Otterly Scorched

by Tara Sivec

  “You were just standing around with your thumbs up your asses, letting my goddamn otters get taken right out from under you!”

  Shooting a glare back over my shoulder at Nanci, she just shrugs as she quickly gets up from her own chair. “I swear, I had no idea he’d be back today. He said at least two more days.”

  I narrow my eyes at her and study her face, looking for any sign of deceit, but hell if I can see any. I never saw any for over a month though, so this isn’t making me feel any better right now.

  “You’re all fucking fired!” Another loud shout comes from the back of the house.

  “Shit,” I mutter, turning away from Nanci to rush down the steps, hearing her feet pounding down the stairs behind me.

  As pissed as I am at the man shouting at his employees, they don’t deserve this. He’s mad at me, not them. Even though I want to punch him in the face for still being mad at me when he wouldn’t even let me explain, I can’t let all those nice, wonderful employees take his wrath when it’s meant for me.

  The rat bastard.

  Dax is still shouting and cursing at the top of his lungs, and when Nanci and I get around the back of the house and around the large dog kennel area, I’m hit with a sense of déjà vu so strong that it has my feet stuttering to a stop and Nanci stumbling into the back of me.

  “What are we doing? Why did we stop?”

  “The greatest ass in a pair of jeans,” I mutter, shaking myself out of my thoughts and pulling my eyes away from Dax’s ass.

  He’s standing about twenty feet away in a grassy area next to the hen coop with his back to me in a wide stance. With his arms crossed in front of him, he continues to rage at the handful of employees standing in a cluster in front of him and facing me, with poor Ryan in front of the pack.

  “And now Chris has to go on a fucking diet, and you’re all to fucking blame!”

  Ryan and all the employees behind him jump at Dax’s bellowing rage, one of them putting his head down, covering his face with his hands and starting to cry.

  “And you!” Dax uncrosses his arms to point at Ryan, who takes a couple steps back from him. “I’m gonna kick your fucking ass for your part in all this, you piece of shit!”

  “If you could just calm down for a minute….” Ryan trails off, holding his hands up.

  “Oh no, not again,” Nanci mutters from behind me, and I start wondering if I’m in the movie Groundhog Day.

  Dax starts to charge Ryan, Ryan looks like he’s going to piss his pants, and I take off like a shot, closing the distance between us in the blink of an eye. Performing the same maneuver I did the first day I saw this infuriating man again, I rush up next to him, crouched down as low as I can get, then kick my leg out and connect it with his shin.

  Just like a little over a month ago, Dax’s thundering rage is cut off as he pitches forward without a sound, his big body slamming into the grass in front of him while Ryan and the employees quickly jumped out of the way.

  I don’t have time to get all girly and emotional and think about everything that’s happened between us since the first time I did this—wishing I could do it all over again, experience it all again for the first time, and not lie to him for even one second about his dad and Nanci. I immediately jump onto Dax’s back and straddle his waist, quickly grabbing both his hands and yanking them behind him, swallowing back the tears, remembering I’m a badass and this rat bastard broke my heart. He doesn’t get to break one of his employees too.

  Gripping his wrists in one hand as tightly as possible, I rest my other hand in the middle of his back while he struggles beneath me, and I lean forward until I’m close to his ear.

  “Stop acting like a dipshit. You’re better than this now,” I growl until he finally stops struggling between my legs.

  After a few quiet, tense moments, I lean back a little when Dax finally cranes his neck to look back at me over his shoulder. His hair is falling down around his eyes, and I grip my hold on his wrists tighter and clutch onto the material of his shirt at the back of his neck harder, so I’m not tempted to reach out and brush it out of his face like I’ve done a hundred times before.

  I brace myself for the explosion that’s about to come out of him, trying to come up with as many curse words as I can to fire back at him when it happens.

  “Awww, no handcuffs this time?” Dax pouts back at me, which makes my jaw drop open in shock when he doesn’t scream at me to get the fuck off him.

