Page 22 of Iron Heart

The last time I even tried to have sex was a few months after my diagnosis. A drunken hook-up at a college party, except I wasn’t drunk. It was not a memory I cherish, to say the least. But something about Dante — the heat and energy and realness of him — is an uncomfortable reminder of just how much I’ve shut myself off from men in general. He makes me wonder what I’m missing. He makes me feel like a woman. Or rather, he makes me realize how much I’d like to feel like a woman once in a while. Instead of just a small-town reporter with a defective heart.

Dante.

It’s the perfect name for him. But he’s wrong about its meaning, though. Heisan inferno. He’s all heat. Fire. Danger.

And every time I look at him, I wonder how delicious it would be to get burned.

10

Dante

The next few days, I spend a lot of time thinking about hot blondes with ice-blue eyes — and trying to ignore the fact that whenever I do, all the blood in my body seems to be go right to my dick.

I’ll say this, though. Tori Lowe is doing a bang-up job of distracting me from wondering why the hell Dominic has been making himself so scarce ever since he got to Ironwood. Here I thought he’d be underfoot in my house all the damn time. But in fact, it’s been just the opposite. He’s been out until all hours of the night, and crashed out like the dead every morning — whenever he bothers to come back to my place to sleep. I haven’t actually talked to the fucker once since the day he arrived.

Maybe he’s just tryin’ to milk the time I’ll let him stay with me for all it’s worth. I sure as shit wouldn’t put it past him. Dom takes what he can get, almost like it’s his due. Always has. Typical youngest kid, maybe, I dunno. He was always the apple of my ma’s eye. He was the most spoiled by far. He grew up knowing that anyone in the family would do anything for him. It ain’t surprising he probably still thinks that’s the case.

When we were kids, Ma was always talking about how she wanted better for all of us boys than what she had. And better than what her parents had had before her. She did our best to make sure all of us were on the right path. Unfortunately, as a single mom of five unruly boys who had to break her ass to make ends meet, she had a hard time keeping track of us all. Our grades at school were mediocre or worse, but between the two jobs she worked to keep food on the table and a roof over our heads, she didn’t have much time or energy left over to make sure we studied. Most of the time, she had to be content with us staying out of any obvious trouble.

And hell, to our credit, we didn’t do so bad at that, at least for a while. Antony, Marco, and Matteo got in fights, sure. But they were all big and matured quickly, so most kids their age were too scared to challenge them. When I hit puberty, I grew tall before I grew muscular, so I had to learn to fight with my wits before brawn. I learned quickly how to size up a situation — how to evaluate an opponent’s strength at the same time as his brain power. When I finally did start to fill out, I was a better fighter for it.

Dominic, the last of us, has always been the most reckless. He has what they call the gift of gab. That ain’t unusual in Italians. But unfortunately, his mouth and his swagger have gotten him in a hell of a lot of trouble over the years. He talks before he thinks, that one. Always has, and probably always will. He doesn’t back down before a fight, either. Even the fights he can’t possibly win. I’ve gotten that motherfucker out of more scrapes over the years than I can count.

Like my other brothers, he’s gone his own way. On the rare occasions he came back to visit our ma when she was still alive, he would always have a new story about some great job opportunity that had just fallen in his lap. She accepted these lies without questioning him, because she wanted to believe him. And hell, to one extent or another, we all lied to Ma when she was alive — to protect her from learning shit we knew she didn’t wanna know. But with Dom, it was always different. Ma worried about Dom more than the rest of us. Maybe we were just more convincing liars. Or maybe she saw the same thing I see in my youngest brother sometimes. A self-destructive streak. Something inside him that makes him forget to look before he leaps.

Maybe that’s why she was always harping on us to look after Dominic when we were kids. Because she figured he was always gonna need someone around when he fell, to pick him back up.

The truth is, I don’t really want to know what the fuck Dom’s involved in these days. Just like with my other brothers, I prefer the don’t ask, don’t tell approach. But the old weight of guilt in the pit of my stomach comes back at the thought that Ma would be pissed at me not watching out for Dante more. No matter that we’re all adults now, and that I can’t control his decision making.

The longer Dom stays with me, the more it weighs on me that if she was still alive, she’d be expecting me to be my youngest brother’s keeper. To make sure he’s not gettin’ himself in a mess he can’t get out of.

So when I pull into my street one afternoon and see his SUV is back in my driveway, I decide I’m about to fuckin’ find out what the hell brought him back to Ironwood, once and for all.

“Hey, big bro,”Dom greets me from his position on my couch. He looks like he’s taken root there, with fast food containers and chip bags strewn all around him.

“Make yourself at home,” I say sarcastically.

“Don’t mind if I do,” he grins. “What’s up with you? You look like you could use a drink, or to get laid. Aren’t those club girls takin’ care of you the way they should be?”

“Fuck you,” I shoot back. I go into the kitchen and come back with a cold bottle of beer from the refrigerator. “Glad you’re here, Dom. It’s about time you told me why the hell you’re in my house, eatin’ up my damn food.” I eye the food wrappers on the coffee table. “You been sittin’ there in your own stink all day, or you manage to do anything productive?”

Dom grins wider and points to a tablet that’s sitting on the couch next to him. “That’s the beauty of the twenty-first century, brother. I can do business right from here, in the comfort of your less than well-appointed home.”

I grunt and sit down in a chair. “That business got anything to do with why the fuck you’re here?”

“Matter of fact, it does.” He picks up the tablet and waves it at me.

“What the fuck are you on about?”

“I’m thinking about starting my own transport company.” He points toward the text at the top. “‘Iron City Refrigerated Transport,’ I’m gonna call it. I’m online lookin’ for deals on a used refrigeration truck.”

“Refrigeration?” I scowl. “What the fuck do you know about refrigeration?”

He cocks a brow at me. “What’s to know? You buy a truck. It keeps shit cold. You move that shit from one place to another.”

“Where the hell did you get that idea?”

Dom shrugs. “I used to do transportation for a while. Moving product is good business.”

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