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The aroma of fresh coffee pulled her from a deep, contented sleep.
After making love the first time, they’d fallen into a light, satiated slumber, naked, in front of the fire. Somewhere after midnight, Bree asked if she had enough to write her sex-in-front-of-a-roaring-fire-scene, to which she’d giggled and told him she did.
After saying, “Good. The last time I slept on the floor I was in the army and I had a blanket to cover me,” he lifted her and carried her up to the master suite where, once they were snuggled and spooned under the down comforter, they drifted off for an hour before waking and reaching for one another again.
Sleep finally overtook them for good in the darkest hours of the night.
Abra was used to unpredictable wake/sleep cycles from writing, but Bree wasn’t. So when she woke and found the space next to her empty and the delicious scent of brewing coffee drift up from the kitchen, surprise jumped through her that he’d woken before her.
A quick trip to the bathroom where she took care of business, then ran a brush through her tangled hair and another across her teeth, she found him in the kitchen. Standing in front of the ancient waffle maker, the box of mix on the counter next to a carton of opened eggs and a jug of water, he was clad only in his boxers – and Lordy, did the man have a fabulous ass. She stood, silently salivating in the doorway at the way the muscles in his broad back and thick arms flexed and moved while he stirred a spatula in a bowl.
He was making her waffles.
For breakfast.
No man she’d ever been involved with had cooked for her. Not a meal, not a sandwich, not a quick snack.
Chuck could burn water if left to his own defenses, and Frank was the take-out king of the Vegas Strip.
Abra had been the one who put meals on the table.
And yet this man, this lovely, charming man, was making her breakfast after a night spent in her bed, looking mouthwatering and delicious doing it, too.
The tiny string that had tugged on her heart the night before dissolved, replaced by a thick, solid rope that held on fast, was knotted, and showed no intention of loosening. Thank goodness Bree wasn’t facing her, because if he had been, he’d be able to read what she was certain floated in her eyes.
She’d fallen in love with him.
No denying it. The man - quite simply - snuck up on her heart, claimed it, and now owned it.
Abject terror warred with infinite joy and she didn’t know which emotion to cling to.
She hadn’t come back to town to fall in love with anyone. It hadn’t even been a blip of a notion she would. With everything that had happened with Frank, the rat bastard, the last thing on Abra’s mind was love. After all, she was a three-time loser in the game of relationships and the old saw about three hits at bat and then bye-Felicia was true.
So how had Colton Bree slipped into her heart so easily? If she were writing this story, she’d have the wisecracking side-kick best friend say something, well, wise, like, “Love finds you when you’re not looking for it,” or “Just when you think you’re unlovable, wham! Cupid strikes.”
Good thing she had a world class editor, because neither of those lines would ever make it into one of her books without some serious re-editing and rewording first.
But back to the matter currently occupying her brain: being in love with Colton Bree, and how she should feel about it.
When he glanced over his shoulder, tossed her a lopsided grin and a gravel-filled, “ ‘Morning,” she let the joy sluice over her.
The terror?
Well, Scarlett had it right. She’d think about it tomorrow.
The urge to touch him whenever they were in the same room was becoming a habit she couldn’t break and didn’t want to. From behind him, she slid her hands around his trim waist and crossed them, open-palmed, over his flat, hard-as-steel abs. His shoulders were covered in strings of cinnamon-colored freckles so she kissed one, letting her mouth dawdle for a moment on his warm skin.
“ ‘Morning,” she mumbled.
Bree dropped his head back a bit and she took it for an invitation to nuzzle the column of his throat. The prickly scratch of his needing-a-shave neck and jaw had tingles of arousal sliding down her spine. Her hands decided to take a stroll, so she slipped them under the waistband of his boxers and twined her fingers in the mat of hair stretching downward.
Bree’s body went statue-still.
Emboldened, she reached further, found him, warm and...growing. If that wasn’t a call for further exploration she didn’t know what was.
She slid a hand around him and squeezed.
“Abra—”
“Shh,” she whispered against his shoulder while gently tugging her fist upward. “Let me play.”
His shoulders shook against her. “What is it with you and kitchens?” His voice was thick with amusement. “The other day you were all up for having some fun on my table. And now...this.”
She bit back her laugh. “Sex on a kitchen table is still on my bucket list,” she said. “There’s something about a man cooking that makes me hungry and want to...eat him up. All of him.”
“Oh, good Lord.” He slammed the bowl down onto the countertop. “Woman, I’ve got a hot griddle going here. You keep fisting me like that and I’m afraid one of us, namely me, is gonna get singed.”
This time she couldn’t keep her laugh contained. She pulled her hand from his boxers and stepped back. “Sorry. I certainly don’t want to be the cause of a kitchen catastrophe or accident.”
Bree spun around and in a flash had his hands wound around her waist. He hauled her flat against him.
With a molten look she seriously thought about incorporating into her current book hero, Bree slid a knee between her legs, lifted it and rubbed against her naked mound while he pressed her back against the counter.
Abra was glad he held her because her legs decided now would be a fun time to loose all their strength to keep her upright.
“I-I- thought...you were worried about...burning...oh, dear sweet baby Jesus!”
He’d slid one of his hands down to replace his knee, cupped her, and dragged a finger along the naked length of her.
Then did it again.
“You’re not the only one here who’s...hungry,” he ground out right before he took possession of her mouth.
While his tongue did wicked and wonderful things to hers, he lifted her up, sat her down on top of her kitchen table and wedged himself between her thighs. The force and mass of his erection pushed through his boxers as Abra wound her legs around his waist and crossed her ankles over one another.
Looks like she was going to check off a bucket list item early, and she didn’t have one complaint about it to voice.
“You still up for a sleigh ride later on?” Bree asked while they sat and – finally – ate the waffles he’d made.
