Gwen laughed with her friends and felt as giddy as a teenager before her first date. Somehow Dominic made her want to be that carefree again. She longed to go back to the days when she hadn’t been disappointed and let down by every man she dated. Why did she always have to be the one in the relationship willing to give everything to make it work while the other person just treaded water until something or someone better came along? For once, she wanted to be number one. It wasn’t as if she needed to be worshipped twenty-four/seven, but dammit, was it too much to ask for a man to just want to make her happy? She wanted to come home at the end of the day and feel like she’d actually been missed while she was away. In the past, she mostly came home to an empty apartment and a lot of excuses.
Mac had been one of her better dating experiences until the last few weeks of their time together. After that, the pattern had become all too familiar—knowing there was something going on, but wanting to believe that it was just her imagination. God, she had grown to hate those alarm bells that inevitably went off in all of her relationships. The warning bells that told her she was hanging on to a sinking ship and no amount of paddling would ever make it right again.
Crystal might be disillusioned with men after divorcing her controlling husband who always wanted her to be perfect, but Gwen had never had that problem. The men she’d dated didn’t seem to care enough to try to control her. That would have involved more time than they were willing to give her. The sad part of it all was that after the experience with Mac, she had concluded that it had to be her. Men fell in love and got married every day; heck, most of her exes married soon after they dumped her. Maybe she was some type of marriage training course. They dated her and got their selfish, jerk days out of their systems, and then went on to settle down and be perfect husbands. Stranger things had happened.
Mia and Crystal left her with her thoughts. She promised that they’d try to have lunch together tomorrow so she could fill them in on her dinner with Dominic. Gwen only hoped that she wasn’t a complete fool for even considering spending more time with him after breaking up so recently with his friend. She winced at the thought because it sounded so cliché. When had her life turned into something from a romance novel?
* * *
“Dude, you got laid, didn’t you?” Dominic blinked in surprise at Gage’s accurate assessment. Shit, was it that obvious? He hadn’t said anything even alluding to his night with Gwen so he had no idea how Gage had zeroed in on it within fifteen minutes.
Dominic kept his head down and his eyes fixed on the security feed from the previous evening. Their first task each day was to read reports from their various clients and glance through the footage to ensure nothing was missed. This was something that they could assign to one of their other employees, but when time permitted, he, Gage, and Mac still preferred to keep their hands on the pulse of their business. “Don’t you have something else to do?” he asked Gage when the other man continued to sit and study him.
“Well, of course,” Gage scoffed, “but this is so much better. I mean, I’m pretty damned impressed that you had the energy to go out and hunt a woman after traveling all weekend. I’m just gonna admit that I went home and crashed till this morning. If I’d found a naked woman on my doorstep, I’d have probably sent her on her merry way.”
When his hand slipped on the mouse and it clattered to the floor with what sounded like the force of an atomic bomb, he knew he was screwed. Gage was now in his favorite position of interrogation. His feet were propped on the desk in front of him, and he was leaning back in his chair. “No fucking way. Who did you get a door prize from last night? Crap, was it Kandi?”
Dominic had briefly dated a woman named Kandi a few months ago. When they’d met, she told him that she was a dancer but had been evasive as to where she did that dancing. He’d been surprised that wherever they went, half the men in the place seemed to know her. One night, she had finally confessed that her real name was Mona and her stage name at the strip club where she worked was Kandi. He was far from a prude, but when she wanted to share him with her friends, Bambi and Trixie, he’d called it a day. Yeah, he’d had a threesome back in his wilder, boot camp days, but it wasn’t something he was interested in now. Of course, her strange need to speak in baby talk to his crotch didn’t exactly make her a keeper, either. Gage had never gotten over his rejection of Kandi and her crew. He was sure there had actually been tears in the other man’s eyes when he’d told him. “No, it wasn’t her,” he answered flatly, trying to discourage further questions.
“So, that actually happened? Shit, I was just harassing you, but some chick did show up naked last night? If it wasn’t Kandi, then it must be someone new. A neighbor? I can’t believe you let go of your Gwen crush long enough to sleep with someone else.”