Who's on Top? (9 page)

Dominic got into the car himself, started the engine and began to drive, still sporting quite a stiffie.

Jane sat in heated, embarrassed silence until she noticed that they weren't heading back to her car. “Uh, Sayers? Zantyne's in the complete opposite direction.”

“I'm taking you to dinner.”

Jane absorbed this. “It's customary to
ask
a woman if you can take her to dinner before actually doing so. She might object.”

“Are you objecting?”

Of course her stomach chose that precise moment to emit a growl that was half lawn mower, half jungle beast. “Um, not exactly.”

“Well, then, that's settled.”

“Has anyone ever told you that you're a bit high-handed?”

“Darlin', better high-handed than underhanded. Don't you agree?”

“That's not the point,” she said stiffly. “I didn't agree to a…a…date.”

He stopped for a traffic light, turned toward her and smiled. “And yet you're such a hot one.”

“Whoa,” Jane said.
Dom thinks I'm hot.
But she
said, “I think we just, um, got carried away out there. You really shouldn't talk to me like that.”

“Mmm? Well, I don't think you should kiss me or touch me like that if you don't want me to talk to you like that.”

Her cheeks caught fire for—what?—the tenth time that night? But she wasn't giving up. “I didn't actually kiss you. You kissed me.”

“Yeah,” he said in a dry voice. “And I noticed that you kicked and screamed and broke a chair over my head.”

“If you were a gentleman, you wouldn't point that out.”

Dom sighed and shook his head. “You know, we've
had
this ‘gentleman' conversation.”

Ooooooh!
“You know what? I
don't
want to have dinner with you.”

“Do, too.”

“Do not!”

Dominic, blast him, began to laugh. Then he called her “chicken.”

Jane pointed out, with any dignity that she could still scrape together, that she was not a chicken.

“I know,” he said. “Because you're coming to dinner with me. You're not going to run away from what you felt out there.”

Jane folded her arms across her chest. “I didn't feel a thing, Sayers!”

“Liar,” he said in agreeable tones.

She made a strangled noise.

“Want me to prove it? Pucker up, sweet Jane!” The car swerved dangerously as he leaned toward her.

“No!
Drive.
Just—drive, you lunatic.”

“That's better. Now, no more fibbing or I'll leave you at Max's Downtown to wash the dishes after our meal.”

Beyond words, Jane simply clenched her fists and stared out the window. Max's? Dom was taking her from the Three-Legged Dog to a four-star restaurant. The man was nuts, plain and simple. Would they go bowling for dessert? And whether he was nuts or not, she
had
to get things back on a professional footing.

 

D
OMINIC PULLED OUT
J
ANE'S
chair for her, noting with approval that she'd taken her hair out of that grungy rubber band. Her dark curls flowed freely to just above her shoulders, and he had to restrain himself from running a hand through them.
Back off, now, buddy. You're trying to seduce her, not scare her off.

He seated himself and accepted a wine list from the waiter. He glanced at Jane's face before he scanned it. Her firm jaw jutted in sharp contrast to her soft eyes. She was a strong, full-bodied woman with some spice and deep flavor to her. “Red zinfandel,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“Do you like red zinfandels?”

Her full, pale pink lips parted, and she straightened in her chair. “They're my favorite.”

He smiled.
Good guess.
He looked forward to running the game at this table, too. He'd sink her
every objection into a handy pocket and sweep her off her feet—and into his bed. Those little whimpers she'd made in the back of her throat when he'd kissed her and pleasured her—sexy as hell—had given her away. She was his for the taking.

Dom ordered an interesting Australian zin. They made small talk until the waiter brought it to the table, the requisite swirling/tasting was complete and their glasses had been supplied with ample amounts of deep ruby wine. He was preparing to make a toast to her when she preempted him.

“Order anything you'd like, Sayers. I'll expense this meal.”

The romantic potential of their dinner wilted immediately.
Sneaky little psych major.
He'd bet she'd said it on purpose.

A change had definitely come over her. She lounged back in her chair and lifted her glass to him quickly before drinking. “Mmm. Nice choice. A little too oaky for my tastes, but quite decent.”

His mood darkened. “First of all, you're not paying for this meal or any other while we're out together. Second, if the wine's not to your taste, we'll send it back.”

“Oh, Dominic, really. We're past the millennium, which means you can drop the alpha-male crap. And there's nothing so wrong with the wine that it needs to go back. It's
fine.
Perfectly acceptable.”

Alpha-male crap?
Merely
acceptable
wine?
Ouch.
His seduction plans were going horribly awry.
Jane was supposed to be
under the spell of his male magnetism.
He'd had her at his mercy—he knew it instinctively! Where had he lost her? He had to regain control of the situation, get her all soft and mellow and turned on again. Damn it.