  “We good here, boss, or do you need anything else?” Ryan asks.

  “That should be all for today. Thanks for your help.” Dax looks away from me to nod up at Ryan. “I’d shake your hand, but I have a gorgeous woman straddling me, holding my arms behind my back, and she is ridiculously strong.”

  It’s not until Ryan chuckles that I wake the hell up and scramble off Dax’s back.

  “What the fuck?” I shout, looking back and forth between the two of them as Dax pushes himself up from the ground and brushes himself off.

  And then I look around at the rest of the employees still gathered here. They’re all smiling, high-fiving each other, and chuckling too, and I’m not surprised in the least to see that Nanci the liar is suddenly nowhere to be found.

  “Oh, they know I own the place now.” Dax shrugs. “I came clean and sucked up to them for keeping it from everyone all this time by telling them I screwed up with the woman I love and asking for their help.”

  “We still on for happy hour later, boss?” Craig, the man in charge of the horses, asks, holding his fist out.

  “Hell yeah, first round is on me.” Dax bumps his fist before Craig walks away, a couple other employees also giving Dax fist-bumps before following him. “Thanks again, everyone!”

  When Dax looks at me again, the happy fucking smile falls from his face, and he quickly takes a few steps toward me when he sees I’m about two seconds away from taking up where I thought he had left off when I tackled him and kicking everyone’s ass who is still standing here.

  “When a gentleman messes up with the woman he loves, a grand, romantic gesture is often suggested to repair the damage he has caused, and my employees were kind enough to help me out.”

  “Don’t be mad at Dax. It was supposed to happen last night, but Corrie needed five run-throughs, and it took forever.” Ryan rolls his eyes.

  “Do you have any idea how hard it is to pretend to be scared of Dax now? He’s so nice! I laughed every time he yelled we were fired. But I got it together in the end, didn’t I?” Corrie nods proudly.

  “I didn’t expect him to improv and bring up Chris. I almost shouted ‘Fat Back’ and had to put my head down and pretend like I was crying,” the new guy, who I thought had been crying, chuckles and shakes his head.

  “You son of a bitch!” I shout at the top of my lungs, pulling my arm back and punching Dax as hard as I can in the gut.

  He immediately clutches his stomach and bends at the waist, grunting and panting and trying to catch his breath.

  “Run!” Dax wheezes to the rest of his employees still standing around. “Save… yourselves!”

  They all scatter, and I grab onto the hair on the back of his head, yanking his head up so he has to look at me. “I shed tears over you, while you were setting up a fucking play as a stupid romantic gesture?”

  All of a sudden, there’s a bunch of loud chirping and squeaking, and something furry on four legs goes whizzing past. I look away from whatever it was to glare back at Dax.

  Dax coughs, wheezes, and groans a few more times before he can finally get words out again.

  “Oh that was just an employee bonding experience, and since I didn’t figure you would pick up the phone if I called, after never returning your calls, I thought a trip down memory lane would help get you to talk to me again,” he explains.

  I finally let go of his hair by shoving his head away, taking a step back when Dax stands up to see Ryan running back toward us.

  “Which way did he go? Which way did he go?
”

  Just then, I hear the loud chirping and squeaking again, and the furry thing that kind of looks like a tiny deer that raced by before comes around the corner of the hen coop and whizzes past once more.

  “You dick!” Ryan shouts before racing after whatever that was.

  “That’s the romantic gesture,” Dax announces while we both watch Ryan run around in circles, shouting at the quickly running animal, diving a few times to catch it, but having no luck when it just squeaks louder and runs faster.

  “You got me Ryan running through here, screaming like a lunatic, and chasing what looks like a baby deer? How romantic,” I deadpan, even though now that I’ve gotten a look at the tiny creature who couldn’t be more than six pounds, the ice around my heart that Dax put there starts to melt.

  “No, no. What Ryan is chasing is your romantic gesture.”

  He closes the last few feet of distance between us until we’re standing toe-to-toe.

