The Christmas Sisters

She tugged his shirt out of his jeans. “Let me know when you have it figured out, but in the meantime I think the best thing is if I distract you.” She grabbed him and pulled him across her living room toward the bedroom.

They stripped off the rest of their clothes, clumsy in their haste, and he tumbled her down onto the bed, trapping her beneath him.

His mouth was hot and urgent and she responded in kind, slaking her hunger. Even though the relationship was still relatively new, she already knew the feel of his tongue and the touch of his fingers. There was a greed to the way they took from each other, and a generosity in the way they gave.

They rolled so that she was on top and she pushed her fingers into his hair while she drank from the heat of his mouth. The kiss was incredible, electrically charged, desperate, and when she was dizzy with it, drowning, he flipped her onto her back again so that she was underneath him.

He cupped her face with his hand, his gaze locked on hers.

His eyes were a shade somewhere between blue and gray. They made her think of mountains and mist, and of still winter mornings. She’d seen his eyes bright with laughter and gleaming with determination, but right now they were fierce with need.

He’d said he had feelings for her, although he hadn’t said what those feeling were, but she saw it in the way he looked at her and felt it in the way he touched her.

Later, they might put words to those feelings, but for now this moment was all that mattered.

She heard the wind rattle the windows, but inside the hayloft it was cozy and warm and here in her bed the temperature was close to scorching.

He lowered his head again, and this time he kissed his way down to her shoulder and then lower, exploring the tips of her breasts with his tongue until she arched under him. She felt the slow slide of his hand over her thigh and the intimate pressure of his fingers as he stroked her with erotic precision.

Her body felt heavy, her brain slow and her thoughts disorientated. She wondered how it was he knew exactly how to touch her. “Don’t stop.”

“I’m not stopping.” Instead he shifted his position and she felt the weight of him, the power of him, and then he sank into her, driving deep, silencing her choked cry of pleasure with his mouth.

For a moment they stayed like that, locked together, all thought suspended by pleasure.

Then he started to move, slowly at first, and she wrapped her limbs around him and arched her hips, matching the rhythm he set, digging her fingers into the hard muscles of his shoulders. She held on to him, needing to feel something solid and safe to counteract the dizzying lightness she felt from being with him.

He kissed her mouth, her jaw, the curve of her neck, all the time keeping up the same relentless rhythm, driving her closer and closer with each measured thrust.

She let go, gave in to it, whispering that she wanted him, needed him. Her heart was hammering, her muscles clenched, and when she tipped over the edge with gut-swooping pleasure, she cried out his name and took him with her, the spasms of her body dragging him to the same point.

Afterward she lay with her head on his chest, feeling the unsteady rise and fall of his chest. She felt weak and achy and totally incapable of moving, but he didn’t seem inclined to move, either.

He held her tightly as if he had no intention of letting her go.

He was the first to speak. “I have a question.”

She smiled against his skin. “You have to ask?”

“My question isn’t performance related.” He kissed the top of her head and smoothed her hair back. “When I leave, will you come with me?”

She lifted her head, wishing he hadn’t chosen this moment to raise the topic of leaving. “You’ve booked the barn until March.”

“That’s the first thought that comes into your head? That you’ll have a vacancy?”

Her heart bumped against her chest. “You’ve become useful for mountain rescue training sessions. It’s not easy finding volunteers willing to hide in a freezing snow hole while they wait to be found.”

“I wonder why.” He lifted his hand and wound a wayward strand of her hair around his finger. “So you’ll miss your lodger, and your dogsbody. Nothing else? Because it seems to me that although I’ve laid everything on the line here, you haven’t done the same.”

“I know.” She rolled away from him and lay on her back, staring up at the wooden beams that stretched across her bedroom.

“Is this because you think I wasn’t honest with you? For what it’s worth, I had a good conversation with Suzanne after you left. It made me wish I’d contacted her sooner.”

“That’s not the problem.”

“Then what is?”

She felt a flash of frustration and something that was close to despair. “I can’t just leave, Luke. I can’t just walk away from my life.”