The Dominator (38 page)

Tia

I’d put all the groceries away and made a marinade for the steak and another one for the chicken then chopped potatoes, mushrooms and onions and put them in a tin foil packet along with some butter and spices. I also spiced and then wrapped corn cobs in foil. I made the bed and tidied up and then watched him out the back busying himself. His muscled skin glistened in the sunlight as he chopped wood wearing just his jeans and his motorcycle boots.

After a little while of watching him chop wood, lost in thought --- thoughts about him, about my life, about my Dad, about my future, about the muscles on his body flexing (who knew how sexy a guy chopping wood could be to watch?) that I decided to take my container of worms and my pink fishing pole and head down there. As I passed him, I put a bottle of beer on the log beside him, he looked sweaty and dirty and thirsty. He mumbled thanks to me but kept chopping wood.

I tried to ignore him and sat down on a huge flattened rock to fish from but then I opened the lid of the worms and seeing them squirm in dirt was…ugh. I couldn’t imagine touching one let alone poking it with a hook so I put the lid back on and then just sat and stared out at the pond.

When I glanced in his direction I thought he still looked pretty pissed off, broody, grouchy, and then I caught him stealing glances at me here and there, his expression softening. Finally, he stared at me as he drank from the bottle of beer and then walked over and without saying anything to me he put the worm on my hook and passed it to me.

“Thank you,” I said and then casted out.

He walked back to the now massive wood pile, grabbed the neck of the beer bottle, downed it while watching me, then resumed chopping.  The sun started to set and he finally put the axe down and then I saw him fiddling with the barbeque and so I headed back to the loft and washed my hands, tossed the salad, set the table, and started grabbing the steaks and the vegetables to bring down.

“That needs to heat a little still,” he said, “I’m grabbing a shower. Join me?”  He pulled me against him and even though he was sweaty he still gave me the tingles. I squirmed against him, “You’re all sweaty and manly.” I guess his foul mood was over?

He let out a barbaric little growl slash snort against my throat, making me giggle, and then nibbled on my earlobe. We walked back up to the loft hand in hand and after I put the food back in the fridge and then turned he crouched, put a shoulder to my belly, and hauled me up over his shoulder, “Rawr! This man want woman in shower!”

I giggled all the way there. Then when he put me down, my dress came right up over my head all in a fluid motion. There was hardness in his eyes; my giggle faded to a hard gulp.

After shower time, which included some pretty spectacular getting-slammed-up- against-the-shower-wall sex, he promptly passed out cold on the bed, towel around his waist, still soaking wet, lying on his stomach.  Evidently, when Tommy Ferrano was pooped, shower sex put him over the edge. In the shower, though, he’d looked me in the eyes while holding my face in his hands and said, “Any secrets I keep from you, baby, are so that you can sleep at night. You don’t need to lie there like I do wishing you didn’t know shit. Okay?”

I’d nodded.

I took a rest beside him for a bit but didn’t fall asleep. He was snoring. After a while, I decided to check on the barbecue. I added more charcoal and got it going again and got dinner cooked for us.

When all was done and the table was all set, I woke him up by tugging his towel away. He hadn’t moved at all and it’d been a few hours. His eyes stayed closed but a smile spread across his face. Then I climbed onto his back and sat on his naked and very fantastic rear end and started massaging his shoulders and his arms.  He had a hard, muscular body, a man’s body. It was gorgeous. I kissed his muscled back in between his shoulder blades,

“Dinner’s ready,” I murmured against his skin.

He twisted around onto his back and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and then caught my face between his hands and pulled me close to kiss him.

“Somebody’s awake,” I mused, feeling his erection hardening underneath me.

He groaned and tried to gyrate, grabbing my hips.

“Dinner will get cold and I worked hard; let’s go, Mr. Sleepy.” I ruffled his hair, scooted off him and he smiled lazily at me.

Tommy

And she could cook! Fuck me. It was sweet that she’d done that while I slept, taking care of me like that, especially considering she’d spent last night in the hospital. After dinner was finished, we cleaned up together, talking casually about things couples who were getting to know one another talked about: movies, music, video games. We didn’t have the same taste in most of it (her taste in music generally sucked) but she seemed open-minded enough and promised to watch old Bruce Lee movies with me if I promised to watch some Notebook movie with her. I had a feeling it was a chick flick. She shook her head when I muttered that but didn’t verbalize a No.

I built a campfire and once it was roaring she proceeded to prepare and then demolish a bunch, maybe six, of her s’mores.  I barely got one into me, trying to refuse it because I was stuffed from dinner but relented and only because she insisted I eat “the best thing ever.” Talk about toothache on a graham cracker!

She started to look drowsy, yawning and staring sleepily at the fire so I scooped her up and carried her back up to bed with thoughts of making love to her again. She acted all shy when I lifted her up but then the yawns and the moans as she held her belly from all the chocolate cookies and marshmallow led to me simply tucking her in and holding her until she fell asleep against me, her head on my chest, her leg hooked around me, and her fingertips slowly scrubbing the stubble on my chin. When her hand dropped as she finally was out, I kissed the top of her head and pulled her tighter to me.

I laid awake half the night holding her and thinking that I didn’t want to take her back to the house; I wanted to stay here with her, away from gunfire, seedy business dealings, and people who hated me enough to want to take out someone I loved.  Being here, living a simple life where she cooked me dinner and I chopped wood and baited her hook… just us two had appeal. Fuck the big house and the servants. Fuck the business, fuck the truth, I just wanted to keep her here and forget everyone else existed. Keep her here and protect her, spend every minute making up for the shitty hand she got dealt when she ended up with O’Connor as a father and then wound up with me in her life.

