Page 12 of Wounded Christmas Wolf
“Well, this isn’t going to be awkward at all,” she said under her breath. She swung a leg over the machine and started it up again. Over the low rumble of the engine, she said, “Look, at least put your bag in the trailer. There’s no reason for you to carry it, no matter how you feel about me.”
She had a point about that. He could have carried it easily,but he felt like he ought to make some kind of gesture in her direction. Jace dropped the duffel in the trailer, which had an open back and contained some hay and bits of pine boughs. “I’m not mad at you,” he said.
“Oh?” She half smiled. “Will you accept a ride, then?”
Jace stiffened, in more ways than one.
Holly’s thawing warmth began to crystalize icily once again.
He had to get over this, he told himself. He couldn’t keep a hundred-yard distance from her the entire time he was here. He might as well figure out whether he was going to be able to handle his wolf around her, and if he couldn’t, he needed to leave now.
“I don’t bite,” she added, with a hint of her lip pulling back in a way thatwasn’ta smile.
And suddenly his wolf reared up inside him, responding to the challenge.
The back of the seat had no obvious place to sit, but it extended back far enough that there was room just behind her, like a very broad saddle. Jace swung his leg over the machine and settled on the seat and then froze again. There was nowhere to put his hands that wasn’t intensely personal. Or his feet. Or his .... crotch.
“Move forward,” Holly said impatiently. “You’re going to fall off like that.”
Jace cautiously scooted forward until he felt—oh hell—the warm, round curve of her jeans-clad ass press between his legs. It had been a really long time since he’d had a woman there. He hadn’t willed down an erection this intensely since high school.
But his wolf wasn’t losing its mind inside him anymore. In fact, strange as it seemed, it began to calm down once he was in contact with her. He was afraid to move for fear of upsetting their carefully balanced equilibrium.
“You can rest your feet on the edges of the footrests, outside of mine,” the woman was saying, so he cautiously did that. “Wow, I didn’t realize how awkward this was going to be with someone your size. I used to do this with my sisters, and they’re a lot smaller.” She gave another of those bright, wonderful laughs, like a flicker of lingering sunshine. “Well, it’s only for a few minutes. You can hold on to me, or the cargo bar behind you, if you need to.”
It was going to have to be the cargo bar, because even though she was bundled in a coat, he could tell that putting his arms around her warm, flexing torso was going to cost him the battle he was currently fighting against his erection.
He groped behind him and felt a wire mesh cargo rack with a high raised bar running around the edge of it. Grasping that with his good hand gave him something to concentrate on other than Holly’s body pressed against his, and he tried to send all the feeling in his body down his fingers to the cold metal pressing into his palm.
Then the ATV lurched into motion, and the situation suddenly got far more pressing.
So to speak.
The ATV vibrating between his legs and jiggling Holly’s warm ass against his thighs was difficult enough to deal with. But every now and then they’d go over a bump, and he was jolted forward, slamming his crotch firmly against her round buttocks. Even the tug of the scar tissue on his thighs didn’t make much difference to his growing libido.
The ride up the hill was probably a couple hundred yards, but it seemed to take a million years.
By the time Holly slewed the machine to a stop in a plowed area in front of a row of small, colorful houses, Jace was holding himself back from her bottom with stiffened arms (not to mention stiffening other places) and arching hisbody slightly to try to avoid her discovering the reaction that he was having.
It wasn’t just the proximity to her that seemed to be doing it. This was more powerful. Primal. He’d been around women, plenty of women—he wasn’t great at talking to females, but it also wasn’t as if he was going to turn into a raging horndog around them. Women touching him or randomly brushing up against him in public didn’t do this.
Holly was different. There was something about the way his body was responding to her. Even her smell was amazing, a warm scent of soap and shampoo and hay with an underlying floral spice ofwomanthat sent a powerful tingling down his spine to pool with the growing heat in his groin.
As soon as the machine stopped moving, he swung his leg off and sprang away, realizing only in retrospect, when she gave him a puzzled look, that it must have looked like he couldn’t stand to be near her for a single minute longer.
Somehow he didn’t think that explaining would help. Jace busied himself grabbing his bag out of the trailer, and let it dangle semi-casually in front of him, which had the convenient side effect of hiding his hard-on for the time it took to fade.
Holly got off the machine. It seemed to Jace that she looked a little flushed as well. She turned it off, and as the sputtering engine died, a quiet so complete that it felt like a blanket seemed to cover them.
For most of Jace’s life, he had never truly been anywhere quiet. And that had been particularly true for the last few years, in a string of cheap apartments and pay-by-the-week hotels, the kind of places where sirens in the middle of the night and neighbors screaming next door had been inescapable. And most recently there was the shelter, where he was surrounded by human noises (voices, sobbing, fights) at all hours of the night.
The peace and calm of the farm settled on him gently. Even with Holly’s proximity screwing his insides into a new kind of tension, he could still feel some of the accumulated stress fading away.
Seeming to recognize his mood, Holly was quiet for a minute, letting him adjust. The sun had set, and the sky was filled with color from horizon to horizon, a mottled network of pink clouds and glimpses of evening-tinted sky. The pink reflected on the snow. It was stunning.
“Isn’t it pretty here?” Holly asked quietly. “I think that’s part of why I’m not sorry I came back to this place. That sky ...” She took a deep breath and seemed to shake herself out of it. “Come on, I’ll show you the options. The first three tiny houses in the Christmas village are set up for guests, so you can pick one of those.”
Jace had been too distracted by the sunset to really look at the buildings in front of them. Now he did, and he could see why she had called it a Christmas village. There were six small cottages, each of them different and uniquely colored. One was yellow and brown, another red and white, another one blue and silver. They had decorative trim, shutters, twinkling Christmas lights. It was like being surrounded by life-size dollhouses.
