The Protective Dominant

by Jan Irving

“Like your hot tub out back?” When she smiled, she had dimples.

  He cleared his throat. “Yeah.” Had she seen him out there in the nude?

  “I’ve always wanted one of those, but I’d probably pretty mine up with landscaping, give it a fake waterfall.”

  “That’s good. Picture renovating mine.” He let his voice drop, become roughened velvet to wrap around her. “You can hear the soft tinkle of falling water and above your head, a breeze is playing with the palm leaves, making them rub against each other.”

  “They sound like paper crackling when they do that,” Jenny mused.

  “Yes, that’s right, Jenny. As you float on your back you can pick out the stars, the planets hanging above you like points of light. You have nothing to do, nowhere you need to be.”

  “Sounds so nice.” Her voice was wistful.

  “Now I want you to close your lips and inhale slowly. That’s it, slow, yeah… And now, when you exhale, pretend you’re blowing toward a candle right in front of you. See it, Jenny, a pink candle with a slender flame. You want to blow just hard enough to make that flame flicker but not blow it out.”

  A frown line briefly appeared between her eyes as she took her first two scripted breaths, but in only a moment she had it. Again he felt warmth move through him. He was helping her. It felt completely right that she was here, under his roof, fed by his hand, protected from the night terrors by his body and his voice.

  “You’re doing so well, my good girl.”

  When she slumped back in her chair, her face impassive with deep relaxation, he risked stroking her hair. “Mmmm.” She turned her face toward his touch.

  His heart jolted.

  Mine.

  He yanked his hand back. What was he doing? He knew she’d only responded that way because he’d put her in a light trance.

  “Jenny.” His voice was hoarse.

  She didn’t respond this time. She was dead asleep, sitting upright in his kitchen.

  He got up and quietly put away the dishes and cleaned up. He lived alone, but he was meticulous about cleanliness and not living the careless bachelor life.

  Then he couldn’t put it off anymore. He knelt beside Jenny and carefully pulled her into his arms. She was very slight, her head resting against his collarbone.

  His heart pounded as he just gazed down at her, seeing the purplish shadows under her eyes. How much sleep was she managing? He knew she worked at home as a computer programmer, which was probably the only reason she’d managed to hold her job while dealing with the fallout of her attack.

  Did she catch a catnap only to wake in terror?

  He was fucking tired of worrying about her.

  He headed deeper into his house, past the door that led to the basement—which he’d have to remember to lock—and up to the second floor where he kept a home office, a master bedroom and the tiny guest room that consisted of a twin bed made up militarily neat. A couple of boxes sat in one corner. The room was barren of any life, but it wasn’t atypical of the rest of his house.

  He laid her on the bed and covered her with an old quilt. She looked so small and pale, and again he flashed back to seeing her in the hospital. He remembered hearing her crying one night when he’d come to visit her. He’d frozen outside her room, unable to enter but also unable to leave, as if somehow it was important that someone heard Jenny Ann sob her heart out alone in the dark.

  “Sleep, honey,” he whispered and then, because she wasn’t awake and he couldn’t make her afraid, he kissed her forehead.

  Chapter Two

  Jenny woke in a strange place.

  One minute she was curled into a warm ball, feeling oddly floaty and safe, like when she’d slept in as a child. Then her eyes snapped open and the sights, the smells did not belong to her house.

  The first thing she spotted were a couple of closed moving boxes in one corner. She jerked upright, looking around wildly, only to catch the view of her garden from a second-story window.

  The bright zinnias, the dahlias and roses and the copper bowl that had gone green and served as a bird bath immediately soothed her. And told her where she was.

  Taz. Intimidating, six and a half feet of gorgeous black-haired, green-eyed man. Her neighbor. And the man she’d had an embarrassing crush on before—

  She cut off that thought like switching off a light. Off, on, off, on. She’d gotten good at doing that. She’d had to, in order to survive. Only at night when her mind opened up in dreams did things come out that she didn’t want to face. Not ever again.

