Page 17 of The Holiday Whoopie
When my brain reboots, I find myself flat on my back, breath knocked out of me, and something heavy between my legs.
“Please tell me that was filmed,” Felix says from somewhere above, half-horrified, half-delighted.
“Do you see what I mean?” Eileen asks someone.
“Oh, yes,” a voice that oddly sounds like Amanda Willis answers. “You can count me in to help.”
Somewhere behind a tree limb, Elizabeth whispers, “Mayor Locke, I’ll cover the damage. All of it.”
But it all fades—because the weight between my thighs just shifted.
Jack Lourd, city-boy lawyer and expert whoopie pie salesman, pine needles tangled in his hair and a very grumpy, very naked cat clutched securely in his arms like a football made of vengeance, looks up at me from his eyes-to-my-chest vantage point. “I caught him.” He drops his forehead to my shoulder. “But I think your dog broke my spleen.”
“He’s not my dog.”
“Well—” His laugh is low and winded. “For the record, this isn’t my cat.” He shifts, bracing himself, and it brings his hips snugly—verysnugly—into contact with mine.
My brain stops functioning—completely.
Not because Jack Lourd is handsome. Well, notjustbecause he’s handsome. I already knew that.
But what I didn’t know until this very second is that a man laughing while covered in tinsel and holding a pissed-off hairless cat as he’s pressed between my thighs like a holiday fever dream is my new kink.
Yeah. I’m gonna need a new set of ovaries.
CASTING CALL
Jack
I’m walking the dog.
And as much as I wish that were a euphemism, it’s not.
There’s no leash. No ownership. No signed agreement. Just me, trailing behind a slobbering Saint Bernard with a bad sense of direction and apparently zero shame.
Ihave shame. So much that I spent the last three days post tree-lighting drama in my hotel room, only emerging when Amanda played to my overdeveloped sense of responsibility by mentioning she had seen Skippy limping.
Cut to me—once more freezing my man-bits off—Pied-Pipering Skippy to the local vet in the early hours of the morning via a trail of bacon bits left over from my bougie hotel omelet.
Thankfully, the vet declared Skippy the picture of tramp health.
Which is more than I can say for me as my neck, stiff from the cold, also aches from being hunched over my phone and laptop with poor Wi-Fi connection and no hope of expedited shipping on the one Ethernet cord that might’ve saved my sanity over the past seventy-two hours.
I tried to make the most of it by deciding to knock “learn to meditate” off my self-improvement checklist every time the spinning wheel of death hijacked my screen.
But while I may now qualify as a Buddhist monk by default, I don’t feel the least bit enlightened. Or peaceful. Mostly, I feel cold. Unproductive.
And deeply ashamed of how many hours I’ve spent scrolling through the Instagram account of a local bakery named Making Whoopiefor glimpses of the type-A baker whose thighs feel as if they left permanent scorch marks on my obliques ever since I landed between them under a rainfall of pine needles.
My cyberstalking started innocently enough. Felix and Amanda had tagged Making Whoopie in one of their many tree lighting selfies, and—seeing as I wouldn’t be much of an agent if I didn’t ensure my clients weren’t accidentally endorsing something off-brand—I felt it was my professional duty to investigate.
Hours later, I was one of the many new followers of the Making Whoopie account and deep into the void of whoopie pie reels. I’ve seen every post. Twice.
I know which hairstyles the attractive patron favors—bun or braid—and how many seasonal Croc charms sheowns—infinite. Hell, I could probably recognize her piping technique in a frosting lineup.
My mind connects frosting and Audrey in multiple naughty ways, making me glad of the gust of wind that whips around the corner of Lobstah Lane and slices through my coat with enough power to one, cool me off and two, remind me why people wear hats.
Skippy trots on ahead, tail swinging, drool flinging, no limp in sight.
