The Christmas Proposition

by K.A. Mitchell

  A stealth attack by a yawn split my face in half. By the time it had passed, I was aware of every muscle I’d overworked. Pruning acres of trees, maintaining the farm and hauling around plates at Skipper’s was all physical labor, but I felt like I’d crammed two weeks’ worth into a day.

  Bryce looked up at me and smiled. “If you go warm up the sheets, I’ll make it worth your while.”

  I remembered this look of split focus from three years ago, when he’d be busy at the table in his trailer, sending me off into his plush lair with that promise, only to end up working all night. “Or I’ll find you down here when I get up.”

  “Nah. Don’t want to waste time.”

  Right. Because our time was limited. After the wedding on Friday, there was nothing keeping Bryce in Epiphany. And Tuesday morning was only a few more ticks of the clock away.

  I don’t know if I fell asleep fast or if Bryce was later than he’d promised, but I woke to a delicious backrub, hard fingers finding and soothing the aches in the muscles. Then he took wooing to a whole new level when his tongue traced down the length of my spine before lapping at a muscle that was even more appreciative. Rimming should definitely make it into a handbook on landing a guy because I sure was hooked. Caught. Suspended from lick to lick. Waiting for the slick flat swipe or tickle of his tongue tip, or the dirtiest, sexiest French kiss there was.

  I gasped, grinding my hips into the sheet as his shoulders held me down and pinned me open. His groans hummed against my wet, shivering skin. He worked a finger in and swirled his tongue around it. I tried to press up onto my knees, but he kept me right there.

  “Fuck me. C’mon. Fuck me, Bryce.”

  He teased me some more—just to show me he could, the bastard—then climbed up my back. The lube was cold after his mouth, but I forgot about that when the fat head of his dick started pressing against me. He kissed the back of my neck while working his way in, but I’d had all I could stand of gentle and coaxing. I wanted it nasty. I shoved myself onto him, rammed his cock into my ass.

  “Fuck, yeah.” Bryce wrapped an arm from the base of my ribs, across my chest and onto my shoulder.

  I reached back, digging my fingers into his thighs and we got rough. I spared a second of thought to the squealing bed frame and squeaking mattress then gave in to the incredible feel of him pounding inside, as hard and fast as I needed, both our holds tearing into each other as if we wouldn’t be happy until we got under the skin, down to the bone.

  Bryce tangled his free hand tangled in my hair, yanked my neck around and forced the salty sour taste from his tongue into my mouth. I kissed him back, a hard clash of lips and the edges of teeth until all the sensation was too much and I fell forward, face down, ass high. He hung on by my shoulder and hair, while I got a hand on my dick and flung the other back again to grab at his hip. He hauled me onto him, both of us wanting, clawing our way deeper. Just the right slam and I was coming, the build of pleasure releasing from where he was hitting me inside, spilling through my balls and flooding my dick hot and sweet.

  I must have clamped down hard on him because he grunted, “Yeah, Mel. Come for me, angel,” before sinking a bite into the back of my neck. We were going to have to do something about that pet name. Later. Right now he was urging me back up on my knees and groaning against the spot he’d been sucking on. I tightened my muscles on him, a sharp burn of friction tangled around the echoes of delight still rolling around in me. He fucked me hard for about a minute, then came with a stutter of hips and breathy groans, slamming his hips against my ass at the end.

  As we caught our breath and untangled, I was pretty sure the hickey on my neck wasn’t the only bruise I’d be wearing tomorrow. I felt each of his fingers still on my collarbone, and couldn’t control a wince as he pulled out of me.

  “Jesus, Mel.” He tucked me against his chest as I curved away from the ribbons of come I’d left on the sheet.

  “Yeah.” We were pretty amazing.

  I was nine tenths asleep when I felt him leave, then come back, tucking us into a more comfortable arrangement, his fingers back in my hair.

