“Everybody gets hurt sooner or later,” I said lightly.
“Not you. Not anymore. I can’t take it.”
I rested my forehead against his. “Some things are out of even your control, Charming.”
“I refuse to believe that.”
I was aware of the fact that he was only half-joking.
“Your father,” he began.
I leaned back to study his face. So strong, so serious. The cut of his jaw, the furrowed brow. I lusted after the subtle hollows in his cheeks. It was the face of a warrior, a god. And those blue eyes were anything but icy now. As if a fire had been lit deep within him.
“Does it bother you to talk about him?” he asked.
I shook my head. “No. It’s the situation, the disease, that are hard to…” Talk about. Deal with. Face.
“I can’t begin to imagine,” he said quietly. He tucked me back into him, those hands stroking paths up and down my back. Comforting. Soothing. Turning me the eff on.
“He was the one person who never let me down,” I told him. “The one person whose love for me I was always absolutely certain of. To have that taken away? To have the man still here but to lose everything that made him Dad? It’s a devastation I didn’t know could exist.”
Dom held me, and Brownie decided to get in on the action too. The dog danced on his hind legs to give my knee a slobbery lick.
“How did you end up being responsible for him?” Dom asked. His lips brushed their way down my neck.
“I lived in Boulder for a few years and didn’t notice the early signs for a while. He’d always been absentminded, forgetful. But things were getting worse. Dad’s neighbors kept an eye on him for me. None of us realized just how quickly things were deteriorating until he went missing last summer.”
Dom stiffened, but his hands stayed gentle.
“I was on a plane home when the cops found him in a park ten blocks from his house. He couldn’t remember where he lived. They dumped him in this horrible state-run facility.” A shudder rolled through me just remembering the dirty linens, the stench, the windowless rooms. “Every day there was a special kind of torture, knowing that your loved one is suffering and ignored. I moved him out of it as soon as I could get him in a spot in a nicer place. But it was so expensive.”
“Doesn’t he have insurance? Retirement savings?” he asked.
I stroked a hand over Brownie’s soft fur and sighed. “Normal health insurance doesn’t cover nursing homes. He’s got a pension and Social Security, which go directly to the home. Which, did I mention, is astronomically expensive? Medicaid’s skilled nursing coverage is tricky and limited. And, as it turns out, my parents are still married. Something I didn’t know until I started digging through the paperwork.”
“What does that mean?” he asked.
“Her finances, if she would bother responding to my emails, count against my father, and I can’t complete the paperwork without them. Plus, here’s the kicker, about a year before all of this happened, my mother—and I use that term in the loosest possible definition—realized she still had access to all of Dad’s accounts.”
Dom’s fingers flexed into my back.
“She helped herself to everything he’d saved. She took it all,” I said.
“What the hell kind of monster is she?”
My laugh was humorless. “That’s just it. On paper, she’s a saint. She’s been gallivanting the world, building wells, raising money for vaccines, giving speeches. I haven’t talked to her since the day she left when I was eleven. But every once in a while, usually when tequila is involved, I’ll Google her.”
“She abandoned you,” he said.
“She did. She left me and my father, saying the world had a bigger calling for her than wife and mother.”
“Fuck her.”
His unwillingness to cut the woman who gave birth to me any slack was sweet and satisfying. “The irony is she’s doing good things.”
“Probably because she gets off on the attention,” he guessed.
I rewarded him with a smile. “She got an honorary doctorate for her fundraising work for Sudan. She goes by Dr. Morales now. She gave a TEDx Talk about worldwide empathy. Nonprofits pay her as a consultant so she can tell them how to make people care.”
“Why did she take the money?” Dom asked.
I shrugged. “She’s a virtual stranger to me. But I did some sober sleuthing and discovered she founded her consulting business right around the same time she helped herself to Dad’s accounts. Oh, and I also found out her boyfriend won the United Nations Public Service Award.”
“While her husband is on the verge of being kicked out of a nursing home for nonpayment. What are you going to do about her?”
“I can’t afford to do anything about her. Not yet. First order of business is to get Dad’s house ready to be put on the market. Once it sells, the money will be enough to keep him in the home for years. He’ll be safe. If there’s enough money left, I’ll hire a lawyer. I don’t care to see her or speak to her or listen to an impassioned speech about how she deserved the money more. I just want every dime of my father’s savings back.”
“How bad is the house?” he asked.
I winced. “Not terrible,” I said, feeling the heat flare up on my neck. “I mean, it’s nowhere near ready for sale. There was a little plumbing mishap. I’m doing as much of the work as I can myself.”
“Ally,” he said. And I knew that Caretaker Charming was dying to be let off his leash to fix everything.
“It’s fine. This job saved me, saved my dad. The salary helps a lot, and your stupid no outside employment clause is giving me the time to actually do more than half an hour of sanding floors and mudding drywall at a time. Everything is going to be fine.”
“I want to see the house,” he insisted.
To distract us both, I squeezed Dominic’s hips between my legs and felt the answering pulse of his cock against me.
“I’d rather see some other things right now, Dom. Please?” It was unfair, and I knew it. If I asked, he would deliver.
In answer, he shucked my sweater over my head and hurled it over his shoulder. The laugh that bubbled up inside me disappeared on a gasp when he sucked one of my nipples through my tank.
“Yes,” I hissed. This is what I needed most right now. The physical sensations of lust and want and desire drowning out everything else.
He hooked his fingers in the waistband of my leggings and swiftly dragged them down my legs, adding them to the pile on the floor.
I chose to worry about lady juices on prep surfaces later and made a grab for his belt. Together, we fumbled his pants open.
When he freed and fisted his cock, lining up the velvet-smooth crown with my slick folds, a tremor made its way through my body.
Brownie, sensing he wasn’t going to have our undivided attention anytime soon, tip-tapped out of the room, his tail wagging. He took my sweater with him. But like the lady juices and everything else that was wrong in my life, I’d worry about it later.
Dominic kissed me like he was starving for my lips, my tongue.
“I want to taste you,” I whispered into our open-mouthed kiss. “I want to be on my knees in front of you.”