Chapter 6 Holly
HOLLY
Holly blew out a breath as she motored back down the hill in the gathering dusk. Holy moly, but this was going to be a difficult week to get through.
The ATV engine throbbing between her spread legs was helping not at all.
She had been unprepared for her visceral reaction to her sight of Jace’s face.
(And now she knew his name. Also not helping.) When she first saw him standing at the edge of the yard, looking awkward and out of place with a beat-up duffel over his shoulder, she figured he was simply going to be one of her dad’s fixer-upper projects.
For all that the Colonel gave off an air of gruff unconcern most of the time, he had helped a lot of current and former military men and women over the years—helping them get set up with counseling, with civilian jobs, or just giving them a soft place to land for a little while.
And Jace looked the part, in his rumpled secondhand coat and shabby gloves.
But then she saw his face. The defined cheekbones, pink-tinged with cold; the full lips, bringing back all-too-tactile memories of how it felt to touch and taste them.
The black hair was growing out of a severe haircut, getting shaggy and blowing into his eyes.
He was all clean, sharp lines, a crisply defined jaw with a couple days’ worth of stubble that served mainly to define it, high cheekbones and a sharp nose.
The only thing soft in his face were his full lips.
And his eyes, which she had seen flare into vivid shifter gold in front of her.
All shifters had unusually bright eyes. Holly had not inherited the shifter trait herself; women rarely did.
The only female shifter she knew was Aunt Grizelda, her dad’s sister.
But even in herself, she knew that her eyes were clear and bright in the mirror, green shot through with gold.
Some shifters’ eyes were impossible to hide in their human form.
Her dad’s eyes were a hazel so light it was nearly gold even when he wasn’t on the verge of a shift.
She had seen shifters with eyes that were an unearthly blue, vivid purple, or a stormcloud gray that seemed to change with their moods.
Jace’s eyes weren’t quite like that, but even in their normal brown, they seemed almost to glow, holding her stare magnetically.
Now she couldn’t stop thinking about that. About him.
She stopped the machine in front of the barn and left it running for a minute, the vibration between her legs thrumming through her hips and rising into her spine. Then she firmly shut it off.
Nothing was going to happen between her and their guest. This was residual horniness from her years-long dry spell.
The only time she’d come close to getting any in the last couple of years had been her brief and incredibly ill-advised attempt to rekindle things with Rob, before she found out he had the morals and the manners of a skunk.
Actually no, that was an insult to skunks everywhere.
In any case, it had been a long while since she’d had a good experience with a man.
No wonder their extremely eligible lodger had slammed into her libido with all the impact of a sexy, scruffy freight train.
Holly tried to redirect her mind back into the groove of evening chores—and tried not to think too much about the ache between her legs.
It had begun to fade, and she had a private bathroom upstairs that she used to share with her sisters, and now had all to herself, where she could enjoy some private time later.
Dad probably would have wanted to meet Jace tonight, but he was out running more Christmas tree deliveries this evening. As anticipated, the snow had made it a busy day. The Colonel was the one who cancelled the six-o’clock-on-the-dot dinner, not the other way around.
It was just as well, Holly thought, as she went to close up the chickens for the night, already contemplating a private dinner of leftovers and canned Spaghetti-O’s.
She didn’t want to think about the awkwardness of sitting through dinner while lusting after her dad’s guest. (Her mind promptly combined them into “sinning through dinner” and she rested her hot face against the cabinet door for a minute to calm down.) Hopefully by tomorrow, she would have gotten her runaway libido under control, and they could have a nice quiet holiday season with absolutely no shenanigans.
Of any sort.
Before the light began to dawn, long before her dad’s enthusiastic six a.m. knocking reveille, Holly was rudely torn out of dreams of a sexy Jace being licked by puppies when her phone chimed with an incoming text.
She rolled over, dislodging Cupcake, who was once again snuggled into bed next to her, and fumbled for her phone on the nightstand.
She rarely put it on Do Not Disturb; the only people who ever texted her at night were her sisters, and she didn’t want to miss something if it was important.
Squinting at the screen, she found that it was 4:51 a.m., and the text was from a number she didn’t recognize.
