“Bill!” Reba seemed horrified at his behavior, rightfully so. She hurried to my side and squeezed my shoulder. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him right now, SJ, but he doesn’t mean that. Your father loves you. You know that.”
I blinked back tears and grabbed my clutch. “You have such a problem with how I ended up, Dad? Guess what. I’m not overly thrilled at the father you turned out to be, either.”
“You won’t stay here in my house if you don’t leave that job and those men, SJ!”
Grandma laughed. “Like hell will you ever kick my baby out of this house!”
I went to the door and looked back at him over my shoulder. “Mom was always a better father than you.”
50
***Holden***
IjoggedintoDominic’skitchen, set on finding the little brat who’d exposed me to hordes of randy people on the internet. “Come out, come out, wherever you are! It’s time to pay the price for your joke, little troublemaker!”
Sugar looked up from the couch when I moved into the living room. Her hair was falling out of her ponytail and her eyes were swollen from crying. Her bottom lip wobbled and her arms came up for me to hold her.
With my heart threatening to fall out of my ass, I grabbed her up and held her tight. My pulse raced as I tried to imagine what was wrong, what’d made her cry. I was torn between wanting to rip someone to shreds and crying right along with her. Feeling emotions for someone like I was feeling for Sugar was new, and I was quickly coming to understand that it was hard to care for a partner. I’d just never done it, and I honestly felt like there was medically something wrong with me some days, the way my chest ached for her.
“What happened, tesorina?”Little treasure. And she was. A little treasure I’d been lucky enough to find, but like so many treasures, finding her came at a cost.
“My dad…” She pulled away to grab a box of tissues sitting close by. After blowing her nose, she fell back on the couch and let her arms and legs flop in every direction. “He heard that I’m working for Dominic and started demanding I quit.”
I bent down and scooped her upright so I could sit with her on my lap. “Obviously that went over well with you.”
“He was part of the crowd that ruined Dominic before. I had no idea. He hurt Dom and I got so angry. That he would dare try to warn me away from Dominic when he’d been the one to hurt Dominic! How dare he feel like he has any kind of foothold to judge from!”
Her chest heaved as she told me what happened, angrily wiping her eyes with her crumpled tissue. “So, I told him that I’ve been seeing Dominic. And you. And Barrett.”
I grinned, enamored with the fire inside of her. “Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. I just put it out there. Then, he suggested I’d only gotten my job because you three wanted to fuck me. He suggested I was whoring myself out and told me he didn’t raise me to be a slut. But, in case you were wondering, he did warn my dead mother that naming me Sugar would lead to this. So, of course, this is somehow my mother’s fault.”
All traces of humor faded from my body and I suddenly understood murder and the showSnapped. I ground my teeth together as I tried to get my brain to work past mayhem and toward something to make Sugar feel better.
“Logan called me on my drive home. I accidentally answered it and had to listen to him threaten me. Blackmail me? I don’t even know. He thinks that threatening to expose me as a whore who slept her way to the top will get me to sleep with him.”
She blew her nose again and growled. “These aren’t even sad tears anymore. I’m angry. I’m so angry, Hold. Did you know that my dad hurt Dom like that? Doesheknow? Why would he want anything to do with me, knowing who my father is?”
“He knows. It doesn’t matter, though. You’re not your father. He’d want you no matter who your father was.” I put her on the couch beside me and stood up. “Now, tell me everything Logan said to you. Don’t leave a single thing out.”
She did, and when she finished and saw my face, she frowned. “Can we just not talk about it with Dominic or Barr tonight? I don’t want to go through it all again. I’m hungry and I have a headache. I feel like the world’s spinning so fast, like one of the strawberries at a carnival when a bigger kid spins the wheel inside. I want off, but that asshole kid just keeps spinning us faster and faster.”
“Come on. If you need the world to slow down, I’ll take you to a place where time basically stands still.” I pulled her up and tried to hide the way my hands shook with fury as I patted her ass. “Why don’t you fix your ponytail and we can go?”
She felt her head and pulled the struggling ponytail holder out. “I’ll be right back.”
As soon as she was out of sight, I opened my phone and tapped out a rage-filled message to both Dom and Barr. I explained her asshole father and Logan before letting them know where I was taking her. I was just putting my phone away when she came up next to me and leaned her head against my arm.
“Thank you.”
“I haven’t done anything yet.” I took her hand, amazed as always at how small hers was in mine. “Save the thanks for the moment you eat your first bite of dinner tonight.”
We drove in a peaceful silence, my hand on her thigh. When the city broke apart and the buildings had more space between them, I stole glances at Sugar to see how she was reacting. Eventually, we reached the neighborhood I’d grown up in. It was just as run-down as it’d been when I was a kid. The small house at the corner of a neighborhood had been a restaurant for over seventy years. Different families had run it at different times, but the recipes never changed.
“What’s this?” Sugar was already climbing out of the truck and looking around, not at all nervous to be in a neighborhood with graffiti and broken windows covered in wood.
I wrapped my arm around her and nodded to our destination. “That’s where we’ll eat dinner. It’s one of the oldest restaurants around, has no name, and it’s where I learned to cook after I came to America with my nonna when I was just three.”