Rekindled: A Holiday Romance

by Victoria J. Best

  Blowing out a breath, I pulled down the visor and looked at myself in the mirror. I wasn’t sure what I was checking for, but it gave me something to do while I waited for Bianca to come out of the B and B. I flipped it back up a little too hard, knocking it off the hook. I had to calm myself, this wasn’t a big deal.

  Not even a moment later, Bianca exited the front door of the bed-and-breakfast. Just as she had the day before, she took my breath away. Her dark hair was loose around her shoulders, fanning out around the fuzzy collar of the black winter coat she wore. Her legs looked like they were miles long in the black skinny jeans and stiletto boots she wore, and images of them wrapped around me the night before played in my mind as I watched her walk towards me. I shifted in my seat uncomfortably, arranging the erection that had sprung up out of nowhere so that she wouldn’t notice.

  I leaned over and pushed the passenger door to my truck open as she approached. She grabbed the handle and slid in, a smile on her face when she looked up at me. I was unable to speak, move, or even respond for a moment as I looked at her. She was so beautiful it took my breath away.

  How would I make it through the night without saying something stupid?

  “Hey,” she said, shrugging out of her thick coat. “It’s warm in here.”

  I nodded. “Want me to turn it down?”

  She shook her head. “No. It’s nice. I hate wearing this thing.” She pointed to the coat.

  We drove in silence to the church. My mind was racing and I was afraid I’d say something I regretted. Or something that would push her away. My heart was getting ahead of my brain and I wasn’t sure how to slow it down.

  I pulled into the parking lot, which was already almost full, and shut the truck off. Just as I was about to get out, Bianca place a hand on my arm.

  “We don’t have to go in there. We can go somewhere else, out of town where no one knows who we are.” She searched my face and I could tell she was considering the words she offered to me.

  I let out a breath, contemplating it. Did we want to hide what was happening? Should we go somewhere no one knew us and pretend like last night never happened? I didn’t want to. Maybe I was being foolish to think that there could be a chance of something more than a fling with Bianca, but I didn’t want to hide what we had from everyone.

  “No, let’s do it. Let’s go in,” I said.

  Something flashed in her eyes—regret or uncertainty—but she nodded.

  “Okay. I’m glad I wore my new sweater.” She gestured to the front of her red sweater.

  A laugh burst through the tension in the cab of my truck. She was wearing a Christmas sweater with a large reindeer face on it, complete with sparkly red nose.

  “Where did you get that?” I asked once I could finally speak.

  “The Donahue boutique. You don’t like it?” She stuck her bottom lip out in pout.

  My eyes flashed to her mouth, more images from the night before flitting across my brain like a film reel. I suddenly didn’t feel like laughing anymore.

  “Oh, I like it,” I said, my voice deep with lust that replaced the humor.

  “Garrett,” Bianca breathed my name. She felt it, too.

  I didn’t give her a chance to say anything else, leaning into her, my mouth crashing against hers. She moved closer, practically in my lap, her arms around my neck. We warred with our mouths, tongues lashing one another’s as we tried to get closer, tried to go deeper. My hands slid under her sweater, over her smooth abdomen and around to her back, pulling her even closer. I didn’t care if someone saw us or if people were watching. I wanted to be as close to Bianca as possible, I needed to feel her skin against mine like a junkie needed a fix. Her hands plunged into my hair, pressing me closer as our teeth clacked together. I couldn’t get enough of her and I didn’t think I ever would.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t go in,” I managed to mumble out around her mouth.

  I wanted nothing more in that moment than to spread her out on my bed and have my way with her.

  “No,” she said. “We have to.”

  But neither of us made any moves to let go of the other right away. Slowly, while still touching and kissing, we managed to pull away from one another. We were both breathless and panting when we did so. Her hair was mussed and my shirt was untucked from my jeans.

  “We cannot go in there like this,” she said with a chuckle, pulling down the visor to fix her hair and smudged lipstick.

