By a Thread: A Grumpy Boss Romantic Comedy

He took me home. Brownie was waiting not so patiently for us inside. I stayed in the kitchen, helping myself to a glass of water and hopping up on the edge of the counter while Dominic let the dog out into the backyard.

Minutes later, man and dog returned in a burst of energy. They’d clearly been playing in the dark. Brownie stuck his face in his dish, sloshing water everywhere. But Dominic set his sights on me.

He stalked toward me, a gleam in his eyes, and I felt a delicious cocktail of nerves and excitement mix inside me. He looked positively devilish, and I was pretty sure I looked debauched.

Stepping between my legs, he put those big hands on my thighs and ran them up to my hips, squeezing and kneading. My breath caught in my throat because apparently the two most volatile, explosive, violent, world-ending orgasms I’d ever had were not enough.

Judging by the subtle tightening in his jaw, I wasn’t alone.

“I’ve fantasized about you just like this.” His voice was a honeyed rasp that I wanted to bathe myself in.

Orgasms? What orgasms? My vagina’s short-term memory was clearly impaired.

His hands slipped around my hips to my ass, and he yanked me against him. His mammoth penis definitely had a case of amnesia because he was stone hard.

We needed to talk.

Needed to have a conversation about what the hell this all meant.

Discuss why he’d suddenly 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 empathy. Nonprofits pay her as a consultant so she can tell them how to make people care.”

“Why did she take the money?” Dom asked.

I shrugged. “She’s a virtual stranger to me. But I did some sober sleuthing and discovered she founded her consulting business right around the same time she helped herself to Dad’s accounts. Oh, and I also found out her boyfriend won the United Nations Public Service Award.”

“While her husband is on the verge of being kicked out of a nursing home for nonpayment. What are you going to do about her?”

“I can’t afford to do anything about her. Not yet. First order of business is to get Dad’s house ready to be put on the market. Once it sells, the money will be enough to keep him in the home for years. He’ll be safe. If there’s enough money left, I’ll hire a lawyer. I don’t care to see her or speak to her or listen to an impassioned speech about how she deserved the money more. I just want every dime of my father’s savings back.”

“How bad is the house?” he asked.

I winced. “Not terrible,” I said, feeling the heat flare up on my neck. “I mean, it’s nowhere near ready for sale. There was a little plumbing mishap. I’m doing as much of the work as I can myself.”

“Ally,” he said. And I knew that Caretaker Charming was dying to be let off his leash to fix everything.

“It’s fine. This job saved me, saved my dad. The salary helps a lot, and your stupid no outside employment clause is giving me the time to actually do more than half an hour of sanding floors and mudding drywall at a time. Everything is going to be fine.”

“I want to see the house,” he insisted.

To distract us both, I squeezed Dominic’s hips between my legs and felt the answering pulse of his cock against me.

“I’d rather see some other things right now, Dom. Please?” It was unfair, and I knew it. If I asked, he would deliver.

In answer, he shucked my sweater over my head and hurled it over his shoulder. The laugh that bubbled up inside me disappeared on a gasp when he sucked one of my nipples through my tank.

“Yes,” I hissed. This is what I needed most right now. The physical sensations of lust and want and desire drowning out everything else.

He hooked his fingers in the waistband of my leggings and swiftly dragged them down my legs, adding them to the pile on the floor.

I chose to worry about lady juices on prep surfaces later and made a grab for his belt. Together, we fumbled his pants open.

When he freed and fisted his cock, lining up the velvet-smooth crown with my slick folds, a tremor made its way through my body.

Brownie, sensing he wasn’t going to have our undivided attention anytime soon, tip-tapped out of the room, his tail wagging. He took my sweater with him. But like the lady juices and everything else that was wrong in my life, I’d worry about it later.

Dominic kissed me like he was starving for my lips, my tongue.

“I want to taste you,” I whispered into our open-mouthed kiss. “I want to be on my knees in front of you.”

“Is that what you wanted that night? In my office after your date?” he demanded, one hand yanking the neck of my tank down, baring my breasts, while the other taunted me by stroking back and forth from that hungry bundle of nerves to my opening. Back and forth in a torturous rhythm.

“Yes,” I breathed against his mouth, pausing long enough to nip at his lower lip, his jaw. “I wanted you to fuck my mouth. To watch me make you come. To have your cock in my mouth when you say my name.”

The noise he made, a deep, pained rumble, was inhuman, and it awoke something primal inside of me.

“Did you use my underwear that night?” I asked the question I’d been dying to know the answer to.

“Yes.” He kissed me hard, all gentleness abandoned. Our teeth clashed, his hands gripped my hair, my hips, my breasts, as if they couldn’t decide where to settle. “I fucked myself with your panties wrapped around my fist.”

I made a very unsexy squeaking noise.

“I came on your wet spot and kept coming.”

I was so lightheaded I was afraid I’d pass out before he made me come again.

“Look down,” he ordered.

I did as I was told. And watched as he fed the tip of his erection into my body. We were connected, joined. I could feel my muscles fluttering around his crown, trying to draw more of him inside. The veins on his shaft stood out rigid and angry like what he was doing to me was an act of violence rather than beauty.

He growled, low in his throat.

