Chapter Six #2
Dominic dropped his towel into the sink along with hers. “You just made more work for yourself. You’ll have to wash out the mop bucket before you clean the floor with it again. And you’ll have to move the bucket to clean out the cabinet.”
Once again, he had a point, but she was glad for the lack of irritation in his voice. If he had scolded her instead, she might not have stayed so calm.
Suddenly, she heard her mother’s reprimand in her ear.
Stop being so difficult. It wasn’t like her to be so prideful that she’d completely go out of her way to ignore a sound suggestion.
But when Dominic ordered her around, telling her to get the towels and then what to do with them, something came over her.
She needed to prove to herself that he couldn’t control her, even if it meant doing the opposite of what he told her.
With an exaggerated sigh, Erica went to the sink and scooped up the towels to take them outside like he had originally told her. “Get yourself together,” she muttered to herself once she was outside. “He’s just trying to help.”
Dominic, with all the charm that seemed to come just so easy and natural for him, wasn’t trying to be patronizing.
He was trying to be a gentleman, and she should have let him.
What was wrong with her? This was a great opportunity, and she was ruining it.
Was that what she wanted? To scare him off with her stubbornness?
She already knew she had some self-destructive tendencies, but this was a new level of bullheadedness.
After she hung the towels over the railing, Erica turned and walked back into the house, shoulders back and chin up. Like turning the pressure valve on an overheated machine, she did her best to loosen her defenses without totally opening up. That would definitely ruin everything.
Dominic squatted in front of the existing piping to make sure the measurements were precise, some of the new PVC in his hands. She had already measured and cut the PVC earlier, but she let him do what he wanted without a word of protest.
“You probably don’t even need to replace this,” he said, his eyes still on the plumbing. “The metal seems to be in fine condition. You could just give the P-trap a good washing and reinstall it.”
Now that the floor was somewhat dry, Erica was free to sit cross-legged beside him and watch his deft hands make quick work of the assembly. “I don’t want it to rust out later.”
“I have the same pipes in my house. They shouldn’t rust.” He shrugged. “Rot, maybe, but not rust. You can have rot with the PVC too.”
Erica held back the impulse to argue. Her stare trailed up his arm, to his muscled shoulders, and her stomach clenched at the way they bunched and moved beneath his shirt as he twisted the nuts around the joints.
If she had no self-control at all, she would have reached out to touch those muscles and see if they were as rock-solid as they looked.
She had never been this close to a man while he worked like this.
At least not one so ripped and undeniably handsome.
What really fascinated her was the calm, resolute quality of his eyes, confident and so sure of himself in every way.
Why did he have to seem so perfect? She had to break him down somehow, find a flaw or a quirk to break the spell. A mole she hadn’t seen before, maybe, or a scar that held a traumatic story about an uncontrollable temper. Anything.
Erica saw nothing. Nothing but a kind soul behind those pure blue eyes and a strong body that she wanted to wrap herself around.
She had already spent so much time imagining him kissing her, holding her, caressing her curves as she basked in his manliness.
She willed the images away when she felt an aching between her legs that she didn’t want.
In the middle of her wicked thoughts, Dominic spoke.
“What made you decide to go into photography?”
She gripped her ankles, thankful for the distraction.
“I’ve always liked taking pictures. Whenever I saw something I liked, I snapped a picture of it so I could remember it later.
I’ve still got a box of Polaroids I took when I was little.
I can’t count how many lawns I mowed over the summer as a teenager just so I could buy a digital camera of my own. ”
A lazy smile spread over his lips. “Sounds like a calling to me.”
She caught herself mimicking that grin. “I guess so. When I found out that people could actually make a living off of taking pictures, I was all over it.”
“Did you do any professional studying? Do they have degrees for that?” Dominic took up the wrench and set to loosening the nuts on the metal piping attached to the drains.
“I took a few classes from the community college in Decatur.” Even Erica was surprised she’d offered up so much information.
Despite the way his eyes made her heartbeat rabbit in her chest, Dominic was surprisingly easy to talk to.
