All I Want for Christmas...: Christmas KissesBaring It AllA Hot December Night

by Lori Wilde

  Her nod was jerky and tight, as was the lock in his jaw.

  They were two sides of the same coin. If the fates flipped heads, your life was awesome. Tails, then you kept flipping the coin over and over again, trying to not be tails.

  “Why are you a paramedic?” It was a noble profession, an honorable profession, but not exactly a silver-spoon sort of job. She’d figured that he would have been a lawyer. Harvard or Yale. Maybe Stanford if he’d developed a wild hair. Of course, Eric had always had a wild hair.

  For the first time, his gaze seemed familiar to her. Rebellious, a little bit defiant and nervous, all at the same time. “I hated law school.”

  “Yale?” she asked. Edwin Marshall was a third-generation graduate.

  “Stanford.”

  Chloe laughed. “I bet Daddy was horrified.”

  “It was either that or William and Mary.”

  A state school. “Quelle horreur.”

  “Did you ever go to school? You always bragged that you were going to NYU.”

  Memories swirled like wispy figments, flitting through her brain, just out of reach. Some things were so clear. Some things, like leaving her home and venturing out into the world of college or men or making money, were still a big ol’ question mark.

  “Graduated top of the class, with a degree in finance,” she lied in grand Chloe Skidmore style.

  “And after that?”

  She lifted her shoulders in a casual shrug.

  He was watching her, studying her and something akin to sympathy entered his eyes. “It’ll come back. You suffered a blow to the head, on top of the trauma of the fire. It’s pretty common, actually.”

  And she was back to feeling the victim. She hated that feeling, hated the idea that she was dependent on him. Hated even more that all she had to do was leave. But she couldn’t. No, that was the hardest truth of all.

  Needing something to distract her, she looked around the comfortable room, instantly noticing what was absent.

  The bay window overlooked a lit-up view of the town, glowing in green and red lights. The walls held an assortment of art. Splashy Dali painting, noir Edward Hopper and a traditional Monet. The bookshelves held a mix of new and old. Fiction and non. This was a man who had created a welcoming home, and yet...

  “Why don’t you have a Christmas tree?” she asked, because there was a spot near the window. A perfect spot. Made to hold a welcoming tree. She wanted her Christmas. She wanted her holiday.

  “For one person? Seems like overkill to me.”

  “You say overkill, I say heresy. Let’s cut one down. Do they still have the forest of firs on the back ridge?”

  His eyes narrowed. “How much do you remember?”

  “How much should I remember?” she asked, holding his gaze for a moment, searching for a past. Eventually it was Eric who looked away.

  “Let’s go kill a tree,” he answered, and she was glad that she wasn’t the only one who couldn’t walk away. Then she looked down at her ringless left hand, and waited for some feeling of guilt. But instead the woman with a hole in her soul felt nothing at all, except a brief flicker of happiness when Eric helped her into her coat, his hands lingering through layers of material.

  It wasn’t the touch that she had longed for, but for tonight, it was enough.

  * * *

  THE NIGHT AIR was cold, with the sort of wind that put a burn on your cheeks. From the top of the ridge, a whole forest of pine trees stood, a line of defense that had separated the town of Pine Crest from the world for hundreds of years. The town was full of lines and boundaries. Walls that weren’t meant to be scaled. Mountains that weren’t meant to be climbed. Chloe remembered being up here before, sneaking through the barbed-wired fence with a large group of kids. That night, she had been out of breath, wearing the ugly moth-eaten wool coat. When she was growing up, she’d always hated her clothes, the big tent dresses, the ill-fitting jeans.

  Instinctively her hands skimmed over her hips, checking the shape, relieved to realize that no, she was skinny. Chloe the Cow was no more.

  Chloe the Cow.

  She had gone home in tears that night. Not in front of the others, because Chloe would never let anyone know that the words got to her. But somewhere between the end of the mountain trail and where the town sidewalk began, the tears had started to flow.

