Let it Snow

by Suzan Butler, Emily Ryan-Davis, Cari Quinn, Vivienne Westlake, Sadie Haller, Holley Trent

  “Why should I provide easy access when you don’t?” How the man managed to acquire white leather pants in time for the gala, she had no clue, but they would probably be hell to get out of.

  “There’s nothing easy about you. I have to work hard for everything I get. A man shouldn’t have to be a Dom to get a kiss.”

  “If all you wanted was a kiss, we’d have fewer problems.”

  “Excuses.” He clucked his tongue. “If you don’t want to dance with me, how about you get us something to eat?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Surprise me.”

  She rolled her eyes and eased off his lap. The leather clung to the back of her thighs as she stood. Normally, she might have complained, but the truth was she liked him in leather. Leather didn’t lie. Didn’t leave anything up to the imagination, and saying that Max was well built would be an understatement that bordered on offensive.

  He gave her ass a little slap as she maneuvered between their two chairs, and sighed as she walked away. The tap wasn’t worth complaining about because, for one thing, she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of calling her out on having the last word. And second, she didn’t really care. Max was handsy. He touched. She didn’t understand until years into their convoluted relationship that he craved contact. As a Dom, he resisted it when he played, but the moment she walked into a room—there he was. Hands on her. She hadn’t noticed it because Max was right—she sucked at observation. Maybe her worldview was too black-and-white.

  She paused at the end of the long buffet table and pondered that while picking up plates. Huh, I really don’t do gray areas. Yet another thing that’s wrong with my head.

  “Ms. Burke.” That deep voice nearly startled her out of her pumps. Her hands shook, clinking the plates together, and she had to set them down. She turned to address Mr. Beaudelaire.

  “You look lovely,” he said.

  “Uh. Thank you.” Heat seared up from her heart to her cheeks. Had he been anyone else, she wouldn’t have been so affected. She got hit on all the time, and ignored it fairly masterfully, but she suspected that Mr. Beaudelaire wasn’t especially generous with his compliments.

  “I’m glad the concierge could help Max find something suitable for you.”

  “You really do know everything that goes on here, don’t you?”

  He shrugged gracefully, clasped her elbow, and moved her gently out of the way of the line queuing behind her.

  “I know only what I want to know.”

  “Must be nice.”

  “Indeed. You know, Ms. Gibson tolerates my eccentricities without too much resistance, but I think she found my talk of the ghost to be…” He put his hands into his pockets and looked out toward the dance floor. “Well, difficult to ignore.”

  “You really do believe there’s a ghost?”

  “Of course there is, and you heard one. The wailer.”

  “You’re sure that was a ghost?”

  “Sounds precisely like her. We have several ghosts, actually, but I’m not as sensitive to them as some of the other staff members. If you ever bring up ghosts around Chef, he might personally volunteer to show you the exact halls they haunt.”

  “Chef?”

  “Does that surprise you?”

  “I mean, I don’t spend much time around him. He seems to be a nice enough guy, but really, I just pick up trays from the kitchen, and most of the time when I go in there, he’s too busy to look up.”

  She’d always thought Chef was a very serious character. Any chef who’d earned a Michelin star at his last restaurant would probably have to be.

  “He is very busy. Probably needs more help, but won’t ask for it.”

  She opened her mouth to volunteer, but then her brain caught up to her body. There was a reason she worked in room service, not in the kitchen. She couldn’t afford to be a cook, no matter how much better the job suited her.

  “Anyhow, Ms. Gibson did go and read the history I suggested, and guess what she found?”

  Giselle straightened her mask and shook her head. “I couldn’t even begin to guess.”

  “There was a firsthand account of one staff member’s run-in with the ghost back in 1947. A young housekeeper named Monette Gomes.”

  Giselle let out a startled breath. “Gomes…”

  “Is that name familiar to you?”

  “If it’s the same woman I’m thinking of, that was my mother’s mother. She’d told me she worked here for a while before she got married, but I guess it slipped from my memory.”

