Chapter Two – Chloe

 

There aren’t enough carbs in the world to counteract the amount of bullshit.

Trust me. I’ve tried to eat them, and all I got was an extra five pounds on my ass.

 

I was saved.

Dom hadn’t shown up to work yesterday—and he hadn’t been home, either. On one hand, it pissed me off because I had to explain to the woman who’d shown up for a meeting with him that he was sick. On the other hand, I stole her from him.

Cha-ching.

You snooze, you lose.

As it stood, he was late today, too.

How could you be late when you lived upstairs?

Oh, that was right. You made sure you weren’t home.

Seriously, it was his funeral if he didn’t show up today. I knew how to kill people. I’d even do time for his death at that point. I’d long since passed any ability to be empathetic with the giant child I called my business partner.

I also needed another job. The lack of my own love life was unsurprisingly uninspiring, and if I had to watch one more romantic movie to get that inspiration, I was going to puke.

The sound of the front door opening had me looking up. Dom entered the office with a big, shit-eating smile on his face.

“Oh, look. He remembered he has a job.” The veiled insult jumped off my tongue before I could stop it.

He froze, still holding the door open. “Can that wait?” he hissed. “I’m with a client.”

My nostrils flared, and I gripped the edge of my desk, ready to push my chair back.

I was stopped by the arrival of a tall, beautiful woman with a smile that was either a thousand-watts or the result of too much whitening.

I knew which my pick was.

She pushed some of her voluminous brunette hair behind her ear, her smile widening as the red lipstick she wore only made her teeth look whiter. It was almost too dark for her pale complexion.

Boy. I was judgey today.

“Why don’t you take a seat, Ruby?” Dom said, motioning toward his side of the partitioned room.

“Sure.” The smile she offered him was entirely too flirtatious, and I barely hid a snort as she walked on heels over to where I couldn’t see her. The clicking of the stiletto heels against the wooden floor grated on me—mostly because she sounded uneasy on them.

“I’ll be right with you,” Dom said, smiling in her direction.

“Sure, honey,” she said with a voice that was, like her affectionate name for him, a little too sweet.

Dom nodded, still smiling, and turned to me. His smile dropped instantly, and he closed the distance of my space, stopping on the other side of my desk.

The desk I was still gripping.

I didn’t care that he knew I was pissed.

“What was that?” Dom asked in a hushed tone. “You can’t—”

“Don’t you dare.” I finally stood up, pointing my finger at him. “You’re the one who skipped out on work yesterday, missing a meeting with a new client, and then is late today.”

“Keep your voice down. Ruby is a client,” he said in the same, low voice. “We can talk about this later.”

“A client who wasn’t in your appointment book, unlike Charlotte Porter who was.” I glanced at my diary. “I’m going to get breakfast.” I grabbed my purse and got up, then stalked past him. “Oh, and don’t be too long, because you have an appointment in forty-five minutes,” I added, right before I walked out of the door without looking at Ruby.

I left the door to shut behind me, and as I stopped to take a deep breath, the echo of Dom’s apology to Ruby sounded in the hallway.

“It’s okay,” she replied in that same, sweet tone. “It’s nice that your assistant is looking out for you.”

Assistant? The nerve.

“Yes, well,” Dom said, skipping over it. “Let’s get started, shall we?”

I was going to wring his balls through a blender.

“I won’t take up all your time now. We can always rearrange,” she finished on a flirtatious note.

Dom laughed.

Peyton’s door swung open. “What are you doing?” she whispered.

“Pretending to get breakfast,” I whispered back, cocking my thumb in the direction of my office.

She nodded in understanding and stood aside. “I have donuts.”

I basically ran into her office.

“Chlo, is there a reason you don’t have shoes on?” She stared at my feet.

I looked down. Shit. I’d taken my shoes off when I’d gotten to work this morning, and in my frustration, not put them back on.

“I think Dom knows you aren’t going to get breakfast.” She was trying not to laugh.

“I’m getting breakfast here. I didn’t say I was going out,” I muttered, opening the box of donuts on the table in front of the sofa. “Therefore, I am not lying.”

I snatched a glazed donut out of the box and dropped down onto the comfortable sofa. Crumbs fell onto my lap when I tore a bite off, and Peyton did her best to hide her wince.

With a grin, I chewed and picked up the crumbs one by one, dropping them back into the box.

She exhaled. “You get me.”

I laughed, leaning back on the sofa. “Get you, tolerate you. All is fair in friendship.”

