Page 6 of Smitten with the Single Dad

“Aim for the dick. Aim for the throat.”

So, she did that. She hammered him hard between the legs with her knee.

“Fucking bitch,” he croaked, buckling forward a little.

She figured he’d release her hair, but he didn’t. His grip just tightened.

This was survival mode.

She wasn’t afraid of death. Everyone she’d ever loved was dead now.

But like hell would Ludovica Vitale let some monster of a man hurt her. She’d rather die than allow someone to take her power. She wasn’t ready to die yet. She wasn’t afraid of death, but she also wasn’t ready to give up.

She was in fight-mode now. The option to flee, to take flight, was gone. Now she had to stand her ground and fight—for her life.

Even though he had his hand around her ponytail, her hair was long enough that while ignoring the pain in her neck, she could spin around to face him—kind of. That was when she saw her opening. His throat was exposed.

Only for a second.

A second was all she needed.

Her brother, Lorenzo, and his three best friends: Alessandro, Nico, and Matteo, taught Vica all there was to know about self-defense.

She hated it at first and couldn’t understand why she needed to know how to throat punch a guy, or where the weak spots were on a person to make the most amount of impact. But they wouldn’t let her quit. Not until she successfully took down each one of them. They started her off with Matteo, the smallest of the four—though he was still a muscly mountain compared to Vica. Then she finally worked her way through all of them, ending with Nico who was six foot five and weighed over two hundred and fifty pounds. It took her a few years of not only training with the guys, but also strength training to get there. But she did it. She successfully brought Nico to his knees, earning her brother’s stamp of approval that she was ready for the world.

If she wasn’t so terrified, she’d laugh.

She honestly never thought she’d need to use the skills her brother and hisfriends taught her.

But there she was, relying on those skills to keep herself from getting assaulted—or worse.

When Track lifted his head, exposing his neck for that split second, she took her window of opportunity and swung hard and sure, delivering a right jab to his throat.

She barely registered the surprised and pained choking sound he made. She was already scrambling through the sand and up the small incline to the front of the pub and parking lot.

The need to get as far away from her attacker as possible was at the forefront of her mind and she booked it through the parking lot toward the laneway that led to the road, only to run smack-dab into a brick-hard chest.

How did Track catch up to her so fast?

CHAPTER TWO

Wyatt was just heading home after a hot, grueling day in the kitchen when the sound of heavy breathing and shoes crunching under the gravel made him spin around, just in time to be crashed into by a swirl of floral skirts and dark-brown hair.

They had a streetlamp in the parking lot, but it typically didn’t give off enough light to be able to see someone’s eye color.

But what he could see in this woman’s eyes when he gripped her by the shoulders, with her entire body trembling, was that she was terrified.

“Hey, hey,” he cooed. “It’s okay. It’s okay. What happened?”

She struggled to get free of his grasp for a moment, her ponytail flying wildly, but when she looked up at him and blinked a few times, something seemed to register with her. He was not a threat.

“What happened?” he repeated.

“I … I just had to get away.” She had a beautiful, thick Italian accent. That’s when he noticed the cut across her cheek and the swollen and bloody lip.

Rage lanced through him like a hot poker. “Had to get away from who? Who did this to you?”

“M-my boss. He … he’s on the beach. I-I thought you were him.”

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