Page 5 of Worth the Vow

And when she invited herself back to my place for a night cap, I allowed it.

Huge mistake number three.

After things got hot and heavy, and she volunteered her own condom, I happily accepted the rubber.

Colossal mistake number four.

Savannah assured me she was on birth control, but offered up the condom as a secondary measure to make sure she didn’t get pregnant. I didn’t know at the time that she wasn’t on any kind of birth control, and she poked holes in the condom. I continued to see Savannah sporadically throughout the coming months, mostly for sex, but she never complained.

When she showed up in Eternity Springs with an ultrasound picture and a tearful story about how she didn’t have medical insurance and couldn’t afford the cost of giving birth and raising a child, I did what I thought was the responsible thing. I offered to marry her.

“I just wish …” Mom says, her voice trailing off as she grips her hands fretfully. I get my skin tone and hair texture from my mom, but everything else is from my dad. At just over six feet, I’m one of the shortest men in my family. My brother Luca towers over everyone, and my two other brothers, Alex and Leo, beat me by a couple inches.

“What, Mom?” I sigh, closing my eyes and rubbing the bridge of my nose in a mixture of frustration and exhaustion. Because I’m fucking tired.

“I hate how stressed you look, Dom. You never smile anymore. I don’t know if you’re unhappy, if you hate being in charge at the hotel, or if you need some time to yourself. Your father and I are worried.”

“Oh, I’m sure he is,” I mutter.

As for my father? Well, our relationship isn’t the best, as I wasn’t his first choice to take over the reins at Everlasting. He assumed his firstborn, Alex, would be following in his footsteps. When Alex announced on his eighteenth birthday that he had enlisted in the Air National Guard, our dad was crushed. Looking back, I recognize all the signs Alex gave us about his desire to do anything but work for the hotel. Alex is best when working with his hands, or anything that gives him an opportunity to be out and about. Putting him behind a desk would have been brutal for him.

But our dad didn’t care about that. He couldn’t see that I was the only one interested in taking over from him. All he saw was his firstborn choosing something else over his birthright. Not even having me ready and willing could change that feeling for him. It’s been a tug-of-war for every decision at the hotel, no matter how willing I’ve always been to continue in his footsteps.

I’m one of seven siblings, and I’ve always been the one most interested in business. I ran lemonade stands beside the hotel driveway at the age of six, and convinced my grandfather to let me sit in on board meetings not long after that. I was shadowing a local business owner in high school, ready to step into whatever role I could get behind the scenes at the hotel. All the kids in my family filled roles when needed. We all helped out with housekeeping, setting up banquet rooms, and cleaning the property after a windstorm. And while it was clear early on that my sisters, Gianna and Arianna, were destined to take on the roles of events coordinator and spa and hot springs coordinator, respectively, I always knew I wanted to work at the top. With the bigwigs. Well, my dad and grandfather weren’t that big, but they were to me as a little kid. I idolized them and everything they did.

As the rest of my siblings began to show their interests lay elsewhere, my dad finally realized I was his only hope of extending the ‘family-owned’ aspect of the hotel. I started at the bottom however, as his way of showing that nepotism had no place in our family. It allowed me to learn every minute detail in the running of our hotel. I worked the concierge desk for a year, then moved on to shadowing every manager on the property. The summer before my senior year of college, I had the unfortunate job of being my father’s assistant, a role I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. My dad is particular about everything, and I think he made it worse out of spite.

Once I took on a more senior role, it was apparent my father was having difficulty letting go. My mom finally put her foot down and demanded he retire, and he grudgingly agreed. He announced he’d be slowly retiring and giving me more responsibility. But he fought me tooth and nail on everything.

Years later, I’m still dealing with the same shit, because he will not cut the damn cord tying him to Everlasting. Should any of my children have a desire to take over from me, or any of my nieces and nephews, I vow I will never do this to them.

“You need to come up with a plan soon, sweetheart,” Mom says softly, bringing me back to the problem at hand.

“I don’t like having people I don’t know in my home,” I say to my mom.

“I know that. No one really does. Your father wants me to get someone to clean our house, and I continue to say no. I’d have to clean before they came to clean, because it would stress me out to think they were judging my lack of cleanliness.”

“That’s … well, that’s pretty on track for you, Mom,” I comment wryly. She rolls her eyes at me with a huff, making me chuckle. My wonderful, caring, thoughtful, sensational Italian mother has a little bit of an issue with giving up control to anyone around her. I wonder where I get it from.

“You know Sienna is going to be the same way, right?” she teases.

“I’m aware.” My oldest daughter, Sienna, already shows how she gets her stubborn nature right from me.

In any case, Savannah caught me on a bad night. After we were married, she started nit-picking at everything. We didn’t go out enough. Some random woman in a mom group with her had a nicer purse than her, and why didn’t I buy her more nice things? Why couldn’t I be home by five every evening? And the list goes on and on.

Subconsciously, I started staying even later at work. One hour more per day was sixty additional minutes Savannah couldn’t nag me. I hated being away from our daughter, but it felt like Savannah was sucking the soul out of me.

I should have known when I came home one night, the house filled with candles and light jazz playing, that Savannah was planning to seduce me. But I was so relieved that she wasn’t nagging me that I played right into her hand. Three weeks later, she showed me a pregnancy test, and announced that I was expected to spend more time at home now.

I hoped things would get better once Carter was born, but Savannah got worse, and I escaped into work again. At that point, my dad was letting me handle half of the responsibilities for the CEO position. Savannah was drinking way too much, and I was relying on my mom for babysitting more often than not. Savannah begged me for a night to talk about our relationship, and I reluctantly agreed. We met at a bar in town, and talked about issues we both had with our marriage. She promised to stop drinking. To stop complaining all the time. I promised to spend more time at home and focus more energy on our family. We had sex that night, and two weeks later, she announced another pregnancy.

Two months after Aspen was born, I saw a rather abrupt change in Savannah. When I found her drunk, and borderline passed out, in our bathroom while Aspen was in her infant tub, I demanded Savannah go to rehab.

Over the course of the following few weeks, Savannah admitted to screwing with her birth control for all three pregnancies in an attempt to trap me and keep us married, but no longer wanted to be in a loveless marriage where her only job was to care for her kids. She left quickly thereafter, and I was suddenly a single dad to an infant, toddler, and preschooler.

I thought I’d been handling it well, but apparently not. Yeah, I ask my mom or siblings to babysit pretty often, but it’s always for work-related tasks. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve gone out alone, or to meet friends, in the last year. It’s not ideal, but it’s my life.

“I have an idea of who can help you. And you’d be helping her in the process,” Mom says quietly, jolting me from my rather depressing walk down memory lane. “She needs employment, and she already knows the kids. Our whole family, actually.”

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