Dominic wasn’t seeing it.
He wasn’t listening.
And the same heat I had felt in the hospital—raw, humiliating, uncontrollable—rose up my spine again.
“Dominic,” I said, my voice shaking despite my effort to steady it, “who you want is not me. Men like you don’t end up with women like me. You end up with women like the one my ex married.”
For a split second, his eyes went dark.
Not figuratively.
Literally.
Black swallowed the brown so fast I had to blink, my heart stuttering as I told myself it was just the lighting, just the alcohol, just my imagination spiraling again.
“Payton,” he said coldly, “is nothing but a w***e, Thumper. Your ex-husband is a pig. And you are nothing like her.”
His words landed like a slap.
“She wishes she had half your worth.”
I stared at him, stunned—not
