Page 26 of Between Love and Loathing
DOMINIC
“I’m not going to talk with her,” I ground out into the dumb FaceTime chat my siblings had me on.
My brother Declan sighed as he bounced a baby in his arms while making a protein shake. He’d really gone all in with Evie, and I couldn’t even knock him for it. “You have to do something.”
“Shut up and show me my nephew. I don’t want to see your face anyway.”
Atticus yawned and there was a collectiveawover the FaceTime. All six of us were wrapped around the next generation’s fingers, and we weren’t too proud to deny it.
“Dom, you’re changing the subject. She’s making waves in the press. You can’t just stay silent,” Evie said behind him.
“The hell I can’t,” I grumbled.
“Don’t talk to my wife that way,” Declan snapped at me, and then both my younger brothers, Dex and Dimitri, snickered.
“Fuck all of you, okay? Evie doesn’t care how I talk to her.”
“That’s right. I can lay you out next time and make you say sorry over and over if you want to mumble under your breath like a twelve-year-old.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. I’d barely gotten any sleep after carrying Clara to the penthouse, and I had a fucking headache from last night—not because I’d drank too much or got home too late, either. Instead, it was simply because I kept imagining how sweet she tasted, how I wanted to eat herandher cupcakes about a hundred more times to get my fix.
It was supposed to be a one and done.
“I don’t have time for this.”
“No, you’re not hanging up,” my sister Lilah said. She was the logical one of the six of us, and when she asked for something, we all listened. “You need to handle this, Dom. She broke your heart once before, don’t let her break your business too. This resort is important to you.”
I tried to cut her off, because Natya wasn’t going to ruin anything with my resort. She knew better.
“No. Let me finish.” She held up a hand and then pushed her dark wavy hair back. “You need to think about what would push her away enough that she’ll leave you alone, that she’ll understand you’re done.”
“I told her we were done three years ago.” Natya was the most lethal ex of the century. She was an international entrepreneur of a woman. She graduated top of the same class as me, where I met her. When we’d started dating, she worked just as hard as me on those new building designs and I’d fallen hard. She’d been impressive in the business and so I let her infect my engineering firm with extravagant ideas, let her push limits within the business and outside of it.
She started to enjoy the attention our contracts got us and partied hard night after night. Then, she came to work tired day after day. I shouldn’t have ever given her a team to manage. When I got the call about a work injury I’d given her permission to handle, the failure hit me like a freight train.
I pulled back hard and still remembered the headlines reading “Promising Young Architect Dominic Hardy Loses Billion Dollar Contract.”
I rubbed at my heart, still feeling the pain of it. We tried to work through it until I found her in bed with someone else not much later. I told her I was done.
She’d told me she was pregnant.
God, that woman put on a good show, crying and pleading, and talking about a happy family. I was the eldest of the six kids of immigrant parents. They’d worked so hard to put me through college, to show I was worth something and I wanted to make them proud so badly. I wanted to prove to them and my younger siblings that we could all have the American dream.
The pain she inflicted the next time though, the way she lied again … that was enough for me to walk away forever. Now, I wasn’t stupid enough to fall for any of her breadcrumbs—or for any other women for that matter. I usually didn’t indulge unless it was worth it, and I made my intentions pretty clear.
Except with Clara. I wasn’t really sure what the hell my intentions were.
“Natya's not going away,” Dex grumbled. He was just as jaded as me when it came to his exes.
“How do you know? Keelani went away.”
“Man, fuck you for bringing her up.”
Dimitri laughed. “Low blow, Dom. He’s still not over her after, what? Like ten years?”
“I’ve been over her since the second we broke up. And it’s not about me and her. It’s about Natya and Dom, because I got a casino partnering with us in Vegas and they want nothing to do with Natya. She screwed them out of a contract years ago.”
“Which casino? Tell them I’ve blocked her on all forms of communication. She knows we're done.”