  “They’d definitely have something to talk about later then.”

  Bianca nodded, smoothing her clothing back into place as I tucked my shirt back into my pants.

  “How do I look?”

  She had wiped off all of her lipstick with a napkin, the natural pink of her lips the only color present. Her hair looked fuller from my hands and her lips plump from my kisses.

  “You look beautiful,” I said before I could stop myself.

  A flush crept up her neck at my words and she dipped her head. “You aren’t so bad yourself, Garrett Alexander.”

  We sat without speaking for a moment, trying to calm our raging lust but also not ready to give up the privacy we had in my truck.

  “Ready?” I asked her, holding out my hand.

  Bianca bobbed her head. “Let’s do this.”

  “I was ready to throw it all away,” I said as Bianca giggled next to me.

  “I had to help him, or this party would not be happening,” she added as the priest and my mother looked at us like we were losing our minds.

  “You would have done a good job,” my mom said, patting my arm. She was humoring me.

  “I think it looks wonderful,” Father Lindon said with a pleased smile.

  He was at least eighty-five years old and I was pretty sure he couldn’t see very much with his large Coke-bottle glasses, let alone without them, but I appreciated the sentiment.

  After making small talk for a few minutes, Bianca and I excused ourselves to get another drink, non-alcoholic of course, before moving to an unoccupied table to sit down. It was as if every set of eyes in the room were following us as we moved about the hall. This was beginning to get obnoxious.

  “Your mom keeps giving me strange looks,” she said, taking a sip of her eggnog.

  “Ignore her,” I barked the words out with irritation.

  While I wasn’t having a terrible time, it was evident that news of me spending a late night at Bianca’s room had made its way around town. This was a bad idea.

  “Maybe it’s time to leave?” Bianca asked me as she set her empty glass down on the table.

  I wasn’t sure what to do. We’d thought this would be fine. We’d said we didn’t care what people said. But now that we were embroiled in it, it felt dirty and illicit instead of what it was supposed to be, though I had no idea what that actually was.

  “I think it’s time,” I said, standing up. We had been there just over an hour.

  We made our way around the room separately to say goodbye. I noticed that, even though both of Bianca’s parents were there, she only spoke to her mother and her sister. One day I would have to ask her what the family rift was all about, but right now, we had to leave the prying eyes of the townsfolk behind.

  “You’re leaving so soon?” my mom asked with hurt in her eyes as if I were rejecting her specifically.

  “I have a meeting tomorrow morning, about a project in Pittsburgh,” I lied. The meeting wasn’t until Monday.

  “On a Sunday?” My mom gripped her neck. If she had been wearing pearls, she would have clutched them.

  “Yes. It’s a big project for the company, Mom. If I don’t land it, we’ll miss out on a big construction job for after the new year. One that will last a few months and pay my guys a lot.” I wasn’t exaggerating the details. It was a big construction bid. My company would be put on the map if we landed this job.

  “Well, in that case, be safe getting home.” She stood up on tiptoe to kiss my cheek before walking away.

  I felt a twinge of guil
t for lying to my mom, but not enough to tell her the whole truth. At that exact moment, Bianca walked back over, a look of exhaustion and something else on her face.

  “Ready?” I asked her. I felt as exhausted as she looked.

  “Oh my god, yes.”

  Without saying another word, we headed out to the parking lot.

  “Why was that so exhausting?” Bianca asked, resting her head back on the seat and closing her eyes as she spoke.

  “We didn’t get much sleep last night,” I said, trying to break the tension with a joke.

  “Ha! I guess you’re right. But I think it was more the fact that I felt like I was pretending or playing a part.”

  I’d felt the same. “You’re right. I felt like we were on stage or something.”

  “Right? Like we were pretending to be a couple when we weren’t, just to please everyone in the room.” She closed her eyes again and sighed.

  “Yeah . . .”