“My mom couldn’t afford much, so I didn’t pressure her to send me to college.
I didn’t want to spend years studying stuff I’d never use like trigonometry and anatomy. ”
Dominic glanced her way, and her stomach once more tied itself in knots. “Your parents weren’t putting money aside for your education?”
She looked away and tried to think of the right words so she wouldn’t make her life sound so tragic. “It was just me and my mom. College was never a big concern, and … we pretty much lived paycheck to paycheck.”
“No dad?” The wrench slipped, and Dominic hissed out a curse when his hand banged against the cabinet paneling.
“Nope.” She declared it so quickly that it surprised her. “He was in the picture for less than a year and then left. Mom never told me why, but it doesn’t matter.”
Dominic suddenly stopped and lowered the wrench to stare at her. “It does matter.” The force behind his words startled her, and his dark brows angled in such a way that made her feel as if she had said something wrong or untruthful. “Did your mom even know why he left?”
Erica locked eyes with him, her expression carefully blank and uncaring.
She’d conditioned herself to be apathetic to the thought of her father a long time ago.
If she hadn’t, she would have probably been a bawling mess any time the subject came up.
“I’m sure she did, but didn’t want to tell me.
When I was really little, I held out hope that he’d come back, but when he didn’t …
” She shrugged, as if it didn’t mean anything to her now.
“Such is life. My mom did the best she could.” Then, she allowed herself to smile.
“And she must have done really well when I wasn’t looking.
If she hadn’t been putting money away, I wouldn’t have had enough to buy this house without a mortgage. ”
Dominic appeared impressed. “You paid for this place in cash?”
She was satisfied by his amazement. “See. I told you I could take care of myself.”
“That you did.” Dominic nodded and turned back to the plumbing. “Was that big bag of cash a birthday present or something?”
When the lawyer told her about her inheritance, Erica thought it was some cruel joke.
She knew she’d have to take care of her mom’s house, car, and bank accounts, but she never expected to receive any sum of money after she died.
She couldn’t begin to fathom how her mom managed to put so much aside over the course of her lifetime, and it would remain a mystery.
While she might have liked that money to have been used on other things throughout her childhood, the house was the best use of it now.
Erica opened her mouth to reply, but she was glad that he couldn’t see the torn look in her eyes. She hated the sympathetic way people passed out their condolences whenever she mentioned that her mom wasn’t around anymore. She couldn’t bear to hear that pointless sentiment from Dominic.
“Something like that.” She managed to fake an untroubled tone, despite the ache in her chest. “So, what about you? What’s with the antique shop?” Dominic let out a breath, as if dreading the turn in the conversation. “Come on,” she teased. “I just poured out my life’s story. It’s your turn.”
A pause stretched between them before he replied, “The antique shop’s been in my family for a long, long time.” The remaining metal piping came off with a dull clang. “My father owned the shop before me, and my grandfather before him. It’s our equivalent of a family heirloom, I guess.”
“That’s quite an heirloom. Beats a ring or a necklace. You can actually make money off of it.”
Dominic shifted from balancing on the balls of his feet to completely on his knees as he ducked his head under the cabinet space. “It has its advantages.”
“So, all that stuff has just been collected over … how many generations?”
He eased out from under the sink and looked heavenward as he mentally counted back the decades.
“Well, my family founded Tolstone and that was in the early eighteen-hundreds, I think … So, maybe six or seven generations. I never really sat and counted, but I have a family-tree book. Of course, the antique shop has only been around since maybe the turn of the last century, whenever people became interested in collecting old things to show off to their guests.”
Erica’s mouth dropped open. “You’re kidding.”
“No, I’m serious. My family’s incredibly proud of their ancestry, so we kept pretty good track of birth records.”
“No, I mean about your family being, like, the founding family of Tolstone.” She made sure to throw in some haughty emphasis to make it sound as grand as she believed it to be.
He grabbed up a few of the PVC pieces and the plumber’s glue. “I’m serious about that too. It’s a pretty involved history, but my ancestors were French traders who came to settle in this area long before it was a state.”