You know when you just have one of those days?
The kind of day that started off totally normal and then progressively got so mind-bogglingly terrible that by the end of it, you’re expecting to wake up in your bed thankful that it was all a dream?
That would be today for me.
Today was Friday and the end of my first official week working for the Reeds. The week had actually gone well, much to my relief and even greater shock. I’d gotten lucky this week. Heather was gone before I got there each morning, and Dominic made it home before his wife each day to relieve me. Apparently, it wouldn’t always be that way.
Dominic’s schedule was the most consistent except when he had to pull a double and work patrol at night, so he said. As far as Heather’s work schedule, he warned me it was chaotic and that she could pop up at any time she wasn’t in the office or showing a house.
Lucky me.
Tonight was also Daren’s friend’s party. Mrs. Sharon ended up making the kids’ movie night a sleepover so I could stay out later, and I wouldn’t lie that I was a little excited to have one night of no obligations. Just drinking my face off, making reckless choices, and no guilt over it. I hadn’t been out out in… God, I couldn’t even remember how long. Plus, I hadn’t seen Layla since I got canned, and within thirty seconds of me texting her about tonight, she was sending me photos of dresses.
I was really looking forward to tonight. I just had to get through the rest of the work day. Currently, I was lying on the ground, Maya on the couch with our board game sprawled in front of her on the cushions, the news on the T.V. in the background.
“But why do I have to move onto the red square? I didn’t pull a red card.”
“Because those are the rules, Ms. Kat!” Maya ran her hand back across her face to rid her forehead of stray hairs that had escaped her ponytail. “Pay attention.”
“This is my first time playing. Give a girl a break. Jeez.”
I held my hands up in mock surrender, careful not to show off my cards and lose even more than I already was. This game either made no sense, or I was actually as dumb as Heather assumed I was.
Just then, the sound of the front door opening and closing echoed through the house, and both our heads snapped that way.
“Daddy!”
Maya scrambled off of the couch and flung herself at her father as he walked through the threshold of the living room; he barely had time to brace himself for his daughter’s full on attack. Dominic let out half a groan as he caught his daughter in his arms, lifting her up to sit on his hip.
“Hey Munchkin.” He pecked a kiss on her forehead.
“I missed you.” Maya snuggled her head into her father’s neck. She picked up his detective badge that was hanging around his neck like a necklace and fiddled with it.
“You saw me yesterday,” he chuckled.
In a small voice, she replied, “I still missed you.”
Dominic’s face softened, and his grip on his daughter tightened a bit more. An uncomfortable pang went off in my chest at the display.
Eyes like the sky after a thunderstorm found me on the floor, and that pang turned into a full-blown gut punch. I sucked back a quick, sharp breath and steered my gaze back down to the game.
There were two reasons I couldn’t look at Dominic Reed right now. One—and this reasoning had persisted all week long—was because of that stupid fucking, dumb as shit, mind-blowing orgasm he helped usher in last week when I was with Daren. It had come so far out of left field, I still felt a rush of guilt when I thought about it.
And horny. So. Fucking. Horny.
It was no secret that Dominic Reed was extraordinarily handsome, but he was also married and my boss, so you’d think my fuck-o-meter would turn off for him, but nope. In fact, he broke the damn thing, making me so hot whenever he looked at me now that I felt like I was shattering in a fit of boiling flames and guilty sweat.
The second reason was something new, but equally as combustible.
The peculiar sympathy in his eyes as he hugged his daughter and she hugged him back was infuriating. It was insulting. I didn’t want or need his unasked for pity. I didn’t need him dissecting what made me tick like a bomb whose fuse was always lit.
So my father was a fuck up? I didn’t see any reason why that should intrigue him.
In the middle of trying to distract myself from the odd cocktail of insult and desire, Maya let an excited gasp rip across the room.
“Come play with us! You can be on Ms. Kat’s team since she needs help.”
Not looking at him, the pause he gave his daughter before answering read loud and clear. “Sweetie, Daddy’s really tired. I have to go back to work tonight, so I’m about to go lay down for a nap.”
“Please, Daddy? One game!” I cocked a keen eye over to Maya just as she clipped a glance to me and then back to her father. She leaned in close to whisper, but was loud enough for the entire neighborhood to hear. “Ms. Kat doesn’t get how to play, and I know it’s mean to say, but she’s not very good and-and it’s hard to play with her.”
My jaw slacked in open offense. Dominic’s now noticeably tired eyes slid over to mine, a spark of humor dotting them both. The corner of his full mouth tipped up.
