AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He’d meant the kiss to be chaste. Sweet even. But I wasn’t made for sweet. And I wasn’t going to reach for it only to have it melt in my hands. I wrapped my fingers around the back of his neck and held him to me. Opening my mouth, inviting him in.
He began to roll over me but I pushed him back.
“Like this,’ I said, and slipped down his body. Taking his erection in my hand, running my fingers over the tip and then down to his balls. And I sucked him into my mouth and his body bowed off the bed.
Yes. This made more sense. This I could control. This was simple. It wasn’t love. It was just sex. That’s all it could ever be for Trudi Colfax’s daughter.
For a showgirl who got married in a smelly chapel to a man who woke up the next morning and left.
19
Lexie
The members of the Kringle Inn Sewing Club (we kept the name, Pageant Club didn’t roll off the tongue) were bundled up and heading down to the hill to the barn where Jasmine had been working so hard on the Christmas festival. “Will there be lights?” Chelsea asked.
“Christmas lights I imagine.”
“But not like spotlights?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “No spotlights.”
“That blows!”
I’d learned not to give her outbursts any oxygen. She always calmed down on her own. I tucked my hands in the pockets of the coat Ethan had gotten me. A bright pink puffy coat with fur trim that matched my boots and a pair of black gloves with white fur trim and a black knit cap with a white fur puff ball on top.
“I want you to be warm,” he’d told me, bundling me into everything. “God, you’re cute,” he said and pulled everything back off me. It had been a week since we slept together and I was beginning to make myself crazy trying to keep him at arm’s length while falling into his bed every chance I got.
“What about a stage?” Ben asked.
“I don’t know.”
“A stage would be nice,” Ben said and I nodded in agreement.
“But you know our motto,” I said.
“We are the show,” he said, reciting back to me the words every showgirl knows by heart. “We don’t need anything but each other.”
Inside the barn was nice little beehive. Christmas lights going up. Chairs being set up.
“A stage!” Ben cried and fist pumped the air.
Yep. In the corner a little stage was being built with sweet red velvet curtains. It was perfect.
“A little small, don’t you think?” Chelsea said, and Ben and I accidentally met eyes. He gave me a smile and I winked at him. Jasmine came by with a clipboard and her phone pressed to her ear, and when she walked by she squeezed my shoulder and I gave her a one-armed hug.
“Sorry,” she mouthed, pointing to her phone.
I gave her a thumbs-up and she wandered off. Above us, I guess in the hayloft—that was a thing, right?—there was the buzz of a saw.
“This is going to work out great, isn’t it?” I asked my little squad and got enthusiastic shouts back. “Okay, sewing club dismissed.”
The two of them took off running back to the inn. They’d made plans to go sledding and get hot chocolate at Paul’s drinks shed set up in the forest. And I had just turned, ready to head back to the inn and the front desk, when the saw upstairs started up again.
Whoever was working on my stage must be up there. Maybe Paul? I found the steps leading to the second floor and decided I’d just pop in to say thanks and see if they needed any help. One fall some girls from the Wild Stallions Club did a fundraiser for a dancer who needed cancer treatment, and since I was a pretty shit stripper I’d helped build the stage. I wasn’t too bad with a power drill.
The hayloft was a whole workroom with a long bench and all kinds of saws and power tools. The sun came in a pair of huge old windows and glittered across all the cobwebs and sawdust. It was pretty and gross.
In the middle of it was Ethan, buzzing a piece of wood through a saw.
He must have caught me out of the corner of his eye. He stopped the saw and smiled, lifting the sunglasses he was using as safety goggles up into his hair. He was covered in sawdust.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. “I’m trying to surprise you.”
“By building me a stage?”
“Yeah. I thought it would be nice for the pageant.”
“It’s perfect for the pageant.” I crossed the room toward him, stepping over drifts of sawdust.
“Chelsea is going to think it’s too small,” he said.
“She does. She’ll live.”
I stepped between two big machines and stopped, every muscle in my body paralyzed. A silent scream ricocheting through my head.
