Page 17 of My Ex’s Dad (Scandalous Billionaires #1)

I notice the shower tiles feel a little slick, but when I turn the spray on, it goes from I think it might be a little bit slippery straight to your ass is glass, airmail style.

Forget slipping.

There’s zero traction. I’m one of those poor fuckers straight out of those black ice videos trying to walk down their sidewalk or get up their driveway.

“Yaaaaafucccccckkkkk!” I vainly grab the glass as I’m falling, but there’s nothing to get my hand around. My palm bangs against the glass, and I go down.

I try to remember all my early-in-life jujitsu training, my karate lessons, the boxing class my parents put me in, and even earlier, gymnastics.

I have a personal trainer I train with at least four times a week, but lately, I’ve been far more into calisthenics than anything else.

Oh, and yoga, but I save that for when I’m at home.

Breathing exercises, I tell you. They’ll change your life.

I could use a few now.

I try and get upright, only to slip and fall on my back again. My tailbone is smarting, and my shins ache, but at least nothing’s broken. I didn’t land backward on my wrists as I tried to catch myself in the worst way. The water spray is practically drowning me though.

And …that’s how Amalphia finds me.

In my dude-in-distress era.

While I was thrashing around, trying to stay alive, I didn’t hear her thunder up the stairs. I left my bedroom door open a crack and the bathroom door is thrown wide open.

My eyes lock with hers. They’re wide and terrified. Her mouth opens in a horrified O. “Oh my god, are you okay?” she yelps.

I must look like a drowned, sputtering rat or turtle or alien in there. I slip around, trying to cover myself up because I’m well aware she can see everything through the shower glass. It’s not like the windows in the house. It’s not tinted in any way.

“Did you happen to clean the shower?” I groan, groping my way around to the back so I can try and grasp the wall to get the spray turned off.

It comes out more like Glib yoush thappen to bwean bwe showwber?

There’s a cough, snort, and a wet blubbery noise as the water continues to cascade straight onto my face.

“Ahh! You’re drowning! Holy fuckshit, did you break anything? Hold on!”

The shower door flings wide open, a towel is thrust on top of me, and then Amalphia steps onto the edge of it.

The tiles are so slick that the terrycloth can’t even get traction, but she maneuvers herself carefully toward the controls on the far side and just about manages to get the water turned off.

We both pause. The silence is real . The only sound in the bathroom is her panting and my slightly waterlogged sighs.

“I…I might have cleaned the shower…yes, I…uh, I did,” she admits, biting down on her bottom lip, but then she realizes she’s literally standing with her legs spread, and my face is pretty much right between them. She’s fully clothed, but still.

She gasps and scrambles back, keeping the towel under her so she can get good traction. Her hands claw behind her, reaching for the shower’s glass, and then she swings her leg over and out. As soon as she’s on safe ground, she covers her mouth with both hands.

“Did you, by chance, clean it with bacon grease ?”

Under other circumstances, she might find that funny. She might even shoot something snarky back about it not smelling like breakfast in here, so clearly, she didn’t use anything related to food.

Instead, her face does a crumpling on top of a crumpling thing where her eyes squish together, and her lips tremble.

“Oh. Oh my god. I…I must have used the wrong…the wrong cleaner. I didn’t realize it was going to be slippery.

” She forces her eyes open, though they’re filled with tears.

I realize she’s looking down her nose, making herself cross-eyed in order to give me some privacy.

“Are you okay? Should I call an ambulance?”

I want to ask her how much of my au naturel state she just saw, but instead, I draw the towel up closer around me to hide my bits from the waist down.

Her gaze slams straight to my tattooed chest and continues lower, lingering on my cut abs that happen to be a huge bonus of working out for stress relief.

When I’m in the gym or even doing yoga or stretching at home, the hours melt away, and so does everything else.

I can forget about all the work and family bullshit.

“I don’t need an ambulance. Maybe just an extra towel so I can get out of here safely.”

Her face goes from pink to scarlet, her eyes jerking back up. “Right. I’m so, so sorry about this, Warrick.”

Okayyyyy, it’s a bad time to start getting excited about the way my name rolls off her tongue.

She draws out the syllables like rich, black velvet shimmering in candlelight.

Shit, if I’m waxing poetic, waxier than these shower tiles, it’s a slippery slope.

No pun intended. I don’t need this towel, which is barely covering my waist as it is, to turn into a tent.

Amalphia rushes out so fast that she almost slips on the floor.

Note to self: Watch your ass out there too.

She’s back with an armload of towels in under a minute, and she practically tosses them all on top of me.

If I was near frantic about the boner being a visible thing, I don’t have to worry anymore.

Amalphia is at exactly the right angle to my ass, which is splayed out on the floor, that my eyes shoot directly to her chest, where her long-sleeved flowy shirt is now no longer so flowy and more stuck to her body because it’s soaked from the shower.

Thank fuckkkk for the towel mountain.

She sticks her index finger into her mouth and bites nervously at the nail.

“I swear I wasn’t trying to kill you. Death by housekeeping.

I just…grabbed the wrong stuff. I’ll show it to you downstairs.

” I didn’t think it was possible for her face to screw up further, but her frown lines get frown lines on top of frown lines, and her eyes both twitch at the same time.

Her jaw pretty much bangs down to her chest. “Fuck! Downstairs! The meatballs!”

She’s gone in a blur of auburn curls, denim, and water droplets.

I drag myself out of the shower with extra care, throw the towels down on the bathroom floor, and get my sore ass into the bedroom.

I think I’m going to have bruised butt cheeks, but it could be so much worse.

