Chapter 21
dung-on-a-twig
NICK
“Besides the one encounter I had with Virginia at your wedding, I’ve been truly fortunate to never run into her again,” Eloise said, not holding back on my account.
Not that I would have thought she would.
Eloise tended to speak her mind, and I honestly didn’t care one iota.
I didn’t wear blinders and knew that my mother could be somewhat of an acquired taste.
Candy stopped scrolling on her device. I’d caught a third of what she had told me she was working on earlier.
Something regarding our party, that was all I knew.
I would have inquired further, but I didn’t tend to involve myself in shit I didn’t know enough about and would only wind up in a heated discussion over.
“Eloise, what exactly are you trying to say?” Candy asked.
It seemed obvious to me, but I would be staying out of this one.
Eloise shrugged, bringing her finger to her mouth and biting on the nail. “Come on, Cici. When she walks into a room, it’s like gird your loins because shit’s about to go down. Far, far, far down.”
Well, that was one way of looking at it.
Candy’s eyes widened with astonishment. “Can we please change the subject?”
My guess was that the gird your loins comment got to her.
Eloise hopped off the couch and extended a hand for Candy to take, moving her fingers at a rapid pace like they weren’t attached to the rest of her body. “Okay, but remember you so totally asked for it.” She let out a loud shriek.
Nobody asked, but I had grown fond of my hearing over the years.
On the one hand, I had to listen to a hell of a lot more stupidity from strangers than I cared for, but on the other, it allowed me to hear Candy’s cries of pleasure.
That might not have been happening as often as I liked, but that was beside the point.
All this to say, I needed to put earplugs in around my sister-in-law.
“You might as well take her hand,” I informed Candy, choosing now to speak up and put my laptop down.
I wasn’t even looking at anything good, just some dumb lessons from a class I had started taking so I could—
Never mind. It wasn’t important.
Candy flashed me a look that sent daggers. “What is it, Eloise? This party isn’t going to coordinate itself, and I have many details that need confirming.”
Yes, she must dot those i’s and cross those t’s.
We wouldn’t want a nutcracker to be out of place, or heaven forbid, a ceramic polar bear to come parading in here like it owned the damn penthouse.
“Isn’t that why you have a planner?” In other words, wasn’t that why we were paying for the best of the best, as Candy had so eloquently put it?
“I have to do my part. I can’t trust that everything will be done, so I get involved. Sue me,” Candy said, her tone serious and her cheeks growing red. Beets weren’t my favorite thing to eat, but the color suited her.
“How lazy are you?” Eloise asked, placing a hand on her jutted hip.
Candy, lazy? No. Stubborn? The very definition of the word.
“I’m not lazy,” Candy insisted, finally giving in and getting up, but not taking Eloise’s hand. “Is this something Nick should also be privy to?”
I waved a hand in the air. “You ladies have fun. I wouldn’t want to intrude on your…sister time.” Only, I knew my wife, and she didn’t care about sister time or any other time besides alone time.
Eloise turned on her heel and shook her head, tsk tsking. “My last boyfriend didn’t like to go places with me, and do you know what happened?”
“You broke up?” I asked.
“Bingo!” Eloise shouted, and there went my hearing again. Almost, anyway. It was at risk today, that was all I was going to say. “How did you know?”
“Lucky guess.” I’m a fucking genius, that was how.
Oh, and she wasn’t with him for the holidays, so it was either they were headed for a breakup or they had already gone down the slippery slope.
Either way, I didn’t want to talk about this any longer, so I got up, if for no other reason than to kill this conversation.
She bit down on her lower lip. “Except that wasn’t actually the reason why we broke up, but it was definitely a factor. I gravitate more toward people who want to shake their bums and feel the fresh breeze on them.”
I’d learned a long time ago never to ask questions where Eloise was concerned, so I wouldn’t, but was she trying to say that she wanted them to be naked? Because, if so, there wasn’t enough whiskey in the world to erase this moment in time from my memory.
Candy crossed her arms and nudged her chin. “Aren’t you supposed to be leading the way to wherever you’re dragging us?”
Eloise nodded and snapped her fingers. “Yes, follow me.”
We did, and Candy mumbled under her breath. She wasn’t the greatest whisperer of all time, so I heard her say, “I regret wanting to change the subject.”
Yeah, I bet she would have rather talked about my mother, and that was saying a lot considering their fraught relationship.
As we walked, Eloise filled the air with idle chit-chat. “You two had absolutely no dung-on-a-twig. Did you know that?”
I stuck my hands in my pockets and thanked God that was true. “I believe we do.”
“She means mistletoe. That’s the literal meaning in Anglo-Saxon,” Candy supplied, clearing things up for me.
“I just refer to it as mistletoe.”
“Boring, BIL,” Eloise spat back at me, tossing her head over her shoulder as she led us to the foyer. Yes, this is the very last place I want to be, so thank you for taking me here.
I leaned against a wall. “We don’t need mistletoe.”
“What do you mean?” Eloise asked, her eyes flitting from Candy to me and going back again. Don’t give yourself a headache there, sis.
Candy rolled her lips, and I could smell the fumes from her brain working on overdrive all the way over here. “We don’t need a reason to kiss.”
