Page 44 of For the Love of the Gods

If looks could kill, the one Dominic gave me would have me laying on the floor in a pool of my own blood. He left me bleeding as he looked at something behind me. “What did Julian want?”

“First of all, I approached him.” Dominic’s head shot back to me so fast, I moved my hand from his shoulder to the base of his neck to steady him before he got whiplash. His skin was hot with rage. “Calm down, that’s not what I meant. I walked up to say hello and then he asked me to dance.”

“How quaint.” The words were clipped, brutal.

“It’s not like you weren’t busy.” Busy standing silent and brooding in conversations he would normally engage in.

“Those conversations weren’t particularly fun.” Point: proven.

“And why is that? Their inability to deal with your cheery attitude?”

I was clearly losing my mind, because I thought I saw the corner of Dominic’s mouth twitch up. “It was the topic of conversation.”

“And what was that topic?”

“You.”

“Me?”

“You.”

Fuck. “What did they say?”

Dominic considered me for a second, running his eyes over every corner of my face, leaving me waiting with baited breath. “Everyone here seems to know a lot about you.”

“They do,” I said, the tension in my voice endangering my composure.

“Why?” Dominic’s question toed the line between genuine and doubtful.

“Well, you see, when two people are friends, they tend to have conversations. And in those conversations, they normally share personal information.”

Dominic spun me around to avoid Corrina’s dramatic dancing, pulling me flush to his chest. I winced from the contact, my burns still fresh.

“What was that?” Dominic asked, clearly catching my reaction.

“The dress is kind of uncomfortable,” I lied. I wasnotabout to tell him what had happened earlier. I still wasn’t over it, the situation pushed down to be dealt with at a different time. It wasn’t urgent, not when stuff like that happened all the time.

Dominic tipped his head down to look at the dress, catching a glimpse of my heaving chest while he was at it. “It doesn’t look it.”

The words looked physically painful to get out and I released a low chuckle. “You should be a poet, really. Your compliments are just immaculate.”

Dominic’s jaw ticked and I saw the restraint gathering in his whiskey brown eyes. “Would you rather me say that you look so good in that dress I want to pin you down and rip it off with my teeth?”

Oh. Wow. Okay.

I swallowed, and tried to press my thighs together as subtly as possible. It was all I could do to relieve the knot of pressure building low in my stomach. When he spoke in that low, low grumble of his, I lost control of my senses.

I tried to regain some of my footing. “It will have to wait till the sun sets.”

I snuck a glance over Dominic’s shoulder to the patio. It was the peak of summer, the sun setting far later in the night than normal. Even then, I had already missed the best part in my attempt to pry information out of Julian. Damnit.

“Right, the patio.”

It was my turn to snap my head towards Dominic. And his to drag a hand up my spine to the base of my neck. It took a Herculean effort to speak against the scalding pressure of his fingers on either side of my neck. “How did you know that?”

“Corrina told me,” He barely opened his mouth to speak, and the second the words caught out he clamped back down on his jaw.

“You are about to crack a tooth.”

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