Funny how I initially thought getting married was a means to getting more power, more autonomy, but now the idea of getting married got me thinking more about life with a wife than anything else, about the things and people I’d have to protect her from, about keeping my own demons at bay. I felt sick for a second when I imagined the fear I’d have one day when she carried my baby, the fear of someone taking her, hurting her, and my child. A child. Shit. I also thought about the shit her father had told me, the shit Earl’d told me, and it all went round and round all fucking night long.

Tia

We woke up bright and early and Tommy grumpily told me that he hated tea, that it tasted like dishwater, that instant coffee was sacrilege, and that it was even worse that I was trying to offer either to him when it was to be made by microwaving water, and that we needed to get a move-on quick because he needed
real
coffee ‘like now’. So we packed up and off we went, deciding that the next time we came we would bring a coffee maker and a few other staples to leave up here.

The drive back to the city was quiet; he seemed broody, even after he got a coffee.  As we strolled in through the front door of the house and he turned his phone on, it made a long succession of text and voicemail alert noises. He scowled at the phone and if it weren’t an inanimate object it probably would’ve ran and hid at that scowl. He headed into the office without saying anything to me. A bodyguard I didn’t recognize carried the few bags we had upstairs and I wandered into the kitchen and got a glass of juice and then headed upstairs. My heart must’ve stopped briefly walking through the hall and remembering the dead bodies that had been lying there a few days ago. Now it looked like nothing had happened.  The guard smiled at me and gave a business-like nod as we passed one another in the hall.

The carpeting was gone and instead there were gleaming hardwood floors. The bedroom doors were open. One of the doors looked the same but was bullet-free so a replacement door that was just the same must’ve been put in. Our bags had been dropped on the sofa.  I got down onto my knees and looked under the bed. Sure enough, there were two guns and a knife up there. I got back to my feet and walked out onto the deck off the bedroom and now the backyard had a glass-looking fence that was at least 20 feet higher. You could still see the forest beyond the infinity pool but through glass.  My heart sank at that. I wandered into the bathroom to run a bath, wondering where the bodies had gone. I’d never been asked to make a statement to the police about how we were interrupted in bed by gunfire. Clearly, the police hadn’t been involved in the clean-up and there’d been no investigation. I sank into bubbles trying to put it out of my mind.

Tommy

You’d think I’d been gone a month instead of 2 days with all the shit that had piled up. Holy fuck! I got two quick calls taken care of and decided to handle the rest later. I headed upstairs and heard the bath running so my clothes were quickly off and when I opened the door in the buff she looked up from the tub and gave me a sexy smile. I climbed into the tub with her and we made what she’d called a soapy splashy mess.

When back in the bedroom, ready to get dressed while she unpacked, I heard my phone go off.  My PI was calling. I decided to meet with him to discuss the additional information I’d found out from O’Connor as well as follow up on the Earl stuff. I asked Tia to give me the photo of her Mom and my Pop and she found it for me in the basement. I kissed her goodbye and told her not to wait up but to talk to Sarah in the morning about packing for us for Vegas.

I made her promise to be no more than 2 feet away from her iPhone at any given time and then I had a quick chat with the 4 guys on the house, including my brother-in-law Jimmy who was gonna be my main house security guy, replacing Earl. Until I really knew all was good, I wasn’t taking any chances.  Maybe when we got back I’d take her to the range and teach her how to shoot, too.

Tia

The rest of the evening was, thankfully, uneventful, except that Tommy didn’t come home.  He texted me at midnight to ask if I was okay. Then he texted me again at 3:30 am, waking me, to say he’d be home in the morning. It sort of nagged at me and I didn’t sleep much after that.

I wondered if he was seeing another woman. Was he out somewhere giving someone else the ‘rough’ so that he could give me the ‘sweet’? I knew I’d have to swallow a lot being with him but if infidelity was one of those things, I wouldn’t be able to handle it. It’d revert to being a prison sentence for me and one I’d never stop trying to find my escape from.

At 7:30 in the morning I got up because there was no point continuing to lie there and torment myself. Sarah was up and about so she and I started to pack. I would’ve done it myself if I had a clue of how to pack for a vacation for him. She clearly knew what she was doing, what sorts of clothes we’d need, etc. She was being sweet and chatty and had tried to broach the topic of my and Tommy’s relationship,

“So, you two? Things better?”

I smiled and changed the subject, “Do I really need all these pairs of shoes for a short trip?”

She smirked, “You can talk to me. I’m like Fort Knox. You tell me somethin’ and it won’t go nowhere. I sat under interrogation for 6 hours once. I was in a hundred degree room and I had to pee. Still not a word.”

I found that hard to believe since she never shut the heck up --- like ever. I didn’t even want to ask her why she was interrogated for 6 hours.

Tommy strode into the bedroom and saved me from the Sarah Inquisition. He came right to me and folded me into an embrace.  Sarah left the room and shut the door.

He ran his hands up and down my back and his nose travelled from the nape of my neck up to my temple, then he kissed it, “Miss me?”

I stiffened.

He looked down at me, “Something wrong?”

I shrugged.

“Tia?” He had alarm in his voice.

“Where did you stay last night?” I asked. My face felt hot.

He frowned, “I didn’t stay anywhere. I haven’t slept yet.”

I looked down at my feet, “Oh.”

“Tia?”

He let go of me, then backed up and sat on the bed beside the opened suitcase and crossed his arms and stared.

“What time do we have to go?” I tried to change the subject. My face still felt hot.

“In half an hour. Look at me.”

My eyes met his.

“Did you think I spent the night with someone else?” He had his eyebrows raised and he looked on the verge of pissed.

I shrugged my shoulders once, slowly.

“Athena.”

I chewed the inside of my cheek and stared at the ceiling. Weird how in a few short weeks he felt like he could use my given name like that to show he was serious. But it worked.