Page 15 of Wounded Christmas Wolf
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-tactilememories 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 anycase, 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 tornout 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:
