A hush fell over the kitchen, and it was as if Dominic wasn’t even there. He didn’t move, didn’t utter a word, and she refused to meet his stare. Somehow, it unnerved her. Everyone else gave their condolences right away, but he didn’t. Did he instinctively know that she didn’t want his sympathy, just like she didn’t want his help?
She tried to cover up the storm of emotion in her chest by taking up the brush and beginning again, this time with more forceful strokes across the space between the counter and upper cabinets.
“Sounds like we have a lot in common,” he finally said, tone calm. “My dad died eight months ago. That’s when I took over the shop.”
Erica glanced up and before she could say anything, his own confession spilled out onto the kitchen floor.
“The doctors all said it was heart failure. Worked himself too hard for too long. When people knew he was going downhill, they called me home. I took my time.” Dominic sucked in a breath that expanded his chest. “By the time I got back, he was gone. My dad was good friends with the sheriff, and he told me that in those last days, he basically shut down. Kept asking for me. For my mom. And when Cole told him we weren’t around, my dad cried. That man never cried a day in my life.” A painfulwince passed over his face. “Maybe physical heart failure wasn’t the only cause of death. Metaphorical heart failure too.”
Erica froze and saw the broken look in his eyes, the same look she tried to hide in herself. More than anyone else, she understood what he might have been going through. They both lost the only parent they had ever really known. Now, they were both trying to grapple with their grief in the only way they knew how. They both had regrets. They both struggled, though in different ways. But in that, he was right—they had more common ground than Erica previously imagined.
She never believed in anything like fate or destiny, but it couldn’t have been a coincidence that they met when they did. Now, maybe she had someone who understood those moments when she felt like bursting into tears because she missed her mother so deeply, so ardently, that she couldn’t keep it in. Did Dominic have those moments? Did he miss his father? Or did the nature of his upbringing sour his memory? By the way he looked, however, Erica doubted it. He could be tough in front of the rest of Tolstone, but he let her see the truth. He was torn up over the way things ended between him and his father. He had to be. That bit of glossiness in his eyes confirmed it.
Returning the favor of discretion and respect, she didn’t say how sorry she was to hear of his loss or give some platitude about how his father was in a better place now and that if they had the chance, they would have reconciled before the end. She had been sick of hearing those things from her few friends and perfect strangers. Dominic would have heard it from the entire town. He didn’t need to hear it from her.
To save them both from the awkward segue, she jumped to a safer topic. “And what do you do when you’re not running an antique shop and… you know?”
Dominic seemed to have pulled himself back from the brink of that hard, dark emotion. “I read… Boring, I know, but whenyou look at how much free time I have, you’ll know I don’t get to read much at all anyway.”
Erica cast a glance over her shoulder and hit him with her best cunning smile to try and make him laugh again. “So, you’re an intellectual through and through, huh?”
He copied her look. The effects were acutely felt through her limbs, and she would have buckled straight into his arms if she hadn’t leaned into the counter instead. “Surprised?”
The brush bristles slowly slid against the sheetrock, unintentionally sensual. “Not really. I mean, you don’t look it at all, but…” She stopped herself, the truth of her opinion just on the tip of her tongue.
“Go on. Say it.”
Bravery slowly pushed the words out of her throat. “It shows in your eyes. You just know things. I’ve met guys who… who look like you do, and you can just see the lights aren’t all on upstairs.”
Amusement glimmered in those eyes she spoke of so fondly. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“I mean it too. Just like you, I mean everything I say.”
“What a lucky break for me.”
Erica nearly burst into a wide grin at the way he appraised her with such… She didn’t even know how to describe that look. She only recognized it from the faces of the clients she had done shoots for over the years. Husbands and wives looked at one another like that during family photos. New parents, too, when they gazed down at their baby. Engaged or freshly married couples beamed at each other with that same sparkle in their eyes.
She bit her lip and turned back to the paint to realize she had only progressed about a foot into the backsplash. “I’m not getting very far, am I?”
“I’m distracting you.” Dominic eased off the counter and made his way back to the card table.
Before she could understand what could have possessed her, Erica reached out and grabbed his arm, feeling the taut muscles move under his skin.
“No,” she said quickly. “You can stay there.”
They locked eyes and something like fire passed between them, hot and scorching, but painless and exhilarating all at the same time. All that sexual tension between them, all the looks, the vibes, the energies that told her something had to be there, roared back into focus. The elephant in the room, this unspeakable, indistinguishable longing for one another lurking beneath the innocent conversation, was now a beast that demanded to be noticed, to be recognized and given a name.
Erica couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t break down and call this weird mess anything. Giving it a name would have been like confessing that it existed, and she didn’t want it to. Not yet. Maybe she wasn’t ready for this after all.
She wanted her freedom, but she also didn’t want to be lonely. Dominic’s rebuke to trust someone played back in her mind. Moving away from her hometown, losing her mother too soon in her life, all of it made her lie awake at night and wish she could have been sharing a life with someone. Someone like Dominic.
But why? She hardly knew him. They hadn’t spent enough time together to yearn for something so intimate. Why should she want a perfect stranger in her arms, in her bed?
And then it hit her. Dominic wasn’t a stranger. This mysterious emotion felt so natural that he couldn’t be a stranger. Ever since the moment they met in the shop, she felt she had known him all her life. How could she be so comfortable with anyone like this otherwise?
All at once, those walls she had tried to reconstruct after his demolition job earlier that afternoon came tumbling down again, and she felt faint. Her heart lay exposed under the open sky of his gaze that seemed to burn with his own frightening revelation of what they shared.
Erica withdrew her touch. She couldn’t fall, she couldn’t let someone in, someone who might change her entire sense of self, something she had to white-knuckle and preserve above all else.
