Fired (Worked Up Book 1)

by Cora Brent

  “I’m all right,” I muttered, waving her away before carefully rolling off the broken glass and getting to my feet.

  While I flexed my torn-up hand and watched the blood leak out, Melanie suddenly scampered away like a frightened rabbit. Maybe she had a phobia of blood. But no, five seconds later she was back, waving a roll of toilet paper that she must have grabbed from the bathroom.

  “We need to stop the bleeding,” she announced before she took my hand and pressed the entire freaking roll of toilet paper against the wound.

  I tried to take my hand back. “I got it. Thanks.”

  Melanie ignored me. She stared intently as the toilet paper turned red. “Looks like it’s slowing.” She whipped her head around, slapping me under the chin with her ponytail. “Where’s my bag? Ah, there it is. Dominic, you need to keep this against the wound to staunch the flow of blood.”

  She left me alone with the toilet paper and darted over to the laptop bag that she must have dropped on the floor when she came rushing to my aid. There were drops of blood on her white Esposito’s shirt.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  Melanie rummaged in her bag. “Don’t panic. I’m just getting my keys.”

  “I’m not panicking for god’s sake.”

  “It’ll be okay, Dominic. The hospital is only a few miles away. Do you feel dizzy at all?”

  “No, Melanie, I don’t feel dizzy from losing about three tablespoons of blood.”

  “Okay, good.” She could really move quickly when she wanted to. She was back at my side and trying once more to gingerly lead me by the elbow. “Come on, I’ll help you.”

  “Wait, you’ll help me do what?”

  “My car’s right outside. We’ll be at the ER in ten minutes.”

  “I’m not going to the ER.”

  She stopped and looked at me, all openmouthed and horror-struck, as if I’d just told her a moon-sized meteor was going to crash on our head in the next eight seconds.

  “But you have to!” she gasped. “You need stitches. You need a tetanus shot. You might have severed a tendon.”

  “I didn’t sever a tendon,” I said in exasperation. “I have a goddamn scratch.”

  Melanie put her hands on her hips and glowered at me. Then she reached out and seized the roll of toilet paper. “See?” she said, triumphantly pointing to the trickle of blood that still flowed from the ugly wound.

  “Yeah, I do see. Now if you move aside, I’ll get to the bathroom, wash it out, and slap a bandage on it from the first aid kit.”

  “We have a first aid kit? Tell me where it is,” she demanded.

  “Why, did you forget to add your MD credentials to your resume?” I asked sarcastically.

  Melanie drew herself up to her full, unimpressive height and glared up at me. “I was a nursing major for two semesters.”

  “Which of course qualifies you to dispense medical advice and even perform routine surgeries now and again,” I muttered.

  Her face reddened. “Are you going to stop being a macho show-off and seek medical care, or do I have to call your brother?”

  I pushed past her and headed for the men’s room. “Call away, sweetness.”

  And believe it or not, she stepped right in front of me. “Don’t run water on it. You might wind up embedding the glass more deeply.”

  “I’m not sure you have any idea what you’re talking about, and besides, I already pulled the glass out.”

  “Let me see,” she said, grabbing my hand and examining my palm. Even in these strange circumstances, the feel of her soft touch did weird things to me.

  I swallowed. “You’re getting my blood all over you.”

  She smiled vaguely. “I’m not worried about that.”

  “No? How do you know I don’t have hepatitis or something?”

  She paused, those deep-blue eyes surveying me intently. “Do you have hepatitis?”

  I sighed and withdrew my stinging hand before I did something really off-key like grab her left breast. It was time to end this conversation. I was bleeding; I was exhausted; and there was a sexy, bossy busybody standing between me and the men’s room.

  “No known communicable diseases,” I said tersely, and sidestepped Melanie to get to the bathroom. Then I locked the door behind me just in case she had ideas about bursting in to fulfill her caregiver fantasies.

  Once I’d tossed the bloody toilet paper roll in the garbage and run some water over the wound, I could see that Melanie was right about needing medical care. The jagged cut was about two inches long and would need stitches to close properly. Plus a dose of antibiotics to prevent infection wasn’t a bad idea.

