Page 43 of Christmas With A Stranger

"Did you already go through your Christmas gift?"

His laugh is warm on my chest. "Twenty-three of them are still in the box on my dresser."

"I'm pretty sure we're past the point where they'd help, anyway.”

He gets down on his knees on the carpet between my legs. He unbuttons my work pants and peels them down my legs with my underwear, tosses them somewhere behind him, and hooks his hands under my thighs to drag me to the edge of the mattress.

"Carson."

He doesn't answer. He puts his mouth on me.

Nobody has ever done this to me in broad daylight, with cars pulling in and out of a hotel lot under the window. I grab a fistful of the bedspread with one hand and his hair with the other.

His stubble scrapes the insides of my thighs. He takes his time, with flat, unhurried strokes of his tongue, until my hips come up off the bed chasing him. He closes his lips around my clit and sucks. I forget the parking lot exists.

I come with my heels dug into the side of the bed, and his name comes out of me three times.

He doesn't stop until I push his head away with both hands. Then he stands and shoves his jeans down. He's so hard it looks like it hurts. I reach for him, but he takes me by the hips and turns me, gentle and certain about it, until I'm on my knees at the edge of the bed with my hands buried in the bedspread.

"Okay?" His mouth is right beside my ear.

"If you ask me that one more time, I'm calling a cab."

He pushes into me slowly. There's no latex between us this time, only the thick, hot drag of his cock. The difference is so sharp that I drop onto my forearms and moan into the bedspread. Behind me, he swears under his breath and holds still with his hips flush against my ass.

He pulls almost all the way out and drives back in, long and heavy. Every stroke hits a spot deep inside me that curls my toes. The shark tooth swings on its cord and taps the bedspread every time he bottoms out.

One of his hands grips my hip. The other slides around my front and spreads wide across my stomach, holding me back against him, and it stays there.

I can't see his face. All I have is the sound he makes low in his chest, the slap of skin, and that hand.

"Harder," I tell him. "I'm not going to break."

He gives me harder. The headboard knocks the wall twice, and I don't care who's in the next room. His hand leaves my stomach and slides lower, and two rough fingers find my clit, circling it in time with his hips.

My second orgasm builds faster than the first. I clench around him and shake, and I bite down on the bedspread, so I don't scream his name for the whole second floor.

He loses his rhythm when I tighten around him. His fingers dig into my hip, and he comes deep inside me with a groan I feel all the way down my back. His forehead drops between my shoulder blades.

Afterward, he lies on his back with one arm over his eyes, breathing hard.

He doesn't reach for me. I don't move closer.

For a few minutes, the only sound in the room is the heater kicking on beneath the window.

Then I sit up and find my bra on the bedside table. Carson drops his arm. "You have to go to work?"

"Unfortunately, twins have not made me independently wealthy."

I dress while he watches me, and I don't know what to do with all of the heaviness weighing on me. I thought the sex would somehow solve it.

ELEVEN

Carson

"I," said the cow, all white and red / "I gave Him my manger for His bed."

Mackie is nearly dressed before I've found my jeans. She stands at the foot of the bed working the last button on her blouse.