  When I staggered downstairs to find coffee the next morning, no doubt looking rode hard and put up wet, Bryce had already disappeared on one of his little missions, and I could hardly bitch at him for taking my truck again, considering the Range Rover I could see through the kitchen window.

  That wasn’t all that he’d left me.

  “On the second day of Christmas my boyfriend gave to me,” Cas started, “two little hickeys.”

  “And a brand new Range Rover SUV,” Bal and his wife joined in.

  I grabbed my mug and retreated to the bathroom to inspect the damage. Yeah, there were two. Tiny red marks on my neck under my ear that I couldn’t even remember getting. They’d fade, along with the beard burn I could feel in other places.

  While my hair was wet from my shower, it covered most of the damage. I read the paper as I finished off some toast. And choked on it. “Fuck.”

  “What?” Cas was the only one still in the kitchen, and she came to look over my shoulder.

  The top story in regional news, though I thought it should have made the front page, was Family of Six Sickened; Water Contamination Suspected. The Lenhoff family of Timber Township would apparently be spending their Christmas in Vergil Boyd Memorial Hospital. No one could pinpoint the cause, but the mother was blaming contaminated water from drilling, and there was no comment from the gas company.

  “Oh,” she said, unhelpfully.

  “Oh?” I rounded on her.

  “Mel, it doesn’t mean—there are at least five companies drilling around here.”

  I shoved away from the table. I’d known, damn it. I’d known that Mr. Bryce Campion was a business-first, screw-the-rest-of-you kind of guy. I didn’t have to look further than the drills popping up in back of Skipper’s parking lot to know that he’d changed Epiphany forever. But most of the town was happy with their mineral royalties, happy with the extra business all the workers brought in.

  Who was I kidding? As long as Bryce was sex on legs and wanted me in his bed, I hadn’t given a shit.

  “At least promise me you’ll ask him, talk to him before you get all—” Cas broke off.

  “All what?”

  “Like you do.”

  “Like what?” My anger was perfectly happy to find a substitute target, thank you very much.

  “All judgmental. Like you’ve got all the answers.”

  “Judgmental? If I’m so fucking judgmental, why the hell would I have wanted you back here after you stole from me?”

  Her face flushed red. Honest to God, I hadn’t known I was going to say that. I’d forgiven her. At least I thought I had. “Cas, I—”

  “Asshole.” She ran out of the kitchen.

  Painting is not the best activity for working out frustration. I wished there was more hammering and post driving that needed to be done, but unfortunately we’d handled it all yesterday. I’d tried to go after Cas, but heard her car spitting gravel before I could get out the back door. I’d still apologize, grovel if necessary, even if she was wrong. I couldn’t act like I had all the answers because, well, I didn’t. Every decision I was forced to make felt more and more impossible, the consequences more irrevocable. Why couldn’t anything just stand still and not change?

  I wish I’d never read the stupid paper. Maybe I could still pretend I hadn’t. So when Bryce came back, we’d go along as if the only changes to Epiphany were that lots of people could spend their mornings down at Bagel Bounty now that they didn’t have to work so hard to stay on their farms.

  After the third time I’d applied the brush too hard and splattered Red Velvet paint over me, Bal and Allie, my brother said, “Why don’t you see if there’s something else you can do?”

  “Like?” Great response, I told myself. That had been all the opening Cas had needed to push my buttons.

  Bal was probably about to suggest jumping off a bridge, but we were s
pared that juvenile recitation when my truck rolled down into the driveway.

  “Thank God,” Bal said. “Why don’t you go work out some of that tension with your boyf—buddy.”

  I planned to, but not the kind of tension he meant. As I stepped down from the platform, I heard him mutter “like a pair of fucking rabbits” with a trace of admiration in his tone.

  Bryce smiled as I came toward him. “Hey. Gimme a hand with these.” He pulled down the tailgate. The bed held two portable generators, gasoline containers, and two free standing heaters, the kind people used for their livestock when it got really cold.

  I locked my back teeth together and helped him move the stuff to the barn.

