Winter Love
Page 52
“You’ll tell me when you’re ready.”
“I’m ready.”
She took a deep breath. “Why are you sleeping on the floor?”
“Well, six months ago I was supposed to be on airplane…” He told her the whole story. Getting a few hours extra, going home to his apartment, finding his roommate and girlfriend together. And then getting on that airplane anyway, instead of melting down, which is what Chelsea would have done. She was so angry on his behalf, incandescent with rage, and then the comedy of errors started. Him returning, getting the key to this apartment, only to find it empty and his stuff…somewhere.
“I think it’s currently on a truck in Oregon. Sort of like this tree was a week ago,” he said lightly. “And until it comes back, I’m making the best of what I had in my truck, and my bins.” He jerked a thumb toward the bedroom.
She craned her neck and saw a stack of stuff marked with spray painted labels. “So this isn’t your usual aesthetic?”
“Not at all. Although I don’t have a ton of stuff, I do have a real bed, and a couch. I’m not an animal. Just…a guy who was a bit embarrassed about all of this until you needed a place for a tree. I should have told you sooner.”
She cupped his face in her hands. “We just met. We’re going to be learning things about each other for a while. This is fine. This is more than fine, because it’s another funny story.”
This time his smile wasn’t nervous at all. It crinkled the corners of his eyes, and that was all she could see as he leaned in to kiss her deeply. “That was what I was hoping you were going to say.”
She kissed him back, the lights and decorations forgotten. He tasted so good, so pure and kind—could someone taste kind? Ben did, though—and she needed more of him.
Her mouth dropped to his neck, and he groaned as her tongue flicked against the taut muscles there. It was a beautiful sound, so she sucked on his skin to hear it again.
He shoved her shirt up, his hands big on her torso. Lifting her effortlessly, he carried her into the kitchen, where he set her on the counter. “What about the tree?”
“Right.” She pulled at his shirt. “Can you be naked?”
“I can be whatever you want me to be.”
They peeled each other bare, kissing and licking and sucking at newly revealed slices of skin, and once they were stripped all the way down, he carried her back to the empty living room and stretched out on his quilt in front of her tree.
Then he hauled her up his body, her limbs sprawling wide as she landed on top of him.
His mouth crashed against hers, his kiss hungry and demanding. Between them, his cock found her wet slit.
“Need you like this,” he muttered. “Want to feel you come on me. Can you come like this?”
His cock lay between them, pointing up at his taut belly. If she rolled her hips, her clit would drag up and down the underside of his erection.
Could she come like this? She’d come like a magical Christmas Elf. “Mm hmm.”
“Ride me, then,” he urged. “Let me feel you.”
Her bare flesh rubbed against his, hot and wild, no barrier between them. It made her think of rising up on her knees and taking him inside her without a condom, without anything between them.
Too soon, Chelsea Jane. Too soon. But very hot, and oh, she didn’t care if it was too soon. Not as a fantasy. For once in her life, she wasn’t going to be pragmatic and reasonable.
She wanted Ben so much it hurt, but in a good way. She wanted him desperately, endlessly, hungrily.
Heat built inside her as they ground against each other, a wave of need and pleasure twisted together. It felt so good, him between her legs, the surging, rolling muscles of his body. But even better was the way he watched her from below, the wide-eyed boyish appreciation for her naked body on top of his.
I’m going to fall for you, she realized with a shock.
“Chels…” he breathed.
She rocked her hips, suddenly slicker than before. An unintelligible sound slid from her lips, and he clamped his hands on her thighs, holding her in place as she rocketed to the stars.
As every cell in her body seemed to explode at once, he grunted and tensed up beneath her, hot come spilling onto his stomach.
She slid to the floor beside him and buried her face in his side.
“Well, that was hot,” he said after a bit. Then he laughed. “I did buy a couple of towels. Any chance you could grab one for me?”
She hopped up, and felt his gaze on her bare bottom as she went to the washroom to grab that so he could clean up.
When she came back, she kneeled beside him. He scrubbed his belly, then gestured to the tree. “Should we get dressed and decorate this thing?”
