“You’re going to freeze to death,” she said, already taking the five steps needed to move from the far side of her living room to her bathroom. Travis had kept her big, fluffy bath towels, insisting they belonged in the bathroom they were bought to match, so she only had the old, thin towels her mother had boxed up years ago. However, a towel was a towel, and when you were drenched in melted snow and slush, any towel should be welcome. At least, that was what she told herself as she carefully selected the two most respectable looking of the bunch. Then, she went to her room and rummaged through her drawers until she found a pair of big, baggy, unisex sweats she liked to wear during her oh-so-special time of the month.
“Here,” she said, shoving the collection of cloth at Kit. “The bathroom is over there.” She nodded unnecessarily at one of the only two doors besides the one he was still standing in front of. “Feel free to grab a warm shower if you need it.”
At the mention of a shower, her brain automatically pulled up an image of his body — the wonderfully muscled and hard body she’d seen straining above hers — partially obscured by steam as rivulets of water ran over his chest and down his stomach.
Spencer’s pebbled nipples scraped against the thin material of her top. Her nipples that were not encased in a bra. Against the thin, nearly transparent material of her top.
She quickly crossed her arms over her chest as her face gave off enough heat she was surprised it didn’t steam Kit dry then and there.
“Yeah, umm… that would…”
Spencer peeked up, and sure enough, Kit’s stammering was due to the fact he was looking at the one place in the whole world she really wish he hadn’t been. The poor guy was probably so embarrassed for her he couldn’t even think of something to say that wouldn’t further humiliate her. She could have told him there was no way for her to not reach a level of ultimate humiliation, especially not where he was concerned, but she held her tongue, knowing it would only make things worse.
“There is soap and shampoo and all that jazz on a little shelf in the shower.” Because where else would she keep it? Damn, she was babbling. “I’ll just…” she nodded toward her bedroom door and then ran there as quickly as her legs could carry her. And okay, so she was the worst hostess in the history of Southern women, but she didn’t even look back before she slammed the door shut and slumped to the carpet behind it.
Chapter 18
She hated him.
It shouldn’t have been a grand revelation, but it was. And man, did it ever hurt.
He knew he was the reason she’d run off, but he thought it had been more of a screw-them-then-leave-them type situation. It never entered his mind that it was because she could’t stomach the sight of him. But she’d barely looked at him since she opened the door, and when she did…
Ouch. If looks were bullets, he’d be a Star Trek redshirt.
And then he’d gone and been so idiotic as to stand there and stare at her breasts. It was like he had zero control over his eyeballs. Now that they knew what they were missing, they couldn’t drag themselves away from all that perfection. He couldn’t blame her for being so furious she’d stormed off once she caught him.
This was a bad idea. He should have just stayed at Mack’s house and done his best to distract Rita from her heartache with board games and movies like the rest of the family. He should have seen winter descending like a pissed off Disney princess the moment he reached the state boarder as a sign. When the roads had become so bad it was a miracle he didn’t slide into a ditch or another car, he should have stopped at his house on the other side of the county and waited until the roads cleared up to travel on into the city.
He should have done so many things differently, but he hadn’t, and now he was here. In Spencer’s tiny apartment. Just waiting for her to throw him on his ass back in the snow once she felt she’d fulfilled her in-the-spirit-of-the-holiday kindness quotient.
“What are you doing living in such a crap apartment?”
Okay, so that probably wasn’t the best question to volley her way the moment he stepped out of the bathroom, but it had been bugging him as he’d folded himself into the tiny shower, cataloging repairs that needed to be made on the 4’x3’ bathroom.
“It’s just temporary,” she said, pulling the blanket more firmly over her shoulders. She’d changed into a pair of leggings - dammit - and a pretty red sweater while he had been in the shower. He was once again struck by just how gorgeous she was. It wasn’t the obvious beauty of the celebrities he knew or the polished attractiveness of women he met in the bars, but the kind of pretty that made you lower your defenses and left you feeling all warm inside. If those other women were roses, Spencer was a daisy.
