Page 69 of Dial F for Finance

“I have never wanted to stay in bed so much in my life,” I admit.

“We’ll call it a controlled experiment,” he says, rolling me back beneath him. “Repeatability. Audit trail. Conclusions. Very professional stuff. You’ll hate me. I’ll love you. And we’ll write a thesis on how fucking good that line between the two feels when I’m balls deep inside you.”

I giggle, and it sounds so foreign coming out of me, but I don’t care. I let him kiss me, and I let the morning stretch out lazy and loose and impossible.

Late morning, I’m wrapped in one of his white shirts with the cuffs turned up, poking through his kitchen for espresso pods while he makes eggs. He moves around the kitchen like a man who’s cooked for himself his whole life—which doesn’t fit anything I thought I knew about him.

His phone goes off on the counter. The screen says DUSTY, with a picture of a laughing man in a Mets cap.

Dominic answers on the first ring and the voice that comes out of him is one I have never heard in ten years of boardrooms and bars and one hotel suite in Tokyo.

“Hey, you. No—I know. I know. I’m not in Chicago, that’s why. . . Because I’m in New York, smart guy. . . . Yes. Yes. I watched it. The ending was garbage and the dinosaur documentary was better, and tell your friend he still owes me five dollars.” A pause, and then Dominic laughs in a way that surprises me. It’s so real and helpless, and bubbles up from somewhere I’ve never been given access to. “You’re a menace. . . . OK. . . . I love you too. I don’t think so. How about next Sunday? I—” He stops. His eyes come up and find mine across the island. “Hang on, Dusty.”

He lowers the phone. Looks at me for a long, bare moment, spatula still in one hand, and I watch a man stand in a doorway inside himself and decide whether to hold it open.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“How do you feel about driving to Connecticut with me?” he asks.

“Today?”

“Yeah. It’s like, fifty minutes.”

“What’s in Connecticut?”

He grins. “My family. Sunday dinner. We can fly home afterward.”

I balk. “Your family? I . . . I don’t know . . . I—” I clamp my mouth shut, immediately breaking out in a cold sweat.

Dominic just smiles like he understands and turns his attention back to his caller. “Next week, buddy. I know what I said. But something important⁠—”

“I’ll go,” I say quickly—so quickly my heart is in my throat and I still haven’t consciously made the decision, but he’s watching me and I want to be in this with him, so I just repeat, “I’ll go.” And this time I mean it.

For a second he looks kind of wrecked, like maybe he expected me to take it back and run. But then he presses the phone back to his ear. “She’s in, Dusty.”

I hear a whoop from the other end, a voice with the same raucous energy as Dominic, less polished and twice as gleeful.

Dominic holds the phone out so I can hear Dusty say, “Is she hot?” and Dominic, without missing a beat, says in a deadpan, “Dusty, you have a girlfriend who can read lips—don’t even try it.” Dusty lets out a cackle and disconnects.

Dominic clicks the phone off and sets it aside, then leans both hands on the island to regard me. “You sure? No one will judge if you want to bail.”

“I’m not afraid of your family, Dominic.”

He grins. “Imagine being in a room with about thirty different versions of me.”

I think about it. “Well, OK. Now I’m terrified.”

CHAPTER 17

Dominic

I’ve walked into rooms to negotiate nine figures of other people’s money with a lower pulse than I have pulling onto my parents’ street with Jenna Pemberton in my passenger seat.

The street does what it’s done my whole life—big trees, old stone walls, the long hedges of people who pay other people to be private—and the closer we get, the more cars stack up along the shoulder like a valet line nobody organized. Tío Rafael’s truck with the landscaping logo. My cousin Mateo’s Audi with the parking tickets he collects like stamps. A minivan I don’t recognize, which means somebody had another baby and I owe somebody a gift.

“Dominic.” Jenna is watching the cars accumulate with the expression she uses on hostile term sheets. “How many people are in this house?”

“It’s Sunday,” I say, which is the only honest answer.