Page 28 of Santa's Pucking Hat Trick

“No more nerdy Wes Robbins,” he agreed, but I didn’t like the tone he used.

“You’re still you, though,” I asserted. “Your eyes. Your face…I won’t lie that I noticed back then, before I left Mistletoe. But you were always pretty. And now, you’ve filled out so…” I swallowed hard. “Sowell.”

“Yeah?” he whispered, his eyes darting to my lips when I licked them, trying to solve the sudden dryness of my mouth. I nodded slowly.

“It’s painful,” I admitted. It was barely a whisper. An idea struck me, and I turned to grab my laptop, turning it around and clicking a couple of times to show him his own photo filling my screen. The one that had started my mind on its descent down the gutter, with his sculpted ass on display at the same time as his abs.

It was nothing compared to the real thing right here in my office, but it was still damn good to look at.

“Look at you, Wes,” I urged him quietly. “You’re gorgeous.”

He struggled to turn his face toward the screen. To pull his eyes away from mine. But then he was looking at himself, that sexy shot that made me almost touch myself at work. I squirmed even now, looking at it again, but I couldn’t stand it for very long. I had to move.

As Wes looked at his photo, his expression unreadable, I moved to stand at his side, leaning a little against the arm of the chair with my hip. My hand found its way to his shoulder blade, making him take a sharp breath the second I made contact. Fuck—I shouldn’t have touched him. I started to pull my hand away, but without a word, a turn of his head, he leaned into my touch to communicate that it was okay. I could feel his warmth through his shirt.

“Look at you, Wes,” I whispered again, looking at the screen alongside him. “Your body…you’re unfairly sexy.”

“I—no one has ever told me that,” I heard him ground out between his teeth. “No one’seversaid anything like that to me. Not once.”

If I’d disliked his ex-girlfriend on principle before, I hated her now.

“Your ex?” I questioned. The wry laugh that came out of his mouth had no humor in it. He shook his head and pressed his face into my hand when I couldn’t help but caress his cheek. Even that small touch held a spark. The potential to catch fire.

“I was never good enough for her, and she let me know it every chance she got. Questioning what I wore, how I cut my hair. How I ate, even.” He winced as if reliving a fresh trauma, and a new kind of fire roared into a raging inferno inside me. What kind of partner exhibited that kind of control over someone they were supposed to love?

“She’s cruel, and an idiot,” I bit out. Wes smiled, a little sad, and every word he spoke next only further proved to me that his ex was evil, undeserving of any love he may have shown her before.

“I’ve always kind of thought she was right. That I’m still just that nerdy kid who everyone overlooked,” he went on. “She used to tell me we were meant to be because onlyshecould see my potential.”

Potential.Like he was a project. A fixer upper for her to mold to her will rather than a man who was damn-near perfect as he was. What a snake of a woman.

“I used to think that was nice,” he said, my heart breaking for him. “There was more underneath it, though. Like…I knew without her saying it that I wasn’t enough as I was. And that no one besides her could ever take an interest in me. Especially not anyone like…well, like you.”

“Like me?” I asked. My hand had moved to his other shoulder as if of its own accord, and now my spare hand was on the shoulder closest to me. I was practically wrapping myself around him, rubbing circles into his shoulders, a pseudo massage. I was brimming with needy heat, unable to keep myself away. Wes looked up at me, and our faces were so close that I could see the light dusting of hair on his jaw where he hadn’t shaved in a day or so, pale enough in color that it nearly blended with his skin. My thumb came up to run over that stubble. I was losing my mind.

“You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, Rachel,” Wes told me to answer my question, and my heart stumbled in its steady rhythm. “Every part of you…you’re just perfect. You were always my dream girl, you know that? I kind of can’t believe you’d…see me that way.” As attractive. Sexy. Desirable.

But this man really did look close to perfect, absolutely the stuff of dreams, to me too. And I washis dream girl.

“You have no idea, Wes. If you knew the effect you have on me…” I murmured, watching his mouth. Recklessly, I offered, “Let me show you.”

His breath was ragged, his nod frantic, shocking me entirely. For a second, I just sat there, stunned that I’d asked, that he’d answered. But my stillness didn’t last long. The power of lust and a beautiful man’s desire fueled me as I stood, walking slowly behind him.

“I couldn’t stop staring at your photos,” I told him truthfully, my voice shifting to a low, sensual tone I didn’t know I was capable of before. “All that lean muscle. Smooth skin. Just looking at you like that, getting hints of the rest of your body I couldn’t see…” My eyes found that enticing dick outline in the photo again as I placed each of my hands on his shoulders from behind, letting my flat palms slide slowly down. Feeling his chest through his shirt. His racing heartbeat. “It got me so wet, Wes.”

The breath he let out this time had more power to it. An almost groan. I felt it between my legs, and I pressed my hands more firmly into his torso. Lower, now, to those softly sculpted abs. I was leaning so far forward that my face was in his neck, my breasts pressing into his upper back. I breathed in the scent of him, natural and rich and so…cozy. I wanted to wrap myself in it.

“When you walked in, I was thinking about your body. Your sharp hip bones. Your firm ass. Getting so, so turned on I could hardly think straight. If you’d been a few seconds later…”

“What?” He breathed, panting now. “What would I have seen?”

“Nothing, on the surface,” I said, pressing a daring kiss to the side of his neck. Christ, I wanted to devour him, especially when he let out a sound that was almost a whimper. “But my hand would have been between my legs, and you might have heard me moan your name.”

“Fuck,” Wes gasped. Reveling in the power of this, the way I was building him back up after his ex had torn him down to the studs. I splayed my fingers across his lower abdomen, the tips barely brushing the base of his cock through his pants. I felt the muscles of his stomach twitch, saw with my own eyes how he was growing hard.Goddamn gray sweatpants.“Fuck,” he said again, but I pulled away.

“I’ve wanted you from the first second I saw you on the ice,” I admitted to him, to myself, as I prowled around to the other side of the chair. I was facing him now, and he was watching me with something like reverence. “And if you can’t see that every woman you meet wants you just as badly, you’re not looking hard enough.”

“I don’t want every woman,” he growled, the heat and aggression of it surprising me, shooting a twinge of satisfaction through my core. His eyes locked on mine. “I just want you.”

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