Kit had always preferred daisies.
“My old apartment gave a discount if you paid for six months at a time, and we had paid up in October. My housing budget was shot, which left me with very few options.” She lifted one shoulder, causing her sweater to slide down and reveal the lacy strap of a black bra. “This was cheap, close to work, and not known for having a lot of drug activity or violence. I’ll start looking for a new place this summer, but until then, this will have to do.”
Kit didn’t know it was possible to hate a person you had never met as much as he hated this Travis douchebag. What kind of asshole let the woman he’d been dating, the woman he claimed to love, live in some sketchy-assed apartment while he stayed in the nice townhouse or whatever they had lived in when they were together?
“He didn’t even give you your part of the rent back?” Kit asked, already knowing the answer.
Another shrug of her shoulder. A bit more black lace revealed.
“I’m the one who left. If living in a nice, downtown apartment had meant that much to me, I would have just stayed. Turns out, I value my pride a bit more than square footage or a sink that doesn’t leak.”
“I’ll fix your sink.” It was the least he could do. And anyway, he was good at fixing things. At least, he was good at fixing broken sinks and uneven floors. This situation he’d found himself in? Yeah, on that he had no clue.
“Well, I suppose that is one way to pass the time while you’re trapped here.”
“Trapped?”
Spencer nodded towards the television she had on mute. “They’ve closed down all the Interstates and are advising that everyone stay off the roads so that emergency crews can get where they’re needed. Apparently there is a thick layer of ice under all this snow, and it’s making a mess of the roads.”
He could have told her that without the aide of The Weather Channel, but she was talking to him and not threatening to make him walk home in the blizzard.
“I don’t suppose you have a cup of coffee around here I could borrow?” he asked instead. What he really wanted was a big glass of bourbon, but coffee was the only liquid courage he trusted himself with at this point.
Spencer lifted up one of those super-thermal tumblers. This one was silver and had the outline of Darth Vader’s helmet in black. “French vanilla with two sugars,” she said.
Of course she’d already fixed him some coffee. And of course she knew exactly how he liked it.
“Thank you,” he said, accepting the tumbler and settling on the other end of her couch. It was big and comfortable, but it had obviously seen better days. If he was playing the odds, he’d say that she’d picked it up at a secondhand store sometime after Thanksgiving. “Believe it or not, it’s actually colder than it looks out there. Hard to believe we were shrugging off our coats when we went ice skating on Saturday.”
The corner of Spencer’s lip turned up, but something altogether different flashed in her eyes. She tightened the hold on the blanket wrapped around her shoulders and pressed more tightly against the corner of the couch.
“Why are you here, Kit? Surely you don’t love slipping and sliding on icy roads so much you just had to make the trek down to Nashville in a blizzard and then decided, out of all the people you know, I was the right person to hi
t up for warm clothes and some coffee.” She scratched at the corner of her eye, and God help him, it looked like she was trying to brush away the beginning of a tear. “I’m not even sure how you figured out where I live.”
“Your mom has your address stuck up on Mack’s fridge with a Grand Ole Opry magnet.” Her phone number had been written down there too, and he’d programmed both into his phone a few days ago. Now that he thought about it, it was kind of a stalkery thing to do, but at the time it had seemed smart. He’d thought with the two of them living near the same city they could…
What? What did he think they would do once they both returned to the city after Christmas? Go out for tea and crumpets with her fancy professor friends so he could prove just how much of a slack-jawed chest-beater he really was? He didn’t really know what he was thinking, other than he had thought there was something between them. Something that would have survived past the holidays and beyond their connection to Mack. Something that wouldn’t crumble apart the moment she got what she wanted from him.
One of these days that little revelation was going to stop punching him in the gut every time it popped into his head.
