Chapter 2
D ominic
Two years ago
“I don’t need help.”
I know I sound gruff. But I’m about to lose my damn mind with how often my mother bothers me about finding someone to assist me with my kids.
“Yes, you do.”
“Mom,” I growl. Well, it’s not really a growl. More like an aggravated bark. Mom just rolls her eyes at me and pats my shoulder. She’s standing next to my chair, at my desk in my office at the hotel, and I’m not really sure how we began talking about my schedule.
“You’re running yourself ragged, cucciolo . You can’t keep going on like this.”
If anyone else calls me that, I’m liable to knock them upside the head.
“I’ve got those two teenagers up the street that are cool watching the kids right now,” I remind her.
“And what happens when school starts?” Mom asks.
I look at her, confused. “What do you mean?”
Mom sighs and rubs her eyes with one hand. “Dominic. Your babysitters will be in school. That means they won’t be available during the day …”
“Okay?” I ask, completely bewildered where she’s going with this.
“You have three children.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“Aspen isn’t in school yet, cucciolo .”
Jesus Christ. I completely forgot about that. Aspen misses the cutoff for kindergarten by one month, and will have to complete another year of preschool before she’s enrolled in school full-time. Our preschool options in Eternity Springs mean she can attend three hours per day, four days a week.
“I can watch her on Fridays when she doesn’t have school. I could even keep her on Mondays. But you have to get someone else to help the rest of the week.” Mom sits gracefully in a chair opposite my desk, looking at me expectantly.
Fuck.
I hate having to bring someone else in to watch my kids. I hate it. I’m not saying I wish their mom was still here, because I don’t. Savannah is a waste of space, and I wasn’t sad when she blew out of town with sparks trailing behind her.
My ex-wife admitted to screwing with birth control, or completely lying about being on any, in order to trap me.
Her words, not mine.
I would have come up with a more tactful way to express how she got pregnant. Well, honestly, it depends on the day. Some days, I can be tactful with what I say about my ex-wife. Other days I’m truthful, but not angry. But some days, fire comes out of my mouth at the mere mention of her name.
Right now? Suffice it to say I don’t have anything kind in mind for explaining Savannah.
If it weren’t for my kids, I’d wish I never met her. But I’ll never regret the greatest gifts of my life.
I met Savannah at a bar outside of town after a very nasty argument with my dad about our family hotel. I was primed to take over for him, excited about leading the hotel into the twenty-first century, and continuing on the legacy my grandfather started decades before. I’d scheduled a meeting with my dad to discuss my ideas. I’d worked for months on my proposal as part of my final project for my business degree, then spent a couple years after graduation building upon it. I’d thought of everything: renovations, increasing the scope of technology in our banquet rooms to entice businesses to book their events, and ways to make the check-in process more streamlined.
My father shot down every single one of my ideas.
So, after an incredibly aggravating day, I drove to a neighboring town to have dinner away from my family.
Mistake number one.
When a pretty blonde sat next to me at the bar and struck up a conversation, I participated in the flirtatious exchange.
Mistake number two.
And when she invited herself back to my place for a night cap, I allowed it.
Huge mistake number three.
After things got hot and heavy, and she volunteered her own condom, I happily accepted the rubber.
Colossal mistake number four.
Savannah assured me she was on birth control, but offered up the condom as a secondary measure to make sure she didn’t get pregnant. I didn’t know at the time that she wasn’t on any kind of birth control, and she poked holes in the condom. I continued to see Savannah sporadically throughout the coming months, mostly for sex, but she never complained.
When she showed up in Eternity Springs with an ultrasound picture and a tearful story about how she didn’t have medical insurance and couldn’t afford the cost of giving birth and raising a child, I did what I thought was the responsible thing. I offered to marry her.
“I just wish …” Mom says, her voice trailing off as she grips her hands fretfully. I get my skin tone and hair texture from my mom, but everything else is from my dad. At just over six feet, I’m one of th e shortest men in my family. My brother Luca towers over everyone, and my two other brothers, Alex and Leo, beat me by a couple inches.
“What, Mom?” I sigh, closing my eyes and rubbing the bridge of my nose in a mixture of frustration and exhaustion. Because I’m fucking tired.
