Knots About You (The Dom Next Door #1)

Chapter 1

one

CLAIRE

My phone practically screamed against the counter.

I gripped onto the edge of the counter as messages exploded on the screen. Everybody needed me to pick up their opinion. Or to ask me for mine. Or to offer those probing condolences that were far more gossip-hunting than help.

Ten years of career building were imploding in my face, one vibration at a time, across my boyfriend’s marble countertop.

Was it possible for a vein to burst from sheer stress?

The one in my throat pulsed so hard I thought it might.

The last thing I needed was a bloodbath in Marty’s perfectly pristine kitchen.

Leaving a coffee cup ring was a heinous offence, dying in his apartment would have him blowing a gasket.

I didn’t need to answer the messages to know what they were about.

Two hours earlier, I’d been called into the big boss’s office and unceremoniously fired.

They hadn’t listened to my protests about the fact that Marty had insisted that the reviews were all above board, despite my insistence that there was a lack of AD tagging.

Not to mention the influencer videos he used without their consent.

Dating the boss hadn’t saved my skin when the influencers found out and went after the skincare brand, which in turn led to the PR agency being targeted.

You’d think being the boss’s girlfriend would have offered me some protection from the swinging axe, but Marty had all but thrown me in front of it.

A sacrifice to save his public image.

While I made my way to his apartment, stewing in a volatile mix of anger and incredulity, he would be cleaning house at the agency and eradicating ties with me. Professionally.

No one was aware of our personal ties.

By the time the elevator announced his arrival at the penthouse apartment, I was seeing red. He walked in, cool as a cucumber, clutching a brown paper bag. He didn’t even have the decency to have his tail tucked in shame for the way he’d publicly torn me a new one.

The din of my relentless phone created the backdrop to our awkward silence. Two of us staring, him gripping his bag, and me trying to find words other than ‘fuck you’.

‘Babe,’ he started, which only fuelled my rage.

‘Don’t you babe me, Marty. You threw me under the bloody bus in front of everyone.’ It took everything not to storm over there and kick him in those toned shins of his.

‘I had no choice.’ He crossed the room and pressed the bag into my hand. ‘But I brought bagels. The poppy seed ones with salmon and cream cheese.’

‘I don’t like salmon,’ I said, staring at him like he’d sprouted three heads. We’d been together for years in secret, yet it was like his scapegoating of me had unmasked someone I didn’t know. ‘Have you ever given a damn about me?’

‘Don’t be unreasonable,’ he sighed, running a hand through his dirty blond hair as though I was exasperating him.

‘Unreasonable?’ The shake in my voice had me trying to hold myself together, grasping at the thin veneer of control that I lived pretending to have.

The queen of fake it until you make it. All serene as far as the outside world knew, but inside, I was like three raccoons desperately trying to work a treadmill.

But Marty had busted through to my inner chaos goblin.

‘Think I’m unreasonable? I have worked my butt off for you for years, worked double as hard as any other PR agent at the firm, and after all that, I come back here and take your dick like a champ.

Even when you’ve been an ass at work. And you throwing me to the influencer lions is me being unreasonable? ’

Marty had the gall to roll his eyes.

Like a spoiled teenager.

And it filled me with boiling rage.

‘Listen, Claire, I get that you’ve been a good employee, and that you’ve saved my bacon today, but there’s no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

We have a good thing going here.’ Flicking the kettle on, he pulled out two mugs.

Tea, as though tea could fix the public humiliation I’d gone through.

‘Do we have a good thing going on?’ I said, stepping closer to him, a piece of my red hair springing free from my perfectly coiffed ponytail as if to add to the mayhem. ‘What exactly is this? We’ve been together for years, and who knows about us? No one. I’m just a dirty little secret.’

‘You’re being emotional—’ I interrupted Marty before he could finish. There was no guarantee I wouldn’t shove him off the balcony if he continued down that line of thought.

‘And you’re being a cock. You’ve always said we couldn’t go public because of work. But what about now? Seeing as you fired me, you’re no longer my boss.’

The way his eyes widened and his throat bobbed told me everything I needed to know. But I had to hear it from him.

‘Babe, I don’t think now is the best time to go public with us.’

‘So you want to end it?’

‘No,’ he said, stepping forward and putting his hands on my shoulders.

‘I like you being here. We have fun, right? And you can still help me out with work behind the scenes. No one needs to know. We’ll make it work.