“So tell me about your background, Dom. Where you grew up, parents, siblings, all of that.”

“Perhaps we could order,” he growled, “before you start peeling my psyche like a cabbage? And I never agreed to talk to you, sweet pea. I won. You lost. Match over.”

“Cabbage,” she mused. “Interesting image. I think you're afraid I won't peel at all—I'll just chop your cabbage head right into coleslaw.”

Cabbage head?
The waiter interrupted his glare. “Ready to order, sir?”

“Yes. The lady would like—”

“The lady,” Jane interrupted, “would like the shark steak, done medium. Thank you.”

“The gentleman will have the lamb, rare.”

“Very good, sir.” He vamoosed.

“So,” said Dom, swirling the wine in his glass, “you like to eat predators, do you?”

Jane smiled. “Oh, I just have a thing for sharks. I've got quite a few of their teeth on a necklace at home.”

Dom would bet that was a bold-faced lie. She was just making a point; trying to tell him she had notches on her belt. “Really? You'll have to wear that to Zantyne one of these days. Arianna will think it's quite the fashion statement.”

She narrowed her eyes at him, but he continued despite the warning. “What's the perfect foil for shark-tooth accessories? A grass skirt, perhaps? A top made of two coconut shells?”

“That's enough, Sayers. You can keep your chauvinistic fantasies to yourself.”

“Oh, but that wouldn't be any fun at all. I'd much rather share them with you. That way maybe you'll invite me back to your place to view your lovely collection of shrunken heads.”

“I'm not a headshrinker! I'm a behavioral psychologist and trainer. Can you cut me some slack here?”

“Maybe I'd rather cut off your slacks.” His very white teeth gleamed at her.

Her eyes widened. This had to stop, and
now.
She'd gone crazy and let things get way out of hand in the bar's parking lot, God knew why. But enough was enough. “Okay, that's it. We are going to disregard what happened and be professionals here. One more sexual comment out of you and I call a cab.”

“That's a shame.”

“I mean it,” she said.

He raised his hands, palms up. “Okay. No more.”

She tossed back some wine. “And you can start telling me right now why you're using sex as a way to turn the conversation away from your main issue.”

He felt his jaw tightening. “Which is…?”

“Being judged by women.”

J
ANE LOOKED INTO
S
AYERS'S
blazing eyes. His jaw was a block of granite.

“You are way off base, O'Toole.” He drained the contents of his wineglass.

“Oh, I don't think so. Let me guess—domineering mother, quite possibly verbally abusive. Father not around much?”

“You are
so
over the line.”

“And you weren't just now?”

He pushed his chair back from the table, tossed his napkin on the surface.

“Running away? What does a big, tough guy like you have to get intimidated about? If I'm so off base here, why not set me straight?”

He froze. “You're going to regret this,” he said softly. “I can promise you that.”

“Maybe.” She couldn't help a shiver but refused to look away.

He sneered at her. “You really want to go there, huh? I suppose your professional instincts—and your vulgar curiosity—just scream for the information.
Well, why not, Doc? After all, you're so damned sure you know everything already.”

She didn't blink, didn't back off, and his sneer grew more pronounced, but he began.

“One of my earliest memories of Mommy Dearest is of her tossing me up on a high-strung two-year-old thoroughbred, seventeen hands. She gives me the reins and then slaps the bejesus out of its hindquarters.

“I'd never ridden a horse in my life. My only emotion was terror, I can tell you—absolute terror. I hung on to that beast like a burr while it bucked uncontrollably and then galloped for miles, trying to scrape me off on trees, fence posts, even the side of a barn. You know how I dismounted? When the creature finally wore itself out, dropped to its knees and
rolled
on me.”

Jane had covered her mouth with her hand and simply stared at him as he continued.

“Mummy and her martini thought it was fabulous entertainment—she laughed herself sick—until she had to rush me to the emergency room with several crushed ribs and a snapped femur. Simply ruined the rest of the day for her, I'm sad to say.” Dominic poured himself some more wine.

“Then there was the sailing incident. Listen up, Jane. This is a good one! Mummy and her current beau hauled me out onto the Chesapeake on his shiny new J-35. No doubt she couldn't find anyone to dump me on.

“Somehow between the rumrunners and the sea
breezes, they got a little confused with the lines and ignored the threat of some incoming weather. So who got sent up the metal mast in a thunderstorm to disentangle the spinnaker line? Yours truly, aged twelve.”

“Oh my God,” Jane breathed. “Where was your father?”

“Not in the picture at all. He's some Austrian diplomat that she had a fling with. Never told him about me.”

“Where was the coast guard? Why wasn't this incident reported to Child Protective Services?”