“Just one game, Daddy?”
Dominic’s face was weary, but I saw the cave coming from a mile away. There was no resisting Maya’s pleading little stare. “All right, but just one game. Then it’s nap time for both of us.”
With an enthusiastic squeal, Maya jumped out of her father’s arms and came soaring back to the couch with Dominic towing behind in labored steps.
“Sit next to Ms. Kat so you can see her cards,” she ordered.
Shiny black shoes came my way, and I sat up, tucking my feet under my legs to get comfortable. Getting completely comfortable wasn’t going to be possible given how Dominic looked today and how close he came as he sat down next to me. He was wearing a white button down shirt that pulled over his broad shoulders in a way I’d never seen material do before. It was like I could hear the material gasping for breath against his strong body when he moved a certain way.
The tan slacks he wore were softer than I anticipated as he lowered himself to the floor, and his thigh brushed my bare knee. The sensation was a flawless combination of soft and fire-hot.
Like he’d caressed me with a feather made of flames.
Dear lord. I had to get my shit together.
Next to me, Dominic barely looked awake as he spotted the T.V. from across the room. A vile reaction gripped his expression, and he grabbed the remote and clicked the news story of some nurse who’d been missing for a few weeks off the screen.
Sitting next to him, I got to see the back of his jaw tense and shift just before he shut his eyes. Then he rested his head back against the couch.
“Hey.” I nudged his arm with my elbow. “You’re supposed to be on my team. Perk up.”
“I’m up,” he spoke, eyes fully shut.
“You are not. How do you expect this team to win if you snooze your way through the game?”
With what looked like a lot of effort, Dominic twisted his head to lock eyes on me. “I think you might be taking this a little too seriously, Ms. Sanders,” he replied with eyes half-hooded beneath heavy eyelids. “Besides, no one else wins at this game besides Maya.”
“Well, yeah, because she’s the only one who understands these ludicrous rules.”
“That’s because she made them up.”
I paused.
“What?”
All he did was give a casual shrug. “We lost the rules for the game about two years ago. One day, she made up her own rules, and I let her. No one else understands what’s going on in the game, but she always wins, so she’s happy.”
So I just wasted a solid forty minutes trying to understand a game with rules made up by a four-year-old? I blinked at Dominic, astounded and maybe just a little pissed that there was literally no way I could win this game. At all.
“You know if she always wins these games, she’s gonna become a really sore loser later on.”
Dominic watched me, his eyes doing that thing again. That analyzing, intimate, goosebump-inciting thing, but this time with a wry curve to his mouth. “Speaking from experience, are we?”
God, his mouth. I’d never seen such a beautiful mouth that I wanted to slap so freaking badly.
“Be quiet and help me lose this game.”
About twenty minutes later, the game was over. Maya won, I sulked, and Dominic went up for a nap.
Maya went down for her hour-long nap shortly after, and I got busy with the household chores Heather found for me to do, so I wasn’t ‘just sitting around, making money.’
It wasn’t much. They had a housekeeper that came by every week to do the real, deep cleaning. All I had to do was make the beds, clear out the dishwasher if it was full, and do their laundry. I’d already started a load of Maya’s clothes in the wash when I walked by the upstairs home office, the door ajar.
The door to Dominic’s office was almost always closed unless he was in it, and a quick survey of the inside said it was vacant. Curiosity boiled inside of me, and my fingers danced along the lip of the laundry basket I had clutched beneath my arm. I didn’t need to go in there. I couldn’t imagine there were many clothes lying around on the floor in there that needed washing.
But then again…
I had that stupid saying to uphold, didn’t I? Curiosity killed Kat.
I pushed the door the rest of the way open, sliding inside the room with unusual grace and wandering eyes. One thing was clear right off the bat. Whoever decorated the rest of this house hadn’t set foot in this room. There was none of the tacky furniture or an overabundance of red, white, and black.
There was just a wooden desk pushed up against the wall that curved around to a right angle. That, and a chair. A simple chair, and a simple, light-wood desk.
My feet brought me over to the desk, brought my fingers to slide across the curved edge of its sides. Papers were scattered across it, as were manila files with even more papers spilling out. Most of what was on the pages were printed letters and numbers that all blurred into nonsense. Case numbers and police jargon and a whole lot of other shit that I couldn’t make heads or tails out of even if I tried.
I walked further around the desk, squinting at something that caught my eye. Something blue.
His name. Dominic Reed. Hand-written in deep blue ink.