  “I heard on the radio that it’s supposed to get colder. Maybe snow,” he said as we walked to the truck.

  We’d been enjoying dry days in the mid forties. Not exactly spring, but tolerable if you had on the right clothes.

  “And,” he added, “I talked to Vince, who owns Brookview Restaurant. He says he can do a rehearsal dinner Thursday night and if we stick to cold cuts, he’ll feed us and give us a place to have the reception on Friday after you close up.”

  “How much did that cost?” I asked.

  He wasn’t stupid. He read my tone. “What’s the problem?”

  “Must be nice to think money fixes everything. You throw enough at Kurt, maybe he’ll come work for you again.”

  “I’m helping him because he’s a friend. And when the lawyers are done, whatever’s left of the money they put in for that resort wedding he’ll give to me.”

  I’d never heard him angry before. I liked it better than the patient and amused tone he usually tried on me.

  “Does it help your conscience, spending all that cash? You bought me the car and I wouldn’t even let you drill here. Well, not for gas anyway.”

  His face got blank, almost completely wiped of emotion. “You want to get to the point of this tantrum?”

  “What are you going to give them?” I pulled the newspaper out of my pocket and shoved it in his face.

  “And?”

  “And? Your own geologist quits because of what’s happening to the water and you say and?”

  “Campion Gas isn’t in Cameron County. Northeast Resources got there first.”

  “You think that makes a difference?”

  “And what do you think I should do?”

  “Stop drilling until you check things out.”

  “You want me to throw a thousand people out of work the week before Christmas because of what might turn out to be giardiasis?”

  If you had a well, you knew what that was. Beaver fever. Heavy rains, a dead animal in surface water, a little too much run off from the cow pasture and there you were, chained to the toilet for three days.

  I looked away.

  “Besides, what the hell do you think I’ve been doing up here? I’ve been everywhere getting test samples. Look in the back of your goddamned truck.”

  Two cases of sealed containers gave a glass-lidded stare back, their labels handwritten but unreadable from where I stood.

  “Unless you’re going to tell me I can’t use the truck, I’m going to drive these down to Williamsport. Someone’s meeting me at the airport to get them to a lab.”

  “No, I’m not telling you that.”

  “And after that? You knew who I was and what I did from the beginning, Mel. You want me to find someplace else to sleep?”

  “No.” I could get used to him lobbing these easy questions at me. But sooner or later he’d knock me off the plate with one high and tight.

  He nodded and swung up into the truck.

  Chapter Seven

  I met Cas when she pulled into the driveway and stood stiffly next to her car. It took a bit of groveling, me agreeing that I was an asshole, her confirming it and punching my arm—hard—before hugging me. An hour later, Bal had heard about it and gave me his version of a lecture, during which I bit my tongue to keep from reminding him that he had run out on the Halners long time ago, which forfeited his boss prerogative as the oldest surviving member. I’d had enough people angry at me for one day. And Bal would be headed back to California after Christmas anyway so what was the point to bringing it all up?

  There was still about an hour of daylight, but I stuffed a flashlight in my jacket pocket as I walked to the base of the mountain. We always kept a few unpruned trees up here for the customers who liked their trees with “character.” I pulled some dead weeds from around their trunks as I walked, heading up toward the edge of our property, marked by a low crumbling rock wall. I didn’t know how old it was, only that the valley and mountains were littered with walls like this one. Stones, the most consistent harvest for a Pennsylvania mountain farmer. The wall started near a stream that cut along another edge of our property before meeting up with the Cross Creek that gave our road its name.

  There was a little ground cover of snow from the other day. I dusted off the wall and sat down, chucking tiny pine cones and twigs into the stream. It had always fascinated me since Da told me that some of this water would eventually make it all the way out to the ocean and around the world. It was hard to imagine, since the stream stayed pretty much the same. Even when it was swollen in the spring or down to a trickle in a dry summer, there were the same mossy rocks. But I always liked to think of my pine cones being carried all the way out to an ocean I’d never seen. Imagined myself small enough to ride there with one.

