Was it just me or did big mirrors make your clothes shrink?
I turned to the side in the guest bathroom, smoothing my hands over my flat stomach with a wrinkled expression on my face. God, was this really all I had to grab for today? Black cotton shorts that hugged just under my ass and a tanktop Layla got me last year as a gag gift that said ‘Let’s Get Moist.’
I hated that word about as much as I hated working out. Layla knew both, and so the gift was actually pretty funny. I doubt either of us thought I’d ever actually be wearing it, let alone in front of my boss. It was the only themed shirt I had for exercise though, so I had to wear it. Why I thought I had to be on theme for today was anyone’s guess.
I was anxious as fuck when I chose my outfit for this, okay?
No amount of breathing exercises I did were helping either. My nerves were shot, my cheeks were flushed pink, and my mind had already thought up about fifteen different ways this could go wrong.
Only thirteen of them were perverted.
My work day had ended about twenty minutes ago, and I’d spent the majority of that time freaking out in the bathroom and wrestling the hem of my shorts down. My hair was unnaturally wavy today, rebelling against this idea as much as the rest of me. Best I could do was throw it up in a bun to get it out of the way and hope it stayed.
The green of my eyes looked like it had been cranked up in brightness, shining a violent shade of emerald that stung to stare at too long. Sighing, I shut my eyes and sunk down to my elbows on the bathroom countertop.
The granite was cold, a welcomed change from the heat swelling my pores.
Why I was so nervous for this wasn’t totally clear, but my pulse hadn’t stopped racing since the clock hit 5:30.
“Kat.”
Dominic’s full-bodied voice resonated through the wood of the bathroom door, tripping my heartbeat over itself.
“Come to the garage when you’re ready.”
My head snapped to the door as if I could see Dominic behind it. “Okay!”
I flinched back when my voice fucking squeaked like I was a goddamn school girl. I slapped my hand over my forehead and waited to see if I felt feverish or was just losing my freaking mind.
It had been like this since yesterday.
Our chemistry had created small moments before, but nothing quite like yesterday’s. That one time in Maya’s bedroom had been flustering, but it was only a comment. The incident in the park on Sunday had been unexpected, but my lust for Dominic had never been subtle, and it shouldn’t have taken me by surprise that I wanted to kiss him.
Whatever it was between us was predatory and attacked whenever it saw an opportunity, but I had been its sole victim over the last month and a half. Dominic might have felt nips of it here and there, but he’d remained mostly unscathed up until now.
Until yesterday.
Something about what happened with Daren pushed him off his kilter of right and wrong. Our dynamic was upended when he had me against that wall. We had a strict set of unspoken rules that Dominic broke yesterday.
I teased him and flirted with him because I was reckless and young and I could. Dominic was the older rule-loving authoritarian who let me have my fun but kept me from crossing any lines.
Except the thing with Daren hurt him. It enraged the opportunistic thing between us so much that it finally took a chunk out of Dominic, and he lost his grip on us. He touched me like he wanted to touch me. Talked to me like he wanted to blur those lines.
He was slipping, and I didn’t know how to react to it.
With a final mirror check, I smoothed my palm down my chest in a lame attempt to quiet my palpitating heart and exited the bathroom.
I’d never been inside the Reed’s garage before, but one step inside told me it really wasn’t much of a garage at all.
It had been made into a home gym for the most part. It was a three car garage, and the very end had a space where a car would go, but everything else was equipment and heavy weights.
No wonder Dominic is so jacked.
Speaking of, my boss hadn’t noticed my entrance yet. He was turned from me, unfolding and laying out blue mats on the floor. He bent over, and…
Was it dramatic to say time stopped?
If it was, I didn’t care. I was a dramatic person, and that was an ass worth being dramatic over. He was wearing sweatpants, for fuck’s sake. Didn’t every man know that sweatpants were like kryptonite on a perfect ass?
They were the color of gray his eyes got when he was lit by moon or sunlight. The shirt he was wearing wasn’t helping my hormones either. It was a freaking muscle shirt. I already knew the muscles were there. I’d felt them, but did I really have to stare at the taunting outline of them for the next two hours?
Did he want me to learn anything?
“Kat?”
My lips parted with a faint smack as shock entered my lungs. I pulled my focus up, finding sterling eyes waiting on mine.
“Hi,” I breathed, sounding like a dumbass.
Dominic ignored my equivalent of a vocal hard on and lowered his gaze about a foot.