I felt dirty, decadent, depraved. And I wanted more.

“Lean the fuck back,” he said. I dropped back to my elbows, my body on display for him now. My breasts suspended by the neckline of the useless tank, nipples budded and hard. My breath coming in short rasps.

“Watch me fuck you, Ally. Watch me take you and make you mine.”

He unhooked my legs from his waist and placed my feet on the edge of the counter. The only thing holding me in place was his erection. Coincidentally, it was also the only thing anchoring me to the gravitational plane.

“Stop talking. Start fucking.” I gasped the words out around clenched teeth. I needed more of him. All of him.

“Are you ready for me, baby?”

“Dominic, please!”

With the plea still ringing in the air, I watched in fascination as he drove his thick length into me.

Pleasure. Pain. Otherworldly sensations of fullness and completion. All lighting up my nerves and sending jumbled messages to my brain. This was everything. He was everything. Nothing else existed beyond this man, this room.

If I had ever had any sexual hangups, Dominic’s groan of satisfaction would have untied them. I wanted all he could give me. I wanted him to know and worship every single inch of me.

He pulled out before I wanted him to and then thrust back into me before I was ready. The clench of his jaw, the pulsing at the base of his throat, was catnip to me. My body was driving Dominic Russo wild. I was driving Dominic Russo wild.

“I want to go slow,” he rasped. “To savor you. I want you to come on my fucking mouth, Ally. I want to spend hours just worshipping your tits. But I can’t. Stop. Fucking. You.” Every word of his confession was emphasized by a faster, harder thrust. A return to my body, to me.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to die from the dirty talk or the looming orgasm first.

“Don’t you dare stop,” I hissed. “Don’t ever stop.”

He dipped his head and sucked a nipple into his mouth. I felt the pulls of it echo in the muscles that surrounded and gripped his erection.

I moaned or sighed or made some kind of barnyard animal noise, and apparently it shattered any resolve he had. He released my nipple with a pop and slammed into me, burying himself to the hilt. He was thrusting wildly, and all I could do was curl my fingers around the edge of the counter and hang on tight.

My inner walls did the same thing to his shaft. Closing around it in an early warning system. Danger! Orgasm imminent! He already recognized the signs. This man already knew me well enough to understand that I was seconds away from detonation.

He gritted his teeth and continued fucking his way in and out of me as if it were his life’s mission, as if we were in a race to the top. While his dick ruined me for all future sex partners forever, his hand gripped my breast and squeezed. Then they slipped under me, where his fingers probed and stroked that forbidden ring of muscle between my cheeks.

I definitely should have been worried about work surface sanitization. I should have been over-analyzing how he knew I was that kind of girl. I should have been wondering if I needed an extra-strength birth control pill to fight off what was surely super sperm.

But I wasn’t. I was bucking my hips against him greedily, begging for more.

“I want to touch you everywhere,” he rasped. Sweat dotted his brow and dampened his shirt. “I don’t want there to be an inch of you I don’t know.”

His finger pressed against me again, and I felt a new throbbing, a new emptiness waiting to be filled.

“Do it.”

He brought his finger to his mouth and laved it with his tongue. I couldn’t wait to get that tongue on me at some point before we both came to our senses. Rearing up, I sank my nails into his shoulders. Our lips met in a fierce kiss as his finger breached me. One finger. One kiss. And we were both out of control.

“Need. More,” he insisted. The angle was too shallow. There was more he had to give me. More that I was ready for.

With one arm, he plucked me off the counter and slammed my back against the cold steel of the refrigerator. He powered into me once, twice, three times. His finger flexing inside me. And it still wasn’t enough.

Down to the floor we went. He came up on his knees, bracing his hands on my thighs and pushing them up and out. I was spread wide for him like a shameless banquet of carnal need. That dirty, evil gleam was back in those beautiful blue eyes.

His finger returned, and he watched me through hooded eyes as he slid it all the way inside me. There was a satisfying fullness everywhere, and my muscles were celebrating by clamping down.

“Dom, I think I’m going to—”

“I know you are. I can feel you.” Our breath came in sharp pants as his uncontrolled thrusts destroyed us both. Cold tile bit at my back, while hot, hard man labored over me, into me. Again and again, he slammed into me, making my breasts tremble.

It was probably too hard. I would probably be walking like John Wayne tomorrow thanks to the aggressive ministrations of Dom’s dick. And I was so here for it.

My orgasm was shimmering on the edges of reality, slowly, slowly becoming a real, tangible thing. I could feel myself flutter around his cock, his finger. Implosion was guaranteed. These were for sure going to be my last few moments on this earth.

And then he slammed inside me and held for a beat. I felt the first spurt of his orgasm in a place so deep inside me it was uncharted territory. That pulse, that unholy grunt of pleasure so sharp it was almost pain, sent me hurtling into the abyss. I clamped down on him like his cock was a mechanical bull on Wasted Wednesday.

My walls met the next volley of his release greedily, closing down on him hard. Beat for beat. Thrust for thrust. Wave for wave. We matched each other. Opening and closing. Coming and drowning together.

He drove into me one last time and held there while our releases mixed and mingled inside me as the waves gentled, then slowed, then finally, finally stopped.