“Well,” she said, picking up a donut with pink sprinkles, “If it makes a difference, I’d help you bury my brother’s body.”

“That went from zero to what-the-fuck really fast, Peyt.”

“I saw him bring that woman into the office,” she said, donut in her mouth.

Right on cue, loud, tinkling laughter came from the direction of my office.

I wrinkled up my face.

“Chloe…” she trailed off.

“I’m mad at him because he bailed on work yesterday,” I reminded her. “Not because he brought a half-price hooker into my office.”

“Sounds like it.”

“I need to sage that office. God knows what she brought in.”

“Well, on the plus side, she brought my brother to work.” Peyton smirked.

“Mmm,” I said, licking my fingers. “Probably only because she thought he was in the database. Or she confused our business with yours.”

Peyton held up two fingers. “Scouts honor, if she comes in here, I’ll match her with a teeny peen.”

I held up a hand for a high five, and she obliged. “How long do you think I have before I have to go back in there?”

“Well, given that you’re not wearing shoes…Although Dom might not have noticed,” Peyton mused. “At least another twenty minutes.”

I sighed.

At least she had donuts.

 

***

 

I walked back into my office thirty minutes later, and Ruby was still there.

Hell, she was there. She was perched on the edge of his desk, leaning right over on her hand. She twirled a lock of her dark hair around a finger, and the giggle I’d heard all too many times over the past half an hour now grated on me.

I slipped into my office unnoticed as Ruby leaned down into Dom further. I dumped my purse and put my shoes back on my feet, then headed back to his office, where I stopped and cleared my throat.

Ruby jerked around, while Dom merely glanced over the top of his laptop.

“I’m sorry, did I interrupt?” I asked, taking on my own sweet and innocent tone. “Dom, your next appointment will be here in five minutes. I didn’t want you to forget.”

“Yeah, I got it, Chlo, thanks,” he said stonily.

Ruby giggled, touching his shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Dom. I kept you here longer than I thought I would.”

Dom, almost to his credit, shied away, pulling her hand from him. “Don’t worry about it, Ruby. I’ll make sure to work on you this weekend.”

She stood, her smile as flirtatious as one smile could get. “Oh, I hope you do. I can’t wait.”

Out of sight, I rolled my eyes and walked into the kitchenette. While Peyton had a steady supply of donuts, she’d been seriously lacking on the coffee. I accepted that mixing a sugar high with a donut high wasn’t necessarily the best idea but screw it.

Getting out of bed this morning had apparently been a bad idea, too.

I shut myself in the kitchenette and drowned out the sound of Ruby flirting her way out of the door with the coffee machine. I’d never really appreciated the noise of the machine before it drowned out the grating sound of her fucking laugh.

God, I was petty and jealous and possessive when I had no right to be.

He wasn’t mine. He never had been. He never would be.

I pulled my coffee cup from the machine before it was fully done. The remaining spits of coffee fell into the drip container, and I added my one sugar and milk, stirring it a little too vigorously.

Coffee spat onto the sides from over the rim of my mug.

I wiped it up, then grabbed the mug and leaned against the counter in front of the sink. I cradled the hot mug, blowing on the equally hot liquid in almost a steady rhythm.

“What the hell is wrong with you today?” Dom demanded, standing in the doorway of the kitchen. “Seriously, Chloe? Are you on your period?”

I put the mug down a hell of a lot more gently than I wanted to. “I’m pissed, so I’m on my period? Jesus, Dom. Not all my anger is down to my hormones! In fact, ninety percent of it is down to you.”

“Here we go again.” He moved to the coffee machine.

“Are you for real? Dom, you didn’t show up to work yesterday, and you purposely didn’t come home. I had to take your client on because you didn’t call her to cancel.”

“Shit,” he muttered.

“Exactly. Shit!” I kicked my foot back at the cupboard. “And the first thing you do is come in here with some random woman?”

“Client,” he said. “Client.”

“Right. Where did you meet her? On the corner of Jackson Square while she flogged her wares? And by wares, I don’t mean her artwork.”

“Chloe.”

“No. Don’t Chloe me. I don’t want to hear it, Dominic.”

He turned around, lifting his arms up. His eyes were a devastatingly dark green, and they met mine with an intensity that sent a shiver down my spine.

A shiver I bit back.

