DOMINIC (Dragon Security Book 3)

by Glenna Sinclair

  And then I hit him because I needed to hit something. I buried my fist in his chest over and over again. He never once tried to stop me, never made an attempt to grab my wrists. He just stood there, the most pain a human being is capable of feeling rushing through me, mirrored in his eyes. And when exhaustion caused me to fall to the floor, he knelt beside me and tried to help me to my feet.

  “Don’t touch me!”I turned and looked at him. “I never want to see you again. Stay away from me, stay away from my dad. Disappear, Donovan.”

  My last words to him were to order him to disappear. And he did. Not immediately. I saw him at the funeral; I saw my dad stop and talk to him. He didn’t even try to talk to me. And then he was gone. I didn’t even know where he’d gone until a mutual friend told me months later that he’d joined the Army, went off to be G.I. Joe. And that pissed me off. He didn’t even try. He just ran away, escaped the nightmare that I had to live every second of every day. It wasn’t bad enough that I lost my mom and then my brother. I also had to lose…

  Anyway.

  I stood in the shower and let the hot water wash over me, loving the way calming stream washed away some of the pain in my head. I just needed to get back to work. I needed to have a purpose. I’d learned a long time ago that a purpose helps make even the darkest days a little brighter. I needed Donovan not to be in my house. I needed to not be enveloped in all these memories that refused to go away.

  My dad sure seemed happy to have Donovan back. Had he known he’d been back all this time? I knew Donovan had come back to Santa Monica. A mutual friend ran into him at a party about a year ago. Said he was quiet, distant. I laughed and said that Donovan was never quiet. And then I waited for him to show up, maybe stop by the house to see my dad. But he didn’t.

  If this hadn’t happened, would Donovan have sought me out at all? Probably not. And I don’t suppose I would have either—if I were in his shoes. Who wants to face the reality of their own actions? But it still pissed me off for reasons I couldn’t even begin to explain.

  I washed my hair, careful of the lump at the back of my head. It was pretty tender, and there seemed to be a little dried blood around it. I couldn’t remember what hit me, or even if something hit me or if I managed some bonehead move where I hit my head on something. It bothered me, this blank spot in my memory. I was always proud of how good my memory was. I never forgot anything, yet I’d somehow forgotten that I’d witnessed Joe’s death.

  Poor Joe. He was a good guy. I’d miss seeing him standing there at the door every night.

  I stepped out of the shower and dried myself, realizing I’d forgotten to bring clothes with me so I could dress here. Ash and all his damn cameras. I wrapped my towel tight around me and slipped out of the bathroom, rushing to my dresser to search for something comfortable. I glanced over my shoulder, looking for the camera or some wire or something. But there was nothing obvious.

  And then I heard laughter.

  I snuck up to the door and pressed my ear against it. Again there was a titter of laughter. Female laughter.

  Who the hell did Donovan have here in my house?

  I dressed quickly, forgetting about the camera, tugging on a pair of sweats and a light t-shirt. My hair still wet and dripping a little down my back, I slipped out of my bedroom and walked silently down the hall in my bare feet. There were definitely two voices. Donovan’s baritone and a woman’s higher pitched, overly sweet voice.

  “There’s that apple stuff that you like so much. I don’t know how you can stand that stuff,” the woman said.

  “You should try it. Then you’d understand.”

  “If even Ash won’t eat it…”

  She laughed and then there was a little squeal, followed by, “Cut it out!”

  I turned the corner of the archway that led from the living room to the kitchen and found Donovan towering over a dark-haired girl where she was backed up against the refrigerator. He was holding something in his hand and was trying to force it into her mouth, but her head was turned, and she was laughing so hard that she probably couldn’t have swallowed anything anyway.

  She spotted me and the laughter died. That made Donovan glance in my direction. He didn’t seem in a hurry to let the girl go though. He popped whatever he’d been trying to get her to taste into his own mouth and stepped back, his hand connected to her hip for a long moment before it finally fell to his side.

  “You must be Kate,” the girl said as she approached me.

  I crossed my arms over my chest and glared at her, warning her to stay back. She took the hint quite well, pausing awkwardly a few feet away.

  “Be nice, Kate,” Donovan said, as he watched the scene with slightly hooded eyes.

  The girl studied me a long moment, the she turned to Donovan. “If you need anything else,” she said, leaving the statement open ended.

  “Thanks, Stormy,” Donovan said, touching her arm as she passed him. She stopped and smiled up at him.I thought for a second that she might reach up and kiss him, but she just caught his hand and squeezed it before glancing back at me. Her lips were slightly parted, as if she had something she wanted to say to me, but then she left without saying anything.

  “That your girlfriend?”

  Donovan ignored me in favor of unpacking the grocery bags the girl must have brought. He pulled out coffee and juice and fresh fruits and an array of meats. There was enough there for several feasts, the kind of food Donovan and Joshua had always scoffed as teens. They’d rather devour a bag of Doritos than eat the pot roast our housekeeper slow cooked for hours and hours on Sunday afternoons.

  “Are you hungry?”

  I shrugged, even though I was starving. “You’re not going to answer my question?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because I want to know the kind of people you’re going to have coming and going in my house. It is still my house, isn’t it?”

