A Royal Christmas Cruise (Stonewall Investigations Miami 2.50)

“I have to run to the bathroom,” I said, feeling more than a little flustered with how close Nick and I got under the table. I stood up. Should I have been surprised when Nick stood up right after me, saying he had to go, too? Maybe. But I wasn’t.

I also wasn’t exactly upset about it.

We walked through the dining room, passing around a stack of gift boxes that looked like they’d been pulled from a Dr. Seuss movie. They were all kinds of different shapes, wrapped in pastel colors with bold patterns. One item was clearly a trumpet, another a unicorn.

The bathrooms were spared of the holiday decorations. The only touches were in the red and white tinsel that hung above the long mirror, four farm-style basin sinks sitting on top of the marble counter.

Nick was on me in seconds. He started kissing my neck, pushing me back against the counter, his tongue flicking at my skin, his teeth barely pressing down, applying just the right amount of pressure to get me rock hard. I pushed my erection onto him, my hands gliding up and down his back, my head thrown back so I could expose more of my neck to him. A sign of pure submission. He could tear me apart, and I wanted him to. I didn’t even care that we were in a public bathroom. Anyone could have walked in, and I would have kept on going, offering a free show with prime seating.

But he stopped. “Let’s get in a stall.”

He grabbed my hand and started me toward the open stall.

The thought hit me like Grandma getting hit by a herd of reindeer: Is this a mistake?

Sure, I could follow Nick into the stall and lose myself to a man who’d walked out of my wildest and horniest fantasies, or I could take a step back and think with the head on my shoulders and not the one below them. Maybe this was right—maybe this was what we should both be doing.

But not yet.

It was my turn to stop. I wanted this in a really bad way. I wanted everything Nick had to offer and more.

I didn’t want it here, though. Nor did I want it when we were under friendship pretenses. Those situations never worked out well. Ever. Even if the friendship started as weirdly as ours had. I had to set some kind of boundaries, some ground rules.

“As hard as this is—” I shot a look down between us. “Clearly.” We both chuckled. “I’ve got to bring this up… Damn it, another pun. I didn’t even mean that one.”

Nick flashed me that perfect grin before kissing me again. Freaking hell, he was making this so difficult. Here I was, literally getting exactly what I had asked Santa for, and yet I was ready to shove it right back up the chimney.

“Ugh,” I groaned as I broke from the kiss. “Sorry, but… we’ve got to set friendship rules. This should clearly be a rule. For friendship. You know?”

“And what’s the rule?” Nick’s hand went down, past my stomach, rubbing me over my pants and almost causing my eyes to roll backward. “That we have to do this inside of every bathroom? You know”—Nick squeezed, licking his lips—“for friendship.”

I parted my lips, ready to succumb. All I had to do was get in the damn stall. Then Nick’s hand could be on me without the annoying clothes between us. I could have him, give myself to him. So what if this practical stranger turned out to be a rebound fling for me?

“I can’t,” I said, the words sounding as if they came from someone else. Instead of moving away, though, I reached for him, an instinct I couldn’t quite place but one that felt loud and forceful. I hooked a thumb through a belt loop on his pants. His hand had moved off me, leaving me with a powerful need that threatened to derail my rules before I even said them out loud.

“This has to be one of the rules,” I said. “We have to act like friends. It’ll just make things complicated if we don’t. There’s plenty of guys on this ship; I’m sure we can bump into one under a mistletoe somewhere.”

Even though the only guy I wanted under any kind of “toe” is you.

Nick cocked his head and slanted that sexy smile. “What if we can bend the rules when no one’s around?”

“I haven’t even said what the rest of the rules are yet.”

Nick’s hands were beginning to roam over my body, slowly traveling up and down my side, fully putting me into a trance. I was like one of those sharks that go comatose when you rub their bellies.

“What are the rules, then?” He was slowly pulling us toward the open stall.

I couldn’t think. All I could focus on was the long rod Nick appeared to have smuggled onto the ship in his pants. The outline of his hard dick only deepened that previously mentioned trance.