“I’m here because this juvenile pouting thing you’ve got going on has gone and broken Rita’s heart. She’s a good woman. She doesn’t deserve to have her Christmas ruined just because her daughter is an immature brat.” He hadn’t meant to be so harsh, but part of him wanted to hurt her as much as she’d hurt him.
When it came to that immature brat thing, he was the proverbial talking pot to her kettle.
He was also an ass. Because this time there was no denying that little eye scratch thing was just a cover to keep her tears in check since it didn’t quite work. A single tear slid down her cheek, and he had to clinch his fists to keep from reaching out to halt its journey.
“So you’re here as yet another favor to Mack?” She was blinking rapidly, and he could see her neck working as she swallowed down as much of her emotions as she could. “Tell me, Kit, how did you end up with Spencer duty this time? I mean, obviously the girls couldn’t handle the first task, but you would think you’d already put in your time. Surely one of the girls could have run this little errand, or taken care of it over the phone. Isn’t that how chores are supposed to work in families? You take turns? Or am I now and forever your assignment? Amanda unloads the dishwasher, Beth rolls the trash to the corner, and Kit has to deal with Rita’s pathetic, high-maintenance daughter.”
What the hell was she talking about?
“Are you drunk?”
“A little,” she admitted. “Not much anymore. Seeing you pretty much killed my buzz.” And then she lost her battle with the tears and they spilled over, one after the other in silent succession. “You know what the worst part is? It actually worked. There for one bright, shiny moment, I felt… desirable. Sexy. Non-unfuckable.”
“Non-un…?” He couldn’t stand it any longer. He slid across the couch, looped an arm around her shoulders, and pulled her into his chest. “You’re not making any sense, sweetheart.”
“Please don’t touch me,” she whimpered while simultaneously grabbing onto his shirt to secure him against her.
“Why not? I like touching you.”
“No, you don’t. You’re doing it under duress.”
“Duress?”
“You were coerced.”
“Coerced?” He didn’t mean to be a parrot, but he had no idea what she was talking about. Hell, he wasn’t one hundred percent sure he knew the definition of some of those words.
“You don’t want to hold me. You want to hold sexy, fuckable girls like Tinsley.” She pulled back and tilted her face up to his. Her little button nose was all scrunched up, and despite the tears still staining her cheeks, he was overwhelmed by the urge to kiss her. “Tinsley sounds like the name of a Christmas stripper. One who covers herself in tinsel.”
“Spencer, I swear to God, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Her jaw firmed and her chin tilted up, but there was no hiding the hurt that flashed in her eyes. “I’m talking about how you only fucked me because Mack asked you to.”
Chapter 19
Oh God. What had she done?
Damn those carolers. If it hadn’t been for them she’d have never found that emergency bottle of wine, and if it hadn’t been for the emergency bottle of wine, she never would have admitted to knowing about how her mother’s new husband had talked his ex-stepkid into having pity sex with her.
And exactly when had her life turned into a melodramatic paperback novel? This was even more emotionally draining than the kid-with-a-dead-parent YA novel of her youth.
“You think that what we did… That Mack…”
“I’m a college professor, not a member of the Academy. Save the Oscar-worthy performance for someone who matters,” she said, pulling herself out of his embrace and trying not to think about how hard it was to do so. Even after everything, it felt good to be held by him. He was so… solid. And not just because he seemed to be forged from pure muscle. When she was in Kit’s arms, she felt safe and protected, like she could withstand whatever life threw her way simply because she was with him.
Which just went to show how screwed up her instincts were since he was the very thing tearing her apart.
He really should go to Hollywood. With his drop-dead gorgeous face, Adonis body, and the way he was able to look so confused, hurt, and earnest when he knew exactly what he’d done, he would give Chris Evans a run for his money.
“You think I slept with you — made love to you — as a favor? To Mack? The guy who hasn’t missed a Sunday morning worship service since he got his appendix removed twenty years ago?”