“All right,” he said. He pulled his cup from the coffee machine and looked at me without finishing making it. He needed milk and three sugars before it was close to anything he’d drink. “Shoot, Chlo. You’re pissed. You’re not on your period. Let go on me. Tell me all the things I’ve done wrong.”

Well. I was never one to back down to a challenge.

“Where the fuck were you yesterday? You weren’t working. You weren’t home. You didn’t answer your phone. You didn’t answer emails. You avoided Facebook. You have responsibilities. I don’t care if you’re sick like I told your clients or if you’re feeling like shit. You at least need to have the balls to tell me that you’re not showing your ass the fuck up here.” I folded my arms across my chest as he had the dignity to drop his gaze to the side. “Then, this morning, you show up with a half-price hooker and tell me she’s a client? Are you soliciting now?”

“We met in Starbucks,” he said wearily. “She started to hit on me, then when she asked what I did, got all interested.”

“Of course she was interested in the fact you run a dating website. Except all she wants to date is what’s inside your pants.”

He quirked a brow. “You know that, do you?”

“Do I look like a woman?”

Dom’s eyes ran over my body, lingering on both my chest and my hips a little too long for it to be accidental.

“Knock it off!” I turned, grabbing my mug. “You’re an idiot!”

“You asked!” he yelled as I walked past him. “And the answer is yes!”

“Goddamn it!” I shouted back, storming through his office and into mine.

Not that it did any good. He followed me. He followed me right through his office until he’d joined me in mine. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I know she wants that, but she wouldn’t leave me alone.”

“Now you just sound egotistical and self-absorbed,” I said.

“Look, she either wants me, or she doesn’t. That doesn’t change from your opinion to mine.”

“Actually, it does. That’s the definition of an opinion.”

“You’re starting to piss me off, Chlo.”

I tilted my head to the side. “Oh, are you on your period, too? I hear the male period is so much worse than the female one.”

Dom stared at me. “Why haven’t I killed you yet?”

“Same reason I haven’t killed you. We haven’t got life insurance on each other.”

He went to say something, then stopped. “You’re right. And even then, you wouldn’t be worth it.”

“That’s all right,” I said, leaning back. “I’ll kill you on my period. PMS has been successfully used for insanity pleas in the past. Win-win.”

“Thank God we use security cameras in here.”

“Awesome. They’ll see just how much you provoked me.”

“Fuck me, you’re like a shark with blood, aren’t you?” Dom folded his arms over his broad chest. “One fucking sniff and you turn into a savage.”

“I guess your bullshit is to me what blood is to a shark. And by bullshit, I mean every time you speak. The bonus is that I can smell it miles off.”

His eyes pierced mine. Strong. Sturdy. Intense. That was his gaze, pinning me in place despite the fact there were a good ten feet between us.

“I genuinely don’t know how I haven’t killed you yet,” he said in a low voice. “But fuck me, I know why you’re single.”

No. You don’t. You have no idea.

“Enlighten me, then.” I folded my arms over my chest and held the eye contact.

His eyebrows shot up as if he wasn’t expecting me to say it, but it didn’t last long. “Enlighten you? You’re prickly. You’re snappy and short-tempered. You’re incorrigibly frustrating, and you have the demeanor of a desert full of cactuses.”

“Cacti,” I corrected him. “And that’s a repeat of prickly.”

He jabbed his finger at me. “You’re picky and can’t help but point things out to people when they get it wrong.”

“It’s called education. You should try it sometime.”

“I have a degree.”

“Yeah, but a Masters in assholery doesn’t count.”

“I might have a degree in assholery, but you’re teaching the damn class.”

“And everything I’m teaching I learned from the textbook you’ve written over the last twenty-five years.”

Dom choked in something that sounded a little too much like a laugh, but he brushed it off before I could take even a second to revel in that. “This is why you’re single. Seriously. You’re so…so…”

I raised my eyebrows. “Quick-witted that mere mortals can’t keep up with me?”

“Full of shit,” he finished. “You’re so full of shit. Nobody, absolutely nobody, could ever hope to keep up with your ability to flip between sweet and innocent angel and intolerably angry devil.”

“Nobody? I doubt that. There’s probably someone out there who won’t piss me off nearly as much as you do.” I picked up my coffee and sipped.

“I doubt he lives on this planet. Maybe not even in this galaxy.”

“The same could be said for the woman who could take your shit. You lose everything, you’re careless, and you’re so insensitive to everybody around you. You’d need a fucking saint to put up with you.”

“You need more than a saint, Chloe. You need a damn God.”

“So find him.”