  So Taz must have…carried her up to this bedroom after he’d fed her that omelet? Usually he just left her on the double porch swing beside her front door, covering her with an afghan.

  He’d been doing it for a month and a half now.

  Heat burned her cheeks as she imagined him finding her out in her garden again, acting like a crazy person. Which was what she was. Nothing she did seemed to help with the sleepwalking. She’d tried relaxation tapes, over-eating, sleep deprivation and yes, yoga before bed. But as soon as she fell asleep it was like she was swallowed by a black hole, dragged down.

  She threw off the blanket and climbed off the bed. She realized she wasn’t dizzy for a change then remembered how Taz had insisted on feeding her a very early breakfast. Weird. She usually had trouble keeping anything down and had no appetite. His food hadn’t been particularly good, but she’d eaten it all without thinking about it.

  It was just that way he had of acting as though of course you’d do exactly what he wanted. It used to make her toes curl, imagining him behaving that way with her instead of coldly rebuffing her shy offers of friendship.

  Taz had told her once that he wasn’t friends with women, that they were good for one thing.

  Oooh boy. She rolled her eyes. Why did she still like the guy, caveman that he was? That attitude was what had most annoyed her about some of the Southern boys she’d dated in high school, except they had been a lot smoother about hiding it. She’d vowed never to let herself be dumb or pathetic enough to belong to a caveman.

  Why else had she moved to the West Coast, far away from her busybody family?

  At the thought of her family, she rubbed her forehead, knowing she’d have to call home today. She’d downplayed her attack as much as possible. She’d been grateful that her mom had come out and stayed with her for a month right after it happened, but it had been hard to keep up the façade that she was fine. She’d begun to feel like a bright, smiling robot, parroting whatever she thought her mother most wanted to hear while burying those overwhelming feelings into that deep hole.

  Which had worked out brilliantly.

  Her mom had finally returned to Georgia, and Jenny Ann had started sleepwalking.

  Putting aside thoughts of the upcoming phone call she was duty bound to make, Jenny decided it was a good opportunity to take a look around Taz’s house—as long as he didn’t catch her snooping, of course.

  Maybe it came from growing up in a small town, where everyone knew everyone else’s business, but she had wanted to see the inside of this house for months. She’d even gone so far as to bake Taz a pecan pie and bring it over so she could get a peek into his kitchen.

  He’d informed her that pecan pie was not on his diet, but he’d been known to eat pretty little brunettes.

  She remembered the shock she’d felt at his bold double entendre. At first she hadn’t believed he’d meant…that. But then, as if reading her mind, he’d added, “Yeah, I mean putting you on my kitchen table, shoving up your skirt and eating you, sweetheart.”

  His green eyes had burned her, taking in the way she’d started trembling, then he’d made a sound of disgust and shut the door.

  In her face.

  Leaving her with her embarrassment and a whole pie she had no idea what to do with.

  Horrible man.

  She’d finally wised up and begun ignoring him, though it went against her friendly Southern grain. Until the night she’d woken up in a
hospital bed, hurting and so blackly depressed she’d wanted to die. And somehow Taz had been there, slumped in a chair by her bed, smelling of smoke.

  He’d reached out and gripped her hand while she’d cried.

  Don’t think about it. On, off, on, off.

  Sucking in a deep breath, she opened one of the boxes as quietly as she could and found…an old laptop and some printing paper and a half-full bottle of turpentine. So he’d been doing something like painting the trim in his house? Boring. Why did she think Taz had some kind of secret, if only she could find it?

  Knotting her long hair behind her head, she glanced in dismay at her ancient nightgown. Why on earth had she put it on the night before? She knew she was sleepwalking. She couldn’t look more…dowdy. And it was also a little thin in some spots.

  Crossing her arms over her breasts, she peeked out of the room where he’d put her, looking down a long hallway with three closed doors.

  “Hello?”