  Chloe was a great secret crier. Her father hadn’t liked it when she cried. Her parents had divorced when she was four, Betsy Skidmore leaving Pine Crest behind and eventually finding her way to Arkansas, where she remarried, had four other sons and left Buddy and Chloe Skidmore in the dust.

  Eric had caught up with her on the sidewalk that night, falling into step beside her, not saying a word, until eventually the tears stopped falling. He’d been wearing a leather bomber jacket with the fleece collar pulled up around his neck. He hadn’t worn a hat because Eric never wore a hat, and there was snow in his hair, making him look older, more like a man.

  He had walked her to the edge of the mansion, his hands jammed in his pockets. “You know we were just kidding.”

  As apologies went, it wasn’t the best, but he was Eric Marshall, and he was tall and serious and had clothes that she would have killed for. He wasn’t exactly nice to her, but Chloe was a girl and there were things that she understood. When he was with his friends, she wouldn’t be acknowledged. But when he was alone...

  Eric Marshall wanted her.

  Her sixteen-year-old heart understood that. Even with the mountain of a coat, even with the extra forty pounds. It was a heady feeling for a fat girl from the wrong side of town.

  He was Eric Marshall.

  She had kissed him for the first time that night. Oh, no, Eric would never had touched her on his own, she knew that then. But when she had reached up, and pulled his head down, she remembered his arms locking around her, locking them together.

  He smelled of Halston and money and lust, but his kiss had been everything that a first kiss should have been. Urgent yet respectful, passionate yet tender. His touch had been careful, never out of bounds, never going too far. No, Eric Marshall never went too far.

  Not that night, anyway.

  * * *

  YES, SHE MANAGED to suppress the moonstruck sigh, but Chloe couldn’t keep from touching a finger to her mouth. Not twenty feet away, Eric was attacking a tree trunk with heavy swings of an ax. His parka was thrown carelessly in the snow, and each time he pulled back to swing, Chloe could see the raw power in his shoulders, the bunch of muscles underneath the wool shirt. There was something very...stimulating about the sight of a man performing manual labor. The mouth that had kissed her so long ago was pulled tight, muttering what looked to be swear words, but she didn’t mind.

  “How’s it going?” she yelled, mainly to be cheery and perky, and all those things that Chloe Skidmore had never been in the past.

  Eric stopped in mid-swing and glared.

  “You know we don’t have to do this,” she told him, almost feeling guilty, but not quite.

  “Yes, we do.”

  “Not on my account.”

  He pushed the ax into the ground. “You wanted a tree.”

  “Not if you’re going to be grumpy about it.”

  “This isn’t grumpy.”

  And no, this wasn’t grumpy Eric. He’d never been one of those happy-go-lucky types. She remembered that much. His complaints about the high school science teacher, Mr....Crown. Yes, Mr. Crown. The general dislike of all things football, especially the Redskins, and the way he vowed to one day trash his father’s car. Except he never had. No, Eric had always been too smart for that.

  “Thank you,” she said simply.

  “For what?”

  “For cutting the tree.”

  He shrugged carelessly, as if it didn’t mean anything, but that was another thing she remembered about Eric Marshall. He never did anything that he didn’t want to do. Even cutting a tree.

  Or kissing a girl.

  The moo
nlight touched down on his hair, and she sighed happily, touching her lips, and remembering a little bit more.

  * * *

  THE TREE WAS two feet taller than the ceiling, and had to get a haircut. Chloe supervised, and Eric tried his damnedest to trim the branches, but every time he cut, Chloe was back at him to repair the damage.

  “No, that looks awful. Whack off that little bit that’s hanging to the left.”

  Eric looked down from the ladder to where Chloe was calling orders like a general. A very sexy general, with a great chest, which, when he closed his eyes, he could remember in exquisite detail, but a general nonetheless. He blocked out the Chloe-naked vision and grabbed the edge of a long, fluffy branch. “This one?”

  She shook her head, and pointed. “Above.”

  He climbed up a step. “Here?”

  She motioned him to the left. “Over six inches.”

  He reached out, shook hands with the tree. “Here?” When he glanced down, she was smiling like the devil. “If you don’t play nice, I’m forfeiting my Christmas elf duties.”