It said:
Cum on babe, u kno I din’t mean it. I bet ur getting needy, u always did want it. Lets hook up for old time sake!! Ill make u feel really good!
Seriously? Now she was getting middle-of-the-night wrong number explicit texts from randos who sounded exactly like her useless ex.
Holly typed back shortly:
Wrong number.
Before she could get around to blocking the text, an answer came back:
is this holly?
An unpleasant sensation crawled down her spine. She texted back:
Who is this?
The answer was what she had feared.
hi babe!! its rob!
Holly typed back: What the hell? I blocked your number. What’d you do, get a new phone?
its my buddy brad’s phone
Great. The other thing about Rob was that most of his friends were as worthless as he was. And she knew he wouldn’t be up at 4 a.m. unless he’d stayed up. Between that and the typing, he was definitely drunk.
Holly typed back:
Screw you, Brad. And Rob, I will NEVER screw YOU again, so stop trying.
She blocked the new number, rolled over, and covered her eyes with her arm. Yet another reason to stay out of their new guest’s life and definitely out of his pants, considering this was what had happened the last time.
Cupcake licked her chin and growled softly at the phone.
“Yeah, you and me both.”
She was too wound up to go back to sleep. She gave it another ten minutes or so, ended up looking up random things on her phone in the darkened bedroom (huh, that’s a cute dog sweater, maybe she ought to order it for Cupcake for Christmas) ... then groaned, rolled out of bed, and got dressed.
Just another brand new way Rob had found to ruin her day.
She was already stirring eggs in the kitchen when Dad came downstairs, scratching his ass through his robe. She’d heard his alarm go off at 5:30, or rather, start to go off only to be immediately slammed off at the first beep. Colonel Doug Porter was not a snooze button kind of guy.
“Good morning, Colonel,” she said brightly, snapping off a playful salute.
He was wearing his old threadbare gray bathrobe and looking, dare she say it, tired and frazzled.
He turned a look on her that combined bleary curiosity with the disgruntled annoyance that all non-morning people felt for morning people.
She had never actually been able to get up early enough, let alone to be chipper enough at an early hour, to earn that look from him before. Inwardly, she preened.
After a moment, he said, “Hand and wrist straight and palm down, soldier. Aside from the fact that you aren’t in the military and shouldn’t be saluting in the first place, a sloppy salute is a disgrace to the uniform.” But his lips were twitching.
Holly looked down at her bathrobe, then up at his. Hers was much nicer: it was fluffy, pink, and had flowers on it.
“I strive to behave in a way that is a credit to my uniform at all times. Three over easy? Bacon?”
“You know it,” he said, and slouched off to the bathroom.
By the time he came back, shaved and crisp in a plaid shirt with creases, Holly had fed both dogs, set out her dad’s breakfast, and was hastily wolfing down a couple of eggs on toast for herself.
Her dad stopped at the sight of Cupcake, who was lying under Holly’s chair, wearing a gaily colored sock with holes cut in both ends.
Then he just shook his head and sat down in front of his plate.
Holly, meanwhile, shoved the last bite of eggs in her mouth, hopped to her feet and put her plate in the sink. She picked up a covered dish.
“Where are you taking that?” Dad asked, raising his eyebrows.
“I’m taking it up to our guest. I thought he might want a hot breakfast for his first morning here, since all we had to offer him yesterday was frozen TV dinners.”
“Hmph,” was all the Colonel said, picking up his knife and fork. “Don’t neglect the dishes when you’re done.”
“Do I ever?”
She was leaving as he answered, but she heard him say quietly behind her, “No, honey. You don’t.”
Holly hesitated. Cracks in her dad’s armor were as rare as a misaligned fence post on the tightly run farm. When she looked back, he had his head down and was shoveling in eggs, pulling his phone toward him to read the day’s weather and the news headlines.
Holly went out through the dining area. Once upon a time, this room used to echo with laughter and cheerful voices.
Now it was dark and quiet. She had put up some Christmas decorations out of habit.
The Father Christmas centerpiece was on the table, surrounded by what small part of the miniature Christmas village she had been able to find the time and energy to pull out and set up.