For The Holidays (Gaming The System Book 9)

by Brenna Aubrey

  Right now, not-so-numb nuts, actually. They, and the rest of me, were feeling mighty fine considering the stunning woman who was currently wrapped around me. With my mouth still attached to hers, I eased us back over to the edge of the springs, toward the rock where we’d piled our clothes. We’d done this before, breaking off foreplay for the condom grab. So often, in fact, that it had become a regular part of our choreography. Emilia would touch and kiss me while I made the frantic search for the familiar foil packet.

  If the situation was reversed, I’d do the same to her—torment her while she hunted down the condom. My favorite move was the hand-bra position, which she usually laughed and acted annoyed about, but I knew she secretly liked. I wished that my hands could always be her bra.

  I broke away from her just long enough to flop my wet paw around, groping through our clothes for the elusive condom. Her hand had drifted southward and was now gripping me like a hand-jockstrap. Nice one, sweet wife...

  Suddenly, off to the left, the bushes began to shake, branches snapping under a loud crashing sound. Emilia froze and tensed in my arms, eyes going wide.

  “What is that?” she shout-whispered.

  “Could be someone coming to jump in with us.” I grimaced at her. Oh well, the best they’d see would be our bare asses as we pushed out of the hot spring, grabbed our shit and left.

  The noise came again, a much louder crash. Emilia sucked in a gasp. “That was way too big to be a person.”

  I gulped, remembering the brief bit of research I’d done about the resort when she’d first proposed the idea to me. In this part of B.C. there was plenty of wildlife—some of it dangerous, like bears and moose.

  Without another thought, I grabbed her around the arm. “C’mon, let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  With a small shriek—for which I shushed her—we darted out of the hot spring. The frigid air slapped every cell on the surface of my skin, stinging like a swarm of wasps. Fuck, it was glacial out here.

  I pushed that out of my mind, focused on Emilia’s safety. I took her by the elbow and hauled her out of the water. Whatever-it-was continued to crash in the bushes less than a hundred yards away.

  Emilia grabbed our clothes, and I grabbed the jackets and footwear. Then we booked it to another set of bushes just along the edge of the road. At this point, running through the neighborhood naked seemed more desirable than getting attacked by rabid wildlife.

  Since we’d put some distance between us and the noise, I stopped her and we hastily shoved on some of our clothes. She pulled on her shirt and her jacket and, bottomless, stuffed her feet into her low boots. I pulled on my jeans and grabbed the rest of the shit while I shoved on my footwear. Fifteen seconds after leaving the pool, we were moving, hand in hand, down the lane back toward our secluded mansion.

  And though I cocked an ear to see if it was following us, I never heard a thing. Emilia was bare-legged under her jacket—which barely covered her ass. We were almost to the house when one of the private security cars for the gated community headed up the road in our direction. Shit. I grabbed my wife and pulled her into the side yard. That would be an awkward explanation to the rent-a-cops. And that was assuming they’d even believe us, instead of thinking we were some weird, half-naked cat-burglar Bonnie-and-Clyde team.

  Despite my continued reminder for her to stay quiet, Emilia was rattling on in a loud but breathless whisper, as she shivered and pulled her tights over her wet legs. “Holy shit, that was totally a bear. It had to be a bear. Could you hear how big it was?”

  I kept my eyes on the road, and again put my finger to my lips to silence her, while nodding to answer her question. When and if we made it in the front door, we’d look like a pair of drowned rats, but at least we were returning unmauled and with everything intact besides our dignity.

  Christ, that had been a close call.

  By the time we reached the front porch, our adrenaline had faded, and we were both legit shivering. And Emilia got cranky when she was cold, so I was motivated to get us inside lest I lose my chance for sex tonight.

  But as soon as we busted through the door, my cousin, Liam, along with Jenna, Kat, Lucas and Heath all looked up from their Uno game.

  “What happened? You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Jenna set down her cards and pushed up onto her knees to get a better look at us. Her eyes flicked to me and then back to my wife. “Maybe two ghosts.”