Hmm. That was one way of putting it.
She walked over to me and stared down at my arm before petting it.
For Christ’s sake. I uncrossed my arms and wrapped them around her waist, standing behind her.
“You know your sister. She’s not big on PDA, but we don’t need dung or mistletoe or whatever people are calling it.
” I looked up at the mistletoe she’d hung in our foyer.
Eloise brushed us off and pointed to it. Yep, saw it already, thanks. “Well, the season practically calls for it, so get on board.” When neither of us flinched, she pushed, “Kiss for Kris Kringle’s sake!”
Silence.
“This would be a lot easier if there was a large group of people chanting it, but I can play all the roles. Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!” Every time she said the word, it came out sounding different. The first time normal. The second time masculine. The third time whiny and, frankly, annoying as hell.
“Enough. Enough,” I said, chanting my own prayer and turning Candy around in my arms. “What do you say we appease her this once?”
Candy gave me a shaky smile, but my eyes fell to the pulse in her neck. It was going crazy. Her chest was rising and falling at an alarming rate, her back arching as she obviously tried to remain in control, straightening for whatever reason.
Any verbal protest she had would’ve been a moot point. We’d been through this before. On the piano. Let’s be real, she wanted me. This. Us.
I hadn’t felt her soft lips on mine in a while, a really fucking long while, and I had enjoyed every second of tasting her other lips, but these…
“We’re not even standing under it,” Candy replied. She was as predictable as the traffic in New York.
Fair point, but I had a solution. I picked her up, holding the sides of her, and placed her underneath the decoration.
“There we go,” I said hoarsely, watching her clench her thighs together as she peered up at the mistletoe.
So, clearly, she was purposefully diverting my gaze.
I had to admit that this was doing wonders for my ego, not that I needed much help in that area. I was self-confident.
“Be serious, Nick. We’re not teenagers, Eloise, so we’re not actually going to—”
I didn’t hesitate in my next move, just made it. I didn’t see the point. I saw her, watched her lips moving, wanted her, and had to have her. Shit was complicated, okay? But this, kissing her, had always been simple.
* * *
CANDY
He didn’t hesitate in making his next move, only made it.
So much between us was complicated, but even I had to admit that the physical attraction and intimacy never was when we dared go there.
It was as easy as breathing. Except in this moment when breathing was somewhat of a challenge.
It was the best way I could describe the greedy, savage way he claimed my lips, like we were in a competition for oxygen.
At this rate, we were both going to lose, though, because as I cupped his jaw with my hand, a low groan sounded in the back of his throat, and whatever restraint he had broke like a cheap, old condom.
An unfamiliar feeling zipped through my body at a disturbing rate. My husband was kissing me. I wouldn’t be able to forget what his lips felt like on mine if my life depended on it. Soft. Warm. Commanding. Convincing.
His tongue darted out, sliding across the seam of my lips and urging me to part for him. A bolt of electricity ran through me, and I felt it quite literally from my head to my toes.
Dropping my grip on his jaw, I reached between us and curled my fingers in the front of his shirt, pulling him closer.
Obviously, he wanted us to be closer too, since he dragged his hands to the back of my neck and gripped it firmly.
Taking control of the situation, he nudged me to angle my head for better access as we both parted our lips.
I was a step ahead of him, though, my body working a lot faster than my brain right now.
From everything I knew, I knew that this was the previews before the movie began.
This was the prequel to an obsessive, nail-biting book series.
I traced my tongue over his bottom lip before raking my teeth over it.
With a flick of his tongue, he was inside and deepening the kiss as he explored me like this was our first kiss.
Honestly, it’d been so long, it might as well have been.
I moaned, but his mouth was devouring mine in a passionate dance, so it was nothing more than a mere throaty muffle.
He growled in response and plunged his tongue so deep in my mouth it was practically at the back of my throat.
This was unlike any kiss we had ever shared before.
It felt more real somehow. Like he had imprinted on me all over again with a kiss.
Like no matter how hard I tried, I’d never be able to forget it.
It was going to plague my thoughts, wasn’t it?
Oh, no, what was I doing?
I was deeply rooted in reality, and the reality was that this was silly. It should have never happened. It was…difficult to ignore the incredibly obvious truth that Nick had always been a walking aphrodisiac for me.
But that didn’t change the facts in front of us.
I was kissing my husband who wanted a divorce…
All because of a plant…
My sister had hung in our foyer.
I loosened my grip on his shirt and broke the kiss, backing up. Heaviness filled the air as we watched each other, studies in stillness. We were both withholding things we wanted to say but couldn’t bring ourselves to.
“I think I’ll take a walk.” I licked my lips, abandoning my desire to rub my fingers across them and replay the memory of what made them swollen on loop.
I looked to the side, where we had left my sister standing, but she was gone.
If I hadn’t seen her there before, I may have believed it to be as made up as Santa Claus.
The entire notion that one man could make all those trips in one night was preposterous, so it was no wonder children stopped believing as they matured.
“I’ll join you,” he said, jarring me from my random thoughts.
I let the words wash over my body, my skin prickling. “That’ll be fine.”