AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Good morning, Liam,” she said, banishing the chill he felt with her warm reception.
“Morning, Tess,” he said.
Her electric blue eyes flickered toward his home, and he saw amusement roosting behind her smile. “Are you taking me up on my offer?”
He nodded. “I just checked my phone a bit ago, and there’s supposed to be a big snowstorm coming in a few days—and it won’t get any warmer before then. So, time is of the essence if I’m going to get these lights up.”
The utterly ravishing woman let him bask in further waves of amusement radiating from her eyes. She opened her door enough for two fingers to beckon him inside. Taking her up on her offer, she shut the door and shivered again.
“I’m up for it,” she said. “Just let me go get myself properly protected against the cold.”
“No rush,” he quickly said, though it was quite the opposite.
Eyeing him knowingly, she turned and started pathing up her stairs toward her presumed bedroom. His eyes naturally followed. They were anything but prepared for Tess to seemingly spot something lying on one of the stairs midway up and bend forward to pinch it between her forefinger and thumb.
As Tess’s belligerently sexy ass strained against her leggings’ tight fabric, every droplet of blood in his body sizzled so swelteringly hot that he almost broke into an instant sweat. His tongue turned into a desert, and his jaw dropped like a skydiver leaping out of their plane. Not even to speak of the sudden strainhispants were currently suffering from.
After a second, picking up whatever blessed catalyst it was that had caught her eye on the stairs, Tess straightened and finished her climb. As she disappeared, he barely tracked the soft impacts as she walked above him. His mind recomposed itself with the same sluggish, unperturbed speed with which a freshly overturned hourglass would empty all its sand into its other half.
Even once it did, the memory Tess had unwittingly seared into his mind with the same intensity as if she’d marked him with a white-hot branding iron dominated his contemplations—if they could even be called that. For the next several minutes, the primal desire flooding his veins reduced him from a potentially worthy conversational partner into a lustful animal. Allowing himself to bask in its flavor, the gentle thud of a bedroom door’s closing forced him to scarf down his inappropriate lustfulness before Tess found him panting like a dog over the memory of her shapely form.
“I just need to grab my boots,” she explained as she reentered his field of view, now swaddled in a sweater and dark overcoat. The damnable latter of those covered her waist and upper thighs, promising that Liam would likely receive no further arousing gifts like the one he was still struggling to recover from.
Nevertheless, time with Tess was time with Tess. In fact, he shouldn’t be leering at her at all, which he chided himself over while she fetched a pair of winter boots from a downstairs closet. With that extra time allotted, he found his equanimity. Heavenly beautiful as she was, she was also sophisticated and graceful. The type of woman who wanted to discuss philosophy and ethics. If she caught him gawking, what would she think of him? Especially after their conversation last night about rotten marriages and a rotten man.
“Ready to go?” Tess chirped, now fully dressed to brave the shivering cold.
“Let’s do it!”
Chapter Five
A Shivering Offer
And shiver they did. Plentifully. However, first, which Liam realized he should have handledbeforehe sprinted over to bother Tess about helping him put up his Christmas lights, they needed to get his family’s decorations down from the attic.
So, as they tromped upstairs and he pulled down the unfolding ladder that led to his attic, he apologized for the third time since he’d realized his mistake. Only for Tess to respond with her repeated promise that it was no inconvenience.
“You can relax until I get it all down,” he said as he climbed the ladder.
“Nonsense. Just pass the tubs and whatnot down to me.” She planted her hands on her hips and stubbornly stood at the ladder’s foot.
“If you’re sure—”
“I am,” she responded, shooing him up the ladder with a smile. “I’m going to help you pack them all up and stow them up there when Christmas is over, too.”
Relenting before her determination, he popped his head up inside his home’s attic space. Even before he was born, his parents had regularly conferred about its potential as an extra office space. However, this was possibly the only project they hadn’t meticulously completed. Left eternally as a storage space, Liam intruded inside for the first time this year.
Thankfully, though the attic’s potential remained untapped, his parents’ scrupulous organization still extended into the room. Immediately in front of him sat the two boxes filled with “sentimentals,” ranging from baby clothes to photo albums to a few marquee school assignments, like the report on enamel he’d gotten an A+ for in the fourth grade. Climbing up fully into the attic, he looked left.
Five tubs. Two for lights, three for decorations. Standing next to them, a five-foot-tall plastic Santa Claus waved jovially. Beside it, a box taller than he was laid on its side. This one depicted what the Christmas tree inside should look like once assembled. Thankfully,thathad been put up downstairs before he got home, with the presents his parents had bought him already sitting under it.
Popping open the tubs with decorations inside, he found the one containing the indoor decorations and excluded that one alongside the tree. Hauling the first of four boxes, he checked with Tess before he dangled it halfway down the stepladder and let her take it from his grasp. Fortunately, none of the tubs were that heavy, and Tess easily handled them.
“Okay, now where’s Santa Claus?” she asked knowingly after she’d laid the fourth tub next to its siblings.
“I’m getting him,” he promised.
Hefting the hollow plastic figure by looping his arms around its rotund waist as if he planned to suplex it over his shoulder, he waddled toward the ladder and carefully passed Saint Nick into Tess’s waiting grasp. Once she’d confirmed she had him, he waited until she moved away before climbing down. Resetting the ladder into the ceiling, he and Tess spent the next few minutes sliding Santa and the tubs down the stairs and carrying them to his front door. There, they spent the next ten minutes perusing each tub’s contents, which were as neatly ordered as the attic they’d come from.