  “Dominic!” Melanie called in a high-pitched, officious voice. It sounded like she was two inches away from my ear.

  I finished cleaning up in the sink and grabbed some paper towels, pressing them against the cut. When I opened the door, Melanie fell into the room.

  “Shit,” I sputtered as I caught her and got hit in the face with a flailing arm in the process.

  “I’m sorry. So sorry,” Melanie gasped as I set her upright.

  I took a step back and peered at her. “What the hell were you doing?”

  The blush started around her breasts and traveled clear to her hairline. She fidgeted and crossed her arms. “I, uh, didn’t realize I was leaning against the door. Sorry.”

  I waited for a few seconds, but Melanie didn’t make a move to stand aside. “You mind if I exit the bathroom now?” I asked.

  “Of course.” She backed up and stared at the floor, fidgeting the whole time. She was flustered. It actually made her look even sweeter, and once again I regretted behaving like a jerk.

  After I fished around in my back pocket for my car keys, I gestured to the far side of the dining room, which was still littered with glass and blood. “Please don’t worry about the mess,” I told her. “I’ll take care of it later.”

  “Wait. You’re leaving?”

  “Yeah.” I held up my wounded hand and wiggled my fingers. “Tetanus and stitches, remember?”

  “Well, how are you going to drive there?”

  “By turning on the ignition and pressing the gas.”

  “Dominic,” she said, that know-it-all tone back in her voice. “You shouldn’t try to drive when your dominant hand is unusable.”

  “My what hand?”

  “Dom-i-nant.” She enunciated each syllable like she was speaking to a toddler. “The hand you use for everything.”

  I looked down at my bleeding right hand. Then I lifted my other hand and held it three inches from her face. “I’m actually left-handed. And I’m going now. Alone. Just me and my dominant and nondominant hands. I’m sure you can find some work to do here. Sorting through all those boxes of invoices and shit is probably a three-day job by itself.”

  She was frowning. “But—”

  “Melanie,” I hissed, exasperated. “Stay here! Work.”

  I didn’t give her a chance to respond, but I was sure she muttered the word asshole as the door to Espo 2 swung closed behind me. That was fine. Given this morning’s weird turn of events, it was better that she was cussing me out under her breath than getting close enough to tempt me into having dirty thoughts.

  I stalked over to the parking garage, welcoming the punishing heat that bore down on my head. It wasn’t even midmorning and the temperature had to be over a hundred. Plus there was the asphalt effect that always made city heat so much worse than anything else. It was like living on a giant stove top.

  I fumbled with the keys, my hand actively throbbing now. Yet I welcomed the pain. It helped distract me from the thing that had happened a few minutes ago in that brief melee outside the bathroom. In all the commotion of sprawling limbs, there’d been an accident. Somehow my left hand, my dominant hand, wound up cupping a shapely breast as I tried to stop its owner from face-planting on the shiny new tile. It was only for a brief second. Maybe Melanie hadn’t even noticed. Or maybe I’d imagined a shoulde
r into something more erotic. The only reason I was all bent out of shape about it now was because I’d already been guilty of fantasizing about how that girl’s body would feel in my hands. Now I knew, in a way.

  She felt pretty fucking good.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  MELANIE

  When I was a kid, I used to have this thing about pretending I was different famous people. After a third-grade living history project, I stayed fixated on Clara Barton, American nursing pioneer. For about a month I wore a floor-length dress in a nod to nineteenth century fashion and carried around a fanny pack filled with Band-Aids, antiseptic, and surgical scissors, even though I was just wandering the Tucson suburbs. Lucy used to get annoyed, muttering to her friends about “weird Mel,” but my parents indulged me. Although now that I was remembering things, I realized I never did receive the requested amputation kit that Christmas.

  It must have been that brief infatuation with Ms. Barton that sparked the nursing bug. Unfortunately my medical career was cut short when I failed to pass college biology. Instead I changed directions and switched my major to business. Still, now and then I couldn’t help but wonder if I missed my calling when an emergency unfolded right in front of me, even if the sight of real blood did make me feel a little queasy.

