Page 1 of The Fall

CHAPTER ONE

Cam

“Where do you want this one?”Dom asks me, holding a box so tall I can’t see his face.

“Wherever the label says,” I murmur absently for at least the thirtieth time since moving day started this morning.

“It saysAssorted Dildos, but I wasn’t sure if you liked to diddle yourself exclusively in your bedroom.”

“What?” I lunge toward the box, my cheeks warm with embarrassment.

Who wrote that on one of the moving boxes? My twin sons are smart and they love playing tricks on me, but surely they don’t know what a dildo is and how to spell it. They’renine. That would be a huge mom fail.

I inspect the box, my future brother-in-law waiting patiently. There’s nothing written on it.

“Why are you like this?” I roll my eyes and shove his shoulder.

“If the box had a label that said which room it goes in, I’d put it there. I do have a few brain cells to work with.”

“You’re basically my third child. Put it in the kitchen.”

In the year my boys and I lived with Dom, my sister Tess and her two kids in Dom’s luxurious Denver house, I got to know Dom a lot better. Even when he annoys me, I love him to death. He’s so good to Tess. He’s good to all of us, but her especially.

“Hey,” Tess says as she walks through the front door. “Unpacking all this will take forever, you know. It’s not too late for us to just move it all back and forget this whole thing.”

I smile at her as she passes me a sandwich wrapped in white paper, having just returned from taking my boys Sam and Tate and my niece Hannah out for a late lunch. Tess has fought me every step of the way on moving out of Dom’s house. Even Dom said we should stay another year so I could save more money. He never charged me any rent to stay at his house, and being there while I finished my degree and started my new job took a lot of financial pressure off of me.

It was time, though. Dom and Tess have only been together for a little over a year, and my nephew Zane will be seventeen soon. With him leaving soon for college, I want them to have time to become a foursome.

As much as I love my sister, who is my best friend, my goal, as we both struggled to get by while I went to school part time, was to be financially secure and independent. To show my sons that their mom can and always will take care of them.

“It’s a solid idea, but I think we’ll stay,” I tell Tess.

She sighs dramatically. “I guess the rest of us will have to move in here, then.”

“Yeah, good luck with that.”

My new home is a neat three-bedroom ranch. It doesn’t compare to Dom’s, but it’s mine, and I’m able to give my boys something they’ve always wanted but never had—their own bedrooms.

“Seriously, you okay?” Tess asks me.

I meet her gaze and smile. She knows me better than anyone, so she knows that while this move is a good thing overall, I’m still haunted by memories of the reason we moved into Dom’s house in the first place. A guy I dated for a couple of months, Jake, stalked me. It was the most terrifying and helpless-feeling experience of my life.

Jake is in prison now, but it’s still scary to be moving out of Dom’s house, which has a top-notch security system. And also...Dom. Even though, as a pro hockey player, he’s on the road a lot, he was the one who caught Jake when Jake was prowling around his house.

I shove aside the unwanted thoughts, reminding myself I’ve moved on.

“Hey, pass me that one.”

My heart beats faster at the sound of the deep male voice as Dom’s teammates Rowan and Beck walk through the open front doorway.

Tess squeaks and practically runs toward the kitchen. She knows I have a thing for Rowan and she wants to give us a chance to talk alone.

“Come on, Boni, let’s go play in my room,” my son Sam says as he leads Dom’s Great Dane into the house. The twins adore Boni, and Dom told them Boni could spend the first night in our new house with them.

“You’re supposed to be unpacking your room,” I remind my son.

“I will.”

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