They did just that, and then they went back to her place to make dinner, but they brought it back, picnic-style, to eat in front of the tree.
The next night, after a Christmas Eve spent video-calling her sister, and then her parents at one brother’s house, and then her other brother, and finally Ben’s parents in Connecticut, they crawled into her bed together.
“Ben, I need to confess something,” she whispered against his bare chest a while after they’d made love.
A light snore was the only response.
She crawled up his body and kissed his neck, then his jaw, but there was no waking him.
She curled up beside him and brushed her lips against his ear. “I wished for a Navy SEAL for Christmas,” she whispered. “But I didn’t know I’d find you, and you’re more than I ever would have hoped for.”
Chapter Ten
Chelsea woke up on Christmas morning with Ben’s erection pressed delightfully against her butt, and his hand caressing the lower curve of her belly.
Right above her panties.
As soon as she sucked in a very-aware breath, he groaned in her ear. “You’re up.”
“And so are you,” she whispered, rocking her hips back.
“Can I touch you?”
“You’re already…” she gasped as he dipped his fingers under the waistband of her underwear.
“Here, Chels. Can I touch you here?”
“Yes.”
He groaned again as his arm wrapped her tighter into his body, until there was no space between them and his hand had more than enough room to cup her sex, his fingers squeezing her almost roughly before gently parting her lips and sliding into her slick folds. Her clit throbbed as he stroked her flesh. “I can’t get enough of you.”
The feeling was mutual.
She rocked against his touch, getting to where he wanted her to go faster than usual. Christmas magic, aka the Orgasm Express.
“Oh yeah, baby, come on my fingers. Make me all sticky and then I’ll stroke myself with your juices.”
She cried out, his dirty talk making her wild, and then she was there, spasming in his arms, as he bite and sucked on her shoulder and her neck.
Twisting in his arms, she crawled down his body, eager to watch him stroke himself with that hand.
“Merry Christmas,” she whispered as her hair brushed against his belly, curtaining the secret open-mouthed kisses she was laying up and down his heavy length. “Show me how you do it.”
He grabbed his cock, his fingers glistening from her, and jerked himself faster than she would, harder. Rougher. She reached out and swiped at his fingers with her tongue, and he made a feral sound of appreciation.
“You like that? Me tasting both of us?” He made her wild. She’d never spoken like that to a bed partner before, but nobody had made her feel this sexy before, either.
Ben was special.
He watched her, his swollen lips parted, his gaze heavy and hot, as she made her way back up to the wide crown and licked up the drop of clear fluid at his tip.
“Merry Christmas to me most of all,” she murmured. “Yum—”
That was as far as she got. His other hand gently cupped the back of her head and guided her to take him all the way inside her mouth.
He pumped against her tongue, giving her his whole throbbing length, but he didn’t finish that way. His hands shaking, he grabbed a condom, covered up, then rolled her onto her front so he could take her from behind.
She fisted her hands in the blanket and closed her eyes, riding the intense sensations all the way to a rapid, amazing climax.
Ben followed her, his cock twitching deep inside her, then dropped his weight on top of her body. “Open your eyes, beautiful.”
She lifted her head and blinked. Somehow she’d gotten turned to the side, and now she was facing the foot of the bed—where an overflowing Christmas stocking hung on the corner of the footbed.
“Ben,” she breathed. “What did you do?”
“Woke up in the middle of the night and had an idea.” He dropped a kiss on her shoulder, then let her up.
As he dealt with the condom, she dove for the foot of the bed. The stocking had an oversized name tag on it. Chels, scrawled in handwriting she knew deep down she would be seeing for the rest of her life. This was the start of their own holiday traditions. Just the two of them, starting over. New and fresh and all their own.
Sticking out the top was a DVD box she already owned, but when she lifted it up, there was something notably different about this copy—it was signed by the stars of the TV show.
Confused and delighted, she looked over at Ben “What is this?”
He gave her his sweetest, most lopsided boyish grin. “There’s a story behind this. The night I moved in, I lay on the floor in my living room and listened to you, watching this series. It echoed through the wall—all night long, it felt like.”