  When no one answered, she decided she was justified in looking for Taz, but really she wanted to open all those doors and discover what was inside. The first was a bathroom, small, but full of all kinds of soaps and creams and ointments. And an aloe plant on the tiny windowsill. Hmmm. For healing scrapes?

  The next room was a home office, completely devoid of any soul. No photographs, nothing but neatly stacked bills under a rock used as a paperweight. A rock. As in, picked up in his yard? Who did that? Hadn’t one of his girlfriends given in to the urge to pretty up the space and gift him a proper paperweight? There was no artwork on the walls, not even curtains on the two tall windows. But it looked out on the lush Eden of her garden, which filled the space with a kind of secondary grace.

  The last room was the master. She put her head around the door but didn’t spot Taz, didn’t feel him in the space. He possessed a kind of angry buzzing force field that was immediately apparent.

  She stood just inside, hands on her hips. No artwork where he slept? One bedside table with an alarm clock. She glanced over her shoulder and went for it, opening the single drawer and… Nothing. Not even a comb. And no condoms.

  Come on, she’d seen him with dazzlingly beautiful women and men. He didn’t…sleep with them?

  It didn’t make sense.

  But this was just a room where he slept. He didn’t live here.

  She didn’t feel him here.

  She noticed that his window was open so that the floral breath of her garden drifted in. One of the vines of morning glory had crept from her property to his and had snaked up his siding as if all the beauty next door wanted to swallow his house and somehow possess it like the castle in Beauty and the Beast, held captive in roses.

  It was a fanciful idea to think of him as the haunted and grumpy beast, yearning for someone to love him.

  Taz was no prince.

  From somewhere in the house, she caught a creaking sound.

  She hurried out of Taz’s bedroom and into the hallway, standing there, heart thumping. If she were a good person, she’d skedaddle and leave Taz his privacy.

  But what did she have to look forward to if she went home now?

  The tick of her grandfather clock, the settling sounds of a house built in the forties. And a microwave dinner made for one. Yay!

  She crept down the stairs, straining to catch another giveaway to Taz’s whereabouts.

  Clink, clank, clink, clank.

  Repetitive metallic sounds and a masculine grunt.

  Immediately heat warmed her cheeks. There was just something so…animalistic about the sounds.

  She headed for the half-open door at the bottom of the stairs. If it was a mirror of her own home, it would take her to the basement.

  She debated a moment on going down there. She wasn’t dressed properly. He couldn’t want her here.

  She chewed her lip, but temptation lured her to push the door open wider, revealing the single bulb shining over unfinished wooden stairs leading into a concrete space below. The sounds were louder. What was making them?

  Hand on the guard rail, she gripped her nightgown in one fist and carefully inched down in her bare feet.

  Cool air breathed under her clothes, chilling her instantly. She reached the base of the stairs and saw him. Sweaty as a god working at a forge, his hair clinging to his face and neck, his lips peeled back from his teeth in a snarl as he stared fixedly at the ceiling and lifted what looked like a ton of weights over his head. Up, down, up, down.

  She watched the flex of his legs, steadying him, the muscles bulging and relaxing as he lifted.

  “What are you doing?”

  The question was so matter-of-fact that there was no reason why it should have jolted her heart.

  “I…wanted to thank you?” She wanted to cringe at the way her words ended with a question mark. Classic female wussiness. She was better than this usually. She cleared her throat. “I’m going to do something about the sleepwalking.”

  In an unhurried movement, he put the heavy weights down then sat up. He was bare-chested, and moisture ran freely over the hills and valleys of a supreme body. He was massive, so large he could easily crush someone as small as she was.

  She dropped her gaze.

  “How do you plan to do that?” He sounded politely curious. Her belly tightened.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What was that?” His voice was harsher—he was on his feet, hands on his hips. “Say it louder, Mouse.”

  Her gaze snapped to his, sizzled. “I said I…don’t know how to stop the sleepwalking.”

