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Tara stuck around until Leah started getting irritable and then she took the baby home for a nap. Before disappearing into the tiny office down the hall, I walked around to talk briefly with each employee. They were a friendly bunch for the most part. My favorite was Carl, the ex-cop, who would happily drone on about his crime-fighting days as he refilled the shakers of parmesan cheese.
“This one night we received a call from a department store, one of those mega stores where they sell everything from motor oil to fresh lobsters. Just before they closed the door for the evening, this guy busts in on a dirt bike and starts riding through the aisles. He wore a blue cape, white underwear, and a cowboy hat.”
“Sounds fetching,” I giggled.
“Oh yeah, it was a sight. We chased him around and finally had him cornered in the cereal aisle. He screamed, ‘Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes!’ and then crashed into an oatmeal display. Dislocated his shoulder.”
I laughed again. “You working until closing tonight, Carl?”
“God, I hope so,” he said, making a face. “The missus has a new hobby. She spends about eight hours a day staring at these cards with weird pictures on them, claiming they tell her the future.”
“You mean Tarot cards?”
“Whatever. She keeps insisting that the cards warned that her I’m going to fall into the Grand Canyon.”
“That seems easy enough to avoid,” I said.
Carl shrugged. “You’d think. But Janet’s decided that the Grand Canyon is just a metaphor and that my fate is unavoidable unless I stay home with her. Melanie, I really do love my wife but, my god, I’ve got to breathe in my own space at least a few hours a day.”
“Well, you go ahead and breathe away,” I said, giving Carl’s arm a pat before moving on.
Even if there was work to do back in the office, the space was so small and cluttered, it made me feel like I was living in an old nightmare from childhood where I was trapped in my mother’s closet while the walls closed in. Every time I had that nightmare, I’d cry in my sleep. Somehow my mother always heard. She would sit on the side of my bed, stroke my hair, and sing “You Are My Sunshine” until I felt safe enough to fall asleep again. It was just one of a thousand memories that was sweet and painful at the same time.
Even though the noise from the kitchen filtered in, I left the door open because it made the place bearable. I thought about the big, airy office down at Espo 2, which would fit all the filing cabinets and several large desks, one exclusively mine. Esposito’s would never match the posh ambience of Desert Princess Resort and Spa, but I was glad to have this job.
For a while I dove into the work in front of me, going over the step-by-step instructions I’d typed out and collected in a binder. I had already documented every aspect of my job and anything else that might come up, from the payroll process to kitchen procedures, in the event I wasn’t available and someone needed something. Once I moved over to Espo 2, I didn’t want to be calling Gio every five minutes with a question, and I sure as hell didn’t want to be tugging on Dominic’s shirt all day long.
But after my conversation with Tara, I thought I understood things a little better. The Esposito brothers were rather young to have achieved this level of success. The two of them had started early. They’d had something to prove. And judging from the hardened look of intensity on Dominic’s face, he was still trying to prove something—to himself or to the world—every day.
A flush of heat rose to my cheeks as I remembered this afternoon and how I’d bit the inside of my lip to distract myself from the sight of Dominic’s muscles busting the seams of his old T-shirt. The best-dressed man on earth wouldn’t be able to compete with the raw sexiness of Dominic in his faded cotton tees. And I couldn’t ignore the way my breath caught as those strangely penetrating dark eyes settled on me. I swallowed and balled my left hand into a fist as an unbidden bolt of desire shot through my belly.
No. Nope. HELL NO with sixty cherries and three pounds of butterscotch on top.
I kept thinking that the strong, evidently one-sided physical attraction I felt toward Dominic would go away. He was abrupt and distant. He was standoffish and irritable. Most importantly, he was my boss.
Maybe I ought to listen to Lucy and go find some random male attention to loosen me up. It didn’t have to be anything permanent. Honestly, I didn’t even want permanent right now. But it would be nice to be looked at, to be touched, to be kissed ...
An image of Dominic Esposito’s full lips flashed through my mind, and I accidentally stabbed my pen through an innocent pink Post-it Note.
That was the last straw, I swore to myself. No longer would I indulge in guilt-ridden masturbation with my favorite battery-operated toy as fantasies of a certain brooding pizzeria owner besieged my mind. Anyway I was bound to get over this weird infatuation, especially once I was actually working with Dominic every day. He probably picked his nose and chewed with his mouth open and screwed anything with legs. He wasn’t my type. He never would be.
Actually, I didn’t even have a type, but if I did, then he wasn’t allowed to be a member of it. Dominic Esposito could never ever find out I’d ever had a single sexy thought about him. Nope. I’d pull my own left thumbnail out before I admitted the truth.