  “He wasn’t just calling the small species of antelope that looks like a baby deer another name for the male genitalia for no reason,” Dax informs me as Ryan finally walks back to us after successfully capturing the animal and hands it over to me. “This little guy is called a dik-dik.”

  “A what-what?” I burst out laughing, forgetting about my hurt for a few minutes, cuddling the little guy who really does look like an adorable cross between a tiny antelope and a deer.

  “A dik-dik,” Dax repeats, reaching over and scratching him behind the ears while I hold the precious little squeaky thing in one arm and rub my hand down his back with the other. “Heralding from the bushlands of Africa, the dik-dik gets its name because the squeaking sounds that come out of them sometimes sound like they’re saying dik-dik. This one was born at a zoo not far from here, but his mother wouldn’t bond with him, and he’s already too acclimated to captivity to go back to the wild. That’s why I was gone for so long. I had to make a pit stop at the zoo and pick him up. So, now he’ll stay here at The Backyard, and he’ll be yours. Because I was a huge dick, and now you’ll have a pet you can constantly call a dick, because you’re going to forgive me and be here all the time, right?”

  I continue petting Dik-Dik, swallowing back the damn tears that just keep pissing me off today, refusing to look up at Dax when he asks me that question with so much fear in his voice. If I look up at him, I’ll just want to kiss him and make everything better, because I don’t like it when he’s worried and upset. But he hurt me too, dammit.

  “I cried over you,” I remind him again softly, knowing I was going to forgive the jerk as soon as I was straddling his back and subtly sniffed his hair when I told him to stop being a dipshit.

  Dax takes the dik-dik out of my arms and hands him back to Ryan, who quickly walks away quietly with the animal, and disappears around the corner of the dog kennel.

  Once my arms are empty, Dax moves in close again, tentatively resting his hands on my hips.

  “I’m sorry I made you cry. I’m so fucking sorry, Harley.”

  Keeping my arms crossed in front of me, I finally look up at him. He looks like he wants to throw up and like he’s not one hundred percent certain I’m going to forgive him, and it makes me feel a little bad. Not bad enough to let him off the hook yet, but a mediocre amount of remorse.

  When I still don’t answer him, Dax quickly and nervously starts rambling again.

  “You calm me when I’m in a rage, and I soften you when—”

  “When I want to eat people for breakfast. Yeah, yeah, I know” I finish, repeating the rest of the spiel he gave me the night of the dinner party. “Do you have any idea how many lives were lost the last few mornings because of you?”

  My words come out scratchy because of all the tears I’m trying to hold back, and I have to clear my throat before I can continue. Everything inside me wants to just wrap my arms around Dax, and keep making jokes with him, and have it go back to the way it was a few days ago. But if we’re supposed to be in a serious relationship, then we need to talk about serious things sometimes too.

  “You thought I said I loved you… to distract you.”

  I can barely get the words out. They hurt so much to say out loud I have to swallow a few times before I can continue, and the anguish on Dax’s face as he looks down at me doesn’t help.

  “I saw it written all over your face, Dax. You stood there in your father’s house, and you looked at me in so much pain, and you actually believed I could say those words to you and not mean them. Do you have any idea how much that sucked?”

  I stopped trying to force the tears back as soon as I choked out his name, and Dax’s hands immediately come up to cup either side of my neck, pressing and holding his lips to one of my wet cheeks.

  “I’m so sorry,” he whispers again, his voice thick with emotion as he moves to rest his forehead against mine. “I wish I could tell you that’s not true, and that thought didn’t go through my head, and that I didn’t spend entirely too many hours doubting you and being pissed as hell when I should have known better. I was pissed when I first saw the file on your desk, and I got angrier when I saw you in my dad’s office, laughing with my family and my otters like you were in on it the whole time, and I lost my shit without thinking. I should have fucking known better. I’m so sorry. I also got chewed out by my dad on your behalf, so there’s that. I’m not sure if you’re aware, but my father has security cameras inside his home, as well as outside. He made me watch the footage of you telling him and Nanci off fifteen times until he felt I was properly remorseful.”