“It was. However, when your mother's family owns half the town, these minor incidents get swept under the rug. And of course, we moved…across several states to shack up with yet another gentleman friend. By this time, Mummy wasn't speaking to any of her family anymore and had finished putting her considerable trust fund up her pretty nose.”

Dominic's face was devoid of expression as he spoke, as if he'd heard about these events on the local news. “Mummy had not been trained to do anything, of course, except party or get married. And her inherent sense of superiority over the ‘masses' was not helpful in her search for or attempts to keep jobs. By the time I was fourteen, I'd taught myself C-code and was paying the rent on our one-bedroom apartment with contract software jobs. Mummy paid for her nose candy in more unsavory ways, while I slept either in the offices of wherever I worked or on the couch if I had to.

“By the time I was seventeen, I'd earned enough money to put a down payment on a house for her and get her into rehab. Finally I could realize my dream to get away. To go to college thousands of miles from there. I enrolled. I left her in Atlanta while I fled to San Diego. I was free—of her and of the programming work I loathed.”

Dominic reached for the bottle of zinfandel and refilled both their glasses. He took a long draught from his. Then he laughed bitterly.

“But Mummy missed her ‘good deal.' She screamed and ranted and threw rehab and her new job to hell. When I ignored her, she found a way to get my attention. She literally managed to set the house on fire when she got drunk one night. What better way to bring me home to take care of her? I mean, I have to hand it to her—the plan was brilliant.”

Dominic leaned forward across the table, his eyes returning from blank and detached to blazing. “Do you understand now? Have you figured out why I'm allergic to manipulative sociopaths? I'm all too familiar with them, Jane.”

She opened her mouth to say something—she didn't know what—but closed it again. There was no platitude in any human vocabulary that could make what he'd gone through okay.

The waiter chose that moment to deliver their entrées, and after a murmured thanks, she simply sat staring at hers.

“Shark got your tongue?” Dom asked.

She found her vocal chords. “I—I guess you could say that.” She wasn't hungry. She wasn't sorry that she'd goaded him into talking…but she was shocked, in spite of all her experience. “Where is she now, Dominic?”

“Locked up,” he said flatly. “Where she should have been a long time ago.”

“In an institution?”

He nodded.

She poked at her fish. Without its teeth and sans menacing
Jaws
music, it wasn't much of a predator, was it?

She cleared her throat of an unexpected lump and blinked back threatening tears. Even the most dangerously macho man had once been a helpless, unprotected boy, subject to the whims of the adults surrounding him. A boy who must have loved his mother in spite of it all.

Jane opened her mouth and pushed harder without even meaning to do so. “You feel guilty and angry about putting her away, don't you?”

His breath caught, a harsh sound in his throat.

“You're furious at her for making it necessary—putting you in that position. Making
you
the bad guy, instead of her. It's not fair. None of it was fair.”

Dominic closed his eyes before he got up in slow motion from the table. “You never quit, do you, Jane?”

She bit her lip.

He leaned forward, placing his palms on either
side of his cutlery. “Back. The. Hell. Off. Do you hear me, Jane O'Toole? This round is a draw. We're calling it a night.”

 

D
OM DIDN'T SAY A DAMNED WORD
to Jane as they walked to the Jag. He opened the passenger door for her without comment, either, and closed it without one. He was furious with himself. Why had he talked to this woman? Had he been bitten by the stupid bug? She was the
last
person he should entrust with his past, for God's sake!

Sweet Jane, with her big brown eyes and her soft lips, had a core of steel and a notebook. She'd be logging every detail; using each painful shard of his history to create a psychological profile of him that suggested he had a problem with women. That he didn't like or trust or respect them.

And that simply wasn't true. He knew damned well that not every female out there was like his mother.

For one thing, there had been his math and later calculus teacher, Mrs. Borofsky. Mrs. B. had been the making of him, noticing his talent for numbers and constantly challenging him. Since she knew instinctively that he was bored in class, every day he'd pick up a special sealed envelope from her desk on the way out. It contained a “brain-buster” problem she'd come up with just for him. And every day on the way back into class, he'd slip his answer to her. At some point she'd find a moment to look at it and flash him a smile.

Dom had never received anything but that smile
as a reward or incentive for doing the work. But the smile in itself, the interest and the attention, meant more to him than just about anything in his young life. And close to graduation time, she'd let him know that she'd help him get a scholarship to any college he wanted to attend.