I’ll give you orgasms, you help me with the fallout from the disaster.

It’ll be like nothing changed, and you can just not work for a bit until it’s all blown over. ’

His words slapped me in the face like a cold fish. Reality check and a half. Marty didn’t want me. He wanted me to remain useful. Even after firing me, he wanted me to do the work to clean up the scandal, which he’d dumped on me.

An apoplectic fury made my insides tremor.

I ripped open the bagel bag and tore it apart, smearing cream cheese over his pristine counters while he stood with his mouth hanging to his knees.

‘What are you doing? he yelled while grabbing an ungodly amount of paper towels and arming himself with multipurpose spray.

‘I’m sick of this. It’s not normal to live in a flat that is cleaner than a surgical theatre.

You can take your coasters and shove them up your overbearing ass.

’ The glass coasters stood in their rack like little soldiers in his army of precision.

One by one, I snatched them up and launched them at his stupid head.

I’d kept everything so tightly restrained for so long, fighting my natural chaotic self to be the perfect girlfriend and the perfect employee, that it felt like my firing had unleashed a monster.

By the time I’d obliterated the coasters, I was craving maximum destruction, and Marty looked like he might cry.

Well, good. He deserved to cry.

‘You say I should be happy with helping you out for free despite you dropping me in the shit so badly that no one is going to hire me in PR ever again. Twelve years of my career down the pan. And for what? Orgasms? Don’t make me laugh.

The only orgasms I have are when I use my hand while you take what you want.

I have a better relationship with my shower head than you. ’

‘That’s a cheap shot,’ Marty said. His brow knitted as he moved closer to the cream cheese smears, hardly able to focus on me while there was a mess in the vicinity.

‘I’ve wasted my twenties on your company and you. God, I’ve been such an idiot.’ I gathered up my coat and bag as I spoke.

‘I can still give you a good reference.’

It wasn’t a laugh that escaped me, but something between that and a scoff. A sound I wasn’t convinced I’d ever made before. ‘And what will you write? Gullible twat. Great for pinning your disasters on. Pop her in the cupboard until you need a mess cleaned up.’

‘That’s unfair. I didn’t have a choice. It was you or the whole agency. Your name was the one that signed off on the campaign.’ Marty swept a paper towel over the counter.

‘You had a choice and I wasn’t the one who signed it, was I?’

Marty sighed.

And our relationship, four long, secretive years, died in that exhale of breath.

By the time I stumbled back to the flat that I actually paid rent on, despite rarely staying there, I looked like the before shot in one of those glossy magazine makeovers where they circle your bad bits in red.

Mascara stains running to my chin, hair stuck to my cheeks and sodden, snotty tissues erupting from my bag like a volcano of self-pity.

You know you’re looking especially tragic when people give you a wide berth on the tube.

The universe evidently decided rock bottom needed a trapdoor for me to trip ass over tit into.

Because when I pushed the front door open, intending to launch myself into the depths of my duvet, I was greeted with the sound of skin slapping skin. Moans that would make the most seasoned sex worker blush.

‘Oh God.’

The living room rug crumpled beneath my flatmate, Shelly, and a man I had never laid eyes on. And I’d seen a fair few men, often involuntarily, thanks to Shelly’s open-door policy on trousers.

They were going at each other with a level of gusto that was pretty impressive.

Marty and I were far more perfunctory than the flesh-coloured tornado in the sitting room.

Limbs tangled, mouths full. If hating men wasn’t so high on my to-do list, I might have admired the absolute hammering of his rather peachy backside.

‘Hey, hun,’ Shelly called breathlessly, as if I’d just walked in on her eating supper rather than screwing on the floor. ‘Don’t mind us!’

‘Shelly, you can’t be doing it in the sitting room,’ I squeaked.

An attempt to reverse into the hallway ended with me pinned between the wobbly coat rack and a pair of antlers she’d bought from a flea market.

My hood caught, and no matter how hard I jerked, I was stuck there like a fish on the end of a line.

I lost it. Deep sobs tumbled out while I stood there, unable to leave.

There was laughter and a grunt before Shelly’s head popped around the corner, hair wild, and the patchwork throw from the back of the sofa wrapped around her. ‘Oh, baby, what’s wrong? Sorry about Dominic, he sort of moved in while you were staying with Marty.’