“Nice shirt.”
Nice ass.
“Yeah, I don’t exactly have ‘quote unquote’ workout clothes, so…” I shrugged, sending a distracting scan around the garage. It was a nice size space and far enough away from the main rooms of the house that it felt secluded. A not-so-cozy nook of the house just for Dominic. The space and everything in it were stoical just like him.
There were a few messy exceptions. A couple half-drunk water bottles lying around, an empty glass tumbler that probably smelled like bourbon, a discarded pair of sneakers in the corner—a different pair than he wore to the park. His park sneakers were around his feet right now while I was rocking the barefoot look.
I even painted my toes with some red polish I’d dug out of my closet last night.
My red toes clashed with the blue mats as I stepped on one, the air squishing out beneath my heel. “So you’d rather be here with me than at some fancy family dinner with Heather and her parents?”
My stare cut across the room just in time to see Dominic’s jaw lock tight.
“I wasn’t invited.”
If I was still standing in front of that giant bathroom mirror, I would have just watched my eyes bulge out. Heather didn’t even invite him? Talk about next level shitty.
Rather than dwell on it, he put on his cop boss hat and got down to business. “Let’s begin.”
“So serious,” I chuckled, trying to lighten his mood.
It had the polar opposite effect, and his eyes turned glacial.
“Self-defense is a serious thing, and I expect you to take this seriously.”
I froze up beneath his gaze and had one of those moments where you carefully think out how you need to react over how you want to react. I wanted to sink my teeth into him and tear him a new asshole.
However, given that he was only here because his wife ousted him from dinner plans, I forced my tongue to draw all the colorful insults I had planned on the inside of my cheek instead.
Dominic watched me with anticipation, his muscles hard locked and braced for my reaction. Almost like he wanted me to lose it so he could lose it too.
Unfortunately or fortunately for him, all I did was nod. I’d be a good little student tonight to make up for what a bad little wife Heather was. A tiny smile pushed my cheeks in for him. Dominic looked at the gesture with distrust.
His browline was so sunken in, and the tips of my fingers tingled with that strange desire to rub the stress out of them. I curled them into my palm to stop myself.
Dominic still appeared wary, but shook himself out of it to go stand in the center of the mats. “Let’s start with how I had you yesterday.”
“Not up against the wall?”
A look of friction captured his expression. “We can skip that part.”
Okay, so he definitely knew yesterday had been a big no-no. Somewhere up against that wall, we’d found our line and crossed it, and now he was trying to wheel us back.
Mentally high-fiving myself for being right, I travelled across the floor to him. How Dominic touched me today compared to yesterday was like a business transaction. There was no touch unwarranted. No body contact not necessary.
His hands locked my arms behind my back like he had yesterday, and that was the extent of it.
“So there are a few ways to get out of this. Your goal is either to surprise or hurt your attacker enough to distract them so you can get away.” His fingers around my wrists tightened my focus on his next words. “You’re not fighting anyone, okay?”
I bobbed my head from side to side. “I mean, I am.”
“No, you’re not. You do these moves and then you run away. You don’t stay and fight.” His next question was pointed. “Do you understand?”
Over my shoulder, I twisted my neck to zero in my disbelief on him. “If someone tries to attack me, you don’t want me to fight back?”
“No. I want you to run.”
“That’s dumb.”
“That’s being safe.”
Swiveling my head back forward, I rolled my eyes. “Whatever. Lets just keep going.”
A sigh with audible irritation inflated his chest to brush my back. Then it was back to bare bones physical contact and Mr. Serious.
“In this position, it’ll depend how they’ve grabbed you. How I have you now, your easiest way to hurt me would be to step on my foot as hard as you can, especially if you have heels on. That, or smash your head back into my nose.”
“I head-butted Daren, but it hurt like a bitch.”
“You went forehead to forehead in the video. You want to aim for their nose whether you’re hitting them from front or behind.”
I cocked my head just a bit. “Can I practice that?”
“I’d rather you not,” he replied, deeply unamused.
An exhale of dramatic proportions slumped my entire body. “Then what’s the point of this?”
“We’re getting to that.”
The low notes of his voice struck like slaps of wind, the chill digging goosebumps out of my skin. I breathed through the reaction, trying to remember why I was here and move it along. The faster we went, the quicker I could get out of here and resume my denial that nothing out of the ordinary was happening between me and my boss.
