screen. Why don’t you just say hello.”

I typed: Good evening, Starla.

Hawk’s phone was propped up beside my laptop and showed a clear image of her, transmitted from the wireless camera. Her eyes narrowed.

“I told you she’s taking hacking classes, right? Are you sure she won’t be able to find the thingy you put on her computer?”

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