  Despite the fact that Dominic had ordered me not to clean up the mess on the floor, I did anyway. I swept up the glass, carefully salvaged the large print of the Manhattan skyline, and located a mop to clean up a few smears of blood. While I worked I thought about the shock of that fall. A feeling almost like tenderness had welled inside of me for him. I had just wanted to help. But something I’d already guessed about Dominic Esposito became even more apparent today. He didn’t want my help. He didn’t want anyone’s help.

  “‘Stay here,’” I grumbled, mopping with vigor as I mimicked Dominic’s tone. “‘Stay here’ so I can play the macho man and bleed heroically all over shit while plowing through downtown Phoenix with one hand.”

  After listening to myself complain awhile, I looked around guiltily, as if I might have been overheard in the empty restaurant. Luckily only the mop was in earshot, and it probably wasn’t even listening. Once I was satisfied with the condition of the floor, I carried the mop to the sink and rinsed it out. I shouldn’t have been so bothered by the fact that my offer of help had been refused. Sitting around at the hospital and waiting for my cranky boss to get his hand stitched up wasn’t the happiest way to kill a few hours anyway.

  I noticed a few more drops of blood in the hallway past the kitchen and sighed, pulling the mop back into action. When I reached the door to the men’s room, my pulse quickened and I paused in my maid duties, staring at the closed door and thinking about things that were better off left alone.

  I hadn’t meant to collide with Dominic. I hadn’t even realized I’d been leaning against the door, waiting for him to emerge. Frankly, tumbling into the arms of my bleeding employer wasn’t one of my finer moments. When his hand shot out toward my chest to prevent me from falling, I knew he wasn’t making a grab for the goods. But the goods are what he got. That wasn’t even the worst part. The worst part was that accidental erotic touch was the most action I’d seen since . . . since . . .

  My god, how long has it been?

  I set the mop against the wall and thought back. An uptight financial advisor named Kyle Kapinski came to mind. We hadn’t lasted long, maybe two months. Whenever we screwed around, he left his black trouser socks on. One of our last dates had been a Labor Day party at his friend’s house where there was a lot of arguing about climate change, and someone suffered an asthma attack. Since we were in the middle of another hot September, the math was easy to do.

  “A year,” I complained to the mop. “A year with no sex.”

  A Year with No Sex might sound like the title of a quirky indie film, but in reality it was a sad and lonely truth, one punctuated only with daydreams and lots (and lots) of batteries. It sounded even worse when spoken out loud in an empty restaurant with only a limp mop for company.

  With a sigh I turned my thoughts away from sex and back to work. Work was a much less frustrating way to pass the time. Work didn’t have broad shoulders, strong hands, and dark, penetrating eyes that left me secretly quivering in places that had been neglected for far too long.

  By early afternoon I’d long since retreated to the office and made some headway sorting through boxes and filing cabinets.

  Eventually my stomach rumbled with hunger. However, Dominic hadn’t left me a key, and I didn’t want to leave the place wide open while I took off to get some lunch. Luckily an online search uncovered a local sandwich shop that delivered. Twenty minutes later a knock on the door announced a skinny young man with my sandwich.

  As I chewed thoughtfully, I looked over my notes. Gio had asked me to start drafting a marketing plan for the grand opening. In this new downtown location, the brothers were looking to appeal to a more diverse crowd than the college kids who typically frequented Espo 1. I was in the middle of jotting down some ideas the old-fashioned way, using pen and paper, when Dominic returned.

  He didn’t call out “Hey, Melanie” or give any verbal sign of his arrival. But I heard the door open, and I recognized the heavy thud of his work boots. After waiting a few seconds to see if he’d bother to acknowledge me, I gave up and went to him.

  “You’re still here,” Dominic said when he saw me. He seemed slightly surprised.

  I nodded. “Yes. I work here.” I pointed to the bandage on his hand. “I see you got all patched up.”

  He looked down at the bandage and scowled. “Yeah. Seventeen goddamn stitches.” He let out an exasperated hiss of air. “That’ll make it tough to do heavy lifting for the next week or two.”

