Page 32 of Deck the Fire Halls

SOREN

I was already running late.I’d finished work later than expected and needed to shower to get rid of the smoke and sap, and I was just getting out of the shower when I heard a knock at my front door.

I wasn’t expecting anyone and was in a hurry, so I just wrapped the towel around my waist. “Ah, coming!” I yelled out as I rushed to the door. “One sec, I’m not really decent.” I peeked through the peephole to see Rob at my front door.

“Oh. Sorry,” he said, a startled expression on his face. “I can... wait. Or come back. I shouldn’t have just?—”

I pulled the door open and grinned when he saw me, his gaze taking in my chest, the towel—lingering at the towel—before he even looked at my face.

He closed his eyes. “I’m so sorry.”

I laughed, pleased at his reaction, and grabbed his arm and pulled him inside. “You’re letting all the warm air out.”

“My boots?—”

“Your boots are fine.” I shut the door behind him, liking how we were standing a little closer than was probably necessary.

“I should have called first,” he whispered. Then he cleared his throat. “Or texted.”

“It’s fine,” I said, not moving back an inch. “I just finished work and I stank of burned pine and had sap stuck all over me.”

He had great self-control to not avert his gaze from my eyes. Not even when I ran a hand over my chest, wiping away some beads of water. “You should probably get dressed,” he murmured.

It was an effort not to grin at his reaction. “Probably.”

He let out a slow breath and his eyes went to the wall behind me, to the ceiling. His self-control really was good, but now I was being cruel. I took a few steps backward, making sure to clutch my towel, right below my navel. Not to ensure it didn’t fall, but to draw his eye downward.

It worked.

“I’ll just be a second,” I said, disappearing into my room. “So, to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?” I called out while I pulled on some underwear and jeans.

“Oh. Uh, dinner,” he replied. “At the diner. Gunter asked me to join them and he said you were invited. I was going to walk down and saw your light on. I thought I’d see if you’d left already. Your motorcycle wasn’t at the side of your house, but I hadn’t heard it the last day or so and I wondered?—”

He stopped talking when I walked back into the living room wearing my jeans and pulling a T-shirt on,giving him another chance to see my torso before the fabric stole his view.

“She’s in the shed,” I replied.

He was still standing at the door. “She?”

“My bike.”

“It’s female?”

“She is.”

“Does she have a name?”

“Harley.”

“Imaginative.”

“I thought so.” I went to the sofa and began pulling on my socks. “And anyway, I haven’t ridden her to work these last few days because she wakes up my neighbor. And although the prospect of him coming back out to yell at me in his flamingo pajamas is enticing?—”

“Oh god.”

“I don’t want to get on his bad side.”

“You’re not on my bad side, though those flamingo pajamas are going in the trash. I’ll have you know. If I had an open fire, I’d burn them, ceremonially.”

---