She buried her face in her hands. “I was marking,” she mumbled.
He peeled her fingers away. “I didn’t catch that.”
“I was marking tests. It was the night before the last day of school. I worked late, then got up early the next morning to check my work.”
“And you watch Navy SEALs be badass while you do that?”
She couldn’t stop the blush crawling down her neck. “Yes.”
“Chels?”
“Mmm?”
“This Navy SEAL thinks that’s freaking adorable.” He kissed her softly. “I didn’t mention it sooner because at first I wondered if you might have a thing for SEALs.”
She closed her eyes. “This is mortifying. I don’t, by the way. I just have a thing for you.”
“It’s okay. I know that now.”
She kissed him back. “I’ve never dated a soldier before.”
His lips twitched in amusement. “Sailor.”
“The mortification continues.”
But he just pushed her stocking back into her hands. “Open the rest.”
She wasn’t ready to move past the surprise. “But I want the whole story about how you have a signed copy of this DVD.”
“Oh.” He gave her the most innocent, nonchalant look. “They came to the base and did some training with us.”
Her stocking was immediately abandoned. She threw herself on top of him and kissed him not-at-all softly. “Tell me everything.”
He tucked her into his side and tangled his free hand in her hair. “It was a couple of years ago, before they filmed the pilot. They came down, and we put them through a Hollywood version of Hell Week. So once the show came out, they sent us a couple of gift baskets, including signed copies of the first season DVDs for the whole team.”
“Okay, I have a present for you.”
“You haven’t finished with your stocking!” But he let her go, and she scampered out of the bedroom.
Ben thought his heart might not be able to grow any bigger than it already was, having surprised Chelsea with her stocking, but he was wrong.
When she reappeared in the doorway holding a cardboard tube, he had a good idea of what was inside.
“I wanted to get this framed,” she murmured as she crawled back onto the bed and handed it over. “But there wasn’t enough time to get it done properly.”
Ben carefully extracted the rolled-up sheet of delicate sketch paper. He had an idea of what he might find in the tube.
He was both right and wrong.
It was a sketch of him, from the life drawing sessions, he was sure of it. But the body part she focused on surprised him.
Chelsea curled up against him, her fingers wrapping around his arm. One hand soft and sweet against his biceps, the other on his forearm.
The same arm drawn in perfect detail on the sheet of paper.
The rest of his body was nothing but blocked out lines, his head turned away. But his arm popped off the page as if he were actually flexing.
“It took me the whole final evening,” she murmured.
Ben’s voice was full of gravel when he finally found words again. “This is incredible.”
She traced her fingers over the lines on the page, down to the tight squeeze of his hand around the corner of the platform he had been sitting on. “Your hand,” she whispered. “This is what I feel when I look at you. This tight anchor to the earth, like if I catch a hold of you, you’ll be a tether point. I see your strength and unwavering calm. I know we’ve just met, but you’re so special, Ben. I—”
She cut herself off.
He turned so they were face to face, nose to nose. “I…too, Chelsea. Right from the first moment we met, I knew there was something special about you.”
“I don’t believe in love at first sight,” she whispered. “But…”
“Do you believe in Christmas miracles?” He caught her lips with his. Those perfect, strawberry pink lips he saw across a room while he was bare-assed naked. “Whatever it is, something happened when I first saw you, and everything that has happened since has only reinforced that you’re someone special, a gift for me to cherish. I love you.”
“Oh, Ben,” she breathed. “I love you, too. You’re more than I ever hoped for.”
* * *
THE END
* * *
I hope you enjoyed this Christmas story! If you would like to keep reading about Navy SEALs falling in love, Cade Duncan’s book, Fall Back, is available for free on all major ebook retailers. Links on my website at www.zoeyork.com!
About the Author
Zoe York is a thirteen-time USA Today bestselling author of contemporary romance, often with military heroes, and always with scorching heat between the pages. Between her two pen names (she also writes erotic romance as Ainsley Booth), she has published more than fifty books. Visit her website to discover more Navy SEAL romances, and follow her on Facebook and Instagram for sneak peeks at her upcoming projects.
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