  “Oh. Then I guess you’ll just have to bite the bullet and trust someone else to do the work.” The words carried more of a sarcastic sting than I’d intended.

  Dominic didn’t argue with me, though. He looked around and scratched at his beard. It wasn’t a true beard. It looked more like negligent shaving habits than anything else. Unfortunately it also made him look even more gorgeous than usual.

  “Told you not to clean up,” he finally said. “This wasn’t your mess.”

  I shrugged. “I wanted to help. Isn’t that what you pay me for?”

  He looked at me, and then a slow smile crawled across his face. “Look, I’m not very good at saying thank you.”

  “Really?” I drawled. “I wouldn’t have guessed that about you.”

  “Thank you, Melanie,” he said without a hint of mockery. “Really, I appreciate it.”

  I lowered my head. I had to. I could feel myself blushing under his gaze. “You’re welcome.” I gestured to the counter. “I set the print over there. The frame was broken in three places, so I ditched it. But the picture itself seems okay. Just a few scratches on the upper right edge.”

  Dominic walked over and took a look. He placed his uninjured hand on the black-and-white city scene. “I’ll get a new frame for it,” he said, his voice uncharacteristically hushed.

  I went to his side and considered the picture. “It’s a really nice view. But it is kind of startling to see the twin towers.”

  “Picked it up in a thrift store years ago,” he explained. His arm accidentally brushed against mine. “Copyright in the corner says it’s from 1985.”

  I stared at him for a moment. He seemed pensive, perhaps almost sad. “I guess it reminds you of home.”

  He continued to stare down at the picture. “Something like that.”

  “Gio says you guys don’t go back to visit.”

  He raised his head and gazed toward the kitchen, a faraway look in his eyes. “No, we don’t.”

  “How come?”

  He stared down at me, and for a second I thought I was being too nosy, that he wouldn’t answer.

  “Too busy, I guess,” he finally said. “And I have to admit there hasn’t been anything there for us in a long time. Once we lost th
e restaurant and the family split . . . let’s just say that there’s some bitter memories mixed in there. So no, I don’t go back. Maybe someday I will, maybe not.”

  As I listened to him talk, I touched the edge of the print. I liked this thoughtful version of Dominic. His tone was even different, no longer clipped and sardonic, but quiet and reflective. I wanted him to keep talking, but he silently took a step back.

  I tried to keep the conversation going. “I’ve always planned on seeing that city,” I said. “My mom’s family was from Brooklyn originally, although there’s nobody left there now. Her parents moved everyone to Tucson when she was about twelve, but when I was a kid, she always used to talk about Saturday trips to Manhattan. The museums, the people, the excitement of a thousand different sights and sounds in one afternoon.”

  Dominic bent down and picked up the hammer he’d dropped earlier. I wasn’t sure he was listening to me.

  “Well,” he said in an offhand tone, “maybe you and your mom can take a trip there someday, see New York together.”

  The familiar ache filled me. I should’ve been used to the feeling of loss and emptiness that always threatened to hit at odd moments when I talked about my parents. But I wasn’t. I didn’t think I ever would be.

  “Afraid not,” I told him, hearing the huskiness in my own voice. “They’re dead. Both my parents. My dad was a motorcycle hobbyist, and my mom loved nothing more than to ride with him. It happened quick. Drunk driver.”

  Dominic didn’t answer right away. When I glanced up, though, I saw I had his full attention. His expression was pained, sympathetic. “I’m really sorry to hear that.”

  I took a breath to control my emotions and then elaborated. “It was four years ago. Whenever I think about them, I remember how in love they were. When I was a kid, I didn’t think about it much except to get embarrassed by the way they held hands or ate spaghetti off the same plate or danced in the moonlight on the back patio. Kids don’t like to think of their parents in love. I never really understood how special their relationship was until I was older. It’s a rare thing, what they had, a gift. At least, since they went together, one never had to watch the other die. That would have been unbearable for them.” My throat tightened and my voice broke. I bit my lip to stop it from quivering.