thrown his principles out the window and crossed a line that, for him, took him too close to his father.
Instead, I hooked my heels at his back and draped my arms over his shoulders. His strong, steady shoulders.
“I hate that someone hurt you, Ally,” he confessed, bringing up a hand to tenderly trace the bruising on my face.
“Everybody gets hurt sooner or later,” I said lightly.
“Not you. Not anymore. I can’t take it.”
I rested my forehead against his. “Some things are out of even your control, Charming.”
“I refuse to believe that.”
I was aware of the fact that he was only half-joking.
“Your father,” he began.
I leaned back to study his face. So strong, so serious. The cut of his jaw, the furrowed brow. I lusted after the subtle hollows in his cheeks. It was the face of a warrior, a god. And those blue eyes were anything but icy now. As if a fire had been lit deep within him.
“Does it bother you to talk about him?” he asked.
I shook my head. “No. It’s the situation, the disease, that are hard to…” Talk about. Deal with. Face.
“I can’t begin to imagine,” he said quietly. He tucked me back into him, those hands stroking paths up and down my back. Comforting. Soothing. Turning me the eff on.
“He was the one person who never let me down,” I told him. “The one person whose love for me I was always absolutely certain of. To have that taken away? To have the man still here but to lose everything that made him Dad? It’s a devastation I didn’t know could exist.”
Dom held me, and Brownie decided to get in on the action too. The dog danced on his hind legs to give my knee a slobbery lick.
“How did you end up being responsible for him?” Dom asked. His lips brushed their way down my neck.
“I lived in Boulder for a few years and didn’t notice the early signs for a while. He’d always been absentminded, forgetful. But things were getting worse. Dad’s neighbors kept an eye on him for me. None of us realized just how quickly things were deteriorating until he went missing last summer.”
Dom stiffened, but his hands stayed gentle.
“I was on a plane home when the cops found him in a park ten blocks from his house. He couldn’t remember where he lived. They dumped him in this horrible state-run facility.” A shudder rolled through me just remembering the dirty linens, the stench, the windowless rooms. “Every day there was a special kind of torture, knowing that your loved one is suffering and ignored. I moved him out of it as soon as I could get him in a spot in a nicer place. But it was so expensive.”
“Doesn’t he have insurance? Retirement savings?” he asked.
I stroked a hand over Brownie’s soft fur and sighed. “Normal health insurance doesn’t cover nursing homes. He’s got a pension and Social Security, which go directly to the home. Which, did I mention, is astronomically expensive? Medicaid’s skilled nursing coverage is tricky and limited. And, as it turns out, my parents are still married. Something I didn’t know until I started digging through the paperwork.”
“What does that mean?” he asked.
“Her finances, if she would bother responding to my emails, count against my father, and I can’t complete the paperwork without them. Plus, here’s the kicker, about a year before all of this happened, my mother—and I use that term in the loosest possible definition—realized she still had access to all of Dad’s accounts.”
Dom’s fingers flexed into my back.
“She helped herself to everything he’d saved. She took it all,” I said.
“What the hell kind of monster is she?”
My laugh was humorless. “That’s just it. On paper, she’s a saint. She’s been gallivanting the world, building wells, raising money for vaccines, giving speeches. I haven’t talked to her since the day she left when I was eleven. But every once in a while, usually when tequila is involved, I’ll Google her.”
“She abandoned you,” he said.
“She did. She left me and my father, saying the world had a bigger calling for her than wife and mother.”
“Fuck her.”
His unwillingness to cut the woman who gave birth to me any slack was sweet and satisfying. “The irony is she’s doing good things.”
“Probably because she gets off on the attention,” he guessed.
I rewarded him with a smile. “She got an honorary doctorate for her fundraising work for Sudan. She goes by Dr. Morales now. She gave a TEDx Talk about worldwide