Page 37 of By A Thread

“Nice to meet you, Ally. I’m Nelson.”

“Thirty minutes seems like a long time to be trapped in a car with a guy like Dom,” she mused to my driver.

His eyes crinkled at the corners. “One gets used to it.”

“So we can’t pretend to be friends, and you can’t promise not to be an ass,” she recapped to me. “How about we clear the air? We can tell each other all the things we don’t like about each other. I’ll go first.”

She was joking. But the idea had merit. Ididn’tlike her. Icouldn’tlike her. We both needed to remember that.

“Your attitude,” I said, launching into my own list. “Your shoes. Your eyes are too big for your face. You have issues remembering that you’re an employee and should act accordingly. And your hair constantly looks like you just rolled out of bed.”With a man.

She blinked. Twice. And then her laugh filled the car. “You’ve put a lot of thought into that list for it to just roll off your tongue like that.”

“I was just stating the obvious. I don’t sit around thinking about you, Maleficent.”

Lies.

She sent a cocky look in my direction. “Sure you don’t, Dom.”

“Not only are you not my type. You’re so far in the opposite direction of my type you rank next to my great-aunt Rose.”More lies.

I did, however, have a great-aunt Rose on my father’s side. She, too, was a horrible human being. There was something profoundly wrong with the DNA on that side of the family.

Ally laughed. “Don’t start being funny, Charming. I like a man with a sense of humor,” she warned.

“You’ll need to fight your baser instincts and resist me,” I grumbled.

She reached out and actually patted my hand where it rested on my thigh. “Don’t worry, Dom. You’re not my type either.”

I snorted to let her know I knew she was bluffing.

She turned in the seat to look at me straight on. The movement made that stupid swingy skirt she had on slip a little higher on her thigh.

“You’re callus, disrespectful, generally in a bad mood, and I’d guess that you have trouble taking anyone else’s feelings into consideration over your own.”

Look at her hitting the nail on the head.

“You’re a workaholic, which is fine. Work ethic is a good thing in my book. But you don’t like your job, so that makes you either too stubborn or too scared to make a change. And I’m not a fan of either.”

My eyes narrowed, and I couldfeelmy nostrils flaring. “You don’t know me.”

“I know you’re not my type,” she said saucily.

She wished I wasn’t her type.

“You’re the type that waltzes into pizza shops and gets servers fired.”

“I’d like to amend my list to add the fact that you’re incapable of letting anything go,” I said, pretending to be fascinated by the website traffic email that just came through.

“I was depending on that job, Dominic.”

“And now you have a better one. You’re welcome.”

Ally growled. Actually physically growled. “There are consequences to our actions, Dominic Russo. And I’m going to make sure that one of your consequences is that you regret the day your mother hired me.”

“Mission accomplished already. Why don’t you quit and go ruin someone else’s day?”

“Please,” she scoffed. “I’m a tiny, little fish in your very big pond. You don’t even know I’m in the building.”