AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I squeezed my eyes shut. “I was right on board until you said that. Now I feel all gross, like I have some sort of Oedipus complex.”
He chuckled and set his cap on his head as light snow floated down around us. It was such a picture-perfect moment I would have sworn under any other circumstances that we were characters in some feel-good TV holiday movie—the kind Leah point-blank refused to watch with me.
“If you wonder why there is nothing under the tree for you, just remember I’ve already given you the gift of a lifetime.” He winked and walked off as if he hadn’t confessed to having had a hand in matchmaking Leah and me.
* * * *
Leah shot her head up from the book she was reading as I walked through the front door, and her shocked expression quickly melted into delight. “Someone has made themselves at home so much that you just walk in now, hmm?”
I jingled the metal ring in my hand. “Hey, you were the one who gave me a key.”
She set the paperback down on the coffee table and pulled her legs up to give me a place to sit on the sofa with her. “How was your photoshoot? Did you appropriately dazzle the crew with your smoldering looks?”
I yanked the blanket off her and put a hand between her raised knee to spread them apart so I could grind my already hardened length against her. “Only when I was remembering all those dirty little promises my sexy-as-hell girlfriend made to get me there. Don’t you dare think I’ve forgotten a single one.”
Leah gave a fluttery little sigh as I kissed and licked and nipped her neck. “Never. Such a hardworking man deserves all the rewards.”
The words danced on the tip of my tongue, and I barely managed to hold them in. When we looked back on this moment in twenty or fifty years, I didn’t want her to believe for a second that my confession of love was driven by passion or clouded by desire. I wanted to utter the phrase I’d felt for longer than I actually admitted with a clear head and emphasized with every beat of the heart that belonged to her.
She pushed against my chest with one hand and reached for my belt with the other. “I would never, ever go back on my promises.”
Once our positions were reversed and she had me on my back, she rested on her haunches as she freed my shaft from the confines of my pants. She licked her lips before wrapping them around it, a dull ache already consuming me.
I buried my fingers into her hair and dropped my skull back on the arm of the couch. She fisted me at the base, stroking up and down to meet her lips as she swallowed the head. She flicked her tongue across the tip, and I nearly came undone. Somehow, I rallied what little self-control I had left to avoid embarrassing myself and ending this far,fartoo soon.
“Shit, sweetheart, I want to be inside you.” Even to my own ears, my voice was desperate and needy.
She shook her head and I lifted mine to look at her and smooth some strands away from her forehead. She worked me thoroughly with her mouth and her firm grasp, her eyes locked on mine, which managed to wreak just as much havoc as her physical touch.
I tightened my hold on her scalp, and she moaned as I thrust deeper into the wet, warm paradise. Any chance of holding back when the pressure mounted to nearly suffocating levels. I arched my back and roared my release, and lightning bolts of energy shot through my entire being, electrifying each cell with ecstasy.
As I slowly floated back to earth, Leah crawled up my body and laid her head on my heaving chest. “See? I told you I’m a woman of my word.”
Chapter Seventeen
Leah
“Merry Christmas, sweetheart.”
I blinked my gritty eyes and squinted, trying to focus on Brendan. “What time is it?”
“It’s seven-thirty,” he responded, just a little too chipper for the early hour. “But I have been awake since five and didn’t jump on the bed until you were forced to get up, so I think I have shown excellent self-restraint.”
I stretched and sat up, clutching my pillow to the front of me. “I don’t know if I’d call it that or pure, simple fear of the beast you’d rouse by making me wake up at a workday hour on a very non-workday holiday.”
He leaned forward, brushing some of the hair away from my face and cupping my cheek as he laid his forehead on mine. “Being here with you and spending time with you is the greatest gift I could ever get. Can’t blame me for wanting to enjoy every second, now can you?”
I gripped the pillow a little tighter and sat back, bopping him in the head. “It is too damn early for you to be that freaking charming.”
Brendan laughed and stood. “Okay, is it better if I tell you that I made breakfast and have the water on for tea?”
When I scrambled out of the bed, the chilly air hit my bare skin, reminding me that I was still naked following our lengthy Christmas Eve celebration the previous night. I snagged the robe that hung from the hook over the bathroom door. “You could have started with that, Golden Boy. Didn’t they teach you in business school to lead with your strengths?”
He jutted his chin out toward the en suite, “Go brush your teeth and put on some clothes before I keep you in bed all day.”
The timbre of his voice sent a chill down my spine, and I couldn’t help but shiver at both the tone and the implication. “Not possible. Your father is expecting us in a few hours.”
Before my still sluggish, uncaffeinated brain could catch up, Brendan rounded the foot of the bed, pushed me against the wall and pinned my wrists over my head. I sucked in a breath, and he gave a wolfish grin. “Oh trust me, sweetheart. I can come up with the best and most plausible excuses if I’m given the right motivation.” He rotated his hips toward me until the proof of his desire pressed between my legs. How he managed that despite the hours of making love on nearly every horizontal surface of my house the previous night was impressive and slightly unbelievable at the same time.
