Page 19 of The Triple Threat

Her mouth thinned into a line and she shook her head. “Sorry, honey. He was in here earlier.”

Dominic Taylor my douche of an ex was back in town – well shit.

“Was he alone?” I asked and picked at the label on my bottle.

Penny nodded. “Yeah, but he said he may come back in tonight.”

“Okay,” I whispered. “Thanks.”

“No fighting, honey, okay?” Her hand drifted over the bar where I knew there was a dint.

“No fighting, I promise.”

As I gave her a smile, someone shouted bingo behind us, and Mr. Parker was no longer the only person speaking. The bar buzzed with conversation and noise as Mrs. Hubert had her card checked. I made my way over to the high table in the back corner of the bar where my brother and Hunter were sitting.

“Ellie,” Hunter muttered with the briefest of glances toward me.

“Hi,” I replied, a little distracted by the news that Penny had given to me.

“Who pissed in your grits?” Carter asked, nudging me with his shoulder.

I took a deep breath and looked up at him. “Dominic is back in town.”

Carter groaned. “You’re fucking kidding me?”

“He on his own?” Hunter asked. “Or is she, whoever she is, with him?”

I shrugged. “Penny said he was alone earlier, but he may come back in tonight, so who knows.”

“Fuck, I’m sorry, Ellie.” Hunter tipped his bottle to mine. “He’s a dick. You’re better off without him.”

I nodded because I knew that for fact. On the night Dominic had said we were coming to the bar because he had something big to tell me, I’d thought he might say he wanted us to move in together. I knew he wasn’t going to propose, because who would tell someone that? Plus, Dominic knew that ‘telling’ me we were getting married would not go down well with me. I’d been ready to move in with him though. I really liked him, and we had great sex, so why not – actually, not good reasons. The problem was he didn’t want to ask me to move in together, he wanted to tell me that he’d met someone else and would be moving with her to damn LA where he’d got a job as a physical therapist in a private clinic.

That was what the fucking dick wanted to tell me, and he chose a packed Stars & Stripes to do it. I kept my cool at first because I was not one to beg. If my mom had taught me anything, it was that I should never lower myself to beg a guy for anything, least of all his time and attention. So, I nodded, asked him to leave my few pieces of stuff from his apartment in the break room at work and then went to the bathroom and sent out an SOS to Bronte.

She arrived within twenty minutes and found me sitting in a toilet stall crying. We stayed there for a half hour and drank the bottle of bourbon she’d bought from over the bar. By the time I licked my lips of the final drop I was wasted, we both were, but I was wasted and thought I was heartbroken – I realized soon after that it was the booze that made me feel like that, because it was ‘Dominic who?’ after three days, max. So, drunk and heartbroken I stormed out of the bathroom intending on dancing the dick out of my head, but when I saw him at the bar laughing and joking with my brother of all people, I lost it. I ran at him screaming like a warrior on the attack, jumped on his back and grabbed his hair.

And that’s the story of why there is a dent in Penny’s bar the size of Dominic’s head.

“Hey, El,” Carter said.

“Yeah?”

“You in a fighting mood tonight?” he asked, rubbing a hand over his stubbled chin.

“Nope, not really why?”

He nodded toward the bar and I heard Hunter groan. I swiveled around already knowing what, or who, had caught their attention. I wasn’t wrong. Dominic stood at the bar with his arm around the shoulder of a woman as he nuzzled his nose against her neck. At the time I’d had no clue who he’d cheated on me with, he would never say, and when he left no one heard from him, so I was shocked to see who it was.

“Well would you look at that,” Carter gasped, his bottle of beer paused in midair.

“You didn’t know?” I asked.

“Nope,” he replied.

I turned to Hunter who was staring hard at Dominic.

“You?”