You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology(96)

She had tried hard to get ready for it, to be brave enough for it. She had reminded herself that she, too, had moved on, not to someone else—God, no, never again to open herself up that way—but to a calm, healed place. Or it had felt calm, it had felt healed, that cold slushy of grief had been almost comfortable, until he got there before everyone else did and she stood at the window watching him get out of his car, his long body moving with such controlled grace.

She set her equipment on the counter behind her, studying the snowfall of powdered sugar and its snowflakes. If Anne and her team weren’t coming, none of this really mattered, but she couldn’t let it go. She had to get it right. It was the only thing she had left to hold on to.

Silence stretched between them, the inside of the cabin as soft and as still as snow falling on an ancient forest. That silence was soothing. It was better. No, let’s not talk. Let’s make at least that one thing easier on both of us. You can just go, Kurt. It’s—it’s okay.

I’ll manage to survive it somehow. I’ve survived everything else.

Yes, one thing she had learned about herself that she had never known before: that she did, in fact, survive things she hadn’t thought she could possibly bear.

Kurt left the window, and she startled. Scarier still, he didn’t head out of the room but straight toward her. By the time he reached the other side of the island, her heart was beating so hard she thought she might be sick with it. Don’t try to kiss me good-bye or anything, Kurt. Not even on the cheek. Please don’t.

Don’t say anything, like, “Well, I hope you have a happy life.” Or, “Good-bye, Kai.” Please, please don’t.

She didn’t look at him, willing the message onto him, willing him away. But she could feel him looking at her.

He took one hand out of his pocket and slowly drew his finger across some of the sugar, and indignation surprised its way through her fear. It was not at all like Kurt to destroy someone’s work that way.

He circled the island, with the sugar still on his finger. She froze, so terribly afraid at his approach that she could have been cowering before the advent of some horrible torturer.

He stopped just behind her, and she bowed her head, all the hairs of her body on end.

Without a word, he ran his palm down the length of her arm—a full, firm stroke that shocked all through her—until he came to her exposed wrist, the sleeves pulled back for her work. There he drew the sugar gently across the exquisitely sensitive inside of her wrist, a magical brush of callused fingertip and powder. Kai gasped, her whole body poised in astonishment, as if she was balancing on a cliff’s edge via one toe on the head of a pin.

Kurt brought her wrist to his mouth and sucked the sugar off.

She gasped again, collapsing, her other hand smashing into that sugar snowfall to hold her up. Kurt, what are you doing? Kurt—wait, what?

He licked her wrist clean of sugar, little sucking sips with his tongue that were so delicate it was as if this tall, controlled, strong man behind her was a butterfly and she was nectar.

Her eyes went blind. What was this? What was this—sudden, incredible warmth and sensuality crossing an impossible distance? The bridge across that distance was burned, wasn’t it burned?

Still with no sound, Kurt drew the index finger of his other hand through more sugar, leaving a path under one of her snowflakes, and—

Stroked a little figure eight of it over her nape. She shivered, the touch washing from her nape through her whole body. And he bent and sucked that off, too.

Kai folded into the counter, shaking all over, the warmth so great and sudden that it hurt, it hurt so horribly, like life coming back to a frozen limb. This couldn’t be happening. Why in the world would he do this?

His mouth traveled up her neck and down, once, twice, and then all at one it pressed into her suddenly hard, until she could feel the edge of his teeth and the tension in his body, as if he was about to bite her, in some animal show of dominance. Which was not like Kurt at all, and yet that edge in him ran all through her, loosening muscles, loosening thought.

He gentled again, the tension still in his body but not in his mouth, so that her own body didn’t know which would win, his tension or his gentleness. Such a tantalizing knife’s edge. She wanted to fall on both sides.

Oh, but that would cut her right in two. She would never get the pieces of herself back together again.

He licked the nape of her neck, that tiny, teasing lick and suck, taking her wrist and bringing her sugar-smeared hand over her shoulder. The move wrapped her arm around herself, his own folded over it, her vulnerable insides so thoroughly protected by both of them. And while she was held in that double warmth, he swirled his tongue in the center of her palm, licked his way up her index finger, and then drew it deep into his mouth.

She stared half-blind across her snowscape at the great window giving onto the deep gray sky, a winter queen yanked down out of her swirling cold clouds into a human embrace. She had forgotten what it felt like, to be warm, to be alive, to be touched. My God, had all this once been familiar?

He took his time on that finger, lavishing it with his attention, long, strong suckles until her weight caved into the arm that held her—all hard muscle. If anything, he had gotten fitter and more intense since the last time his body had been pressed against hers. More driven.

He sucked his way from finger to finger, while all her body melted in some panicked rush of failing winter, I’m not ready for spring, no, I’m not ready! He set her cleaned hand down on her own shoulder—curling it there with a protective stroke, as if he knew she needed to hug herself. Then his hand swept through her snowscape again. Her heart tightened and tightened, and her body shivered in expectation as his sugar-dusted hand rose . . . to her throat, rubbing the sugar slowly into that so-sensitive skin.