Page 20 of Christmas in Coconut Creek

The one whostillhadn’t given me a good enough reason not to be.

“Drink that whole glass, please,” Frankie said, sitting down at the end of the couch again and fluffing the blanket out to cover my legs evenly. His tentativeness wasn’t lost on me, which made the resentment I felt harder to stick. His heated gaze followed me as I gulped down the pills, making sure I finished the water. Even as I put the glass down on the coffee table he didn’t look away.

I tilted my head against the cushion, watching him back with my bottom lip clamped between my teeth. If we were going to be forced together for the next few weeks, left alone in a room in the darkest hours of the night, I needed to know.

“Why did you unmatch me?” I asked quietly.

His hand explored, finding my ankle over the blanket. The gesture wasn’t loaded or expectant, but it still lit up my nerves. I loved that touch, so I let him run his fingers back and forth over the bone silently, until he finally murmured, “I almost messaged you two minutes after you walked out of the airport, Trouble.”

I smiled faintly, his gentle touch and my exhaustion taking over so quickly I almost didn’t register what was said beyond the ridiculous nickname and the gravelly way he said it.

“I don’t know about you, but I’m an all-in kind of guy. When I want something, I tend to get selfish. So, let’s just say I felt myself getting a little too selfish this morning.”

His fingers traveled absentmindedly up my calf. I was drunk, but not enough to misunderstand the implication he left floating there, and maybe he was hoping I would. Maybe he expected I’d forget by the morning, or that he could take it back if he needed to. Or maybe he hoped that I wouldn’t at all.

Maybe he wanted every single word to sink into my skin, so I’d know that he meant he wanted me too much to let himself have me. My body was buzzing to know what Frankie felt like when he was being too selfish.

I opened my mouth with a reply, but in the same breath a ghoulish groan from down the hallway filled the silence. My eyes widened as I sat up, searching for an explanation in an entirely amused and unsurprised Frankie. The noise continued, this time flanked with several yesesand high-pitchedMattys.

I gasped. “Oh my god.”

“I told you.”

7

I’dneverbeensocomfortable.

Warm, soft velvet weighed me down. It curled around my torso and supported my neck, diving between my thighs as I swung my legs around it. I was near the ocean, the morning dawn still purple beneath the horizon, the ripple of waves kissing and lapping at lukewarm sand just a few feet away. No one was around, the only sounds a distant caw of a seagull, and the far-off rumble of morning commutes crowding the intercoastal. The breeze was comfortable and playful on my bare skin as I waited for the sun to wake and nip the last brisk breath of air from the night.

A raspy satisfied groan came out of me as I felt lips on my chest, searing the already hot skin. A soft mouth explored me carefully, traveling toward my exposed collarbones, then my neck, the sensitive spot below my ear at the hinge of my jaw.

God, what is happening?

I hummed at the teasing scratch of stubble down my skin and whimpered, ever so softly, at the feeling of hands, deft and large, pressing carefully at the insides of my thighs, spreading them.

My fingers threaded through feathery brown waves of hair. The short strands tickled my knuckles as the head they were attached to swayed rhythmically down my body, leaving a torrid trail of tongue and teeth, licking greedily at my hip bones.

“God yes.” I sighed, shifting my body to open wider. Somehow the cushion at my back gave like a well-worn pillow as I sunk further into the sand. The softest sand. It smelled like home, like cedar and cotton and the manly tang of teakwood.

The sound of the waves faded into background noise as my breaths quickened and the apex of my thighs ached for use. My brain screamed,Kiss me there, touch me there,but suddenly reprieve felt farther away no matter the very tangible pulse in my core. I reached for it, grinding my hips in circles until the throb was sated by the bundle of fabric caught in the tangle of my legs. I could do it. I could reach my peak like this, with the image of the ocean and the palm trees and those perfectly tan hands and demanding brown eyes flickering up to meet my gaze as Frankie—

The shutter of a camera cracked my fantasy like a strike of lightning to pine. My eyelids flipped open, adjusting to the space through the tired, crusted slit of my eyelashes.Fuck, waterproof mascara was a fickle bitch.

The lights were low. I could see a peek of blue sky and sunshine trying with all their might to breach through the blinds in the Delacora windows. My neck was unsurprisingly stiff; I grumbled and rolled it on my shoulders twice, activating the headache that had been lying dormant.

I laid back down, only to be met with another much louder and apparent shutter of a camera.

I flung into an upright position, immediately coming face-to-iPhone with Frankie at the opposite end of the couch as he had been when I fell asleep. Except now he tauntingly held his camera over my sock-covered toes in his lap.

“Good morning, Colorado. Were you just having a wet dream on my couch?”

“Ugh, sicko!” I tried to kick the phone out of his hand but he snatched it away quicker, showing me the screen. The front-facing camera had been capturing photos of his curly mop of hair and shadowed forehead.

“I had to wake you up somehow. You were performing parts of theKama Sutraon my bed spread. It felt like a thing I needed to give consent for.”

Indeed, his comforter was twisted in a braid between my legs and up the length of my body. I was hugging it like a koala bear would a tree trunk and there was absolutely no way to coyly untangle my limbs without spreading my legs.

I cleared my throat. “Why didn’t you just get up and sleep in your own bed then?”

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