My fingertips were on the D of his name before I could even think about what I was doing or why. Was this his handwriting? It was at the bottom of some paper, like signing off on whatever it was that was contained on that page, so it had to be his writing, right?
The indent of the pen was hard against the paper as if he was furious at it when he was signing it. As if he wanted to stab through the paper with the pen like it would tear through the truth of whatever was on the page and make it not true anymore. It was also elegant. Cursive. Refined. Beautiful handwriting.
A beautiful man should have beautiful penmanship, I supposed.
I wondered what my name would look like in his handwriting. My full name. All curvaceous and swooping and rich, unlike me. A lie in permanent ink.
I picked up the page with his name written on it and read it over, wanting to know what it was that made him so angry as he was signing it. There were locations I didn’t know and names that didn’t sound familiar… until one did.
Becky Johanson.
“The nurse?” I whispered, unable to contain my confusion. That had to be the same Becky Johanson they were just talking about downstairs on the news, right? The nurse that had been missing for weeks now, and police said the trail ran cold.
“Snooping is generally frowned upon.”
The unexpected deep voice zapped shock through my entire body. My head ripped up in a short gasp while my hands dropped the laundry basket and the paper, letting it float back down to the desk.
Dominic Reed was standing in the doorway, hands hidden away in his pants pockets and indiscernible gaze set on me. One look at his neatly styled hair, despite its thickness, told me he hadn’t laid down for the nap he said he’d be taking yet. So here he was instead, catching me red-handed doing something I was definitely not supposed to do.
The way he was staring at me held my tongue in place and fritzed my brain down to basic mechanics. All it left was the faintly spoken lie I heard myself say next.
“I was cleaning the desk.”
One of those thickly shaped brows of his cocked sharply. “Do you have anything better than that?”
Another fighting breath pulled down through my lungs as I parted my lips, and then his words registered. His mocking words. My voice stalled out, and I blinked back at him, my browline drawing in tight on my forehead.
Dominic didn’t move an inch. Simply waited.
He knew I was lying to him, knew I was somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be in his house, poking around through his things. He caught me in the lie and in the act, but he didn’t seem angry so much as… interested in what I’d say next.
So I searched my brain for a fresh lie. “A breeze rolled in and blew the papers down, so I came in to pick them up.”
He nodded to something behind me. “The window’s closed.”
Turning over my shoulder to see that the window was, in fact, closed, was more for show rather than consideration that he might be wrong. I knew he was right. He knew he was right.
“Uh, so then scratch that.” Snapping back around, I dug into my veins for the theatrics I knew were in there. “I actually fell into the room, rolled my ankle, knocked the paper off the desk and was picking it up just as you walked in.”
The slight curve that formed on his mouth was almost cocky. “Awfully clumsy of you, Ms. Sanders.”
“Yeah, I’m a total klutz.”
“Finally something that’s believable.”
My lips twitched in what wanted to be offense but folded into a smile instead that I rolled between my teeth. I didn’t want to smile because of him, but here I was, biting a grin down so hard, the metallic taste of blood overwhelmed my tastebuds.
Trying to ignore him and the bitter flavor in my mouth, I dropped my focus back down to the desk. To one blue-signed paper in particular. “You’re working the missing nurse’s case?”
The pause that followed killed the teasing atmosphere between us. When I drew my gaze back to him, that strange playfulness had slid off his face. It was back to being something close to frostbite. “One of many.”
I didn’t want to stop myself before I asked, “Is that the reason you have trouble sleeping?”
The chill in his stare grew to gray ice. “One of many.”
Silence held between us, and I felt the heaviness of it sitting on my chest. An awkward, cement brick pushing down on my chest, trying to force out words to end the quiet. I hated the silence.
Noise. I needed noise around me at all times. It’s why I was so thankful when Dominic eventually spoke again. “That’s why I came to find you, actually. Do you think you could make me another one of those drinks?”
Surprised, I nodded brightly. “Sure.”
Collecting the laundry basket from the ground, I went to leave, approaching Dominic in the doorway where his shoulders nearly touched the sides. He was standing so tall and straight, appearing larger than I’d seen him yet. Ducking my head as I got close, the interruption of his deep voice forced my head back up.
“Oh, and Ms. Sanders?”
“Hmm?”
Staring down the bridge of his nose at me, authority burned his charcoal irises. “This door stays closed for a reason.”
Rebellion flared hot in my lungs, and a quick memory jumped forward on my tongue.
“Yes sir.”
His reaction was slight, but worth it. A little shocked. A little angry. A little impressed.
Kat: one
Dominic: zero
