in some other woman’s direction. It was that night in the Landmark Café bar in Westerwald all over again. She’d practically thrown herself at him, and he’d left with a thin, pouty brunette instead. “We need to talk about that. Just you and me.”
She didn’t need his pointed glance at Chrissie to know what he meant.
“I’ll wait for you in the car,” Wendy said, taking the hint.
Chrissie was less easy to move. Between them, Nina and Wendy had to each take an elbow to propel her towards the door. “I really appreciate that you came all the way here, and I’ll call you later,” Nina said.
“Who puts cream in an espresso anyway?” Chrissie huffed, finally accepting Wendy’s lead. Nina shut the kitchen door behind them and faced the room. Juliet hadn’t moved.
Dom poured himself a glass of water from the fridge dispenser. “Feel free to leave any time, Sis,” he said.
His sister! It took all Nina’s effort not to grin.
“Yeah, yeah, I get it. You want to be alone.” Juliet wrinkled her nose. “You might want to have a shower first, though!” She shoved his shoulder playfully. “I’ll be happy to keep Nina company while you change.”
He glanced at Nina and she shrugged.
“Go ahead. I need to change too, anyway,” she said.
He scowled at Juliet again. “Any embarrassing stories and you’re out.”
She stuck out her tongue at him and Dom rolled his eyes. “If you’ll excuse me?” he asked Nina.
She nodded, unable to speak. The image of Dom in the shower had grown roots in her brain. Damn this blush. Was it ever going to go away?
When she looked back at Juliet, the other woman had a wicked glint in her eyes. “So you and he haven’t yet…?”
The blush burned even hotter. How the hell could his sister tell whether she and Dom had slept together or not?
“Why not?” his sister demanded. “Most women can’t resist our Dom. Are you really that picky when it comes to men?” Her eyes narrowed with speculation. “Or is it not men you’re interested in?”
Nina stiffened her back and stared right back at Juliet. “What happens between me and your brother is none of your damn business. If you want to know why he and I haven’t had sex, then you ask him.” She would love to know, too.
Juliet grinned, and her cheeky look very closely matched her brother’s. “You can’t blame a girl for being a little protective of her baby brother.”
Nina collected her bags off the counter and headed to the guest bedroom. Any relief she might have felt at Juliet being his sister rather than his lover had evaporated in a moment. She could only thank the heavens her own sister wasn’t as meddling.
“You still here?”
Only Jules remained in the kitchen when Dom returned, freshly showered and dressed. She looked up from the magazine she was flicking through. “Now that’s better. You’re more likely to seduce a famous actress dressed like that.”
“I don’t want to seduce her. She’s a potential client. And I really don’t need dating advice from you, thank you very much.”
Not that he hadn’t already learned everything he needed to know about women from his sisters. Like just how much drama they could be.
Jules frowned. “You can’t seriously be considering her request? You have surgery scheduled. It’s not as if you need her money, and she sure as hell doesn’t need you. That uppity publicist has a Plan B to set her up with some poor schmuck who doesn’t mind running around at the beck and call of a celebrity, so let them get on with it.”
He rummaged in the refrigerator and didn’t make eye contact. Why had the thought of Nina with someone else, even if it was nothing more than a set-up, made him lose his appetite? “I can reschedule the surgery.”
“Please think about this carefully, Dom. You can’t afford to leap first then look.”
When had he ever done anything so rash? “Risk assessment is what I do for a living. So trust me to know and understand the risks.”
“And healing broken bodies is what I do for a living, so you should trust me. You know what the doctor said. You need to stop pushing yourself or you’re going to damage your body beyond repair. Fix the damage that’s already been done before you can barely walk! And until then, you need to stop running.”
“The moment they start cutting through muscle and putting metal body parts inside me, my career is over. What am I going to do with the rest of my life?”
There it was, that specter that had hung over him for months now. His job was who he was. It was the reason he got up every morning. Without it, he’d be lost.
He was still a few years shy of forty; too old to re-train, too young to retire.
He’d be the first to admit that agreeing to prepare Nina for this role was a convenient way to buy himself more time to figure out what he was going to do with the rest of his life.
He shook his head. “My hip, my pain. I can manage it.”
“But you don’t have to live with the pain. A hip replacement is nothing to be ashamed of, and you’ll still have a full range of movement afterwards. Without pain.”
“Will you please keep your voice down?” He glanced past Juliet to the closed door of the guest bedroom. “Have you ever heard of a stunt man with a hip replacement? It’ll take months before I’m back to normal. Months of sitting around, unable to work. And if word gets out that I’m no longer fit, no one will hire me.”
“You always knew this job was going to have a limited lifespan. What did you think you were going to do when you got older?”
He hadn’t. He’d lived every day as it came and not spared a thought for the future. “I’m still young,” he said. “I’ve got a lot of good years ahead of me. When I can’t cope anymore, then I’ll reconsider the surgery.”
“Please don’t wait too long. The better shape you’re in when you have the surgery, the quicker you’ll recover.”
He rolled his eyes. “Is the lecture over yet, Sis?”
She sighed. “I don’t want to see you any more damaged than you are already.”
They’d been having this same argument for more years than he could remember. “I know you want what’s best for me, but I’m not a kid anymore. You need to butt out and let me make my own decisions. And you can tell the others that, too.”
“So your decision is to turn yourself into a glorified fitness trainer for a few weeks? Why? Forget training her. Just get her out your system and move on, the way you usually do.”
He shook his head. “It’s not like that. She’s not like that.”
Juliet shrugged. “If this is really only about training her, then you need to