“We could,” she said. “Or, we could spend the day inside where it’s, you know? Warm. Cozy. Not freezing.”
“How did you ever survive growing up here with the winters being what they are?” He shook his head and forked in another helping of syrup-laden waffle.
“By staying indoors as much as I could. Why do you think I worked so many hours at the diner and Trim-A-Tree?”
“You said because you needed money for college.”
She flipped a hand in the air. “There was that, for sure. But cold air and my thin blood don’t mix well. And it’s only gotten worse since I live in such an arid, hot climate now.”
The subtle sound of a phone ringing interrupted them.
“That’s mine,” Bree said. While he went to retrieve it from his coat, Abra cleaned up the kitchen.
“You’ve got a reprieve from a cold sleigh ride,” he said when he came back into the room. “One of my clients has a busted oven and a dinner planned for twelve people tonight. I gotta get dressed and get over there, make sure I can take care of it fast.”
“You can take a shower if you want,” she said.
“Thanks, but I gotta go home to change into my work clothes, anyway. I’m not going to a job in my good pants and shoes.”
Five minutes later he stood at her front door.
“Sorry about this,” he said when he pulled her into a hug.
“Don’t be. It’s your business and if anyone knows about job dedication, it’s me.”
“I don’t know how long this is gonna take. I’ll call you later, okay?”
With a nod she bussed his cheek and sent him on his way. Faced with an entire day ahead of her now, her laptop called out to her. Somewhere during their sleep interludes into the wee hours, Abra’s mind had worked out a plot device she knew would bring everything together nicely.
As she settled down in the front room and booted up her laptop, she realized she needed to give some serious thought to why sex with Colton Bree sparked her muse. And she would.
Later.
Right now, though, the book was screaming for her to complete it and she was listening with both ears.
~~~~
THE IMPENDING HOLIDAY proved to be a busy time for Bree. Ovens refused to heat, air vents clogged, refrigerators lost their ability to keep things cold, and a myriad of other minor – and not so minor – issues came up with the people in the Dickens realm.
Bree was busy from the moment he lifted his head from his pillow until well after dinner most nights, so he and Abra didn’t see much of one another the next few days. He usually sent her a quick text sometime during the day to tell her his work situation and ask how she was faring. Those little check-ins went a long way in putting a smile on her face because it meant he cared about, and missed, her.
While she missed him, too, Abra used her free time to do what she’d come to Dickens to do: get the book finished. Sticking to her usual plan, she would let it simmer for a few hours then approach the manuscript, fresh minded, to look for any plot holes, structure issues, or anything else she wanted to change or alter.
The free time now afforded her the luxury of spending an afternoon Christmas shopping with Amy at a mall in the next town, and even had her taking a shift with Matilda in Trim-A-Tree. She hadn’t lost her ability to ring up a sale and the added benefit? She got to indulge in Matilda’s excellent cookies without having to bake any herself. A few of the customers who’d dropped in to shop had recognized her and had stopped to chat her up. Even two girls who had been some of her worst tormentors in high school stopped in and seemed, genuinely, pleased to see her.
Two evenings she had dinner with her parents, and laughed along with both of them when they pulled out old family videos.
As an adult, Abra could look at herself on videotape as an inquisitive child and then a sullen teen with more objectivity than she’d thought she possessed. Almost all the videos of Christmas’s past showed her to be straight lipped and serious when everyone around her was smiling and gleeful.
“What a pain in the ass I was,” she admitted out loud.
Amy shook her head. “No more than any other child we had.”
The talk with her parents about her abandonment issues had helped tremendously in laying a foundation for her to stop thinking about being left on a doorstep and start accepting how much she was loved by the people most important in her life.
The notion some professional therapy might help bolster those feelings even more dropped into her mind again. Maybe when she got back home.
But you are home, her mind whispered. Dickens is your home. You merely exist in Vegas.
She felt the shocked truth of that statement all the way to her toenails.
She had no family in Las Vegas.
She did in Dickens.
She had a lot of acquaintances but no real friends in Vegas.
In Dickens, people knew, and liked, her.
While she lived alone and employed a staff in Vegas to help run her home and life, she often experienced real loneliness.
Since coming back to Dickens, the last thing she’d been was lonely.
Abra needed to give serious consideration to what her future life looked like, because the more time she spent in her hometown, the more she didn’t want to leave it.
With a week left before Christmas, Abra was cleaning up the kitchen after making herself lunch, and had tossed the detritus in the garbage disposal, like she had every single day since she’d been in the house. This day, the garbage disposal decided it had had enough and wanted to take a few vacation days for the holidays. With a flip of the wall switch, the motor groaned with the effort of a man walking uphill with a backpack weighing twice what he did. After two quick, grinding whirrs, it shuttered to a dead stop.
Knowing nothing about disposals except how to turn them on and off, Abra pulled her phone from her pocket and sent off a quick text to the one person she’d bet her last dollar was an expert on all things.
~Garbage disposal decided to die. Can you come and either revive it or help me plan the burial?
Bree’s reply was almost immediate.
~ Did it really break or are you just missing me?
“Both,” she said out loud and laughed, then typed in the same response.
~ Give me twenty. I’m almost finished here.
She hadn’t seen him since he’d left her kitchen after he’d made her waffles. While she waited, Abra ran a quick brush through her tangled hair and pulled it up into a messy bun, then swiped some mascara across her makeup-less lashes. She’d just finished brushing her teeth—because fresh breath for kissing was so much more pleasurable than the lingering taste of bologna on whole wheat—when the doorbell chimed.
“You got here fast,” she said, anticipation in her voice and a huge smile on her face as she threw the door open.
The smile died a horrible death when she discovered Frank Flavio standing on her doorstep.