Chapter 34: 34

Dominic

It had been a long day. All I wanted to do was collapse, but I had a feeling my new roommate was going to try to get in the way of that.

With a heavy sigh, I nodded to Leandro and Salvo, the two men who’d spent the past twelve hours sitting outside my door, and walked inside with a gym bag in one hand.

I half-expected to find her in the middle of the living room, glaring daggers at me, but she was nowhere to be seen. The bathroom door was closed, though, and I could hear the water running.

Images of Fallon, naked and wet, bombarded my mind, sending a hot jolt of arousal through my veins. I’d had her naked, her legs splayed, on the verge of orgasm less than twenty-four hours ago. I wondered what she’d do now if I walked in there and joined her in the shower. Would she push me away? Or would she succumb to it, setting the stage for the best angry sex of her life?

The water shut off while I stood there, hesitating. I scrubbed my fingers through my hair. It would have been better if she’d been ugly—a hump, a few warts, and maybe some hideous scars would have made it so much easier to get her out of my mind.

The bathroom door opened, and she stepped out with a towel wrapped around her, tucked between her breasts. She gasped when she saw me and took a step back, hovering between the bathroom and the hallway. Her hair was dripping wet, her eyes wide, her lips parted in surprise. A walking, gasping fucking fantasy come to life.

Her eyes were no longer blue flames. It surprised me—something I rarely felt. It was too much to hope she’d come to terms with our situation. It was more like she was in some sort of trance.

I looked her up and down because I would have had to be dead to not pay any attention to her slim thighs or the curve of her waist, or the way the edge of the towel had been tucked so carelessly between her breasts, it could come loose at any moment.

The sparks were snapping in the air, just like they were this morning when it had been her eyes grazing over my half-naked body. She’d stood there frozen in her sexy black dress, and I’d known for a fact she’d had no panties on beneath it. It would have been so easy to thrust her up against the wall and fuck her senseless, just like it would be no difficult task now.

I took a step toward her, and she remained where she was. Another step and then another, and I could see her throat muscles working as she swallowed hard. Her chest rose and fell faster, loosening the towel’s edge, but it stayed there, taunting me, like it was suspended in space.

But when I stopped right in front of her and reached for the towel, the trance-like glaze in her eyes evaporated.

“Dominic, don’t,” she whispered.

I dropped my hand, but I didn’t move away.

“I won’t do this,” she said, though it sounded like she was trying to convince herself as much as me. “You can’t treat me like a prisoner and expect me to fall all over you. What you’re doing is wrong. I’m a person, not an object for you to own.”

With every word, her voice grew stronger, and her sweetness gave way to bitter anger. Though I didn’t miss the way her body tensed as I drew closer, she was looking at me like I was some vile creature.

I stepped back. Maybe the princess would get off her high horse if she knew just how close her hot little ass had come to being blown to pieces. I reached into my pocket and withdrew the eleven small crushed pieces of metal.

“You’re welcome,” I said, dropping them at her feet.

She looked down, squinting at the fragments on the floor.

“Just in case you’re curious, I retrieved those from your apartment walls.” “My walls?” She paused. “That’s why you dragged me out. That’s why…” She swallowed hard as her face lost some of its color.

Maybe now she’d realize that my apartment was a safe haven, not a prison.

“And this is my life now?” she said, her voice once again an octave too high while she motioned to the bullets on the floor.

That wasn’t the point I’d been trying to make. The point was she was alive. She was safe. She was breathing. She was here.

“There are people shooting at me... shooting at me because of you. That man… he wasn’t after me. He

was after you. If I’d never met you, he would never have known about me.” “What do you want me to do? Turn back time?” I clenched my jaw.

She was right. It was my fault she’d been in danger. But none of this was my choice any more than it was hers.

“I want you to leave me alone. I want you to let me go, and I never want to see you again.” She glared at me while her chest heaved with every deep breath.

“No can do, limone, but don’t worry, as soon as we’re married, you can lock yourself away in here and never lay eyes on me again if you so choose,” I said then turned and walked away.

Inside my bedroom, I closed and locked the door, then proceeded to pace back and forth across the long stretch of hardwood flooring at the foot of the bed.

I let out a groan. She was lucky I wasn’t a lesser man, or I might have been tempted to strangle her just to stop her from spewing her senseless bullshit. Nobody fucking talked to me that way.

Maybe I just needed to give her more time, I tried to reason with myself as I loosened my tie and tossed it on the bed. If I was in her shoes, maybe I’d be just as pissed off as she was. But then again, I was in her shoes. I sure as fuck didn’t want to marry a woman who not only annoyed the hell out of me but wanted nothing to do with me. But my family needed this, so there was no question to it.

Loyalty came first. Family came first.

But who does she have to pledge her loyalty to? a voice taunted from the back of my mind. It hit me like a sucker punch. Fallon had no one. No mother, no siblings, and a lousy deadbeat prick for a father. My father, my mother, every one of my siblings; we would die for each other in a heartbeat. Would Douglas endure so much as a hangnail for his daughter?

I sat down at the edge of the bed and tugged off my shoes. While the woman still pissed me off to no end, perhaps I’d expected too much of her. Maybe she was entitled to her anger. And maybe for once, it was my turn to get off my high horse and try to help her through this.

I laid back and closed my eyes. Helping her might have been the right thing to do, but not tonight. I was too tired to deal with any more of her antics.