  Pine needles made a quiet carpet to walk on, but I wasn’t startled when Bryce appeared along the path. Since Cas must have told him where I was, I guess she had forgiven me.

  Bryce dusted off his own spot and sat on the wall next to me. Our canvas-jacketed elbows and jean-clad knees were close, but not close enough to touch.

  Bryce let out a long breath, but when he didn’t say anything, I went back to sending my little bits of the mountain on their round-the-world journey.

  “Making people sick is bad for business,” he said at last. “The lawsuits alone can really cut into profits.”

  I turned to stare at him.

  “I want people to be safe. I stick so tight to the OSHA rules that we’ve never even had a serious injury for a worker. I’m checking into all the claims, I’m watching to see what’s going on with the other companies that got here first, but I can’t just turn it off. It affects more than me. And even if Campion Gas left, took everything with them, another company would be here in twenty-four hours.”

  The fact that he was right didn’t make things any easier. “You didn’t tell me you were out collecting all those samples.”

  “If you had such an issue with the drilling, why didn’t you ask me?”

  He had me there. Because I just wanted to pretend it didn’t exist so I could have you wasn’t something I was ready to say.

  He answered for me. “You thought I wouldn’t give a shit?”

  “No.”

  Bryce picked up a pine cone and sent it sailing far down the stream. “Why is it so goddamned hard for you to trust in anything, Mel? Were you not held as a baby? Is there some childhood trauma I should know about? I know that your folks died suddenly—”

  “When you asked me before, when you were here last time, to come with you, did you mean it?”

  His brows drew together. “Yeah.”

  “Then why did you say it that way, like you didn’t care one way or the other, like it was just for fun?”

  Bryce kicked at the pine needles under his boots. “Maybe I wasn’t sure how you’d take it, and I didn’t want to be the one with my balls hanging in the breeze. But I got my answer, didn’t I?” He stood.

  There was the fast ball. It was time to swing for the fence, and I wasn’t ready. I took a defensive hack and fouled it off. Standing beside him, I pulled him into my arms. “I really like having you here again.”

  His arms came up, slowly, almost carefully to return the hug. I kissed him, cradling his head for a slow slide of our lips that tingled more
than it aroused.

  “I like being here,” he said.

  We headed for the house, holding hands. He stopped at the base of the trail, staring across the valley. At this point, it was barely five hundred yards wide. “Don’t you ever feel squeezed between the mountains?”

  “I like it.”

  He nodded with a half-smile, half-frown, still looking across the valley.

  It had only taken me three days to get used to having Bryce around again, so when he wasn’t sneaking touches under the guise of helping me with the dishes, I noticed his disappearance right away. Cas was on the computer. My truck and the Range Rover were still there, though Bal and Allie had gone to see a movie that was probably already available on DVD by the time it came to our single-plex theater. Maybe Bryce had gone with them.

  The motion-sensing light was on by the barn, though, so I tracked him there.

  He was up to his old tricks, if the way Fred was eagerly licking at his palm was any indication. Buying Fred’s affection was cheap though. Sugar wasn’t nearly as pricey as a Range Rover. Once Fred was satisfied he’d gotten all the good tastes off Bryce’s fingers, he let Bryce pet him. Well, let wasn’t really the word. Fred’s eyes closed and his neck stretched in every indication of bliss as Bryce’s knuckles rubbed around Fred’s nose and eyes and cheeks and the knotty part of his skull.

  I wondered if I got that dreamy looking when Bryce petted me. Come to think of it, there had been a lot more petting going on this time, not just the heavy stuff. His hand in my hair even when we weren’t in bed, taking my hand, rubbing against my cheek.

  I was pretty sure it wasn’t just sex this time, but I didn’t know if that meant anything past the expiration date of Friday, December 23.

  The barn door wasn’t exactly silent, but he didn’t look my way until I was right at the rail of Fred’s pen. “You definitely know how to please a guy.”