Chapter Eight #3
“The doctors all said it was heart failure. Worked himself too hard for too long. When people knew he was going downhill, they called me home. I took my time.” Dominic sucked in a breath that expanded his chest. “By the time I got back, he was gone. My dad was good friends with the sheriff, and he told me that in those last days, he basically shut down. Kept asking for me. For my mom. And when Cole told him we weren’t around, my dad cried.
That man never cried a day in my life.” A painful wince passed over his face.
“Maybe physical heart failure wasn’t the only cause of death. Metaphorical heart failure too.”
Erica froze and saw the broken look in his eyes, the same look she tried to hide in herself.
More than anyone else, she understood what he might have been going through.
They both lost the only parent they had ever really known.
Now, they were both trying to grapple with their grief in the only way they knew how.
They both had regrets. They both struggled, though in different ways.
But in that, he was right—they had more common ground than Erica previously imagined.
She never believed in anything like fate or destiny, but it couldn’t have been a coincidence that they met when they did.
Now, maybe she had someone who understood those moments when she felt like bursting into tears because she missed her mother so deeply, so ardently, that she couldn’t keep it in.
Did Dominic have those moments? Did he miss his father?
Or did the nature of his upbringing sour his memory?
By the way he looked, however, Erica doubted it.
He could be tough in front of the rest of Tolstone, but he let her see the truth.
He was torn up over the way things ended between him and his father.
He had to be. That bit of glossiness in his eyes confirmed it.
Returning the favor of discretion and respect, she didn’t say how sorry she was to hear of his loss or give some platitude about how his father was in a better place now and that if they had the chance, they would have reconciled before the end.
She had been sick of hearing those things from her few friends and perfect strangers.
Dominic would have heard it from the entire town. He didn’t need to hear it from her.
To save them both from the awkward segue, she jumped to a safer topic. “And what do you do when you’re not running an antique shop and … you know?”
Dominic seemed to have pulled himself back from the brink of that hard, dark emotion. “I read … Boring, I know, but when you look at how much free time I have, you’ll know I don’t get to read much at all anyway.”
Erica cast a glance over her shoulder and hit him with her best cunning smile to try and make him laugh again. “So, you’re an intellectual through and through, huh?”
He copied her look. The effects were acutely felt through her limbs, and she would have buckled straight into his arms if she hadn’t leaned into the counter instead. “Surprised?”
The brush bristles slowly slid against the sheetrock, unintentionally sensual. “Not really. I mean, you don’t look it at all, but …” She stopped herself, the truth of her opinion just on the tip of her tongue.
“Go on. Say it.”
Bravery slowly pushed the words out of her throat. “It shows in your eyes. You just know things. I’ve met guys who … who look like you do, and you can just see the lights aren’t all on upstairs.”
Amusement glimmered in those eyes she spoke of so fondly. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“I mean it too. Just like you, I mean everything I say.”
“What a lucky break for me.”
Erica nearly burst into a wide grin at the way he appraised her with such …
She didn’t even know how to describe that look.
She only recognized it from the faces of the clients she had done shoots for over the years.
Husbands and wives looked at one another like that during family photos.
New parents, too, when they gazed down at their baby.
Engaged or freshly married couples beamed at each other with that same sparkle in their eyes.
She bit her lip and turned back to the paint to realize she had only progressed about a foot into the backsplash. “I’m not getting very far, am I?”
“I’m distracting you.” Dominic eased off the counter and made his way back to the card table.
Before she could understand what could have possessed her, Erica reached out and grabbed his arm, feeling the taut muscles move under his skin.
“No,” she said quickly. “You can stay there.”
They locked eyes and something like fire passed between them, hot and scorching, but painless and exhilarating all at the same time.
All that sexual tension between them, all the looks, the vibes, the energies that told her something had to be there, roared back into focus.
The elephant in the room, this unspeakable, indistinguishable longing for one another lurking beneath the innocent conversation, was now a beast that demanded to be noticed, to be recognized and given a name.
Erica couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t break down and call this weird mess anything. Giving it a name would have been like confessing that it existed, and she didn’t want it to. Not yet. Maybe she wasn’t ready for this after all.
She wanted her freedom, but she also didn’t want to be lonely.
Dominic’s rebuke to trust someone played back in her mind.
Moving away from her hometown, losing her mother too soon in her life, all of it made her lie awake at night and wish she could have been sharing a life with someone. Someone like Dominic.
But why? She hardly knew him. They hadn’t spent enough time together to yearn for something so intimate. Why should she want a perfect stranger in her arms, in her bed?
And then it hit her. Dominic wasn’t a stranger. This mysterious emotion felt so natural that he couldn’t be a stranger. Ever since the moment they met in the shop, she felt she had known him all her life. How could she be so comfortable with anyone like this otherwise?
All at once, those walls she had tried to reconstruct after his demolition job earlier that afternoon came tumbling down again, and she felt faint. Her heart lay exposed under the open sky of his gaze that seemed to burn with his own frightening revelation of what they shared.