  The residual anger I was still holding onto with Martin over what he did to his son instantly vanishes like someone stuck a pin in a bubble, but I still keep my arms firmly crossed in front of me while Dax holds my face in his hands.

  “It took fifteen watches until you were remorseful?”

  I am unsuccessful in keeping the annoyance out of my voice, but Dax quickly pulls his forehead away from mine so he can look into my eyes.

  “Hell no. The first time I watched you call my dad a dipshit pretty much did me in,” he admits, lowering his voice to almost a whisper. “You looked good defending my honor. I don’t deserve you. At all.”

  Finally uncrossing my arms from in front of me, where I was blocking Dax from getting any closer before I was fully ready to give in, I grab onto fistfuls of the front of his shirt over his chest, looking up at the annoying, frustrating, sweet, big-hearted, thoughtful man I am ridiculously in love with and also want to punch in the face sometimes too.

  “If it makes you feel any better, I cried as well. A lot. First, when I realized what a complete piece of shit I was and for the way I treated you without giving you a chance to explain, and then again when I realized what a complete piece of shit I was and that you were definitely going to break into my house and kill me while I slept.”

  I have to fight back the smile that threatens to break through, unable to believe that Dax’s charm is one of the things I love most about him now, when it was one of the things that annoyed the hell out of me when I first met him.

  “You forgot about me,” I whisper, getting out the last of the serious shit so we can be done with it and move on. “You talked to your dad, and you talked to Nanci, but for four days….”

  I have to stop talking. I’d finally gotten the tears to dry up; they don’t need to come back now.

  Dax drops his hands from the side of my neck and steps back, pushing up one of the sleeves of his shirt to his elbow then flipping his arm up and bringing it between us.

  “Dik-Dik was the cute and cuddly romantic gesture,” he tells me softly, pulling his flipped over arm up higher and angling his wrist toward me. “This is the serious, grand one.”

  Looking down, I gasp. My hand flies up to my mouth, and the tears have now declared a mutiny.

  “Oh fuck you!” I sob when I finally pull my hand away, making Dax chuckle as he steps closer.

  Wrapping one of my hands around his arm, I trace my fingertips of the o
ther hand over the words Dax permanently inked into his skin on the inside of his wrist in the last few days, the only small section on his arm that wasn’t already covered in ink.

  Harley

  My lucky charm

  Dax drops his wrist out of my hold, sliding his arms around my waist as I bring mine up to wrap them around his shoulders.

  “I can’t believe you did that.” I shake my head at him.

  “I meant it when I said you were out of your mind if you ever thought I could forget about you. I’m sorry it took me so long to pull my head out of my ass,” he says, kissing the tip of my nose. “Back when we met, when you hit on me first—”

  “Objection! Leading the witness.” I cut him off, making Dax swat my ass with one of his arms wrapped around me.

  “Anyway,” he continues. “Back when we first met, I only had one side, and that was the douchebag side. I hope my two romantic gestures today proved something to you.”

  “That you’re a dik-dik?” I smirk.

  “I knew I was going to regret that one immediately.” He sighs. “No. I wanted to prove to you that I have two sides now. A cute and cuddly one, and a dead fucking serious and permanent one, and they both love you so goddamn much, and I never want you to—”

  Lifting up on my toes, I shut him up with a kiss. Which of course gets entirely too out of control, since we haven’t seen each other in four days.

  “Will someone please, for the love of God, help me catch a dik!”

  Dax and I break apart when Ryan races by shouting again, chasing after my new, cute, adorable pet, who seems to be as stubborn as me.

  “Am I forgiven?” Dax asks when I can finally reach my hand up and smooth his hair back off his forehead.

  “I suppose. But only because I am otterly in love with you.”

  “Awww, you made an otter pun!” Dax gushes, squeezing me as tightly as possible and lifting me up off the ground until I start shrieking, and he puts me down again.