  “But you make such a cute elf,” she teased, her voice wrapping around him like the best Christmas present ever.

  And yes, he was hard again. “I’m up here for five minutes more and then it’s done. It’ll look awesome, and you will take great pleasure in telling me how great a job I’ve done. We got a deal?”

  Chloe cocked her head, and he was happy to see some of the fight back in her eyes. “I don’t remember you being so insecure.”

  He didn’t want to tell her it wasn’t insecurity, but the painful hard-on that he was lugging around like a lead balloon. “I like women to pander to my ego. It makes me feel like an unevolved man. Now can we finish the goddamn tree?”

  She folded her arms across her chest. He noticed. “Cranky, aren’t we?”

  He trimmed the last bits of the branch, and oops, some of it might have fallen into her hair. Quickly he climbed down the ladder, and was going to walk away, but she stood there, watching him with happy eyes, and his feet decided to stay.

  “You have a branch in your hair,” he told her, just like an idiot, and he reached out, pushing his hand through the dark cloud, wondering if it was a sin to debranch a married woman. He didn’t think so, and so he continued to stroke the soft strands, his fingers tangling somewhere they had no business tangling.

  His brain formed words, words reminding her about the ring on her hand, words that explained in great detail why she needed to move a step back. Why she needed to stay away from him.

  The words never came. Her mouth opened and closed, and he watched the tiny flutter in her throat. The center of her eyes grew dark and wide, like an ever-expanding night sky, sucking in everything in its path. He was trapped in her gaze, mesmerized by his own reflection in the heavens.

  He didn’t want to kiss her, he didn’t want to covet another man’s wife, but the smell of pine trees and Chloe took him back to another place, another time, and he wanted so badly to relive the past and show her that he was that epic man reflected in her eyes. He covered the lush mouth, feeling the hungry press of her lips, and his breathing stopped, his mind starting to spin and whir as the lack of oxygen kicked in, as the pure power of her kiss bolted through his mouth, his body, his brain.

  Before she had kissed him like a young girl, innocent, eager, passionate, uncaring, but tonight she kissed him as a woman. Wary, knowing, with an edge of desperation.

  The knowledge that this wasn’t going to happen again. A last kiss.

  Somewhere along the way, Chloe had gotten smart.

  His arms pulled her tight, his hands pushing underneath the back of her shirt, wanting to feel the warmth of Chloe, wanting to feel the softness of Chloe. She wasn’t wearing a bra tonight, but he didn’t dare explore, didn’t dare touch anything more than innocent skin. There was a certain hypocrisy to that line of thinking since his tongue was capturing hers in the most non-innocent way possible, but Eric clung to his standards, meager as they were.

  Her hands jammed inside the back pockets of his jeans, and she pushed his cock into the wedge of her thighs, more non-innocence, but there were barriers of clothes between them.

  This was a frenzied dance of metaphorical sex, which seemed acceptable. Frustrating, yet acceptable under the tall branches of a Christmas pine. Her hips ground against him, torturing his cock. He could remember dates like this, the silent fumblings of pseudo-sex in clothes, but it had never felt so frantic, so essential.

  He wanted to touch her, to dig inside her jeans, to test the softness there as well, but his hands stayed locked against the heated skin of her back. She breathed into his mouth, sucking on his tongue, and he wanted to ask her to stop, because he was about to explode, but the sensation of her lips was making speech impossible. With each stroke of her tongue, her hips, his desire consumed him and he pushed against her, tumbling them onto the floor, arms tangled, and yet all clothes intact. It was that intactness that kept him sane. Kept Eric from feeling like an ass, even as he lay on top of her, his cock nestled ever so snugly between her thighs. As if it belonged.

  His eyes opened, while her own eyes were tightly closed, as if she didn’t want to see who she was with. He understood that need, better than most. He had felt that way with her before, and he had the emotional scars, not to mention the bad mix tape to prove it. When he was in high school, wanting her was like a drug, and yet he’d been unwilling to deal with the realities of the social order.