Erica withdrew her touch. She couldn’t fall, she couldn’t let someone in, someone who might change her entire sense of self, something she had to white-knuckle and preserve above all else.
Dominic didn’t want distance. In one bounding, dominating step, he closed the space between them.
His arm wrapped around her waist and pulled her in until their bodies were flush together.
If she thought just a single touch on his arm had been devastating, feeling his hard, chiseled core against hers made her want to weep.
He didn’t have to guide her, didn’t have to lift her chin up so their lips could meet. They simply did, as if they knew the steps to this dangerous dance by heart and needed no prompting. Her senses were consumed by him, his scent, his warmth, and she wanted more.
Erica dropped the paintbrush and it landed on the floor with a sharp crack as the wood handle hit linoleum.
Her fingers found their way to weave into his hair as the edge of the counter bit into her lower back.
He edged between her thighs as their kiss deepened, and something hard and rigid rubbed against the fabric of her sweatpants.
So fluid, so comfortable, and yet passionate for no damn good reason.
She pulled away for only a second, her breaths ragged. “This is insane.” It was more to herself, a way to bring herself down from the high before it was too late. That wasn’t what she truly wanted, and Dominic seemed to instinctively know that too.
He wouldn’t allow her to make any more excuses. He shut her up as his mouth came down on hers one more time with demanding force. Could he feel the sparks too? The ones that exploded into a blazing fire between them that would consume her soon if they didn’t stop?
His free hand reached down and slid under her knee, pulling her leg up, encouraging it to wrap around him. She obeyed without a bit of resistance. It just felt right. A smile played on her lips as his tongue slipped through to tease hers. God, he tasted so good.
She had expected being this intimate with a man would make her feel trapped, helpless, captured. But in Dominic’s embrace, she felt nothing but serenity. It didn’t seem insane anymore, and Erica couldn’t think of a single reason to pull away.
Apparently, Dominic could.
He went rigid and cut off the kiss so abruptly that she literally reeled and had to blink a few times before she could see straight.
His eyes were fixed on the windows just beyond the breakfast nook, the ones that looked across the expanse of yard between their two homes.
A mask fell over his countenance, the one he had the other day when Officer Spradley came to cart Dominic away.
A second later, a low rumble sounded in his chest, and she felt it crawl across her skin.
Was he growling? The memory of golden eyes came back like a slap to the face.
“What’s wrong?”
Those words broke the spell, and Dominic turned back, something like stifled rage burning in his eyes. That didn’t scare her as much as what she thought would happen next. Every time he got that look, he left her.
“I have to go,” he murmured. “I’m sorry.”
Dominic stole one more kiss. Then, the cold rushed in to replace him.
Erica leaned against the counter, and it took her a moment to gain her bearings.
When she did, she rushed after him down the hall, driven more by fear than a need to know exactly why he was leaving her.
After a kiss like that, how could she be alone again?
“What’s going on?” Her wounded heart broadcast so vibrantly in those few words.
His hand was on the doorknob when he looked back. Heartbreak had replaced fury in his magnificent blue eyes, and she knew he must have been feeling the weight of this moment too. If he didn’t want to really go, then why didn’t he stay? What was so important?
Dominic grappled with his next words and shook his head. “I’ll try to explain later.”
In seconds, he was gone. She heard no raised voices beyond the door, and only one pair of footsteps thundered down the porch steps.
She rushed to the sidelight windows and watched him march down the concrete path into the darkness, alone.
The further he walked away, the more she felt herself drawn thin, wispy, liable to blow over at a moment’s notice.
No one had rung the doorbell, no one had knocked, no one was calling on him. Dominic had left completely of his own will and turned to head next door. What the hell just happened? Did she do something wrong? What was he thinking?
She had never been left so ruined by a simple kiss.
Oh, but that couldn’t have been a simple kiss.
Her lips and tongue continued to tingle with the aftershocks of their passion, and the fire in her belly raged on.
Something else happened. Somewhere between the tongue teasing, the thigh caressing, and the hardness she’d felt between her legs, they forged something together in their spirits.
With her heart unprotected, that bond between them had hardened and became indissoluble.
She couldn’t shake it, couldn’t break it, couldn’t begin to explain it.
Erica covered her face with her hands and felt her legs crumble beneath her until she sat down on the floor in the foyer, nothing but her shuddering breaths to fill the void Dominic had created when he left.
All of a sudden, it felt as if an overwhelming weight settled on her chest, straining against that thing she tried to deny, tried to ignore.
Erica wanted to cry, wanted to beat at the floorboards and scream until he came back.
This wave of grief seemed familiar, and yet completely new and devastating, and she couldn’t fight it anymore.
She never wanted to feel this out of control, but here she was, falling apart again.
She’d see Dominic again. He lived right next door. He wasn’t going anywhere. Then why did it feel like he’d just shot halfway across the galaxy, out of her reach and out of her life completely? What the hell was going on?