A Bad Boy for Christmas

by Jessica Lemmon

  “Not gonna happen, sweetheart.”

  She blinked. “What’s ‘not gonna happen’?”

  “You want me, you get me. I’m not climbing out of your bed and going home to my shithole apartment unless you’re with me.”

  “You are, actually.” This was her place, and he couldn’t tell her he was staying if she said he wasn’t.

  “Okay. Been fun.” With that, he stepped away, wrapped her tightly in her comforter, and strolled through her apartment toward the bedroom. When she shuffled in there, balled in her blanket like a turtle, he was threading his belt through his pants and had pulled on both his T-shirt and sweater.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Going home.”

  “You don’t have to go…yet.”

  He gave her a look of complete disdain. “No? You’re not through with me yet?”

  “That’s unfair.”

  “I agree.”

  Heat infused her cheeks. She had to be glowing like Rudolph right now.

  Stepping into her personal space, he lifted her jaw with his palm. “Look, Faith”—him using her name was almost impersonal and she didn’t like it—“I get that the assbag cheated on you. I get that you’re nervous. I get that you think you’re cursed. I also get that if I reminded you I was younger than you, you’d freak out, so I haven’t.”

  She felt her chin jerk. “What?”

  “I get you. That’s the point.”

  “But what…what does this have to do with your being younger than me?” Even as she downplayed it, she felt sweat prickle her underarms. Suddenly, the cozy blanket was stifling.

  His eyebrows lifted. “I don’t miss much.” Which was not an answer. Before she called him on his evasive maneuvering, he lifted her, blanket and all, and sat on the edge of her bed with her on his lap. “Your mom dates younger men. You do your level best to be nothing like her. I tell you I’m younger, you find another ridiculous reason to push me away.”

  Every extremity in her body began to tingle as she thought back to Sofie’s “Cougartown” comment. Faith was supposed to be lazily floating down denial, so was shocked to hear the question, “How much younger?” leave her parted lips.

  “You’re proving my point.”

  He was right. She was. She didn’t want to sleep with a younger man because her mother had made a hobby of it. “You seem…mature.”

  More mature than her at the moment.

  “Yeah,” he replied drily. “Been cutting my own food for a whole year now.” A sigh, then, “Michael was older than you, right?”

  “By a few years.” Her mind spun at the shift of subject. What was he getting at?

  Connor put his lips on her ear, his rough voice sending chills down her spine. “Did he make you feel like I do?”

  Undeniably sexy, womanly, and wanton? No way, José. She shook her head.

  Connor drew back, a small smile tucked on his mouth.

  “Don’t you want to know how old I am?” she asked.

  “I only care how I make you feel.”

  So he wasn’t going to answer her. She took the sight of him in. He was close. So very close to her since he was cradling her on his lap. Faint lines fanned out from the sides of his eyes, smile lines visible even when he didn’t smile. There were even a few dents in his cheeks for those on-occasion dimples that flashed when he really, really smiled.

  “You don’t look under thirty,” she muttered, unable to let it go, apparently.

  “Afghanistan,” he said. “Like visiting the surface of the sun.”

  She touched a smile line currently not in use.

  “You fearing someone breaking into your place,” he stated, “is a normal fear. You fearing me sleeping next to you, or fearing getting involved with me because I am younger than you, or fearing I won’t like your tits because they’re small. Faith, baby, those are not normal fears.”

  Stiffening in his arms, she tried to get up. He didn’t let her. Those big arms had big muscles and she wasn’t going anywhere. “Let me go.”

  “Forget it.”

  Fine. He wanted to play this way? She could play this way. With as much dignity as she could muster dressed in nothing but bedclothes and being held captive in his lap, she tried to cross her arms over her chest. She ended up with them sort of curled against her body.

  “I didn’t ask you to deliver me from my fears,” she said. “In fact, my entire goal in life is to be independent. I will not rely on a man to take care of me, to tuck me in at night, to—”

  “But you would like one to make you come so hard you cry.”