  He tossed a couple of potatoes into the sink before stowing the bag in a dark, lower drawer in one of my cabinets before glancing at me.

  “It’s still your house.”

  “Then who is she?”

  “She works for Gray Wolf just like me, just like all the other people I’ll have coming and going out of your house these next few days.”

  “Well, excuse my disbelief. But the two of you seemed awfully cozy to just be coworkers.”

  “Yes, well, we’re a family at Gray Wolf. With the kind of work we do, you tend to get pretty close.”

  He opened a couple of cabinets, clearly searching for something. Then he glanced at me. “Do you have a frying pan?”

  I grunted, pushing away from the archway to grab a pan from the drawer under the stove. I held it out to him.

  “Don’t tell me you know how to cook.”

  “I can fry a steak.”

  I pulled the pan back before he could grab it. “I’ll cook. I’d rather not raise my cholesterol because you believe oil is a necessary seasoning.”

  He held up his hands and stepped back. “You’re the boss.”

  “If I was the boss, you wouldn’t be here.”

  ***

  Forty minutes later, the steaks cooked to perfection and the potatoes melting in my mouth, we settled in the living room on opposite ends of the couch. I watched him eat for a second, watching the muscles of his jaw move. His hair was shorter now. Like Ash, he wore it in a grown-out version of a crew cut. No more curls. But he was tan, as if he still spent a lot of time down on the beach. And those muscles in his arms suggested he took the time to work out whenever he could. I remembered the summer he and Joshua decided they were going to get ripped muscles. It hadn’t gone well. I never thought he’d try it again.

  Funny how things change over time.

  “Does it bother your girlfriend?”

  “What?” he asked, glancing at me.

  “The work you do. Protecting other women.”

  “Would it bother you?”

  I pus
hed a piece of potato around my plate, giving it some real consideration. “It would, I think.”

  “Why?”

  “Beyond the point that you’re placing yourself in danger for a complete stranger?”

  “Beyond that.”

  “Because you’re spending long hours alone with a frightened woman.” I looked at him, honestly curious to hear his answer to what I said next. “Surely you’ve had clients throw themselves at you.”

  “A few,” he admitted, as he took another large bite of his steak.

  “Have you ever slept with a client?”

  His eyes moved over me, as he continued to chew his meat. “Are you offering?”

  I could feel the heat of my blush as my eyes immediately dropped back down to my own plate. “Of course not!”

  “Then why does it matter?”

  “I’m just making conversation.”

  “Interesting turn of conversation.”

  “Do you blame me for being curious? Aren’t you curious about the people in my life?”

  He lifted his plate and dug in his pants pocket for a second. Then he tossed me a piece of paper. “I know about the people in your life.”

  The paper turned out to be a list of my friends in my father’s handwriting. He’d gotten most of it correct, but he’d missed a few names and added the names of a few people I hadn’t seen in a few years. But it was pretty accurate, which was a little worrisome. Did my dad really know that much about my private life? I thought I was doing a better job of keeping him out of most of it.

  “I recognized some of those names right off the bat. You’re still friends with Ali and Steph?”

  “Off and on. We get together a couple of times a year to brag about how great our lives are going.”

  “And Tina?”

  “She married Curtis. Can you believe that?”

  His eyebrows rose. “I thought they hated each other.”

  “They did. But then they found themselves alone together at the same university and they became inseparable. They got married two years ago and they have a little boy now.”

  “Must be nice.”

  I shrugged. “They seem happy.”

  We were quiet for a minute, only the sound of cutlery on our plates filling the room.

  “I ran into Amanda a few months ago.”

  That stopped him. He didn’t move, just stared down at his plate where it was balanced on his thighs. Then he slowly began to chew again, nodding just enough so that I caught it.

  “She was there that night, you know. She told me she saw them confront him at the party, that she’d gone to get them some cokes but heard them talking as she was walking back to him. He told her it was nothing. Said they were just blowing off some steam. She asked him to leave with her, but he refused.” I looked down at my food again, suddenly finding it completely unappetizing. “She feels guilty for not pushing the issue more.”

  “It might not have done any good.”

  I tossed my plate onto the coffee table and watched the potatoes skitter across the thin ceramic and fall onto the table.

  “You don’t know what might have made a difference.”

  “I know that analyzing every second of that night isn’t going to make anyone feel better.”

  “Is that what you think this is?” I looked at him just in time to catch something like a dark cloud pass in his eyes. But then again, it could have just been a trick of the light. “Do you think it makes me feel better to be sitting here with you, all those memories coming back after I thought I’d dealt with it?”

  “I don’t like this anymore than you, Kate.”

  “I’m sure you don’t. I’m sure you would rather be anywhere else but here. You made that pretty clear when you disappeared all those years ago.”

  “You told me to leave.”

  “I was grieving!” I stood and moved to the recliner so that I could see him and I wouldn’t feel this overwhelming need to move into his arms. “You didn’t have to run away.”

  “You blamed me for what happened. You still blame me!”

  I nodded. “I do blame you. If you’d been there—”

  “If I’d been there, I wouldn’t have been with you. Is that what you wanted?”

