You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology(97)

Heat and fear and longing swept her at that promise of what was coming.

Wrapping one hand in her ponytail, he turned her, pulling her head back until her body bent over his arm. Her heart was beating so hard, emotion, anticipation, arousal, terror pounding through her everywhere as she stared up at him. His eyes met hers just briefly, just that shock of intimacy, her beautiful secret, those hazel eyes of his. And then he bent his head again and cleaned that sugar off her exposed throat.

She began to shake under the onslaught of sensuality and warmth, shake with the mad tremors of someone coming out of hypothermia, as he pulled her sweater over her head and undid her bra. For a moment after he threw both garments away, he stood there, staring down at her, his hands pressed to the island on either side of her, that look in his eyes so strange and yet familiar, not the Kurt she had known for years with the seriousness that turned into laughter for her, but the Kurt she had left at the end, with that desperate intensity in his eyes. Kai, don’t. Kai, don’t do this.

He lifted hands covered with powdered sugar to her breasts, leaving black granite handprints among the black snowflakes in her sugar-snow. That familiar, long-lost caress as he cupped her sent an ache all through her, as if her breasts had been too tightly bound for more than a year now and finally, finally been freed. She whimpered, and he rubbed powdered thumbs over her nipples, knowing what she wanted, knowing how she loved to have her breasts cupped and caressed, knowing how that made her sigh for him and pet him and want him.

Her hands came up and caught at his shoulders, leaving white prints on his shirt. Pressing her breasts higher, he bent—oh, how her whole body knew exactly what was coming and her nipples strained for it—and closed his mouth around her, devouring the sweetness like someone who was starved. Like someone who had not had anything sweet for a long, long time.

Her breath came in short, sharp pants, leaving her dizzy in the whirl of warmth and heat. She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t. That slushy of grief and loss inside her sloshed so dangerously. If everything that was frozen about her melted, there might not be anything left of her at all.

A snow-woman. A statue of ice. Come face to face with the sun.

Oh, God.

He leaned her backward on the counter, still licking and sucking over her breasts, under them, pushing up the fullness to make sure he had every last dusting of sugar, even as he lay her back into more sugar. He pulled down her jeans and panties both at once, pushing them to the floor. Now she was entirely naked except for sugar, and he was entirely clothed. The only marks she had left on him were the handprints on his shoulders.

He still had not said one word. She could not have spoken if her life depended on it, which she very much felt it did. No, see, please. This is going to hurt like hell.

I was—calm before. I had reached this place where I could be at peace. Where I even understood that I had lost all right to you.

He scraped up a handful of sugar from her counter and sprinkled it in a gentle tickling kiss of powder from her knee up her thigh. Oh-oh-oh. She tried to squeeze herself shut, her eyes, her sex, her fists, her toes, but he bent and put his mouth to her knee, and that was, oh, God, so sweet. He followed that trail of sugar all the way up her thigh, and everything in her dissolved, uncurled—toes, fists, sex. Even her eyelids grew soft and languorous, flickering open and falling closed again, in a blur of him and darkness.

He didn’t use sugar on her sex.

He just spread her thighs on that dark smooth granite dusted with powder and tasted her exactly as she was.

Oh, God. Oh, God.

She was falling and scrambling, hands sliding over slick granite and fine powder and finding no purchase, tumbling into vertigo all while held so adamantly on stone. It was not that he had never done this, but—well, she didn’t usually like it, she would rather they be kissing each other’s mouths—and, and, and—her mind kept dissolving into all these golden hot swirls of not-thought, this being, this warm, warm sense of being—

So, so—

It was just too mu—

The very last thing she had expected of her life that day was to find herself coming, in a rush of gloriousness, dissolving for him, mindless, convulsing. He forced that glory through her and wouldn’t let it stop, his mouth on her so driven, so intense that she had to whimper and pull her legs up onto the counter, curling inward, to get him to let her orgasm subside. Only then did he allow her to come down from it, burying his face in her ribs.

She lay boneless and damp and hot on granite so hard and cold. He straightened slowly, as if every muscle in his body hurt. She couldn’t look at him. Just this flicker of her eyelashes that showed him to her: completely dressed, her only mark on him two prints of powdered sugar on his shoulders and the voluptuousness of his mouth, as he stood over her sugar-dusted nakedness, stroking her slowly, breasts to belly, down her spine, over her hips, those gentle, reassuring touches he had long ago learned she needed, after sex, the ones that made her feel so loved, that told her that he still found her body beautiful after he was done wanting it. He had always done that for her, once he knew she needed it, always, always, always, made sure to take his time afterward, to stroke her and caress her before he fell asleep or left the bed.

Except he wasn’t done wanting, was he? He hadn’t come—had he? He was still completely dressed. Her gaze skated down his body, and—no, he hadn’t come.

She could not think. She bent her arms to hide her face. But then she had to look at him again, because—well, she had to see.