  His brash words stunned her silent. Mainly because they were true. Okay, now she was pissed. “Are you suggesting I’m…using you?”

  “Are you?”

  “I thought this was mutual.”

  “Mutual means me in your bed, and not only while we screw.”

  “Charming.” She elbowed him as she scrambled out of his lap and surprisingly, he let her. In a huff, and not caring that she was nude, she tossed the comforter onto her bed. He helped her straighten the corners of the blanket, holding up an edge so she could crawl in. She climbed in the opposite side and turned on her belly, pulling the pillow under her cheek. She was seething. She was pouting. Angry he would dare suggest she was using him! Even though…she kind of was. Still. Still, he didn’t come clean about being younger than her…or by how many years, until it was way too late for her to back out. Which was a lie by omission. The nerve of this man, who—

  Air hit her legs as the blankets were drawn up. Firm lips hit the back of one knee, then the back of the other. When she went to move, those hands clamped down on her legs, holding them down. Because those damp lips felt so good on the backs of her legs—another place she had no idea she liked to have kissed—her traitorous body began to relax. As his lips climbed higher, decorating her legs with soft kisses, up to her thigh, just under her bottom, she went from relaxed to squirming.

  When he parted her legs, she didn’t fight even a little. He hadn’t visited this particular part of her body with his mouth yet, and she’d be lying if she said she didn’t want him to. He granted her unspoken wish, his hands opening her to him, his tongue slicking along her already damp center.

  A muffled moan sounded from her throat and she buried her face into her pillow. He lifted her hips, continuing to draw his tongue up, over, and around. By the time he ducked his head lower and swept it gently over her clit, she was on all fours, the pillow muting her sounds of encouragement.

  Fingers replaced his tongue, assaulting her by spreading the wetness and causing her to moan more. He inserted one, then two, and she felt her knees grow weak. In a flash of purple, the comforter was thrown off the bed and she was being flipped onto her back.

  Connor hauled off his sweater and T-shirt, mussing his short hair in the process and pegging her with eyes that were filled to overflowing with lust. He took each of her ankles in his hands and tossed them over his shoulders, lowered his face, and continued the project from the front he’d started from behind.

  Oh.

  Oh.

  If before felt good, now felt spectacular. He licked and twirled before sucking, his movements intentional, slow. A hand on her pelvis held her captive, while his other moved under her bottom and tilted her hips up.

  Then he hit his stride.

  Gauging her reactions, he sped up when she cried out, knowing he’d found the spot that would make her come. And she did. The intensity was so consuming, she had smashed a pillow over her face to cry into it, not surprised in the least when she emerged to find tears dampening the corners of her eyes.

  Damn. He was right. She did cry when she came.

  She peeked out from under the corner of the pillowcase down at him. His big shoulders parted her thighs and he wore a look of intensity on his face. Watching her, he drew his tongue along her most sensitive spot again. She thrust upward, he dove deeper.

  “You have another in there,” he instructed. “I can tell
.” Then he set a course to lay waste to her again.

  After he’d given her three—or four…hard to tell—more orgasms, Faith lay limp, pillow over her face, arm over the pillow. She felt his firm mouth glide from her thighs to stomach to breasts and linger briefly before he kissed her neck.

  He took the pillow from her face and tossed it off the bed. Hovering over her, he asked, “Done with me, Cupcake?”

  At least he was calling her Cupcake again. An improvement. “This your way of teaching me a lesson?”

  “No. This is my way of showing you what you’re missing if you kick me out of your bedroom.”

  “Bribery.” The word was more of an observation than an accusation. If she wanted Connor, for as long as she wanted him, she got all of him. That’s what he was saying. She couldn’t pick and choose. Didn’t stop her next petulant question.

  “Why do you want to sleep here so badly?” she barked.

  “Because I like the idea of watching over you while you sleep. I like the idea of you not being alone.”

  “You don’t like to be alone?” Did he? She had no idea.

  “Do you?”

  She answered with a deep breath.