  “It may have slipped from your memory, but the information lives in your employment application. You wrote it down in the field that asked if you had any family or friends employed by the hotel.”

  “That was a lot of years ago, Mr. Beaudelaire. I—” She smoothed her hand over the nervous belly her tight bandage dress covered and swallowed the lump in her throat. “I’ll tell the truth, and it’s not easy, but…I don’t remember a lot of the things I do. Max thinks I need to see a doctor about it, and I agree.”

  She forced herself to meet his pale gaze. He was going to drop the axe on her at any moment, and she didn’t want to be staring at her feet when he did it.

  “Oh. Do remind me to return your knife to you. I pulled it out of the sculpture myself. It looked quite old.”

  Huh?

  “Ms. Burke,” he said in a low voice. “I’m not simply humoring you. If you need accommodations, we’ll make them.”

  “I don’t understand. I’m wondering if I walked into an episode of The Twilight Zone instead of work this morning. You should fire me. That would be the logical thing.”

  For the first time ever, she saw the man of flawless character roll his eyes. She wasn’t so sure it was a bad thing. It humanized him a little.

  “As I was saying, Ms. Gomes recounted that she heard a woman sobbing in the wing that now houses the VIP suites. She went to investigate, and later swore there was a ghost on the bed wailing about a broken engagement.”

  “One of your relatives?”

  He shook his head. “The Beaudelaire family history in the Americas is recorded in painstaking detail. She may have been a visitor. Even before the Civil War, there were many well-attended events on this property. There may have been a span of a hundred years when the woman could have visited.” He leaned forward and whispered, “Ms. Gibson is like a dog with a bone. Now that her curiosity is piqued, she won’t let the matter drop until she finds out who the woman was. She’s going to hire a historian, and I’m eager to know who the mystery woman is. It’ll give me something to gnaw on between now and planning the next Den event.”

  Giselle couldn’t hold back her sigh. “New Year’s?” She couldn’t be the only one who got stressed at the mention of a Den event.

  He shook his head and smoothed his hand over his tidy mustache. “No. I think we’ll shake things up next year. Enjoy your evening.” He bowed, then worked his way through the cluster of nearby tables. For a moment, she watched him schmooze and mingle, and then she turned back to the buffet, feeling a bit shaken, but in a good way. It wasn’t a roulette-wheel spin-around kind of shaken, but more like the simple thrill of discovery.

  In all the years she’d worked at the Hotel Beaudelaire, she’d never had so much contact with the man who owned it. That was a luxury granted to the more senior staff members. Giselle wondered if by virtue of being a bit off her rocker she’d managed to secure entry into an exclusive club.

  Go figure.

  She piled the plates high with this and that and returned to the table, stealthily dodging Max’s arm when he reached to pull her back onto his lap.

  “I can eat in my own chair, thanks,” she said. She unfurled her napkin onto her lap and selected the appropriate fork.

  “You can, yes, but perhaps I would prefer that you didn’t.” He leaned in and whispered, “Pull up your dress a little and slide down my cock. I’ll work your clit while you
writhe on me and make you come. No one would ever know.”

  “No one except you.” She pressed her thighs together with a gasp and dug deep into her well of fortitude. She was still sore from what he’d done to her upstairs. It’d been so long since they’d made love.

  But, exhibitionism was a turn-on for her. Sore or not, he’d be lying if she said she wasn’t tempted. She could ride him right and almost didn’t care if people she worked with saw it. Let them see that the Dark Dom wanted to go home with her. That she was the only one who met his needs.

  “I’m the only person that matters, right?” Max whispered. He dragged his tongue across his lush lips and leaned in even more. “The only one you need to worry about pleasing.” He peppered kisses across her collarbone and down toward her cleavage.

  “Max?”

  “Sit up straight.”

  She did without hesitation, and caught a glimpse of Mr. Beaudelaire at the nearby bar stations the exact moment Max freed her breast from her dress.

