A Navesink Bank Christmas Read online

  "We did good," he agreed, taking the mug from my hands and replacing it with a cookie. "'Cept your cookies," he told me as I saw him bring one up over my head. "They were a fail."

  A hard one.

  But that was okay.

  Because his were a win.

  We balanced each other out that way.

  It was a long time later, both of us just watching our tree which did blink absolutely perfectly thanks to his anal ass, when Wolf's hands moved from where they were perched on my bent knees, gently - well, as gently as a giant could do - moving upward, sneaking inward.

  I had never given much thought to things like holidays before, never being one to participate fully in the festivities at Hailstorm. I would occasionally give Lo a hand since I wasn't one of the people who was traumatized by or avoidant of the holidays. I just never felt into them. So maybe I helped Lo drag the tables into the room and set them up, but on the actual night of Christmas, I stayed in bed reading while many of the others snuck out.

  I just never felt overly festive, I guess.

  So I had no idea what people were supposed to do. Or, more accurately, what couples were supposed to do on Christmas.

  But, well, Wolf's hands on me felt like the right way to celebrate any damn thing.

  My legs slid open, the outsides of my thighs resting on the tops of his, inviting his touch to keep moving upward.

  My air sighed out of me as his fingers traced the sensitive insides of my innermost thighs before moving up and sneaking under the material of my pants and panties.

  His work-hardened, calloused fingertips teased the outside of my lips until my fingernails were biting into his wrists, my hips rocking gently with the need for his touch.

  His hand shifted, thumb moving to press into my clit at the exact same time as two thick fingers slid inside me, making a ragged moan escape me, my thighs pressing closer together, inviting the friction as he wasted no time, started thrusting somewhat lazily as his thumb worked my clit, driving me up.

  "Wolf, please," I begged, hips rocking harder, needing more.

  But he wasn't quite ready to give it to me, despite his hard cock pressing into me, telling me he was.

  Inside me, the tips of his fingers crossed, and he started working them in slow circles, each twist moving across my top wall, letting his touch press over my G-spot, but only ever as a tease, never with enough pressure to let the need deep in my core be released.

  On a frustrated growl after the eighth swipe that was meant only to torture me, I yanked back, losing his touch as I moved to stand in front of him, reaching up to discard my shirt with little fanfare, knowing there wasn't all that much going on up there, though Wolf always gave my breasts a lot of attention, maybe making up for my dismissal of them. But when my hands went for the waistbands of my pants and panties, Wolf's body went taught, a low rumble moving through him as I pushed them off, using his shoulder as leverage as I stepped out of them.

  When I stood upright again, his deep eyes were molten.

  Because, well, I was short. He was tall.

  That meant that my pussy was right in front of him as I stood there.

  And my Wolf, well, he was never one to pass up on the opportunity for a little feasting.

  His hands moved behind my knees, sliding up the backs of my thighs, then letting one wide palm completely cover one of my asscheeks as his other hand yanked slightly, then dragged that leg up and over his shoulder, completely opening me up to him.

  There wasn't even a pause before I felt his lips close over my clit, letting out a rumbling sound of appreciation as a pained whimper escaped me.

  His beard tickled my inner thighs as his tongue moved up and down my slit, always blazing a path right back to my clit where he would circle excruciatingly, until he knew I was so close before pulling away again. Dragging it out until I was half-collapsed over his head, my thighs shaking too hard to be able to stand fully on my own anymore.

  His hand left my thigh to wrap around my lower back, anchoring him to me as I lost the hand on my ass.

  I had no idea to where until a moment later, my walls so tight that I knew this was it, I was going to finally get a relief to the screaming need inside, his mouth pulled suddenly away from me, his shoulder shrugging so my foot hit the ground with a weighted thud, and his arm yanked me almost violently down onto his waist.

  He lifted me slightly up, then yanked me back down, his cock filling me impossibly deep.

