Page 3 of Christmas Chaos
Zoe glanced at him, a guilty expression on her face, before swivelling her chair to face the wall and continuing her own conversation.
‘Yes, Greg. Do you even read your emails?’ asked Campbell. ‘I appreciate Lord MacGinley is a busy man, but I’d like to speak to him at least once in the next six months.’
And this is why I put on a Scottish accent and call myself Greg, Rory thought, circling the astronomical figure Zoe had scrawled on a piece of paper the last time he suggested they cancel this particular booking.
‘I’m sure that can be arranged, Mr Monteith.’
‘Good. Make it so, Greg. Make it so.’
Rory finished the conversation with as much politeness as he could muster, then stalked to his wife’s desk.
It was time for payback.
Zoe’s chair was facing away, her long legs extended and her feet propped on a two-drawer filing cabinet.
He sat on the edge of the desk behind her and put his hands on her shoulders, massaging away the tension created from a half-hour conversation with a new supplier. She leaned back into his touch, her ‘hmms’ of affirmation directed down the phone morphing into sounds of enjoyment directed at him. He knew her body intimately and every little shudder and noise of pleasure made his cock twitch. Her wild curls were perched on the top of her head, secured in place with a pencil, leaving her neck exposed. He trailed soft kisses from her hairline down to her ear. She shuddered. Smiling, he gently bit the lobe.
‘Ahhh! Er! Oh no, um, I thought I saw a mouse. What? No! We don’t have any mice in the castle,’ she babbled.
Rory ran a hand inside her top, rubbing her hardened nipple through her bra.
‘Oh god! Um, it’s a spider. I’m so sorry, I have arachnophobia. Can I ring you back in five minutes?’
‘Fifteen,’ Rory murmured.
‘Sorry, I meant five times three.’
He reached inside her bra.
‘Fift… Agh! Call you right back!’ she cried, ending the call.
Rory turned her chair and lifted her onto his lap. She wrapped herself around him, her tongue meeting his as she squirmed against his hardness. He wanted to tease her, to torment her for agreeing he would attend some random person’s wedding. But now he didn’t care anymore. It would be a minor inconvenience in a life now filled with love and happiness, all thanks to his crazy, brilliant, firecracker of a wife.
The phone rang.
It was always ringing.
Zoe pulled away with a whimper. ‘I should answer it.’
He ripped the cable out of the wall, silencing it.
‘Rory!’
He shrugged and grinned, tugging her T-shirt out of her jeans. ‘I’ll fix it later.’
‘And I forgot I’ve got a meeting at the bakery with Margaret in ten minutes.’
He pulled her top and bra off and palmed her breasts.
‘I’ll get you off in five,’ he growled.
That afternoon,in a break between calls, Zoe had scheduled a meeting to discuss the ‘C’ word. Before he met his wife, Rory considered Christmas to be the one day a year he went through the motions if he was with his army unit or gritted his teeth if he was with his mother. However, as the Earl of Kinloch, pimping out his castle to pay the bills, it appeared he needed to be thinking about Christmas the previous Boxing Day.
It didn’t help that his wife was a believer. It didn’t matter what was associated with the holidays, she believed in it all. Santa, the Nativity, mistletoe, stockings, mulled wine, mince pies, carols and Slade. Everything was up for grabs. She might be humming ‘Oh Little Town of Bethlehem’ one minute, then ‘Merry Christmas Everybody’ the next. If this level of commitment – to what he considered a manufactured holiday to celebrate capitalism – was exhibited by one of his friends, he would have thought they were deranged. With Zoe, however, he was grudgingly forced to admit it was endearing.
But if his wife loved Christmas, stationery came a close second. These two obsessions had come together and were currently making sweet, sweet love across one entire wall of the estate office. An A3 calendar from Rymans was too insubstantial for what Zoe needed, so she’d created her own with washi tape, Post-its, Sharpies and stickers. Each time a task included her, she stuck a sticker of an angel next to it. When Rory was needed, she stuck up one of The Grinch.
‘So, you can’t claim I don’t run things by you,’ she began.