“I hate how stressed you look, Dom. You never smile anymore. I don’t know if you’re unhappy, if you hate being in charge at the hotel, or if you need some time to yourself. Your father and I are worried.”
“Oh, I’m sure he is,” I mutter.
As for my father? Well, our relationship isn’t the best, as I wasn’t his first choice to take over the reins at Everlasting. He assumed his firstborn, Alex, would be following in his footsteps. When Alex announced on his eighteenth birthday that he had enlisted in the Air National Guard, our dad was crushed. Looking back, I recognize all the signs Alex gave us about his desire to do anything but work for the hotel. Alex is best when working with his hands, or anything that gives him an opportunity to be out and about. Putting him behind a desk would have been brutal for him.
But our dad didn’t care about that. He couldn’t see that I was the only one interested in taking over from him. All he saw was his firstborn choosing something else over his birthright. Not even having me ready and willing could change that feeling for him. It’s been a tug-of-war for every decision at the hotel, no matter how willing I’ve always been to continue in his footsteps.
I’m one of seven siblings, and I’ve always been the one most interested in business. I ran lemonade stands beside the hotel driveway at the age of six, and convinced my grandfather to let me sit in on board meetings not long after that. I was shadowing a local business owner in high school, ready to step into whatever role I could get behind the scenes at the hotel. All the kids in my family filled roles when needed. We all helped out with housekeeping, setting up banquet rooms, and cleaning the property after a windstorm. And while it was clear early on that my sisters, Gianna and Arianna, were destined to take on the roles of events coordinator and spa and hot springs coordinator, respectively, I always knew I wanted to work at the top. With the bigwigs. Well, my dad and grandfather weren’t that big, but they were to me as a little kid. I idolized them and everything they did.
As the rest of my siblings began to show their interests lay elsewhere, my dad finally realized I was his only hope of extending the ‘family-owned’ aspect of the hotel. I started at the bottom however, as his way of showing that nepotism had no place in our family. It allowed me to learn every minute detail in the running of our hotel. I worked the concierge desk for a year, then moved on to shadowing every manager on the property. The summer before my senior year of college, I had the unfortunate job of being my father’s assistant, a role I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. My dad is particular about everything, and I think he made it worse out of spite.
Once I took on a more senior role, it was apparent my father was having difficulty letting go. My mom finally put her foot down and demanded he retire, and he grudgingly agreed. He announced he’d be slowly retiring and giving me more responsibility. But he fought me tooth and nail on everything.
Years later, I’m still dealing with the same shit, because he will not cut the damn cord tying him to Everlasting. Should any of my children have a desire to take over from me, or any of my nieces and nephews, I vow I will never do this to them.
“You need to come up with a plan soon, sweetheart,” Mom says softly, bringing me back to the problem at hand.
“I don’t like having people I don’t know in my home,” I say to my mom.
“I know that. No one really does. Your father wants me to get someone to clean our house, and I continue to say no. I’d have to clean before they came to clean, because it would stress me out to think they were judging my lack of cleanliness.”
“That’s … well, that’s pretty on track for you, Mom,” I comment wr yly. She rolls her eyes at me with a huff, making me chuckle. My wonderful, caring, thoughtful, sensational Italian mother has a little bit of an issue with giving up control to anyone around her. I wonder where I get it from.
“You know Sienna is going to be the same way, right?” she teases.
“I’m aware.” My oldest daughter, Sienna, already shows how she gets her stubborn nature right from me.
In any case, Savannah caught me on a bad night. After we were married, she started nit-picking at everything. We didn’t go out enough. Some random woman in a mom group with her had a nicer purse than her, and why didn’t I buy her more nice things? Why couldn’t I be home by five every evening? And the list goes on and on.
Subconsciously, I started staying even later at work. One hour more per day was sixty additional minutes Savannah couldn’t nag me. I hated being away from our daughter, but it felt like Savannah was sucking the soul out of me.
I should have known when I came home one night, the house filled with candles and light jazz playing, that Savannah was planning to seduce me. But I was so relieved that she wasn’t nagging me that I played right into her hand. Three weeks later, she showed me a pregnancy test, and announced that I was expected to spend more time at home now.