  "Fuck," I hissed, hands digging into his shoulders as my forehead slammed to the center of his chest, needing to take a deep breath to adjust to the full sensation.

  "My woman," he declared, voice full of fierce possession, arms squeezing me way too tight, cutting off my air.

  Normally, I would loathe the idea of being anyone's anything. I wasn't a lamp; I couldn't belong to anyone.

  Except, if I were being honest, I could.

  I did.

  I belonged to Wolf.

  I was his, body, heart, soul - if you can forgive that level of sappy.

  But maybe I was okay with it because while, yes, I was his, he was also mine. I could claim him. He would be honored to hear me say he was mine.

  And my love, my fierce possession of him was just as strong as his of me.

  This thing we had, this was something special.

  We both could see that.

  It was an uncommon kind of love, deeper than I even knew was possible.

  And there was a level of safety in being claimed by a man such as Wolf. Because it came with things that many normal men didn't offer with their love. It came with determination.

  It didn't matter what happened in our future, if something ripped us apart. It wouldn't stop his feelings, his commitment. I knew that even if I hadn't seen him for a decade, if I showed up and said I needed him, he would drop everything to help.

  And, in turn, I would do the same for him. No matter what.

  Maybe that was what made the impossible - trusting a man with me - possible.

  The foreverness of it all.

  This was it for us.

  We both felt it.

  So he was right.

  I was his woman.

  My head lifted, his ducking down at the same time so I could claim his lips, tasting myself there, something that made a shiver course through me, my walls tightening around him.

  "My man," I said against his lips, fiercely, like I felt it.

  Then, well, we broke in the skirt of the Christmas tree.

  I had a feeling it was going to be our new tradition.

  Breaker & Alex

  Breaker

  &

  Alex

  __

  "In the Bleak Midwinter"

  Breaker

  "Baby, what the fuck is that?" I asked, walking into the house after two days away at a job, desperate for my bed, my woman, and something to eat that didn't come in a paper fucking bag.

  "What? You said to decorate while you were away," Alex said, shrugging as she closed her laptop, unfolded her long legs, and attempted to get up off the couch.

  Attempted.

  Skinny little slip of a thing like her with a giant belly made most movement difficult for her. And laughable for me. Though after getting a remote thrown at my head the last time I laughed at her attempting to get out of an armchair at Paine's mom's house, I had learned to laugh on the inside. Even when her legs were peddling in the air, and it was funny as shit.

  Because, well, Alex was easy to rile on a normal day. Pregnant, hormonal Alex was borderline psychotic, and it wasn't exactly wrong to be fearing for my life at night sometimes when I, apparently, breathed too hard for her to be able to sleep.

  Alex was not a happy, glowing, nesting pregnant woman.

  She was a surly mess who had given up on pants since she couldn't bend forward properly to pull them up and she Is not some kind of fucking gymnast who can do backbends to get them up over my ass - I had, wisely, not mentioned that she somehow managed to ge
t her panties on though - and who took her usual sedentary life to the extreme now that she had an excuse.

  And holy fuck did I hear it about how what I did to her prevented her from having her computer on her lap like she needed to work.

  I had spent hours finding the perfect rolling laptop table thing that she could position over her belly after about a week of that bitching when she finally popped.

  "Yeah, Alex, but that is not the tree."

  In fact, it was a strand of green lights twisted across the wall in the shape of a tree, kept in place by golden thumbtacks. She had also cut out a piece of printer paper and colored it yellow for the star.

  While the actual artificial tree sat next to the fireplace where I had dragged it and set it up for her next to the plastic container full of lights and ornaments.

  This was hardly our first Christmas rodeo. She knew how the tree decorating went. Usually, we did it together. And by 'together,' I mean that I did most of it while she claimed I had blind spots or too many ornaments in one place. But it had been a crazy as fuck December with work for some reason, and I had needed to be out of town more than I liked. Especially with a heavily pregnant woman at home.

  But that was the reason I did it too.