  He pulled her into his mouth and flicked his tongue against her nipple.

  Moaning, she yanked his hair and curled her toes inside her stilettos. Oh, God, don’t turn around.

  But the fear increased the titillation. She wanted Max to show more of her. To lay her bare and bring her pleasure right there for all to see—the way no one else could.

  He pulled her taut between his teeth, and she watched Mr. Beaudelaire’s back. He remained occupied, and her attention was yanked back to Max when he fixed a clamp onto her nipple and pulled her dress back into place.

  She sat there panting—the pleasurable sting of her nipple ignited a ripple effect in her core and woke everything up. Her breasts felt full and heavy, her belly tight, and her pussy ached to be filled again.

  She could do it. She could climb onto his lap, take his big cock in deep, and moan like a hussy when he hit that special spot, and who cared? They wouldn’t be the only ones there doing it.

  Her hand moved to her clamped nipple as Mr. Beaudelaire turned around.

  She dropped her hand.

  He saluted them with his drink and waved before walking away.

  Oh, God. Her pulse was so loud in her ears, she didn’t hear the words Max was speaking.

  She took a deep breath and tried to focus more on his voice and less on how wet her upper thighs were.

  Slowly, the words unraveled in her mind.

  “What did Henri want?” Max asked and snaked his left arm around the back of her chair. It seemed possessive, which was strange given the nature of their relationship. She’d acted as his pet more than once in clubs, but in public, things were different. The nature of their relationship was different.

  Maybe he was right that they needed to see each other in places other than where they lived and where she worked. What they were doing would seem normal then. Minus the nipple clamping part, anyway.

  “I saw you talking,” Max said, his voice drawing him back into the conversation. “I didn’t interrupt only because he’s one of the few men I know who can keep his gaze above your neck.”

  “And yet you just exposed me for all to see.”

  “For all to see what’s mine. I have a right to show off.”

  What’s his. She wished. She picked up her fork and speared a morsel of roast beef. “Anyway, he’s got his blinders on. He doesn’t see me that way.”

  “G, he’s a hotelier, not a eunuch.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Only that it’s possible to appreciate the feminine form without leering at it.”

  “Maybe I’ve worked in room service too long here and don’t believe it.”

  “You’d get the same looks anywhere you went unless you had a job in which overalls or boiler suits were the uniform.”

  Or perhaps an apron. She set down her fork and hadn’t even gotten any food into her mouth. She’d had the chance to say something about her job to Mr. Beaudelaire, and she hadn’t. Hadn’t said a peep.

  Max made light, seductive swirls with his fingertips atop her shoulder.

  Her breath escaped in a rush as her mind immediately went to that passionate place. Her skin seemed to transmit the sensation from the innocent place on her arm to the nipple under the vise of Max’s clamp, and if he kept it up, she just might scream.

  She grabbed his hand and rested it on her lap. “He was talking about hotel stuff. I thought for a moment that he’d changed his mind and was going to fire me.”

  “If he were going to fire you, I suspect he’d be more discreet about it.”

  “That doesn’t make me feel any better.”

  “But, it’s the truth, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t try to insert logic where it doesn’t belong.”

  He laughed that deep, chesty laugh that made his lips pull back from his teeth and reveal his elongated canines. She’d always thought they made him look a bit wolfish as a teen, but they, like everything else about him, had grown on her. She knew that she was one of the few people who ever got to see them. Maximus the Dark Dom didn’t smile except as a warning. Max the ATF agent probably didn’t grin very much, either.

  Her stomach lurched yet again and her smile waned.

  Of course her mind had to circle back around to that. She couldn’t pretend everything was hunky-dory even if she wanted to. Not even for two days. It was just too hard.

  “Hey.” He nudged her thigh beneath the table and tilted his head to the right. “Look. Two tables over.”

  She stole a glance. The woman from earlier had her head thrown back in a raucous laugh, and a man that was most certainly not the gentleman from earlier leaned in close and whispered to her.

