Then he nodded at me. “Have a good Christmas, Gigi.” And he strode right out of the hotel.
* * *
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* * *
The following week I walked around in a state. Technically, I made it where I needed to be. I attended holiday parties and a church service and a Christmas dinner. I even spent time with Colt’s new wife, Caroline, and her friend Hannah out visiting from Oregon.
But I couldn’t focus. I felt alternately dazed and jittery, dreamy and then paranoid like someone was watching me. It was possible I was losing my mind.
Had I actually seen Dom at the party? It almost seemed surreal. Would I ever see him again? Was he gone now for good? And holy hell, why could I still feel his kiss searing my lips, making me tingle for days afterward?
Something had gone haywire inside me. I swear, it was like that kiss shook something loose. I’d never been paranoid before, even during that summer in the Hamptons when I probably should have felt paranoid around Brock. But I swear, I started feeling like someone was watching me. It felt like I was being followed, as if I’d seen the same man several times, and the same cars. Out to lunch with Caroline and Hannah I saw a shady-looking man lurking in the shadows and staring at me. But when I looked back over again, he was gone.
Seeing Dom again must have thrown me all out of whack. I’d kept so much inside of me for so long it was now all coming out, all those suppressed emotions smashing to the surface. Because the craziest thing about it all was the fact that what I wanted, more than anything, wasn’t for that strange sensation of being watched to go away. It was for it to be Dom doing the watching. Dom following me. Dom somehow about to step into my life once again, this time for good and never letting me go.
12
Dom
The day after the holiday party, I flew back down to Asheville. I had to get out of New York before I did something stupid. Kissing Gigi in the middle of her family’s holiday party was bad enough. I hadn’t meant to kiss her. I swear, all I’d meant to do was say good-bye, but she was standing so close and I could smell her and see her trembling slightly. But it was when she’d tried to pull away that the beast in me had risen. She’d tried to dismiss me with a handshake? Not after everything we’d been through. Not when I could still feel her coming on my fingers, taste her arousal on my tongue as if it were yesterday.
I’d drawn her to me, and it was like the world fucking exploded. She kissed me like she always had, like I was her savior and she’d been waiting her whole life for me to come rescue her. She got me so crazy I even thought about how we were in a hotel and maybe we could see if they had a room free. Then a guy in a tux had rounded the corner and I’d realized that could have been Colt or any other of Gigi’s brothers. I didn’t have a sister, but if I did and I saw a guy like me kissing her like I was, I’d knock him out no questions asked.
Somehow I’d straightened up and walked out of there, then put several hundred miles between us. I knew it wouldn’t change the way I felt or the direction of my thoughts, but it would at least stop me from reaching out and grabbing. It was the best I could do.
A buddy of mine from my battalion had a sweet house on a few acres in the middle of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Sitting on Mike’s porch, it felt like he was out in the middle of nowhere, but he could still get to downtown Asheville in 25 minutes. He’d bought it when he’d gotten married a couple of years ago. For now, it was just his wife and baby holding down the fort when he was away, but they had big plans. They’d bought themselves a five-bedroom home and planned on filling every one. This Christmas, he invited me and all the other strays on leave or on base with nowhere else to go for the holidays. We stayed up late and drank his homebrew and I had to say, I felt my friend Mike had bought himself a piece of all right.
“Some house you got here,” I told him, sitting out late one afternoon on the porch. Half of it was screened, the other half glass so you could sit out in that part year-round. Up on a ridge, the sun was starting to set in the blue mountain haze.
“You should get one yourself, brother.” He tapped my beer bottle, settling down beside me in a chair. “Marry yourself one of Susie’s friends. They’ve all got their eyes on you.”
“Is that right?” I took a swig and nodded, disinterested in the friends. The idea of a house, though, and settling down nearby? Having a few kids of my own, with strawberry blonde hair like their mother? That I could picture so clearly it took me a second to swallow.
“What’s her name?”
“Huh?”
“Who’re you stuck on? I’ve never seen you give a rat’s ass about any girl who’s thrown herself at you. And there’s been more than a few.”
I sipped my beer again. “What makes you think I’m not into dudes?”
Mike chuckled. “If you were, all the time we’ve spent together? You couldn’t have resisted this.” He gestured to his torso, muscled up like we all were. I shook my head. His ego would fill the state of North Carolina.
“So you’re not going to tell me about your mystery woman?” he tried again.
“Nope.”
“See, I knew it.” He slapped the arm of his chair. “There is someone.”
I shook my head again and took a swig of my beer. I was not having this heart-to-heart. There was no point to it. “Not gonna happen,” I summed it up.
“Why? She with someone else?”
“Who’s with someone else?” Another guy came out and joined us. I started to stand up, but Mike had my back. He steered the conversation in another direction and before long we were sitting around sharing stories about the friend we’d lost. We all missed Hank. He would have had us laughing hard out on that deck, and up all night doing it.
Around one o’clock I headed to bed, thinking about how I now had another reason on my list to stay away from Gigi. Serving in the Special Forces meant risking my life all the time. Hank had just left a wife without a husband and a baby without a father. Gigi needed a white-collar guy whose biggest risks were extreme sports like parasailing or hang gliding, not facing hostile raids or checkpoints with suicide bombers.
Not that I needed any more reasons to stay away from her. I already had a long list. First, it had started with her youth and innocence. Then, our parents. Now, we still lived in completely different worlds. I wasn’t naïve enough to think Gigi would want to take her walk on the wild side all the way down the aisle and for the rest of her life. Women who sipped Krystal for breakfast o
n their private mega yachts might enjoy a ride on the back of a motorcycle. But after a while, they’d miss the comforts of home.
Deep down, I knew I was too much for Gigi. She felt attracted to me like a moth to a flame, but I wasn’t good for her. I wanted to burn her up, consume her, mark her flesh. I wanted to ravage her, steal her away into a dark dungeon where I could tie her up and force her to love it, sobbing and coming and begging like a sub for her master. That wasn’t a nice way to think about such an eligible young Manhattan socialite.
* * *
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* * *
A few days after Christmas, I got a phone call from Colt. I’d expected I’d hear from him. He’d said as much when I’d seen him last.
It wasn’t late, maybe only around ten o’clock, and I’d been awake lying in bed and thinking about Gigi. At that party she’d looked like a fucking beam of sunlight struck down through a crack in the ceiling in that shimmering silver dress with her soft, creamy skin and gleaming waves of strawberry blond hair. All the times I’d dreamed of her, envisioned her like a talisman of hope in the middle of my darkest hours, I’d tried to convince myself that I’d exaggerated. I must have embellished the truth over the years. No one could be that staggeringly beautiful.
Then I saw her again and realized my fantasies hadn’t even done her justice. Her full lips, her petite frame. The way she held herself, graceful and light. The way she couldn’t meet my eyes. Then how she’d looked when she finally did, gazing up at me with her dark blue eyes wide and brimming with unspoken emotion. I saw a mixed-up brew of confusion there. And maybe longing? I might have seen a hint of that. Late at night, I sure hoped I had.
But then my phone rang, her brother on the line.