  Something about her words struck like a knife in my chest, but I brushed it off. Was she saying the idea of being with me for real wasn’t something she could ever want? Why did that bother me so much?

  I drove away with more questions and doubts than I had before.

  10

  Bianca

  Garrett was quiet as we drove away from the church back to the bed-and-breakfast. At first, I thought it was because he was just as freaked out about how everyone treated us at the Christmas party, but after a while it seemed as if he was brooding about something else.

  “Is everything all right?” I asked him as he pulled into the parking lot.

  “Yup,” he said.

  Something was definitely up.

  “Are you sure? You’ve been really quiet since we left the party.” I thought back to what we had talked about as we were getting into his truck. Nothing struck me as off.

  He threw the car into park without answering me. We sat there silently, if a bit awkward. I wondered if I should say goodbye and get out. Before the party, Garrett and I were getting along so well—laughing, kissing, and enjoying each other’s company. Now he could barely look at me.

  “Garrett—”

  “Do you want to come back to my place?”

  It was my turn not to answer. Where had this come from? It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go back to his place, but I just wanted to know exactly what was happening.

  “Sure. But what’s going on?”

  “Do you trust me?” This wasn’t the first time he’d asked me this.

  And I did trust him.

  “Yes, Garrett, I do.”

  He didn’t add anything else, only started the car and drove away. We drove out toward the edge of town, in the opposite direction of my parents’ house. He turned off the main road, heading down a long back road that was badly in need of repairs, before turning down an almost invisible driveway surrounded by a copse of pine trees. The driveway wasn’t paved, but it was in better shape than the one leading to my parents’ house. The truck traveled down a long driveway lined with pines, which would have been pitch black if not for the random lights built into the ground on the sides of the drive. Finally, the trees parted, exposing a large cleared area of about half an acre or more. In the middle of the clearing stood a newer-looking farmhouse. The house was built in the old colonial style of some of the hundred-year-old farmhouses in the area, but you could tell it was brand new.

  “This is where you live?” He hadn’t mentioned it last night when we talked. All he’d said was that he lived on the other edge of town.

  “Yeah. Built it myself last summer. My pride and joy.”

  “You built it yourself?” There was so much I still didn’t know about Garrett, yet it felt like we had known each other forever.

  “Well, not on my own. My crew and I built it. I own a construction company.” He shrugged like it wasn’t a big deal.

  It was a big fucking deal.

  “When you said you worked in construction, I had, wrongly, assumed that you worked on a crew in the city. I didn’t realize you owned your own company. That’s awesome, Garrett.” I desperately wanted to know more about his life.

  “There’s a lot we don’t know about each other,” he said.

  I turned to him. “But we can change that.”

  “Are you sure? Because back there, after the party, you seemed like you were happy with the way things were yesterday.”

  The reason for his mood after the Christmas party dawned on me. He thought I was rejecting him when I proclaimed how annoyed I was with the people in town and their reaction to Garrett and me.

  “Garrett, I like you. I always have. But your mom and everyone in town were treating us like we were getting married tomorrow. You just admitted we barely know each other. I can’t go from zero to a hundred like that. I came home to be with my family while my mom has her treatment. Finding you was a bonus. This has been quite a big transition for me. I just need time.”

  He nodded. “I get that. It took me the whole drive out here and this conversation to help me realize I was being ridiculous to feel like you were rejecting me. If you had been, you wouldn’t be here.”

  “I like spending time with you. You’ve helped me adjust to being back in town easier than I would have without you. But I have a life in Florida, I don’t live here, and to start a relationship with someone when I know I’ll be leaving isn’t responsible on either of our parts. You get that, right?” I had to be honest with him. It was the only way this would work.

  Garrett nodded again. “I know, I know. I got caught up. But we have an arrangement. I agreed to that, and I plan on keeping up my part of the bargain. Come inside with me?”

  It was my turn to bob my head. “Of course. I’m dying to see how you designed the inside of the house if the outside is this beautiful.”