  He looked down at her face, watching her as they moved. Her breathing was labored, her glorious chest rising up and down with each stroke of his hips. Taut legs wrapped around him, binding them together even more tightly, but there were so many things wrong with this picture.

  He wanted her to open her eyes. To see him. To acknowledge him. To know who was there, but he couldn’t ask for that. Asking was wrong, and his ego would live, so he satisfied himself with watching the dark shadow of lashes against her pale skin, amazed at how much she was still the same Chloe of before. The same Chloe Skidmore who had teased his cock more than any other woman alive. And yet she never knew, because Eric excelled at hiding the truth from people. His family, his friends, Chloe, himself. He thrust faster, angry at her, angry at the man she married, angry at himself, angry at the whole damn world. It felt so good to give in to the anger, to press hard, hard, harder...

  Then she gasped, and her eyes flew open, and he could see the helplessness there. The same need he’d seen on the night of the fire, asking him for things that he was more than happy to give. He remembered seeing the flare of pain, quickly replaced by lust. Blind lust. The words almost made him laugh, but he could feel the tightening in his muscles, his cock full, and he pushed again, once, twice...

  This time her hips rose, hung suspended like a bridge against him, and time stopped. His orgasm came, spilling into his jeans, a cold uncomfortable dampness that reminded him that he wasn’t thirteen anymore, that he was a responsible, grown-up man. Eric jumped up, his mind still a jumble of mush, and held out a hand to Chloe. She looked at him, with a confused and sated gaze that only made him want her more.

  No. No. No.

  “We can’t do this again,” he stated in an extra firm voice. It was his authority voice, used to calm frightened kids and drunk trauma vics.

  “Technically, we didn’t—” she held up quote fingers “—do anything.”

  “Don’t split hairs, honey. Wrong is wrong. You just give me stupid brain and I want to forget important things. Like you were in the hospital two days ago. Like I promised not to do this. Like you’re married.”

  As he spoke, he could see the fog of sex clearing from her eyes, only to be replaced by something else. Anger. “Stupid brain? I give you stupid brain? Way to pump up my ego, Romeo.”

  And out of everything he said, that was the thing she picked out? Eric pushed a hand through his hair. Chloe mad at him was better than Chloe not anything at him. It was safer. There would be no possibility of sex if
she hated him—or technically if she remembered the fact that she already hated him. So that was the strategy that Eric went with; dumb, yes, but effective. “Put a woman with a great set of...” He tried to think insulting, degrading, sexist. Unfortunately, the Marshall family had strong standards about behavior with women, and polite sensibilities. “Bosoms under my nose, and man is like this giant magnet that follows a female, seeking out...” Oh, God. This was harder than he’d thought. “You know,” he finished, flailing a descriptive hand.

  “You know? You mean sex, Eric? You mean screwing?”

  He nodded. “Yes, that’s what I mean.”

  “And any woman with a set of bosoms gives you stupid brain?”

  He could see where this was going. He knew what Chloe wanted him to say. That it was Chloe that he wanted. Only Chloe. Even madder than hell, she still wanted him to admit what he had never admitted to her. Not once.

  Then he stared into her eyes, and realized that this was the same vulnerable girl he had known forever. Sure, the shell had changed, but inside, her heart was still made of glass. He should break it. Throw it down on the ground, stomp on it because...

  She was married.

  Eric opened his mouth.

  “Not every woman, Chloe. Never every woman. Only you.”

  5

  THEY WERE WORDS she’d wanted to hear forever. Or at least it felt like forever. Chloe slumped onto the couch because her knees didn’t feel so good.

  Eric wanted her.

  It should have thrilled her. It should have pandered to an already bruised ego, and for a second it did. She looked down at her left hand, at the heavy band of gold on her finger.

  “I don’t feel married.” She sounded like a brat, like a kid who can’t get what they want. She hated that she sounded that way. She wanted to be brave and strong, with principles and moral turpitude, but instead, all she could do was hate the heavy circular padlock that she wore on her hand. The ring wasn’t even pretty. It was plain, with no personality, no engraving, no sense of style. It wasn’t a piece of jewelry that she would have ever picked out.