  He climbed off the bed and pulled his hands through his hair, currently ruffled in the pattern of her wandering fingers.

  “This isn’t how I do things,” he announced.

  “What things?”

  Agitated, he groused down at her from the edge of her bed. Shirtless, it was hard not to appreciate how fine he was—even seething.

  “I like you, Faith. I’m not doing anything with you I don’t want to do. And I don’t want to leave you.” He lifted his arms and dropped them as if helpless. “Either we do this thing, you in my bed, me in yours—all night—or we don’t, and I try to find a way to like you without burying my face between your legs and making you scream until you cry.”

  Blunt. Wow. Also, sexy. Which made no sense. Who knew she had a thing for crass?

  She blinked up at him, unsure what to do with a man who wanted her—all of her, in an uncompromising way. After being with a man who was ambivalent, who would have gladly accepted half-measures, Connor’s offer was a little jarring.

  “And if we do this thing…” she said, picking the hem of the sheet. When neither of them finished her sentence, she hazarded a gaze up at him.

  His hard face softened, and the transformation from military badass to buff landscaper happened before her eyes. It was a subtle shift. One was a hometown boy who called ladies “Ma’am” and offered to help the elderly cross the street; the other was a man who would stand by his honor and Code no matter what, rigid and uncompromising when he set his sights on a goal. Apparently, his sights were set on her. And apparently, in bed, Connor McClain was a touch of both.

  “If we do this thing,” he said. “We do it. We don’t do this back and forth bullshit where you want me, you don’t want me. You want me, Faith, you got me. We don’t have to advance to a wedding or a life together, but as long as we’re together, we are going to continue being friends, continue working on the mansion, and continue wearing each other out in the bedroom.”

  And really, when he put it like that, it sounded completely appealing.

  “You know what I want,” he said. “Up to you to accept.”

  Boundaries didn’t get much clearer than the way he’d set them up. Accept or throw him out. He hadn’t left when she suggested it earlier, but she guessed he’d leave now. A gauntlet had been thrown.

  “Guess you’d better get undressed and crawl in here, then.” Her voice was small, but she meant what she said.

  For a few scattered seconds, all he did was watch her down the sharp edge of a perfect Roman nose. “Yeah?”

  She nodded.

  He dipped his chin. “Checking the locks. Back in a sec.” Before he left the room, he chucked the comforter onto the bed in a wad. She was straightening it over the mattress from her position on the mattress—she couldn’t exactly move her legs just yet—when he came back in.

  He undressed silently, throwing his clothes over a chair in the corner of the room. He crawled into bed wearing not a single article of clothing. She turned to look at him. Arm thrown over his head, he lay staring at the ceiling.

  “I don’t want to fight with you,” she said in the quiet dark of her bedroom.

  “Then don’t.” He put his arm around her body and hauled her close. She rested her head between his shoulder and his chest as his hand curled around her back. Cold, and definitely unaccustomed to sleeping naked, she shuddered.

  “I should put something on. My feet are like ice.” To prove it, she stuck cold toes on his legs and heard him inhale sharply.

  “God, woman!” he said on a laugh. When he looked over at her this time, the traces of hard had evaporated from his face. His warm smile, the one responsible for those lines around his mouth that belied his real age, had returned. Dipping his face, he kissed her nose. “We’re doing this.”

  It wasn’t a question. But she agreed anyway.

  “We’re doing this.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Connor didn’t so much jolt awake as he surfaced. And unlike most nights his eyes popped open in the wee hours, the last thing on his mind was war. A feat considering he’d visited Jonas before coming to Faith’s. Sometimes his visits brought that awful day to the surface. Now, it trembled in the distance, wavy, like he was seeing it through the desert’s scorching hot air.

  Not hard to figure out what changed. What woke him was not a thought about the living nightmare of his past, but Faith’s fantastic mouth sucking him deeply.

  Drawing a sharp breath, he knifed up, his hand finding her head, now bobbing up and down over a hard-and-getting-harder part of his anatomy.

  God in heaven, Lord above.