  My eyes narrowed. “Don’t turn this around on me.”

  “I’m not the one who did this, Kate. I didn’t hurt Joshua. The guys who did it are in prison, and they’re going to be there for a very long time.”

  “I know that. I was at the sentencing hearing. Where were you?”

  He stood up and grabbed my plate, carrying both plates to the kitchen.

  “I’m going to bed,” he said. “Don’t try to leave the house.”

  And then he was gone. Just like before.

  Chapter 7

  Kate

  I watched television for a while, thinking about sneaking out just to see what would happen. But my head hurt and I was exhausted despite the fact that I’d spent most of the day in bed. I paused outside his bedroom door, my hand on the wood, wondering if he was asleep, if he was thinking about me.

  “Don’t be stupid, Kate,” I whispered to myself.

  I went into my own bedroom and slipped out of my sweat pants, no longer concerned with the cameras or who might be watching me on the other end. Then I crawled into bed, willing sleep to come quickly,but of course it didn’t. Instead, my thoughts worked their way back in time, to all those moments when Donovan’s constant presence in my house became more than just the boy down the street, more than just Joshua’s friend.

  “Take the remote, Kate,”Joshua said, holding his game controller out to me. “I have to piss.”

  “Real classy, Josh,” Donovan laughed.

  “Why do I have to be classy? This is my house and she’s my sister. It’s not like she’s a real girl.”

  “Gee, thanks,” I said, tossing my book at my brother.

  “See? She doesn’t even know how to spend a Saturday afternoon. We’re seventeen, Kate,” he said, turning to me, “why aren’t you upstairs primping for a date?”

  “Why aren’t you?”

  “Because I’m a guy. It only takes five minutes to change my shirt and put on some cologne.”

  “I’ll have to tell Amanda how hard you work to be pretty for her.”

  “Go for it,” Joshua said, tossing my book back at me before climbing to his feet. “Seriously, take over the game for me.”

  I climbed off the couch in the game room in the basement of our house, taking my time walking over to the beanbag Joshua had just abandoned. He glared at me as his character lost a life because he was too busy glaring at me.

  “I don’t even know how to play this.”

  “You’ve watched us often enough. You should.”

  Joshua shoved the remote into my hand and ran toward the stairs, taking them two at a time. I laughed as I settled down in the bag, moving the character on the screen as expertly as Joshua would have. What he didn’t know was that I sometimes played this game when he and Donovan were out finding trouble.

  “Good move,” Donovan said, his character rushing toward mine as we worked together against the same monsters. It was an intense few minutes, but we managed to clear the level and move to the next.

  “Yes!” Donovan yelled, turning to me with his hand raised, waiting for a high five.

  I slapped his palm.

  “You wouldn’t have been able to do that without me.”

  “You think so?”

  “I’m good at this game.”

  Donovan laughed. “And so modest about it.”

  I shrugged. “Why should I be modest?” Then I reached past him and grabbed his bottle of soda. “And I deserve a reward.”

  I started to get up, but he grabbed my arm, pulling me back down.

  “That’s the last one.”

  “I know. And now it’s mine.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  He reached for it, but I moved it out of his reach. I started up out of the beanbag again, but
he grabbed me around the waist and pinned me to the bag. We started to wrestle, hands gong where they probably shouldn’t have. But we’d played like this since we were seven years old. Yet, there was something different about it, something about the way he looked at me when he finally had my shoulders pinned. I stopped fighting and looked up at him, my heart pounding as I focused on his lips and wondered what they would feel like on mine.

  And he seemed more out of breath than he should have been…but it must have been my imagination.

  Joshua came pounding back down the stairs calling to me.

  “You better have not lost me my last life!”

  Donovan let me go and settled back in his own beanbag.

  “Here,” I said, handing him the soda. “You can have it.”

  “No, you take it. You earned it.”

  I could almost feel his hands on me as I slowly woke and realized I was dreaming, but the dream was most definitely a memory. That was the day I knew there was something between Donovan and I… something that shouldn’t have been there, but had somehow snuck up on the both of us. By graduation…

  A scream reverberated through the house. I sat up, my heart pounding.

  That must be what woke me.

  It came again, a little muted this time.

  I reached over to my nightstand, to the knife I kept hidden in there. But when the scream came a third time, I realized that it wasn’t an intruder. It was coming from the spare bedroom.

  It was Donovan.

  I went out into the hallway and knocked on his door, but he didn’t respond. I pushed the door open. I couldn’t see him at first because the room was so dark. But as my eyes adjusted, the lump on the bed became mused hair against the white pillowcase, a muscular back and heavy thighs uncovered by the sheets that had been kicked to the foot of the bed. He was dressed in just a pair of boxer briefs, the kind of underwear that hugged a guy’s thighs and ass like a pair of spandex workout shorts. And Donovan filled his out quite well.

  He cried out again, mumbling something I couldn’t quite make out, tugging his pillow harder under his head.

  “Donovan?” I called from the doorway. But it had no effect on him.“Donny,” I said softly, crossing the room and laying my hand lightly on his shoulder.