  He nodded once briskly. “All right then.” He picked up a towel and ran it lovingly over his upper body. Or maybe she just imagined it was lovingly since that was what she’d do if she ever had the courage. He was a work of art. Too bad he was so snarly and scary most of the time. “So what are you going to do about it?”

  She blinked. He had thrown her in the deep end and was now watching to see if she could swim. And damn if she didn’t kind of like it, that he assumed that she could deal with this, that she could get better. “Um. I have done some research into the sleepwalking. Apparently until I deal with whatever I’m suppressing, it will continue.”

  “Makes sense. You said you talked to someone.” He picked up a bottle of Gatorade and gulped deeply before wiping the bottle against his forehead.

  Emotion balled in her throat so it felt too tight. “I only get so far and then I…freeze up. I don’t remember what happened, not exactly. I hit my head. Everyone says it’s a blessing.”

  His gaze, green as a cat’s, shot to hers. “My ass it’s a blessing.”

  “No,” she agreed softly. “It’s not. I get pieces and I don’t know where they fit and I’m afraid of finding out. But until I do, those pieces… They’re like broken glass, slicing me.”

  Suddenly he was closer. He cupped a hand around the back of her neck. She felt possessed by him to her bones. “I can help you bring it back, deal with it. If you trust me.”

  Chapter Three

  Jenny stiffened as soon as he had said the word ‘trust’. That splinter opening his heart cracked open a little wider. She’d been so trusting before, so full of innocent enthusiasm. Now her eyes were permanently shadowed, as if she’d swallowed darkness.

  He’d always told himself she was too young and carefree to appeal to a man like him, full of his own shadows. Now he hated that they had this in common.

  She licked her lips and immediately his gaze followed the movement. She blushed and looked down at her toes. “Before… I wanted to get close to you. I guess it was so obvious.”

  His lips quirked. “As glass.”

  “Oh.”

  He frowned, trying to follow her female train of thought. Oh. She was embarrassed. He sighed, not knowing how to handle that. He was used to bringing women to orgasm, not dealing with their tender feelings.

  And Jenny was still tender. Very much so.

  “I didn’t like it when you stopped trying to bring me flowers,” he
said abruptly.

  She lifted her gaze, giving him a quizzical glance despite the faint pink still warming her cheeks.

  “You know—all those bulbs and shit.”

  Humor warmed her eyes. “I see.”

  To prove something to both of them, he deliberately moved closer to her so that he loomed over her. She arched her head back to look up at him, a small woman to his towering size. He waited, breath held, but she didn’t look frightened. After a moment he reached out and grazed a gentle hand down her cheek. Her skin felt like warmed flower petals. No wonder she had such an affinity with her garden.

  “You’re not frightened when I touch you. Not anymore.” When had his voice gotten so low and throaty? He sounded like a sexed up ad.

  She was chewing her lip again. “No. I think because you’ve been there with me every night. You’ve, ah, put your hands on me a lot.”

  His body hardened at the idea of just how much he’d like to put his hands on her, but he shoved down those feelings. He could never truly express how she made him feel. It would be too scary for her and too dangerous for him.

  “But I’m scared of any other male who comes around my house.” She sounded ashamed. “I almost fell apart when the mailman delivered a parcel yesterday.”

  He growled, feeling an absurd wish that he’d been with her in her house so he could have banished the man, kept her safe.

  “I can see how that’s tough.”

  “Since… Since it happened I’ve had all my groceries delivered by a female clerk. I’ve started running only on my treadmill. I’ve quit my water color classes, my regular yoga and I don’t even go to the mall anymore.”

  He grimaced. “I don’t think the local mall is much of a loss.”

  “I wouldn’t know. Not lately.” She sounded so discouraged that he rubbed his chest, rubbed at the unfamiliar ache.

  “I could always go there with you.” He made the offer impulsively, then winced.

  She laughed, the first he’d heard from her in a very long time. It started off as ragged and cut off too soon, as if she was a little freaked at the sound herself. “Come on, you’re a man. You have to hate malls.”