  There were no words. Only the pattern of his chaotic breaths.

  Her tongue swirled, causing him to tense. He pulled his hand from her head, not wanting to force her back down. Well, wanting to, but not wanting to discourage her from continuing. And, oh please, Jesus, he wanted her to continue. Was it okay to pray for a blowjob? He wasn’t sure. He didn’t care. Her fingers drifted up his chest and over his belly, her nails raking down his abs.

  One more downward motion, and she released him with her mouth but held his shaft in her palm. “Did I wake you?” came her sultry voice in the dark.

  “Yeah.” His voice was comically ragged. Deep and barely working.

  “Relax.”

  With her working him into a lather? Not a chance.

  “I mean it,” she challenged. He could make out a lifted eyebrow in the streetlight shining through her bedroom window. “Lie back. Relax.”

  Easing down onto the pillow at his back, he tried his level best to do what she was asking. He closed his eyes and focused on the tongue and mouth distributing zings of pleasure that shot off like firecrackers up his spine.

  When the head of his cock tingled, he sat up again and pulled the blond vixen with the magic tongue off him. Wordlessly, he flipped her onto her back, sprawled over her, and held himself up on his forearms so he didn’t crush her to death.

  “Let me go. I’m not done,” she protested.

  “Feisty.”

  “You were enjoying it.”

  “Hell yes I was.” But he didn’t want to waste it pumping into her mouth. Revved up as he was, he’d like a shot at turning her inside out. “Your turn.”

  “I had a turn earlier tonight.”

  “Your turn again.”

  He slid as far down as her breasts and took those sweet nipples onto his tongue. After a few minutes of torture and her pawing at his head, he pulled her legs apart and worked his hips between her supple but slim thighs. He slid to the hilt, drawing a breath from Faith as well as from him.

  Their lungs deflated in unison.

  “Connor. We didn’t…you didn’t…”

  “Shit.” The condom.

  He froze, pulsing, his head clearing from the fog he was
mired in a moment ago.

  “Wasn’t thinking.”

  “I’m clean, you know. Got tested after my engagement ended.” Her fingers raked into his hair. “And you remembered pretty quick.”

  True. But he wouldn’t hold out long, not without a barrier between them.

  “You feel good. Too good,” he managed, reminding them both, “birth control is important.”

  “I am in agreement.” She laughed as she said it, which was a good sound.

  “Honey, you scramble my brain.” He pulled out, or tried, but a pair of long legs clamped around his hips.

  “Don’t.” It was a whisper. Damn near a plea.

  “I get you, babe, I do.” He pushed his fingers into her hair and kissed her lips gently. “But I can’t hold out with nothing between us.”

  “I’m on the pill. I just…until now I wasn’t sure if we…”

  “It’s okay, Cupcake. We can still use a condom.” Not that he wanted to, but he understood. This was closeness in a different way. He drew back but her heels dug into his ass as she pushed him deeper inside her. He welded his teeth together and concentrated on his breathing. She was tight and hot and he could not, repeat, could not hold out if they continued much longer.

  “Don’t want you to.” Fingers sifted into his hair, pushing it this way and that. “I like how you feel.”

  “I like how you feel,” he admitted, dropping his chest to hers and brushing against her breasts. Unable to keep from it, he began to move. Slowly, intentionally. When she threw her head back, it was in silent agreement he wasn’t going to leave her until they both finished. Her mouth dropped open, but the sounds she made were like before. Quiet, muted, like he’d stolen her very voice.

  He loved every second of it.

  When she shuddered her completion, he was right there with her, pumping deep, rocking into her, kissing her. Breaths intermingled, tongues sparred, and when he drew out of her tight body, again, they expelled the same bated breath.

  “Every fucking time,” he said against her mouth, kissing her.

  “I know.” She did know. She had to know. They were in sync in the bedroom—had been from the beginning. Gauging from his past experiences, this was not typical. The thread of connection deeper than bodies joining in a room. Deeper on a level neither of them claimed to want in the daylight.