  Emilia pulled off her jacket. You’d never would have known she’d just pulled it on a minute before we’d open the door. She blew out a breathy laugh and hung up her coat “No, no... we walked up to the, um, up the road a bit—”

  “To check out the view of the valley,” I cut in case she planned on exposing our plot. Okay, poor choice of words, but yeah.

  Liam frowned and opened his mouth. I just knew he was going to point out some inconsistency in our story, though we’d only rattled off two sentences between us. I plowed on before he could get a word out. “But we had a close call. Damn, it was scary. We were just standing there.... looking out at the view and—”

  “Suddenly a bear was crashing through the bushes right toward us!” Emilia finished.

  Lucas and Jenna’s eyes grew huge with surprise and concern. Katya frowned and bit her lip and Liam, characteristically, scoffed. “There was no bear out there,” he drawled.

  “There was,” I nodded vigorously, anxious to back up my wife’s very accurate account. “It was huge, from the sound of it.”

  “But you didn’t actually see it?” Heath asked.

  “No, but there are bears all over this valley and the mountains. I read the place is crawling with them. There are even signs warning about bears on the side of the road. Bears definitely live here.”

  “True....” Kat said, her eyes flicking sideways, but Liam was shaking his head at me very decidedly. How the fuck would he know? It’s not like he’d been to Canada before this. Ever.

  “It was not a bear,” my cousin refuted.

  “Well, you weren’t there, Mr. Know-it-all. So you have zero idea.” I glared at him.

  He looked at me like I was the biggest idiot he’d ever met. I was well familiar with that look. We had lived together in the same house as teens. “I know it wasn’t a bear because of the date.”

  “The date?” Emilia cocked her head. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s late December, almost January. Adam is right. There are probably thousands of bears living in this area. But none of them was out there in your bushes with you while you were… doing whatever you were doing. Every single bear around here is hibernating right now.”

  Oh, huh. Shit. He was right.

  “Well then it was definitely a moose. A huge ass bull moose.”

  Kat bit her lip and looked decidedly like she was about to contradict me. “Have you ever seen a moose in person? Like close? They are six to eight feet tall at the shoulder. I don’t think they could hide in a bush unless it was a pretty damn huge bush.”

  “Trust the Canadian to know the true moose facts,” snarked her husband, which earned him a playful punch in his bicep.

  Emilia scanned them all, from William to Kat and back. “Well then, what the hell was it? It was way too big to be a dog or a raccoon.”

  Kat grimaced, as if hesitant to embarrass her friend. “My guess? It was most likely a whitetail deer.”

  Emilia turned to me and I turned to her. We held gazes for a long moment. No one said a word. The silence was deafening. Almost as if on cue, we both bust up laughing.

  “Whoops. I guess the big bad deer almost caught us in the buff!” Mia snickered after we calmed down.

  “In the buff?” Kat piped up with widened eyes. “What?”

  My bride immediately blushed crimson, biting her lip and sending me an oh crap look.

  “Just an expression.” I jerked my chin toward the stairs and she nodded, trotting up them before we said anything more to incriminate ourselves.

  “Mia, your leggings are o
n inside-out!” Jenna called in a sing-song voice before we disappeared from their view. The response was quiet chuckles from the rest of the group. Busted.

  When we got to our room, Mia was frantically looking for her hat and scarf.

  “I might have dropped along the way, damn it! I don’t want to go back down there after all that…”

  “I’m on it.” I gave her a long hug. “Go take a hot shower and get in bed. I’ll go have a look.”

  I walked all the way back to the springs—this time with a flashlight I’d found by the front door. On the way back, toward the side yard where we’d dashed, I found the lost items.

  When I got back, the card game had broken up and most of the people were no longer there. I was starving, so I headed for the kitchen to grab a snack. Jordan was in there fixing himself a sandwich.

  “Hey man, heard you had some excitement tonight,” he said with a waggle of his brows.

  Oh jeez. Now everyone knew?

  I clenched my jaw. “We won’t speak of it.”

  “You might not speak of it, but damn if I’m not going to have a lot of fun speaking of it.”

  Time to change the subject. I walked over to the bowl on the counter, plucked a banana and peeled it.