  She was another month and a half out.

  When the baby was born, I wanted to take a good six months off to help her out. To do that, I needed to do as many jobs as possible before he was born so I could sock the money away to hold us over for all that time.

  This last job had been enough to give us eight to ten months of no work without me touching our savings if I needed it.

  But it took me out of town over the weekend when we (I) usually decked the house out.

  "Listen here," she said, finally standing, putting her hands to her lower back and bending backward to stretch it out a bit, "I got those goddamn lights out and sat on the floor to test them all out and everything. And then I had to fucking crab walk back to the couch to get some leverage to get me off the floor. I gave up after that."

  "Know what I think?" I asked, moving toward her, my hands going behind her back to brush her hands away so that I could work at the knots myself, something that always made her make this hot as fuck purring noise.

  "I have a feeling I don't want to know," she guessed, correctly.

  "I think your ass is just being lazy," I told her, making her try to jerk back and pull away, but my hands were holding her too tight, so all she could manage was to small-eye me and cross her arms over the top of her belly. "Come on, admit it. Maybe the tree was asking too much. But the stockings required exactly no sitting on the floor. Or the wreath for the front door."

  "I can't have coffee, Breaker. Coffee. The nectar of the gods. The stuff that makes up two-thirds of my bloodstream. The stuff that gets me out of the bed in the morning. I can't have it. Like at all. And, on top of that, I can't sleep with you gone."

  "You can't sleep with me here either," I reminded her, even if I maybe liked it too much that she liked not-sleeping with me beside her. "Because I breathe too loud. And take up too much of the bed."

  "And are too hot," she added. "You can't forget that. You're too freaking hot. It's like sleeping beside a furnace."

  "Right. I'm too hot too."

  "Yeah, but I'd rather not-sleep with you here." At that, her arms uncrossed, her hands sliding up my arms to settle at my shoulders.

  "Well, luckily, I am done now. I will be there to piss you off for no good reason every night until you force me to go back to work."

  "I was thinking about that," she started, giving me her serious face. "We could always just switch roles. I can be the breadwinner; you can be Mr. Mom."

  Alex was worried about being a mom.

  She hadn't exactly confessed it, but it was right there in just about every conversation we have had since she missed her period after switching to a birth control that, apparently, was not as effective as her old one.

  While her mom had been there for her, had loved her, she had been battling her own demons even before Alex was born. Alex had, in a lot of ways, needed to raise herself. Then after her mom's suicide, she had been almost completely on her own in the world. It had made her a bit more reserved emotionally, more repressed, and - she thought - colder.

  And maybe it was true that no one would meet Alex and immediately think Now that woman was born to be a mother!

  That didn't mean, however, that she didn't have it in her. She did. She couldn't cook for shit, and she didn't get her jollies keeping house, and maybe she didn't exactly go run to the cribs of the babies the people around us had been popping out, oohing and ahhing over the kids, but that didn't mean she didn't have what it took to be a mother.

  She was just going to be a different kind of one.

  It didn't mean dick that she wasn't going to be able to bake cookies without burning them. What mattered was that no matter how many times she turned out ones burned to ash, she kept trying for my birthday and for holidays.

  And it didn't matter that she didn't shriek and fret and wring her hands when I sliced a finger open on a knife, or came home bloodied and bruised. What mattered was she rolled up her sleeves and made sure I was patched up and taken care of.

  It was hard for Alex to love, but when she did, she did it fucking deep. She did it to the marrow.

  I was pretty sure she didn't see it the way I did. So she was convinced she was going to fuck up this kid beyond reason.

  But, hey, I was convinced that was the right mindset to have. People who were convinced they were going to be the best parents known to mankind generally ended up being the ones who did damage with all their well-meaning and high standards.

  "Said it a thousand times already, baby, but I will keep saying it till you fucking believe it - you're gonna be a great mom. Stop stressing so much about it."

