Chapter 4
Dominic
“What?” I ask as I am jarred from the moment.
“Your eye. You’re bleeding, Dominic,” she says again.
“Probably,” I say, wiping my brow again. “I just got clocked in the face because I was distracted by a clumsy girl who dropped a drink in the lap of the Cockpit’s biggest asshole.” Then I stop. “Wait. You know my name?”
Her eyes flash to mine. “Sure. Niko told me everyone’s name,” she says, looking back to the cut. I wish she’d go back to the kiss…
“You need stitches,” she says, almost like it’s a personal inconvenience.
“It’ll be fine.” As I bend to pull my pants on, blood drips onto the floor from my head. It hurts like hell.
“We at least need to stop the bleeding,” she says before grabbing me and pulling me out the door and into the public bar area. A neon sign that reads Cockpit is the only light in the whole place. After all, it’s almost 4am.
“I thought you were leaving?” I muse.
She ignores me. Stubborn little thing.
I watch as the girl grabs some ice and wraps it in a fresh bar towel. She walks over to me and presses it to my forehead.
I wince.
“Sorry,” she says. “It’s a nasty cut. It’s going to burn.”
Despite the pain, my eyes trace her heart-shaped face.
Starting from her arched black eyebrows to her deep brown doe eyes, perfectly turned-up nose and stopping at her dark pink lips. Blonde is not her natural hair color; that much is obvious. I find myself wanting to pull the stupid wig off.
To see her, the real her.
I feel like I’ve seen her before.
Like I know her.
“Have I met you before?” I ask, and her eyes stay locked on my injury.
“I doubt it,” she says.
“Why do you doubt it?” I ask.
“Because I’m just a waitress,” she says, but that’s not a good enough answer. No, something about this girl is very, very familiar.
And very, very attractive.
The kind of attractive that sidetracks a man. Stops him. Distracts him.
But then I snap out of it.
She’s a cocktail waitress.
And I respect the staff here.
“It’s fine, thank you,” I say with less emotion than the words deserve. I am just ready to get out of here.
We make our way out the front door, and I walk behind her for a few steps.
She stops. “Are you following me home?”
“I was going to walk you to your car.”
“Oh,” she says, thumbing in the other direction. “I walked here.”
My eyebrows rise to my hairline at that. “You walked? On this street? At night?” The bar isn’t in a sketchy area, but it’s certainly not a street a woman should walk down alone at 4am.
“It wasn’t dark when I walked here, and I wasn’t expecting to work the late shift. In fact, I didn’t even know there was a late shift.”
“I’ll drive you,” I say before I have time to think about it.
I’m very tired, but I’m not a dick.
I would even consider myself a gentleman, or at the very least, chivalrous. There’s not much point in rescuing her from the hands of an angry, drunk, bare-knuckle boxer only to have her get picked up by some guy in an unmarked van.
“You don’t have to do that,” she says, sounding suddenly panicked.
“You’re right. I don’t. I also didn’t have to jump out of the ring to make sure you didn’t get hurt, taking a knuckle to the face as a consequence. And yet I did. I don’t think you should walk home by yourself, and I’m tired and don’t want to argue about it.”
The girl swallows and bites her lip, and it makes my blood about ten degrees warmer under my skin.
“Alright, fine,” she finally says after another moment of torturous lip-biting. She doesn’t seem to know she’s too attractive to be a waitress. “But you can’t judge where I live.”
“Scout’s honor,” I say, holding up the three-finger sign, but she doesn’t so much as crack a smile. It’s not that she has a resting bitch face, it’s more like she’s nervous, which I get makes sense. She doesn’t know me and has no reason to trust me.
Luckily, I’m not an asshole.
As we drive towards her house, my Maserati is quiet. I can’t help my eyes from dragging over to her once in a while.
She’s wearing the normal uniform for the Cockpit. A very short pleated skirt with a slit that leaves almost nothing to the imagination, a cropped collared button-down shirt, opened down to button four to reveal a black push-up bra from underneath.
And of course, a signature blonde wig.
“You know you can take that off,” I say, breaking the silence.
Her attention whips over to me. “Take what off?” she snaps with the defensiveness of a cat.
“The wig,” I tell her. “It’s got to be uncomfortable.”
“It’s fine,” she says quickly and goes back to looking out the window.
As I come to a red light, I roll to a stop and take the opportunity to study her. I’ve never seen her before at the fight ring, and yet I can't shake this feeling that I know her. “How long have you worked at the bar?”
“A while,” she answers, visibly swallowing.
“And you’ve never worked the ring before…” It’s a question, but it comes out like a statement.
“No,” she answers. “Brynn was supposed to, but Niko asked me.”
Hmm. Still not enough information for me to connect any dots.
“Do you ever go out?” I ask.
“Sometimes,” she answers, and I swear there’s a hint of a smile in her answer, or at the very least, amusement. “Why do you want to know?”
“Because I know I’ve seen you before.”
“I doubt that,” she answers. “You and I probably don’t go to the same places.”
“Fair enough,” I say, and the light turns green. Right before I pull my gaze back to the road in front of us, I see her roll her eyes and shake her head with what is definitely a smile.
“Elsie’s,” I say.
“The speakeasy?” she asks.
“Yeah. You look like a speakeasy kind of girl,” I say.
She snorts, catching me off guard. “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asks.
“You’re dressed up. Fake lashes. Fake nails. High heels…” I nod over at her.
“This is my work uniform. Is it your first time at the Cockpit?” her quick snapback almost makes me smile. Almost. Because it’s really starting to drive me crazy that I can’t figure out where I have seen her before.
“Trust me, you don’t know me,” she says, and while I’m not so sure, I decide to drop it.
For now.
We pull up to her apartment, and I crane my neck to look the building over. It’s a bit run-down, though I wouldn’t call it slummy. The girl unbuckles her seatbelt and reaches for her purse.
“You promised you weren’t going to judge me,” she says.
“I said nothing,” I say.
“Yeah, but your face is saying a lot. You know not everyone in LA has lots of money and lives in secluded beach houses with heated pools and sprawling kitchens,” she says, and my eyes narrow.
“How do you know I live in a house like that?” I ask, and if I didn’t know any better, I’d swear her cheeks flushed.
“It’s an assumption,” she says quickly.
“It was very specific,” I tell her, my lips curling up in one corner of my mouth. “Are you sure we’ve never met before?”
“I can assure you that you don’t know me,” she says.
Her eyes, the color of bourbon, sparkly in the light of the glitching lamp outside, are locked on mine, and I watch as she swallows.
She smells like raspberries and roses, and for a moment, I forget where I am.
I forget about the day I’ve had and the problems that are pressing against my brain and even the gash on my forehead.
For a moment, I shove all of that out of the here and now because something about this girl, familiar or otherwise, is enticing.
Enticing enough that there is suddenly another question in my mind.
I’m no longer only curious about who she is.
I am curious if she tastes as sweet as she smells.
And in the need to find out, I cover her lips with mine.