Page 24 of Getting Wrapped Up

Oh, yeah, best Christmas ever for sure.

Kate had been disappointedwhen Tucker pulled up in front of Phoebe’s. She wasn’t ready to go in and end the night already. But things were definitely looking up when he reached over, grabbed her wrist and pulled her into his lap.

She didn’t know why, but there was something about the truck that made her feel like getting dirty. Not actually dirty, butdirtywith a guy who got dirty for a living. She knew Tucker was a farmer, and that meant he knew a lot of stuff she had hardly a clue about.

The men she dated drove sports cars and stayed in shape by going to the gym and called other people to fix things that broke.

Tucker was a guy’s guy. He drove a truck that he actually used for work. His hands got dirty. He used his muscles to lift things and carry things and throw things. Of course, she wasn’t completely clear on what thosethingswere, but she imagined there were hay bales and buckets and barrels of…stuff. Stuff that she was also fuzzy on. Oh, and tools. She was sure he had tools and things and that he fixed stuff. Engines and tires and…other stuff.

Okay, so most of her knowledge about life on the farm was from television and movies. She was an environmental engineer and a number of her colleagues worked in soil and water in the Midwest, but her specialty was climate change and the oceans. She’d never been to Nebraska before this trip.

The bottom line was, Tucker could use his hands in ways other men she knew could not, and she was very interested in him using those hands on her.

Sitting on his lap again was nice. Even with the multiple layers of clothing between them. Which she hadn’t really thought about. She was not willing to take too many off. She was still cold from sitting in the square and wasn’t sure she’d ever have feeling back in her toes. She wouldn’t have traded it though. The time sitting in the square had felt…magical. That was a fanciful word to use. Heck, it was a fanciful thing tofeel.But it fit and, dammit, she was really going for magical and fanciful here. She didn’t mind that everything about Sapphire Falls, from Phoebe and Joe’s quaint old farm house to the hot chocolate stand in the town square, had felt otherworldly. That was what she was going for here. An escape. A vacation. Something to keep her daydreaming for the rest of the winter. Or more.

Tucker leaned into her, reaching to crank the heat.

“Don’t want anything freezing off.”

She laughed softly. “Very thoughtful.”

“Oh, I’m talking aboutmythings freezing off. I intend to keepyourthings very warm.”

It seemed all he needed to do was talk and her core body temperature went up. She pulled off her cap. “I’m glad it’s dark so you can’t see my hair messed up.”

“Another secret about men—” he said, running a hand over her hair from the crown of her head to the ends that hit her just above the curve of her lower back, “—we like a woman’s hair messed up.”

“Is that right?” She pulled off her gloves and unwound the scarf from her neck, suddenly thinking she could actually overheat.

“Well, I do anyway,” he said. “If a woman leaves at the end of the night with her hair too perfect, I did something wrong.”

Even her feet started defrosting, something she hadn’t thought would happen until March.

“But my hair’s messed up from the hat.”

“Yeah. For now.”

Oh boy. That sounded good. She wanted that. Whatever it was. Whatever he meant. Whatever he wanted.

And maybe they should define making out. Maybe country boys made out differently than city boys. Or girls for that matter.

The way she was currently feeling, she was thinking the queen-sized four poster in the guest room was about right. She just needed to keep enough of her wits together to remember to take the quilt off. That thing was gorgeous and clearly handmade. She couldn’t have hot, sweaty country sex on top of it.

But then thinking became pretty secondary.

“Take your coat off. Let me get my hands on you,” he said gruffly.

A thrill shot through her. She’d imagined that small town guys were gentlemen who would take their time. There would be flirting and flowers and dates where they held hands and saw movies and kissed only if there was mistletoe involved.

Part of her had wanted that.

But now, in the truck with Tucker after hot chocolate and a kiss that had nothing to do with mistletoe, she wanted fast. Not just the sex—though she was a fan of hard and fast frankly—but the whole thing. She was being swept up in Sapphire Falls, in Christmas, in these things that she’d always thought were manufactured by the greeting-card companies but was delighted to find out actually existed somewhere.

She was giving in to all of it, floating on this cloud of Christmas as it should be. December twenty-sixth would come soon enough.

She wanted to be swept up in an affair where she felt an immediate connection with a guy and fall into bed with him the first night because what they were feeling was real and strong even within only a few hours of knowing one another.

She knew that wasn’t true. She knew that love at first sight wasn’t real. She knew that many a girl’s heart had been broken mistaking chemistry for true love. But she was going to go with it for a few days. Kind of like believing that Santa was going to find her in Hawaii every year even without a tree or chimney or cookies or a letter. In spite of her mother. Every December, her brain had tried to tell her it didn’t make sense, that it had never happened before so why now. But her heart had wanted to believe so badly she’d talked herself into it.

---