Page 1 of A Very Armitage Christmas
Chapter 1
Ian
“A little help?” Nate said irritably, turning to glare at me over his shoulder. “All those alpha muscles ought to be good for something!”
He startled me out of my fugue, and I blinked at my red-faced mate, who was sweating even though the temperature had dropped to near-freezing and the air smelled like snow. Nate had needed to bend over really, really far to load the trunk of Matt’s Prius. And then wriggle around. A lot. With his ass in the air, waving back and forth hypnotically. I hadn’t even noticed he’d been struggling to shut the trunk and cursing under his breath until he brought me back to the present and I rewound the last couple minutes in my head. I’d been too focused on how someone so thin could have such a round ass.
Magic? Nate used magic. Would he use magic on his own ass? Would he let me watch?
“Your fault for not wanting to bring a real car,” I said, trying to distract him from the bulge in the front of my jeans. My mate and my brother both had shitty taste in cars, and they ganged up on me. Especially since Nate hated my driving. Arguing some more about the car was sure to distract him. He’d never let me hear the end of it if he caught me getting that hard in a hardware store’s parking lot. Especially standing next to a Prius.
On the other hand, trying to stuff that many light-up candy canes into my Barracuda would’ve been fucking sacrilege, so maybe it was just as well. Christmas. We didn’t do Christmas.
Until Nate came along. Now, apparently, we did Christmas on steroids.
“Real car,” Nate huffed. “Real piece of — eep,” he finished, as I crowded him up against the car and loomed at him.
“I wouldn’t finish that sentence if I were you.”
Nate batted his eyelashes, giving me teasing glimpses of his mischievous dark eyes. I’d have suspected he used magic on those, too, if I hadn’t seen both his eyes and his ass under circumstances where he didn’t have any magic to spare. They were naturally that fucking amazing.
“What are you going to do, Ian? Bite me? Throw me over your shoulder and drag me off somewhere to do unspeakable things to me?”
“Been there, done that, got the magical socks,” I grunted. I tried to scowl at him, but the way my hands had found their way to his waist and started tracing little gentle circles probably made that a losing deal.
“Mmm,” Nate hummed, relaxing under my touch. “Help me fit all this stuff in here and close the trunk and then set up the candy canes along the driveway and put up that Santa,” he said in a rush, like I’d miss the details if he hurried, “and you can do unspeakable things to me all night.”
I looked over his shoulder at the sheer volume of fucking candy canes. And the inflatable Santa. Fuck, did I even have the right kind of pump in the garage? Did I need one? And the boxes and boxes of jumbo-sized all-weather rainbow-hued ornaments he claimed were going on the trees in front of the pack house. And the strings of lights, like a dozen of them. Why? Jesus fucking Christ. Our pack barely had money for the utility bills, let alone this kind of thing. We definitely wouldn’t be able to afford electricity after he plugged all that shit in. Nate had paid for it all out of what he’d earned with his freelance warlock business, and that rankled even more. I ought to be able to provide for him. Even if he wanted red-and-green plastic crap covered in fairy lights.
“Setting those up will take all night. How stupid do you think I am?” Nate stretched up and nibbled the side of my neck, rubbing his body against my half-hard cock like the little tease he was. “That stupid, okay,” I grumbled. “Yeah. Okay. But really, really unspeakable. I’m tying you up so you can’t try to get out of it.”
Nate’s eyes gleamed. “Promises, promises.”
I got the trunk shut in record time, and in spite of how much I hated this fucking car, I insisted on driving, dangling the keys over my head out of Nate’s reach until he stopped hopping around and gave up. If Nate took the wheel, we’d get home two stops for coffee and a million years of following the speed limit later.
He sulked most of the way, but brightened up when we pulled off the main road and into the long, winding driveway that led from the pack territory’s boundary to the main compound and the pack house.
“There’s a lot of driveway,” he said with glee. “Lots and lots and lots of driveway. Good thing I got a lot of candy canes!” And then as soon as we pulled up at the house he leapt out, grabbed an armful of non-driveway decorations, and ran inside, calling out, “Put the Santa up out in the back yard, and have fun!” over his shoulder.
Oh, he was so going to fucking get it. I adjusted my cock a little so it wasn’t pressing against my zipper and got to work.
***
Four hours later, I stomped up the steps to the little house I shared with Nate and flung the door open. Even with my alpha metabolism, I’d gotten chilled — except my feet, because magical socks — and I was dirty and tired and grouchy.
The sight of Nate curled up on the couch wrapped in a blanket, all warm and cozy and sipping from a mug of what smelled like whiskey-spiked hot chocolate, didn’t help. Little bastard. He raised his eyebrows at me and grinned over the top of his mug.
This one saidMy mate has a giant candy caneon the side, and it looked like he’d Sharpie’d it right before he made his cocoa.
My annoyance spiked, and then washed away in an instant. Yeah, Nate had left me to do all the work by myself. But if he’d tried to help me, I’d have sent him inside out of the cold anyway.
And seeing him here, in my house —ourhouse — safe and warm and alive, after all the shit we’d been through…okay, yeah. There honestly wasn’t anything I’d prefer in the whole world.
Except one thing. But shower first. I kissed the top of his head on my way to the bathroom.
When I came out, clean and warm, Nate had moved from the couch to the bed. I’d ditched the towel in the bathroom, and so I didn’t have anything to hide how my cock went from relaxed to standing straight up in a millisecond.
Nate wasn’t wearing anything particularly seductive, and he wasn’t doing more than just lounging there, in a t-shirt and boxers I recognized as mine — because he stole my clothes so often I’d stopped keeping track, even though nothing fit him.