I could have cracked my skull open, broken my wrist or ankle, snapped something, twisted something, or pulled this or that.

I’ll take a few bruises over surgery and months in a cast.

I dry off, throw on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, and hobble downstairs, trying not to wince at the shooting pains from my gluteus maximus becoming a maximus pain in the assimus with every step.

The shower scene upstairs, which was not nearly as sexy as the way that sentence sounds in my head, is nothing compared to the disaster in the kitchen.

Amalphia is standing by the stove and bawling over the blackened, smoking, charred remains of what looks to have been meatballs. There’s a puddle of water on the floor from a pot that’s boiled over, and two of the dish towels are singed. I’m guessing she had to smother flames .

Her huge, tear-stained eyes and puffy cheeks hit me straight in the gut after she rips her hands away at the sound of my footsteps entering the kitchen.

“I…I…don’t even know w-what t-to s-say,” she sobs. The tears keep coming, washing down her face at an alarming rate.

I didn’t even know it was possible to cry that hard.

I hold up a hand, but it just makes her sob harder. The instinct to take her in my arms and comfort her slams into me with brute force, but I can’t do that. Lines. Boundaries. They’re there for a reason.

Her small shoulders wrench up and down, her chest puffs in and out, and the sounds wrenched from her throat are like something close to a dying goose, and they can’t be anything less than painful. When she rubs her hands over her face, she smears tears and snot together.

“I…s-swear I wasn’t trying to kill you or burn down your house.”

She suddenly rushes off, but she only goes to the cleaning closet in the kitchen and basically thrusts a bottle at me.

“This is what I used,” she murmurs.

I glance down at the thing. The words clean, shine, and polish stand out alongside bright, restore, and sparkle, but so do the words wood and furniture .

“Yeah…that’s furniture wax,” I tell her softly, though I almost don’t have the heart to do it.

Her wail of straight despair makes me wish I’d kept my mouth shut.

I close the gap between me and the stove instead. I’m going to have to throw out both the frying pan and the pot, but the water on the floor and the mess on the stove can be scrubbed up.

“Hey, it’s alright. The kitchen didn’t burn down, the stove is fine, the food can be replaced, and a fall is nothing major. Everything is fine,” I soothe. Or rather try to.

“It’s not fine!” she sob-screams.

“It really is all good.”

“Not until I clean up this mess, it’s not! You shouldn’t have to come home to this. Oh my god, I’m so, so stupid. Everyone always said so, and it’s true. Who uses furniture wax on a shower? Only someone with two brain cells would be that dumb.”

There’s beating yourself up in the heat of the moment, and then there’s whatever Amalphia is doing right now. Whatever is bubbling up feels like a long, ingrained nastiness that’s been festering for years.

And I don’t like it.

I don’t like it one fucking bit.

Is it wrong that I want to hunt down anyone and everyone who has ever made her feel like the things she just said are true and then turn my man cave into a real dungeon?

Okay, yeah, it’s wrong, but the intrusive thoughts infiltrate my brain and refuse to let up.

I won’t kill anyone. I’ll just lock them down in what is actually a very nice, finished spot of the house and force them to watch really bad movies on rerun while making them eat overripe bananas.

Is there anything worse? Wait, liver. Brussel sprouts.

The weird tinned fish that’s not tuna or salmon.

I shove all that aside and do the one thing I can think of doing in order to stop the meltdown that’s in full swing.

I might not even know what I’m doing. I might be bad at it.

I might have thought I had zero space in my life for letting someone in, but here I am, closing the distance between me and Amalphia and wrapping my arms around her.

I draw her into my body. Soft presses against hard, and just like the first time we hugged, one of us is stiff.

Fuck, I mean…

I mean, she’s the rigid one this time.

She’s the one who doesn’t know what to do.

But then, slowly, as the seconds tick by, her sobs turn into hiccups, and she melts against me.

My chest feels like I’ve been rammed by an angry porcupine, the quills digging into all my soft spots.

I want to bend my head and brush my lips over the crown of her head, inhale against those soft-looking curls, and see if she still smells like green tea.

I can’t really tell, what with the smell of furniture polish and burned meat in my nose.

All I can think of before my brain short circuits is that maybe this was a bad idea. A very, very bad idea because I’m losing it here, and it doesn’t feel like a bad thing the way it should.

She’s the one who pulls away and stumbles back. Her face is pink, but I don’t know if it’s due to proximity or the force of all that hard crying.

She gives me a brave but watery smile. “Let me clean this up properly.”

“I’ll help.”

“No way. It’s my job. You just sit tight while I fix everything. I know you might be sitting for a while, but I’ll take care of it. I’ll degrease your bathroom and—”

“I’ll order us something to eat. Do you like stir fry?”

She swipes at her eyes and sniffles. “Are you, sir, implying that I’m a monster? Who doesn’t like stir fry? The baby corns are the best!”

Oof. Gag. But also, how literally perfect is it to find someone who will eat the dreaded tiny baby corns to save you from having to waste them? Usually, I just ask for the meal without, but not tonight.

Tonight, we’re getting the baby corns after I was nearly murdered by furniture polish in the shower while the house almost burned down around me. Nothing about that should make me laugh, but here I am, doing it under my breath so Amalphia doesn’t take it the wrong way and get offended.

“Let me find my phone, and we’ll get the baby corns on.”

There’s a one hundred percent chance that I am a total dork.

I leave, my face the one that’s on fire because only a total douche muffin will say something like that, and I’ve been very careful never to fall into the choch category. Alas…here we are, folks.

Here we freaking baby corny corn are.