  "I just think--" she started, but was cut off by the pounding at the door.

  And at this time a year and this late at night, it could only be one person.

  "Dunno why you bother knocking, Shoot. You got a key," I called, regrettably pulling away from Alex to stride across the room when there was just more knocking.

  I pulled the door open to reveal Shoot, stubbornly without a jacket even in the freezing weather, his white tee and skinny black jeans doing nothing to fend off the cold. His hands were full of a coffee tray and a bag of - I imagined - donuts.

  "Sorry, hands full. Are you gonna let me in, man?" he asked as I took the bag from him and moved aside so he could pass.

  "No!" Alex shrieked as soon as the door closed, her eyes falling on Shooter.

  "No?"

  "How dare you come in here with coffee? You cruel, evil, sadistic bastar..."

  "Oh, the radiant, glowing mother to be!" Shoot declared, completely immune to Alex's anger. "Cheeks are even dewy and shit. Motherhood looks good on you, sugar, honey..."

  "Don't Sugar, honey, darling me, Johnny Walker Allen," she snapped, small-eyeing him as he put the tray down on the table beside her, reaching for one of the coffees.

  "But I come bearing decaf coffee," he declared, holding it out, waving at it like one of those models on a prize show. "I even trolled the menus of all the local coffee places to see which ones decaf had the lowest caffeine content. I figured you must be miserable without it," he added, giving her one of his smiles, the ones that always disarmed her. Plus, bearing decaf coffee, there wasn't a damn thing he could do wrong in the world right then. "And I brought you three jelly donuts. Two for you, one for Johnny Junior," he declared dramatically, joking.

  He was not yet aware that we planned on naming him Johnny, but calling him Junior.

  It was a card we were playing close to our vests, something to spring on him when he came to see us in the hospital.

  "Not that I didn't need this after being on the road for four hours," I said, saluting him with my coffee when he handed it to me, "but shouldn't you be getting your surprise by now?"

  "Amelia is behind," he de
clared, dropping down on the couch, kicking his creeper-clad feet up on the coffee table.

  Shoot and Amelia had this tradition where she kicked him out on Christmas Eve, and she planned some kind of surprise for him.

  He reached for the donuts, pulling out a Boston Cream, and considering it for a second before taking a bite, giving Alex a closed-mouth smile when she snatched the bag away from him. Leave it to Shoot to be able to be charmed by her even when she was surly. "She told me about two hours ago that I needed to get lost and not come back until she texts me. I thought maybe it would be a naughty lingerie surprise like the first year, so I just drove around town. But when an hour passed, I decided to drag my ass up here to check on my favorite pregnant lady. And her underserving man."

  "Did Amy get the thousand texts from Kenzi today?" Alex asked, waving her phone at him.

  Traditionally, since Shoot and I didn't have any family of our own, we spent Christmas with Paine's over-the-top clan. Kenzi the loudmouth boss, Reese the quiet do-gooder, their aunts, their mom, us, and now our women, who were welcomed into the fold as if they had just been away on a long trip.

  Amelia got on a little better in the kitchen under dictator Kenzi's rule since she was actually capable of cooking. Alex, not so much. Sometimes she was relegated to tasks like stirring the gravy or putting ice in the cups since Kenz was convinced that Alex could burn rolls just by looking at them for too long.

  "She is on potato au gratin this year. What does she have you on?"

  "Trying not to ruin anything," Alex declared, pulling apart her donut so she could dip the parts that didn't touch it into the jelly. "I told her that I couldn't make any promises. And that maybe I should be allowed to stay in the living room this year since my belly can clear counters now."

  "How's it cooking in there?" Shoot asked, getting close to, but not actually touching Alex's stomach. Which he learned the hard way was a hard no.

  Why the fuck do people think it is suddenly acceptable to go around and touch peoples' fucking stomachs just because there's a lifeform in it? The next person to get within six inches of my stomach is getting their fucking hand broken, I swear.