  “So how’re the plans for Operation Big Rock going?”

  Jordan stiffened and made frantic hand waving motions with his hands while glancing over his shoulder.

  “That good?” I grinned between bites of my banana.

  “The concierge is headed over any minute, so we can talk about it. I need ideas.”

  I glanced at the clock and raised my brows. “Wow, I thought Emilia was exaggerating. She really is into you.”

  Jordan shook his head. “Naw. But the assistant is coming along too, and it’s pretty obvious that he wants in Heath’s pants.”

  I almost chocked on my banana. I didn’t know too much about Heath’s specific preferences but it didn’t take a rocket scientist to know that Anna’s thin, very young, and mildly effeminate assistant, while a very nice guy, was nowhere even close to the type of guys Heath normally went for.

  “That’s not going to go over well,” I muttered, discarding the banana peel into the compost pail.

  “What, the proposal or fixing those two up?” Jordan said in a low whisper.

  “Fixing them up. But I wish you good luck with the rest of it, man. Don’t ask me for any creative ideas because I’m hard-pressed to come up with any of my own these days.” I slapped him on the shoulder. “I’m out. Good night.”

  When I finally made it back to our room, Emilia was fast asleep. I took my own turn at a nice hot shower and collapsed into bed. As I wrapped myself around her prone form, I had to admit to a little amount of relief.

  I’d jump her bones in the morning.

  Chapter 11

  Jordan

  I had to offload this ring as soon as possible. I’d managed to stash it at the very back of my underwear and sock drawer. In fact, I’d actually tucked it inside a roll of socks so that it would be hard to detect even if she did open up the drawer for whatever reason.

  But damn, until I figured out how I was going to do the proposal, that thing was going to hang like an albatross around my neck. I’d been in constant fear of her discovering it. The box was a little big—being a work of intricate engineering wizardry. It lit up when you opened it.

  Yeah I was that sucker who’d paid extra for the fucking box that lit up and shone a light on the diamond when the box opened. I pictured her gazing down at the gleaming stone and being bedazzled, even as I was down on one knee trying not to hyperventilate at the thought of what I was doing.

  In reality, this very expensive hardware wouldn’t make any big difference in our relationship. We’d already been living as committed, monogamous live-in partners. We could just end up being eternally engaged. Who gave a crap about a wedding? A marriage? Just a piece of paper, really. We could talk all that out once I got the damn ring on her finger, provided I hadn’t keeled over from hyperventilation in the process.

  Anna, the snow bunny concierge, finally tapped on the back door and I let her in with a finger across my lips. Though it was after ten at night, she was freshly made up and dressed to the nines in a form-fitting jumpsuit. When she smiled wide, I almost had to squint from the glare. Too many teeth in that mouth or something….

  Whatever, she was here to help me figure this out. It was her job, after all. Anna’s assistant quickly scanned the kitchen, and then, without a word to either his boss or me, he disappeared into the living room, no doubt on the hunt for Heath. I felt for Heath, all too familiar with the clingy types that didn’t get the hint—or thousand—when you weren’t interested.

  Heath was a big boy and could handle rejecting a puppy himself. I had bigger fish to fry, at the moment.

  “Hey there, Jordan,” Anna purred, beaming up at me as she set down a very fancy-looking sticker-covered planner on the kitchen counter. “I’m happy to help with whatever your event is. Just waiting to get the details…” Her eyelashes fluttered and that too-wide smile widened even more.

  Whatever.

  “I’m more than willing to make it worth your while for the extra work. But yes, I have something very important I’d like you to handle.”

  Oh shit, that didn’t come out right. Her cheeks flushed a little and there was a suggestive look in her eye.

  Anna’s thin eyebrows arched almost to the brim of her little knit snow-bunny hat. She flicked her wavy blond hair over her shoulder and laughed. “It’s my job to make you happy.”

  I blinked. Subtle she was not. I guess Adam was right about this chick after all. Ugh.

  Who cared? The minute I let her in on what I wanted her to do, she’d get a clue and stop hitting on me. I wasn’t even the least bit tempted. A man doesn’t go out for hamburgers when he’s getting perfectly prepared Prime Rib at home every night, every morning and sometimes at noon. Nope.