I hoped things would get better once Carter was born, but Savannah got worse, and I escaped into work again. At that point, my dad was letting me handle half of the responsibilities for the CEO position. Savannah was drinking way too much, and I was relying on my mom for babysitting more often than not. Savannah begged me for a night to talk about our relationship, and I reluctantly agreed. We met at a bar in town, and talked about issues we both had with our marriage. She promised to stop drinking. To stop complaining all the time. I promised to spend more time at home and focus more energy on our family. We had sex that night, and two weeks later, she announced another pregnancy.
Two months after Aspen was born, I saw a rather abrupt change in Savannah. When I found her drunk, and borderline passed out, in our bathroom while Aspen was in her infant tub, I demanded Savannah go to rehab.
Over the course of the following few weeks, Savannah admitted to screwing with her birth control for all three pregnancies in an attempt to trap me and keep us married, but no longer wanted to be in a loveless marriage where her only job was to care for her kids. She left quickly thereafter, and I was suddenly a single dad to an infant, toddler, and preschooler.
I thought I’d been handling it well, but apparently not. Yeah, I ask my mom or siblings to babysit pretty often, but it’s always for work-related tasks. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve gone out alone, or to meet friends, in the last year. It’s not ideal, but it’s my life.
“I have an idea of who can help you. And you’d be helping her in the process,” Mom says quietly, jolting me from my rather depressing walk down memory lane. “She needs employment, and she already knows the kids. Our whole family, actually.”
“No.” I know exactly who she’s referring to. Kate Reynolds, my almost-cousin. How can someone be an almost-cousin? Her half-brothers are my cousins, through our mothers, but she’s their half-sister on their dad’s side, thus no relation to me.
“Dominic.”
“No, Mother.”
“Oh, don’t you ‘Mother’ me, Dominic Andrea,” she snaps. Even in my thirties, I know I’m in big trouble when she middle-names me.
“I don’t like her, Mom.”
“You don’t even know her.”
“Exactly.”
“Well, whose fault is that? Whenever she’s around, you find a reason not to be. You’ve gone out of your way to be as unwelcoming as possible to her. She’s family, Dominic.” Mom watches me with her hands on her hips, clearly aggravated with my immediate refusal to hire Kate .
“No, she isn’t.” Because I sometimes like to antagonize her, I put my hands on my hips as well, mirroring her perfectly.
“She might as well be family. Everyone treats her as such. Everyone but you.” Mom’s eyes narrow as they drop to my hips. “And you better watch your attitude. I have no problem calling your father.”
Ignoring her threat, I soldier on. “Can’t she get more hours at the hotel?” I don’t know why I say this. I know how many employees we have, and how much overhead we can fiddle with. It was tight this past year because we had one of the snowiest winters on record, which led to the most cancellations on record for the hotel. Our cancellation policy is rather lax, unfortunately, but something we’ve never held is a steadfast non-refundable policy. And frankly, I hate driving on Colorado mountain roads in the snow, so I don’t judge out-of-towners who don’t want to do it either.
“You know we don’t have the money to give her more hours. I’d do it if I could,” Mom says quietly. Once I took on more managerial tasks, Mom stepped in as the concierge manager. She’s mostly in charge of training new employees, and only works a few hours per week. “Kate needs help, Dom. She’s struggling. There are hardly any jobs in town, and she’s thinking about moving out of state where it will be cheaper to live.”
Shit. I may not want to be around Kate, but I do have a conscience.
“Does she have any childcare experience?” I ask with an exaggerated sigh.
Mom smiles victoriously, knowing she’s reeled me in. “She babysat growing up, and she took a couple child development classes at the community college in Denver before she became her mom’s sole caregiver. When her mom died, she didn’t have the money, or time, to go back to school.”
And now I feel even worse.
I knew Kate’s mom passed away a few years ago, but I didn’t know Kate was her caregiver. I’ve managed to avoid learning anything about Kate for as long as possible. The less I knew, the better. I could pretend she didn’t exist that way.