He'd also spent countless hours at his best friend Andy's house, experiencing the warmth and love that a mom should provide. The thought of Andy's mom was enough, almost, to make him smile at the moment. He pictured her lip-synching to Janis Joplin with a wooden spoon for a microphone as she made them the most incredible macaroni and cheese or meat loaf or brownies…. Renee was her name. She had wild, curly yellow hair; she was big boned and curvy and full of hugs and jokes. Her door was always open; her smile always inviting. And though he never mentioned anything about his own situation, she just seemed to understand.

Looking back on things, Dom thought wryly that she was probably glad her son Andy had taken up with a gangly computer geek instead of a beer-swilling hellion with a Mohawk and a nose ring. Christ, four thousand pans of brownies and countless of her husband's hand-me-downs were very much worth her peace of mind. Yet despite the cynical thought, he knew deep down that her affection for him had been real. He owed them a visit, Renee and her husband Al. He owed one to Andy, too.

As Dom drove, he noticed that Jane kept trying to
catch his eye, but he refused to meet her gaze. He stared straight ahead and focused on traffic. Several times she started to say something, but he gave her not the least bit of encouragement. She'd goaded him into talking to her; now she could damn well deal with his silence.

 

T
HEY RODE WITHOUT A WORD BACK
to the Zantyne parking lot so that Jane could retrieve her car. Dominic's lamb entrée slid and crackled in its take-out bag in the backseat, while Jane held her shark on her lap. Shark in a doggie bag. It was incongruous somehow.

She stole a glance at Dom's harsh profile as he drove, and at his large, capable hands wrapped around the wheel. She tried not to think about how they had felt wrapped around her waist or stroking the back of her neck.

Dom's revelations about his childhood humbled her. She had expected a much less intense story of a demanding, unhappy matriarch who could never be pleased. But he'd been outright abused. He'd been through hell.

And based upon his experiences, it would be an outright miracle if he didn't have some kind of grudge against women. Your parents formed your earliest expectations about the human race. They shaped your worldview.

She'd won. She'd achieved her objective of getting Dom to talk about his past. But Jane felt more deflated than elated to find all of this out about Dominic. Even though it would make writing her evaluation easier.

Dom braked for a red light, and the plastic bag in her lap threatened to slide to the floor. Jane grabbed it and pulled it toward her. She couldn't help feeling uncomfortable with this whole situation.

Instead of feeling triumphant and validated that her hunch about his background was more or less correct, she felt…sick. She felt a little ashamed by how she'd gotten the information. And the manner in which she'd gotten it seemed to suggest that it stay off the record.

Dom had been trying to take her to a nice dinner. Granted, she was also quite sure he'd meant to seduce her. But hadn't she planned on seducing him right back? And what had happened to derail her from that plan?

Somehow she was unable to give up power for long with a man. He'd won the game of pool. He'd had her reeling under his kiss. And he'd had her scared and unsure of how her body would react to him.

She had
had
to get the better of him. That helpless feeling was just not acceptable to her. Why not?

Jane wasn't sure she wanted to know. It probably tied into one of her deepest secrets, the one she'd never share with anybody, the one she'd never cared to examine, in spite of all her training….

They'd reached the tree-lined parkway that led into the Zantyne building and the lot where her car was parked.

She gestured toward her not-so-new red Corolla, and he swung in beside it without a word. Then he
got out, engine still running, and walked to her side of the car, though she'd already opened the door.

“Give me your keys,” he said.

“Really, Dominic, that's not necessary….” but her voice trailed off as he ignored her and held out his hand.

“You'll have to tolerate my
alpha-male crap
only a moment longer.”

She relinquished the keys to him and stayed seated as he got into her car and started it for her.

Then he helped her out of his vehicle and into her own. His eyes rested briefly on the pile of scrawled notes she'd left on the passenger seat—the ones all about him. But he didn't say a word more than was necessary.

“Thank you,” she said, her voice awkward.

He nodded and closed her door with a thud. He turned away.

“Dominic,” she said, rolling down the window.

His face was closed, his eyes distant. “Good night, Jane.”

 

S
UNDAY AT THE
O'T
OOLE
household they ate fried chicken instead of shark. Courtesy of one Kentucky colonel, so nobody had to cook. This time Shannon came with Jane, wearing a hand-painted jean jacket and toting a six-pack of Miller Light.

“Is that a Chinese dragon?” Gilbey asked her. “Let me look at that.” Shan turned for him so he could inspect the back of the jacket. Gil was one of the few guys in the world who would look at the painting and
not Shannon's rear end. They'd all played too many games of cowboys and Indians, hide-and-seek and Marco Polo for him to be impressed by her looks.

Her dad, on the other hand, kept gazing at her. “Girl could be a top model,” he said to Jane in the kitchen.

“She doesn't want to model,” she told him. “It makes her feel weird. She doesn't like to take advantage of her looks. She feels that they're an accident of birth and just wants to be a normal person.”