  “See, I have a ring for my girlfriend. You met April, right? I want to propose to her while we’re up here, but I need it to be an epic moment. Can you help me out with that?”

  She glanced off to the side, appearing annoyed and then shrugged a shoulder. “Sure. We’ve helped out with things like that before. The ski lodge has some lovely overlooks. Or up on the slope...”

  I stiffened, shaking my head. “That’s nice, but I want something....” I gestured big with my hands. “Truly out of the ordinary. Think epic.”

  Anna angled her head at me, bending slightly to give me a full view of her cleavage. I was familiar with that maneuver. Whatever. I looked away. “Uh, are you sure?”

  I scowled at her. “Sure about what? Of course, I’m sure. Why would you ask that?”

  Her eyes widened, lashes batting furiously, and she drew back sharply. “Oh, oh, I’m sorry I just mean are you sure you don’t want to do it on a high slope or on the peak by the Inukshuk?”

  “The what-a-what?”

  “Oh, it’s that First Nations-style monument up on the peak? You know, I pointed it out to you the first morning you were here? A lot of proposals have been done there. We can set it up, get some fur wraps to keep her warm and—”

  I shook my head. “No. Bigger. I want this to be the proposal that she can’t stop bragging to her friends about. Not only that, I want people here telling the story of the epic proposal. Can you be a bit more creative?”

  Anna stared at me open-mouthed, batting her lashes, as if her brain didn’t really work that fast, and she was still processing what I’d said to her ten minutes ago.

  From around the corner, her assistant—Jonny? Joey?—piped in. “What about the Peak 2 Peak, Anna? Like...we could get them on one by themselves. He could ask her there as they cross over the valley.”

  I shook my head. “Peak 2 Peak? What’s that?”

  “It’s a gondola,” Anna said with a decidedly unexcited tone to her voice. “It travels between Blackcomb Peak and Whistler Mountain. And if you want epic, it is the tall
est and longest gondola ride on the continent.”

  I nodded, considering. “Okay so we just...ride in this thing and I ask her as we ride? How long is the ride?”

  Jed—no Joe—oh, whatever his name was, smiled big. “Twenty-two minutes from station to station. But you could loop around, if you want to double that.”

  I waved my hand in a circle, motioning. “Okay but...while we’re in there that long, what are we doing? Besides taking in the view or just chatting, I mean.”

  “Drinks? Appetizers?” The assistant pitched to Anna.

  “How about a three-course meal while we’re at it?” Anna snorted, teasing her assistant, but that actually sounded like a great idea.

  “Yeah, let’s do that. We can loop around three times, right? Twenty-two minutes for each course seems about right?”

  “I’ll make a note to check on availability first thing in the morning,” the assistant chimed in as Anna’s face darkened. “Damn. Phone’s dead. I need some paper… paper… I’ll go ask Heath if he has a pad in his room.”

  As he disappeared around the corner, I called after him, “There’s a pad here on the fridge.”

  No answer.

  Obviously, the paper wasn’t the only thing he wanted. Heath had probably bolted by now.

  Anna sidled up to me, twisting a strand of her blond hair around her index finger and biting her lip like a Playboy playmate. “Uhh, we’ve never done anything like this before. Tying up the gondola for an hour and a half? Setting up a dinner in there? It’s, ah, never been done.”

  I smiled. “All the better reason to do it, then. Seems pretty epic to me. Perfect!”

  “What’s perfect?” a voice called from the doorway. We all turned to look. April stood in her silky kimono and slippers, an empty water bottle in her hand. Her keen eyes flicked from Anna, who was standing way too close to me, then to me and back again.

  “Uh, nothing, uh, I mean...” I fumbled. Shit. Here I thought I’d be safe talking about this in the kitchen. I thought April had already crashed.

  “Oh, I just had a few questions regarding the schedule. I thought Jordan might have some answers so that I can better see to everyone’s...needs.” Her smile toward my girlfriend was sickly sweet. I recognized the reaction in April’s deep blue eyes. Her hackles were up.