Pressure released around my wrists as Dominic loosened his grip, moving up to my shoulders. “To continue, I’ll have to wrap my arms around you. Is that all right?”
Heat thwacked my chest, bleeding up into my cheeks. He’d never asked to touch me before. He maybe should have on any one of the occasions that he’d touched me or held me or even picked me up off the ground, but he hadn’t. The fact that he was now was inarguable, humiliating proof that yesterday, we’d gone too far, and Dominic was acutely aware of it.
“Yeah, that’s fine.”
Gently, he eased me back against him, burly arms circling my upper body and trapping my arms at my side “A lot of times, men will grab you from behind like this so they can pick you up and carry you wherever they want.”
I was hearing him, I really was, but it was difficult to focus on learning defense moves when all I could think about was how I wanted things to go back to normal between us. No awkwardness. No tension. No asking for permission to touch me like we were back in middle school.
Part of me wanted to scream and shake him and tell him to get over it and stop making it such a big deal. He was attracted to me. Big whoop. Though, putting it out into the open like that would probably only make him clam up more.
I just needed to unfreeze him. Make him laugh. Make him remember the easiness between us when we fell back into what worked for us.
“I’ll be sure to eat a huge breakfast that day so I’m too heavy to lug around,” I said. “Really carbo load that day.”
It was a few seconds before he said anything. A few seconds before he released a short exhale that sounded both begrudging and amused. “Even if you were wearing a weighted vest, you’d still be easy to pick up.”
“What?!” I snapped my head back around him as much as possible, showing him my outrage. “You’re exaggerating.”
His eyebrow cocked in confidence. “I’m not.”
“What about when I’m dead weight?”
Without giving him warning, I dropped myself in his arms to a ragdoll of limp muscles and flimsy bones. His forearms stiffened around my chest, locking beneath my armpits. I was a noodle and he was the fork trying to hold me in place, and I hoped like fuck he thought this was funny.
“Ms. Sanders,” Dominic grumbled.
“I can’t hear you. I’m dead.”
His hold around me shifted and reinforced. “You will be if someone comes after you and you don’t know how to defend yourself because you were goofing off during these lessons.”
“I’m not goofing off. I’m proving a point. This is my defense tactic.”
Eyes closed, tension balled up my stomach into a knot of nerves. I was hanging in his arms, legs flopped out on either side and one-hundred percent committed to this bit now. It’d gone on too long to pretend otherwise.
It made sense in the moment when I went full noodle. I imagined him laughing, scolding me a little, and then we would move on like yesterday had never even happened. Except, in the reality of it, there was no laughing. Only scolding and now silence.
This was backfiring fast.
My heart was full on throttling itself, and I was sure Dominic could feel it, beating an apology out in morse code for how stupid this was.
Just before I threw in the towel and heaved myself back up standing, Dominic moved.
He bent at the knees, one of his arms loosening its grip keeping me up. An inaudible gasp caught in my throat. He was dropping me, and I couldn’t blame him. At least my landing would be soft.
I braced for an impact that never came. Dominic scooped an arm beneath the bend of my knees instead, lifting me fast. My arms jumped with my heart and latched around his neck, holding on for dear life.
I was all shock and no words as he cradled me—fucking cradled me—into his chest. Hard muscles I’d felt from behind yesterday were now right there and accentuated by his tight shirt. Arrogance destroyed my next several breaths looking so damn good on him as he stared me down from so close.
“It’s a lousy defense tactic. You’re still too tiny for it to matter.”
Focus. Focus. Focus.
“I am not tiny,” I argued. “I’m 5’3”.”
“Fine. You’re petite.”
“That’s just a fancy word for tiny.”
The corner of his mouth crept up, and he moved his thoughtful gaze out before bringing it back to me. “What do you want me to tell you? It’s another reason I worry. You’re a hundred and ten pounds of backtalk. You’re bound to piss off the wrong person.”
“Jeez, tell me how you really feel.”
He gave a small laugh through his nose, and I felt like I was watching the ice thaw around his eyes. Limp noodle totally worked. “I just mean that if someone wanted to take you, I’d like to make it as hard as possible for them to do that.”
Those words struck an abnormal cord in me, setting my heart on edge. I angled a curious look up at him, a hesitant curve to my lips.
“That’s such a hero thing to say.”
Reflection speckled across winter eyes. “Is that a bad thing?”
“No.” I shook my head, speaking sincerely. “I’m just used to villains.”