The first time I saw Kate, she was standing at the entrance to the hotel, and I literally stopped dead in my tracks. Light brown hair down to her waist had streaks of blue in it, and a gust of wind blew it haphazardly around her face as she threw her head back and laughed loudly at something my cousin Matt said. I knew Matt had met someone, courtesy of my brother Luca, but I thought Matt’s woman was older than him. This vision in front of me was definitely younger. Quite a bit younger than me. A wave of jealousy overtook me, until someone else walked in with two little girls in tow, and slid her arm around Matt’s waist.
When Matt introduced me to Victoria, and her daughters, I couldn’t tear my eyes off of Kate. When he finally introduced her as his half-sister, I remember holding onto her hand and not wanting to let go. It was the oddest sensation, one that both intrigued and disgusted me simultaneously. I didn’t want to feel this pull toward Kate. I’d been burned, and I vowed never to let another woman anywhere close to my heart.
“So this is the elusive Dominic,” she had said, her eyes sparkling as she smiled warmly at me. “I’ve heard about you.”
I ripped my hand out of hers, clearly struggling to keep my composure. It freaked me out that she insinuated someone in my family told her about me, and I hated wondering what they’d said. Assuming the worst, I attempted to maintain a nonchalant attitude, as if nothing she’d heard would hurt me.
“I’m not elusive, just busy. I do run this hotel,” I snapped, then watched Kate’s eyes widen in surprise at the vitriol in my voice.
“No, that’s not what I meant,” she’d stammered. “Luca said —”
No fucking wonder. My youngest brother was one hell of a flirt, and it didn’t surprise me at all that he’d already established a connection to Kate. “It doesn’t matter. Pleasure to meet you, Kate.”
“What the hell was that?” I heard someone whisper as I turned around and stalked away, but stopped when I heard Matt call my name.
“Look, I’m not sure what that was,” Matt murmured as he reached me, “but Kate needs a job, and Aunt Sofia said you’d give her one.”
I looked over Matt’s shoulder to see Kate’s profile slumped, as if I’d taken the wind out of her sails. “It was nothing. I’m very busy today. If my mother wants to hire her, then she can handle it.”
“She specifically said you would handle it,” Matt explained.
In my periphery, I saw my mother watching me, and I got even more surly. “No.”
When I stalked away again, Matt shouted, “Nice talking to you, asshole.”
It wasn’t the first time I’d been called an asshole, and I doubted it would be the last.
Taking my asshole status to the next level, I began nit-picking at everything Kate did. I could find fault with how she tied her shoelaces if I looked hard enough. For the most part, Kate took it all in stride. Even with everything she’d suffered through in her life, she still had a glass-half-full outlook. Somehow, that pissed me off even more.
“Have you already told her she’d be nannying for me?” I ask my mom.
“Yes, she knows it’s you.”
“And she actually agreed to it?” I blurt out, curious to know how Kate responded.
“She wasn’t thrilled, but she loves your kids and knows it’ll give her lots of spare time for other part-time jobs. Until she finds something full-time, that is.”
“So this could be a brief position?” I ask hopefully.
“Possibly. Already trying to kick her out the door, Dominic?” Mom asks playfully.
“Just trying to determine if I need to look for more help, should she quit with no notice. ”
“She’s not that kind of person. She’d never leave you in a bind like that.”
“When did you tell her to start?” I ask.
“That’s up to you. She can begin tomorrow if you’re ready.”
I see a gleam in my mom’s eyes, and I wonder what else she’s up to. There are no two bigger meddlers in my life than my mom and grandmother.
“Alright, I guess Kate is my new nanny.” I sigh, one filled with defeat. I know Kate is the logical choice, but I don’t want her to be. I don’t want to want her at all, and now I’ll have to see her more than I already do.
My mom claps her hands, thrilled with the course of events. Jumping up, she steps around my desk to kiss my cheek, before slapping it lightly. It’s become a running joke that the women in our family are a violent bunch. Nonna, my grandmother, likes to pinch butts rather painfully. “She’s expecting a call from you this evening with more information. This is an excellent decision, Dominic. I’m so glad you came up with it.”
As my mom vacates my office, I realize a few things. Firstly, it wasn’t my idea, it was hers. Secondly, I didn’t even tell her I would be working late tonight, so I’m not sure how she knew. My brother Alex has the kids for a movie night. And finally, I’m so fucking screwed if I have to be around Kate all the time.