  He shut the pickup off and we both hopped out of the car. It had begun to snow on the way out. Unlike the day before, it was coming down in huge flakes that were already covering our path to the house.

  “I forgot how beautiful it is here when it snows,” I said, looking up at the sky as snowflakes fell around us, landing in my hair and on my face.

  When I looked back down, Garrett was staring at me with a strange look in his eyes.

  “It’s breathtaking,” he said, his voice deep and low.

  Our eyes collided across the two feet that separated us, and it was my turn to be breathless. How could I feel such a connection with a man I hadn’t seen in ten years? It was like the years didn’t matter, and we were still a couple of kids in the midst of our first crush. Garrett moved towards me slowly, closing the gap between us, his body heat warming me as he stopped so close we were almost touching. My breath came in short gasps, my hands balling into fists at my sides as I tried not to touch him. I wanted to plunge my hands into his thick chestnut hair and pull his mouth to mine. Though it had to be at least thirty degrees, I didn’t feel the cold any longer. There was only Garrett, the stillness of the surrounding pines, and the snow that covered us as we stood in his front yard.

  “Let’s go inside,” he growled out between clenched teeth, and I knew he was exercising just as much control as I was.

  Without needing an answer, he grabbed my hand and we practically ran up the front steps. He fumbled with his keys a moment to open the door but finally managed to push it open. We burst inside, the snow and icy air replaced with the warmth of his house. The drastic change in temperature gave me a sudden chill. Or maybe it was that Garrett’s hands had begun to peel my coat from my shoulders before the door was even shut behind us. His hands traveled under my sweater, ice cold, but I didn’t want him to stop. I moaned and writhed under his touch as he pulled the shirt over my head and tossed it aside. He lifted me up, and I wound my legs around his waist as he backed me up towards a large sectional in the middle of the living room. We fell back with an oof, his body covering mine as he peppered kisses down my jaw and neck.

  The last time we were together it was slow and agonizi
ng. We savored one another after being apart for too many years. Now, it was desperate, frantic and needy. I didn’t care about foreplay. I just wanted him inside of me.

  “Now, Garrett, now.” I let him know with words what my body was telling me it needed.

  He didn’t waste any time, shucking our pants and undergarments in record time, slipping a condom on and plunging inside me with one swift thrust. I cried out, not afraid of anyone hearing me tonight. I gripped his shoulders with my hands, nails digging in as I tried to hold on while he took me quickly. My back arched off the couch, legs hiked high on his hips as I met him thrust for thrust, grinding my clit against him. The orgasm built swiftly this time, exploding inside of me with a force so great I saw stars behind my closed eyelids as I came apart around him. Garrett growled out his release, a guttural animalistic sound, and I clenched my legs around him to hold onto him tighter as we both rode out our climax.

  He lay down next to me, disengaging our bodies but pulling me against him into the crook of his arm. We stayed that way for a little while as the sweat from our frantic coupling dried on our skin, cooling me to the point of shivering. Garrett pressed a kiss to my temple, stood, and disappeared into another room, only to reappear less than five minutes later with a blanket. I’d gotten up and pulled on my underwear and his discarded shirt to keep me warm. I was standing next to the couch when he came back out.

  “Damn, you look sexy in my shirt,” he said as his eyes roamed my body.

  I chuckled, sitting back down on the couch and snuggling under the fleece blanket he handed me. Garrett put his boxer briefs back on, then turned around again and dashed up the stairs. Moments later, he was back in a pair of sweats and a t-shirt, joining me under the blanket. While we got settled, I had a moment to take in the house around me. The living room—just through a cased doorway off a small foyer to the right of the front door—wasn’t small, but it was cozy. There was the large sectional where we sat, a big flat screen TV above the fireplace, a coffee table, and a tall lamp in the corner by the window. It was neat and clean, unlike most places where a man would live alone. I instantly felt at home.