Page 8 of Christmas Kisses

Peter’s family would have disowned him if he’d had a child out of wedlock, so I begrudgingly accepted the date on offer since I didn’t want to be fifty with a ten year old.

I swear to whatever religious entity you believe in that I tried to walk away from the handsome stranger with as much gall asI fought with not to steal Christmas Eve from families. I told my libido no, that you can’t walk up to a stranger, ask if they’re single, and then if given an appropriate response, hit them up for casual sex.

That’s unkosher and not cool.

So I tiptoed around the idea that I was considering hiring an escort to get the job done, hoping he’d take pity on me and offer his services for free.

I hit the motherload, though now I feel shitty about it.

There’s no way a man as gorgeous as him is single, but he has my head in such a spin that my body has convinced my heart his relationship status doesn’t matter. That consenting adults are the only things needed for a steamy look-what-you-lost fuck, but two wrongs won’t make a right.

“I should go. It was wrong of me to approach you.”

Instead of using words to end my flee this time, he beats me to the door before slowly crowding me against it. He smells as good as I imagined when eyeballing him from afar, and although he stands a foot taller than me, our bodies mold together like God himself crafted them to fit.

“The door is unlocked. You can leave at any time.” He exposes the goose bumps his sexy voice trickled across my skin when he drags my hair to one side. “But if you want to revenge fuckhimout of your system, I’d rather you turn around.”

After delaying his departure long enough to ensure there’s no uncertainty to the murkiness of my panties, he steps back, unpinning me from the door.

My body instantly complains about the loss of his contact. It threatens irritable bowel syndrome for the rest of my life, but my heart is the first to speak. “Are you married?”

I hear the air whizzing from his nose more than I see it. “No. Marriages should be sacramental. You shouldn’t put yourself ina position to cheat, much less act on thoughts you shouldn’t be having.”

His response drives me wild with desire, but I try to keep a rational head. “So you’re single?”

This time, his disbelieving chuckle is more prominent since I shakingly spin to face him. “All the way.” When my eyes shoot to his ring finger to check like I haven’t done precisely that a hundred times in the past ten minutes, he pulls his phone out of his pocket before handing it to me. “There’s no lock code, and I’m active on most social media sites. Scroll as long as you want.”

After being deceived in a way that will forever hang a shadow over my confidence, his reply is everything I need to hear. It liberates my conscience and has me desperate to take back the piece of my womanhood Peter stole when he cheated.

So instead of scrolling the mystery stranger’s phone like I did Peter’s for a week before I walked in on my worst nightmare, I dump it on the desk his backside is propped on and throw myself into his arms, sealing my mouth over his lips.

Strangers or not, I want this.

I’ve never been surer of anything in my life.

The moment should be awkward. It should be uncoordinated and uncomfortable.

It isfarfrom any of those things.

His kiss is too wild for that.

Too roasting.

And his skills…damn. He has no trouble dueling his tongue with mine. At the same time, he toys with my nipples through the rigid material of my little black dress.

Desire rushes through me when he swallows a moan I can’t hold back. Peter wasn’t interested in my Christmas baubles. I always thought he was more of a legs man than a boobs man. I learned otherwise in the bakery earlier this week.

As if busting your fiancé cheating isn’t bad enough, I was stuck in Oregon for five days with the loved-up couple who didn’t care about my feelings in the slightest. They took the itinerary I’d configured and ran with it.

They even collected the tree I’d paid for from the lot and decorated it withmydecorations.

The stranger, whose name remains a mystery, shifts my focus from Peter and his four-inch dick by dropping his lips from my mouth to my neck. He suckles on the sensitive skin before tracking his tongue along the veins keeping my heart rate high.

“Fuck me, you taste like”—I beg him to say sin and depravity. Heaven and hell. Sex and…sex. I don’t get close to any of my guesses—“candy canes and hot chocolate.”

“That’s the woman in seat 17A’s fault. She’d packed a canister of mint cocoa, unaware the container would pressurize in the cabin of the airplane. When she opened it, it squirted all over me.”

His growl makes my frustration nowhere near as bad. It sends a hot pulse darting through my veins and has me wishing my sleeveless shirt hadn’t absorbed most of the mess.

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