“That’s the risk you take, Damien. When you have sex with strange women that you don’t know.”
And suddenly, the reality of all that expanded between them. Sizzled. She couldn’t breathe. She was feeling warm. Far too warm. Oh, she wished she weren’t. She really wished that she could draw a line underneath Damien Prince. She had given him her virginity; wasn’t it enough? Couldn’t that be it?
Apparently not. Apparently, it still...sizzled.
One thing was sure, though; this changed things. She’d been humiliated when he’d rejected her. Thinking that she’d imagined the heat between them that day over her birthday cake, that her fantasies had all been one-sided.
They weren’t now.
He’d seen her naked, more or less, and she’d seen... Well, she’d been intimate with him. She’d felt him lose it. With her. In her.
That made her feel a lot more powerful.
She felt herself being drawn toward him. She took one step forward.
Suddenly, the door burst open, and in came Levi, stepping between herself and Damien. “Holy shit,” he said.
Both she and Damien jumped back like scalded cats, and she had a feeling their guilt was written all over their faces. “What?” they both asked at the same time.
“Dylan is coming back.”
Dylan, the second oldest Granger, had been deployed for nearly eighteen months.
“He is?”
“Yep. For Christmas,” Levi said.
“No way,” she said.
“Yeah, he’s on his way back now. He’s in Germany.”
“Back for Christmas,” she said.
She looked around the house, at the dearth of decorations. They really hadn’t...done anything.
The holidays were weird.
“What?” Levi asked.
“We haven’t seen him in so long. It just seems like...he should have a Christmas to come back to.”
“That’s true,” Levi said. “I’ve got... I got a hell of a lot of work here on the ranch...”
“I can help,” Damien said. “I actually love Christmas.”
She turned to him. “You do?”
“Hell yeah,” said Damien. “It was always a big deal in my family.”
He got a little bit gruff then. And she felt... She felt bad. Because she knew that Damien’s mother had passed away about nine months ago, but she hadn’t really known her all that well, and... The thing was, both of her parents were dead. So that sort of thing often just felt like a sad fact of life. But now she realized he would be headed into the first Christmas since losing his mother. She had left Pyrite Falls when he did, moving with him. And he had certainly been taking care of her.
She had been a single mother for as long as they had known Damien. Which was a pretty long time.
“Well, hey, if you don’t mind. We have Christmas decorations around here somewhere. And you’re welcome to cut a tree off the property.”
“Absolutely.”
“Jessie will help,” Levi said.