How had she ended up in this conversation she’d hoped to avoid her entire life? This — this confrontation, this reliving of her initial humiliation — was the reason she’d left Mack’s house and run back home in the first place. Yet, thanks to a bottle of cheap wine that was currently sitting in her stomach like vinegar, here she was.
The best way out is always through.
Spencer really hoped Robert Frost knew what he was talking about.
She took a deep, steadying breath, which was a mistake. Beneath the scent of her herbal shampoo he’d used and the familiar laundry detergent clinging to the clothes she’d given him, she could still smell Kit. She’d never understood why romance novels always said the hero smelled of man or some ineffable fragrance until she met him. Beneath all the other smells he might pick up throughout the day, he always smelled like Kit.
And Kit smelled so good it made her mouth water and her brain short-circuit.
“Seriously, Spence, how on earth could you ever believe he would ask me to do such a thing?”
“I overheard him talking to my mom,” she said, snapping out of her eau de Kit induced trance. “I know Mack asked you to hit on me, to try and boost my self esteem.” Saying the words aloud for the first time was possibly even worse than hearing them. “I imagine he forgot exactly how dedicated you are to any given task or he would have been a bit more specific.”
“Mack didn’t…” Apparently Kit realized how useless it would be to lie to her because he trailed off mid-sentence and changed tactics. “He did. That first day, he asked me to be nice to you. I forgot he had done that.”
A puff of laughter sailed by Spencer’s lips. Or maybe it was a sob. She honestly didn’t know anymore.
“You were certainly nice.”
And he had been. During those days they’d spent together helping the kids pick out the perfect Dollar Tree gifts for their parents and stealing baked goods from the kitchen, he’d been the nicest, sweetest, most amazing guy she’d ever met.
And then, that night…
Her thighs trembled remembering exactly how nice he could be when he put his mind to it. Her nipples — those traitorous bits of flesh that paid no attention to things like logic or restraint — pebbled against the soft lace of her bra.
“Nice?” K
it’s chuckle was deep and throaty and did absolutely nothing to help her nipple situation. “Sweetheart, nice isn’t a word anyone in their right mind would use when it comes to how I’ve treated you. I’m nice to my sisters. I’m nice to their husbands and children. With you, I’m…” His tongue danced across his lower lip. Spencer couldn’t quite remember exactly why it was she shouldn’t lean in and follow the same path with her own tongue.
“You’re what?” she prompted.
“I’m constantly thinking about ripping off your clothes and fucking you until you can’t walk straight.”
Oh.
Oh.
“But I’m not the kind of girl guys want to fuck.” She was the kind of girl they took with them to their cousin’s wedding. Moms, grandmothers, and aunts freaking loved her. And while she was learning all about Uncle Chester’s recent hernia surgery, her date was in the coat closet with the bridesmaid whose curvy body, badass tattoos, and smokey eyes screamed sex to anyone who bothered looking.
Kit grabbed Spencer’s hand and pulled it against his crotch. Even through the material of the sweatpants she could feel the heat of his hard cock as it twitched against her hand. On reflex she curved her fingers around it, still somewhat amazed he had fit inside her.
“You’re the kind of girl I want to fuck,” Kit assured her, his voice somewhat strangled.
It was hard to argue when the evidence of his claim was hard and throbbing in her hand, and yet, “And Tinsley? What kind of girl is she?”
Kit’s hips were pumping gently against her thigh as his hand eased beneath the hem of her shirt and slowly trailed up her stomach. “What does Tinsley have to do with anything?” he asked, his breath hot against her cheek. Proving that she had no self control where he was concerned, she angled her head to give him access to her neck. His lips were like fire against her flesh. A shiver worked its way down her spine and settled between her legs.
He’d asked her a question. She was almost certain of it. Unfortunately, she was too distracted by the noises he was making deep in his throat as she slid her hand up and down the length of him.
Spencer Nation's Christmas Miracle Page 8