Page 30 of Red Hot Harmony

I leaned forward a little, resting my forearms on the table. “That’s not what I’m doing. I’m the last person you want as a father figure. Trust me.”

“So why do you care?”

The waiter returned to take our order and for a while, we were preoccupied with menu choices. As soon as he walked off, I steered the conversation back to the topic at hand. I wasn’t sure why I needed to know what exactly had happened. Pure instinct. Camille was hurt and Ally was somehow the reason and I felt compelled to get to the bottom of it.

The thought struck me as unusual.

I, Dante Martinez, had become the one thing I’d been afraid of becoming all my life—domesticated.

And worse.

I didn’t hate it.

“If she’s dating you, she should let me date too,” Ally said insistently.

“What’s the rush?”

She regarded me with a long, meaningful stare, the weight of which I felt in my bones. My safe approach wasn’t working against her cunning. Time to try something else.

“So who’s the guy?” I asked.

“Does it matter?”

“Yes, it does. Because once you tell me who he is, I’ll tell you exactly how it’s going to go between you two so you can skip to the next step.”

“Is that so?” She smiled wryly. “Dante Martinez is giving out dating advice?”

“Something like that.”

“Humor me then.”

“Well, tell me about him.”

“He's a friend of a friend and he’s in the band.”

“We’re pigs, Ally,” I said, my voice low but firm. “We’re not looking for some eternal love and happiness at that age, especially if we’re in a band. All that matters is sticking our dick in whoever is ready to put out.” They were words I was well aware I couldn’t say to someone her age, but they were true words. Unfiltered, with a healthy dose of reality. “And then after we’re done, we move on to the next girl. And the next. And the next.”

Ally’s face was still as a stone. The only indication that she understood me was a flicker of unidentified emotion in her eyes. “You don’t even know him,” she muttered, an ugly accusatory hiss.

“I don’t need to know him, Hendrix. Iwashim twenty years ago. I know things seem very different to you from where you sit right now, but believe me, one day you’ll look back at all this and you’ll regret growing up so fast.”

“I won’t.”

“There’s a reason your mom is doing what she’s doing.”

“You’re taking her side because you—your words—want to stick your dick there.”

“Don’t talk like that. Doesn’t suit you.”

“So you can and I can’t?”

“I’m thirty-nine and you’re fifteen.”

“So?”

“I like your mother.”

“So. I like Braden.”

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