Page 1 of Mistletoe Madness

1

“Ithought you said you were getting alittletree.” My roommate Nick Clauson leaned against the door jamb eyeing the eight-foot-tall Douglas Fir I’d dragged up the stairs of the front porch and into our house earlier that morning.

Carefully, I wound another strand of lights through its boughs until I reached the top. “True, it’s a bit bigger than I intended, but I didn’t pick this tree. It picked me.”

He snorted and pushed off the wall, stepping over more lights, garland, and scattered boxes of ornaments until he was standing next to me, Our shoulders nearly touching, he glanced up at the Moravian star I’d barely managed to affix to the tree’s uppermost limb for a few seconds before flicking his blue-eyed gaze back to me. “You promised, Mikayla.”

“I did no such thing.” I turned away before he could see the effect his nearness had on me. To say that my feelings for him were complicated would be a massive understatement. “You told me not to go overboard, and I didn’t.”

He gestured toward the tree. “And how is this not going overboard?”

“I wanted the ten foot one.”

He let out a small huff of laughter, and a beat a silence passed between us before he sighed and shook his head. He turned to leave the room, and when he reached the doorway he paused. “It can stay.”

“Thank you,” I whispered, my head dropping forward as I listened to the sounds of his retreating footsteps and wondering if this would ever get less awkward. I wanted nothing more than to go back to the way things were before The Night That Changed Everything.

Six months ago, when I’d answered an ad on Craigslist for a room in a funky little Victorian house on the outskirts the historic district, I never expected to meet someone I would like, much less care about. All I’d been looking for was a reasonably clean, halfway quiet place to land after finding my no-good, cheating fiancé in bed with another woman.

Since moving in, Nick and I had bonded over our mutual love of craft beer, medical dramas, and take-out Thai food. If his chiseled jaw, washboard abs, and devil-may-care grin frequently drove me to distraction, I pretended not to notice. Frankly, I pretended not to noticea lotof things about my sexy roommate—like the fact that I sometimes woke up in the middle of the night with his name on my lips as my body shuddered beneath the covers.

But then The Night That Changed Everythinghappened, and now I was done pretending.

But let me back up for a minute.

That night, I’d been sitting up in bed, finishing a report that was due to my boss in the morning, my back propped against the wall that separated our bedrooms, when I heard an unfamiliar noise coming from the other side.

“Nick?” I called out, hoping like hell it was him in there and not some serial killer. We’d also taken to watching repeats of network TV crime dramas that made us literally laugh out loud with how stereotypical most of the detectives were.

When he didn’t answer, I set my computer to the side and tiptoed cautiously down the hall. You would have thought all those episodes ofBlue Bloodswould have given me a stronger sense of self-preservation in the face of danger, but you would have been wrong. When I reached his door, I heard the noise again. Instead of texting him to find out if he was okay, I grabbed ahold of the door knob and took a deep breath for courage. That was when I heardanothernoise, and this time, there was no mistaking it was definitely Nick in there.

And he sounded like he was in pain.

Without giving it another thought, I twisted the knob and stepped inside—and stopped dead in my tracks.

Because there he was, laying on top of the covers, his earbuds concealing the sound of whatever he was watching on the iPad that was propped on his naked chest. I had a pretty good idea, though, of what was on his screen given the fist locked around his erect cock and the full bottom lip that was rolled between his teeth in concentration.

Instead of backing out the way I’d come like I should have, I stayed rooted to his carpet, my limbs tingling with arousal, as his eyes fell closed. On the next upward stroke of his hand, he let out a deep, guttural groan I recognized as the sound that had brought me there in the first place. Much to my ever-loving shame, for the next few seconds I stared, transfixed, as my roommate fucked his own hand, all the while remaining completely oblivious to my presence.

Eventually, the sight of his hips bucking up off the mattress broke me out of my lust-filled stupor, and before he could open his eyes to find me gawking at him like some twisted peeping tom, I scurried away in shame. When I reached my room, I launched myself onto my bed with my hand clamped over my mouth to hold in my fit of hysterics. That was when I heard another series of groans and grunts coming at me through the paper-thin walls—these ones louder, more feral sounding. When he came with a muffled shout a few seconds later, I squeezed my thighs together as his pleasure triggered my own.

That had been a few weeks ago, and I could barely look him in the eye when we were home together. And rather than watching TV or sharing a bottle of beer or two like we used to do, I frequently snuck off to my room instead, citing a heavy workload and early morning meetings.

Because ever since that night—ever since he made me come with nothing more than the sound of his own muffled pleasure reaching me through the drywall that separated us—I’ve started wondering things about Nick that I have no business wondering. Everything that I’ve valued these past six months about our friendship has been amplified, and all the characteristics that made him such a great roommate now stood out as qualities I’d look for in a potential boyfriend.

And the idea of him ever finding out how I felt was laughable. There was a reason I never participated in his weekly poker nights despite being relatively good at cards. I wore my heart on my sleeve and my emotions in my eyes. In fact, my complete lack of a poker face and total inability to lie was something Nick had often said he adored about me. I couldn’t let it be our undoing.

Unfortunately, he’d quickly figured out that I was avoiding him. He’d tried not to let his frustrations show, but as well as he knew me, I knew him, too. Every day, he wanted to ask what he did wrong, and how he can fix it so that things went back to normal. But nothing would ever be normal again. I’d fallen in lust with my roommate, and I didn’t see myself falling out of it anytime soon.

2

Iwoke with a startled gasp, my chest rising and falling with labored breaths as I fought to calm my rapidly beating heart. I didn’t know why I was jolted awake so suddenly, but I was somewhat pissed about it since I’d been dreaming about my boss getting fired for her continued ineptitude. Since that wasn’t likely to happen anytime soon in reality, I savored it when it happened in my dreams.

I closed my eyes and tried to recapture the satisfaction I’d felt a few minutes before when I hear a drawer sliding open and then closing shut. A deep chuckle and then … what can only be described as the sounds of fucking. Moaning, grunting, sighing, breathing.

I laid stock still on my bed, afraid to so much as breathe lest Nick know I was listening from the other side of our wall. I didn’t know which of the lanky blondes he worked with he’d brought home from the holiday office party tonight, but I hated her.

More than that, I wanted tobeher.

---