  “She must have ditched him,” Giselle said and said a silent prayer of thanks for the distraction. Her anxiety ticked down a few notches as she retrieved her fork. “I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall and saw what went down after we left.”

  “I wouldn’t. It was probably very awkward. They had an inherent incompatibility and that puts a huge damper on the sexiness.”

  “Is that why you didn’t want me to fully undress?”

  He grunted and reached for cocktail he’d brought from the bar earlier. “No.”

  He sipped. Set down his drink. Dove into his food. Obviously, he had no plans to qualify his answer.

  Not good enough. She pinched his arm. “Why not? You know I don’t care one way or the other about being nude.”

  “Think about it. There have been a limited number of occasions I’ve asked you to take everything off. Can you recall what they were?”

  In her mind, all of the occasions she’d participated in his BDSM sessions sort of blurred. Her memory lumped them all together as one thing. She shook her head.

  “The only times I’ve had you naked in front of other people was when I knew the other person or people in the room wouldn’t fetishize you. When you were there to help me demonstrate behavior for new submissives, their attention wasn’t on your body, but on what I was doing to it. I never brought another Dom into the room who I thought would form an attachment to you or try to claim you since I technically hadn’t. Almost all of the other men I brought in were blindfolded. What does that tell you?”

  And it dawned on her. It was just like him putting his arm atop her chair back. He was an alpha controlling his territory. She didn’t like where the conversation was going. “That you’re possessive?”

  “I guess I am. In my mind, you’ve been mine since we were fourteen.

  She barked with laughter. “Oh my God, that’s a good one.”

  He shook his head slowly. “That’s not really arguable, G.”

  He was serious. He was fucking serious.

  She scoffed. “Don’t to tell me what I’m allowed to be offended at.” Her voice came out in a strained whisper, and her anxiety level crept precipitously toward anger.

  “All I’ve ever wanted was to take care of you, G. More so now.” />
  “Take care of me?” She pointed to herself just in case he’d forgotten whom he was dealing with. You claim you want to take care of me now, but you can’t grasp that being with you makes me worse off.”

  “Why don’t you stop and think for just a moment.”

  “I’ve had plenty of time to think. You think I haven’t thought about this again and again for the past eight years since you left for college? You keep breaking my heart and you act like you don’t know it, but you’re an intelligent man. Goddammit, Max.” She pounded the table and didn’t care if people watched. “You fucked me—were my first—then went to college and said nothing to me for years. Didn’t call. Didn’t email. Didn’t send up a smoke signal or send a messenger pigeon—nothing. To me, that doesn’t say undying love and devotion. That doesn’t say to me that I was yours.”

  He sipped his whisky tonic and stared at her over the glass.

  The fucking nerve of him.

  “Say something.” Her knee bobbed angrily. She crossed her arms over her chest and drummed her fingers on her biceps. “Tell me I’m wrong.”

  “You are wrong, Giselle. You have no idea how wrong you are.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Okay. Just saying it doesn’t make it so.”

  “You’re obviously trying to sabotage this evening. Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing.”

  Am I doing that? She pulled her bottom lip between her teeth and gnawed. Doesn’t matter, anyway. Nothing’s going to change.

  “Every time things get too serious between us for your comfort, you throw out some roadblock to push me away. But if we’re going to go there and that talk, then let’s lay it all out, honey.” He leaned his forearms onto his thighs and leveled a cold stare at her. “Were you chaste in all that time I was gone?”

  “Was I—what?” The question seemed to be from completely out of the blue, and it surprised her enough to still her bobbing knee. “Of course I wasn’t. Why would I have been? You didn’t leave here expecting commitment, and I didn’t offer you one. For God’s sake, we were eighteen.”

  “Right. We were eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty. And so on.” He nodded sardonically. “And did you feel anything for those other men? Feel guilty about being with them? Think that every one of them was a mistake?”